3,862 research outputs found
Neural connectivity in syntactic movement processing
Linguistic theory suggests non-canonical sentences subvert the dominant agent-verb-theme order in English via displacement of sentence constituents to argument (NP-movement) or non-argument positions (wh-movement). Both processes have been associated with the left inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus, but differences in neural activity and connectivity between movement types have not been investigated. In the current study, functional magnetic resonance imaging data were acquired from 21 adult participants during an auditory sentence-picture verification task using passive and active sentences contrasted to isolate NP-movement, and object- and subject-cleft sentences contrasted to isolate wh-movement. Then, functional magnetic resonance imaging data from regions common to both movement types were entered into a dynamic causal modeling analysis to examine effective connectivity for wh-movement and NP-movement. Results showed greater left inferior frontal gyrus activation for Wh > NP-movement, but no activation for NP > Wh-movement. Both types of movement elicited activity in the opercular part of the left inferior frontal gyrus, left posterior superior temporal gyrus, and left medial superior frontal gyrus. The dynamic causal modeling analyses indicated that neither movement type significantly modulated the connection from the left inferior frontal gyrus to the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, nor vice-versa, suggesting no connectivity differences between wh- and NP-movement. These findings support the idea that increased complexity of wh-structures, compared to sentences with NP-movement, requires greater engagement of cognitive resources via increased neural activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus, but both movement types engage similar neural networks.This work was supported by the NIH-NIDCD, Clinical Research Center Grant, P50DC012283 (PI: CT), and the Graduate Research Grant and School of Communication Graduate Ignition Grant from Northwestern University (awarded to EE). (P50DC012283 - NIH-NIDCD, Clinical Research Center Grant; Graduate Research Grant and School of Communication Graduate Ignition Grant from Northwestern University)Published versio
Multimodal Grounding for Language Processing
This survey discusses how recent developments in multimodal processing
facilitate conceptual grounding of language. We categorize the information flow
in multimodal processing with respect to cognitive models of human information
processing and analyze different methods for combining multimodal
representations. Based on this methodological inventory, we discuss the benefit
of multimodal grounding for a variety of language processing tasks and the
challenges that arise. We particularly focus on multimodal grounding of verbs
which play a crucial role for the compositional power of language.Comment: The paper has been published in the Proceedings of the 27 Conference
of Computational Linguistics. Please refer to this version for citations:
https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/papers/C/C18/C18-1197
Translating and Evolving: Towards a Model of Language Change in DisCoCat
The categorical compositional distributional (DisCoCat) model of meaning
developed by Coecke et al. (2010) has been successful in modeling various
aspects of meaning. However, it fails to model the fact that language can
change. We give an approach to DisCoCat that allows us to represent language
models and translations between them, enabling us to describe translations from
one language to another, or changes within the same language. We unify the
product space representation given in (Coecke et al., 2010) and the functorial
description in (Kartsaklis et al., 2013), in a way that allows us to view a
language as a catalogue of meanings. We formalize the notion of a lexicon in
DisCoCat, and define a dictionary of meanings between two lexicons. All this is
done within the framework of monoidal categories. We give examples of how to
apply our methods, and give a concrete suggestion for compositional translation
in corpora.Comment: In Proceedings CAPNS 2018, arXiv:1811.0270
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