Word Activation Forces Map Word Networks

Words associate with each other in a manner of intricate clusters^1-3^. Yet the brain capably encodes the complex relations into workable networks^4-7^ such that the onset of a word in the brain automatically and selectively activates its associates, facilitating language understanding and generation^8-10^. One believes that the activation strength from one word to another forges and accounts for the latent structures of the word networks. This implies that mapping the word networks from brains to computers^11,12^, which is necessary for various purposes^1,2,13-15^, may be achieved through modeling the activation strengths. However, although a lot of investigations on word activation effects have been carried out^8-10,16-20^, modeling the activation strengths remains open. Consequently, huge labor is required to do the mappings^11,12^. Here we show that our found word activation forces, statistically defined by a formula in the same form of the universal gravitation, capture essential information on the word networks, leading to a superior approach to the mappings. The approach compatibly encodes syntactical and semantic information into sparse coding directed networks, comprehensively highlights the features of individual words. We find that based on the directed networks, sensible word clusters and hierarchies can be efficiently discovered. Our striking results strongly suggest that the word activation forces might reveal the encoding of word networks in the brain

Semi-supervised Dependency Parsing using Lexical Affinities

International audienceTreebanks are not large enough to reliably model precise lexical phenomena. This deficiency provokes attachment errors in the parsers trained on such data. We propose in this paper to compute lexical affinities, on large corpora, for specific lexico-syntactic configurations that are hard to disambiguate and introduce the new information in a parser. Experiments on the French Treebank showed a relative decrease of the error rate of 7.1% Labeled Accuracy Score yielding the best pars- ing results on this treebank

The Arabic Language

The chapter looks at the historical background of the language of Arabic and its place within the religious traditio

Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Classical Theory: Affinities Rather than Divergences

Conceptual Metaphor Theory makes some strong claims against so-called Classical Theory which spans the accounts of metaphors from Aristotle to Davidson. Most of these theories, because of their traditional literal-metaphorical distinction, fail to take into account the phenomenon of conceptual metaphor. I argue that the underlying mechanism for explaining metaphor bears some striking resemblances among all of these theories. A mapping between two structures is always expressed. Conceptual Metaphor Theory insists, however, that the literal-metaphorical distinction of Classical Theories is empirically wrong. I claim that this criticism is based rather on terminological decisions than on empirical issues. Conceptual Metaphor Theory focusses primarily on conventional metaphors and struggles to extend its mechanism to novel metaphors, whereas Classical Theories focus on novel metaphors and struggle to extend their mechanisms to conventional metaphors. Since all of these theories study metaphors from the synchronic point of view, they are unable to take into account any semantic change. A diachronic perspective is what we need here, one which would allow us to explain the role of metaphor in semantic change and the development of language in general

Comments on Allan Bomhard, “The Origins of Proto-Indo-European: The Caucasian substrate hypothesis”

The main claims of Bomhard's paper are that PIE originated in Central Asia, which accounts for its Eurasiatic properties such as resemblant pronouns (Uralic, IE, Kartvelian, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic) and originally agglutinating morphology; then it moved by migration to the western steppe, where profound influence of a North Caucasian language or languages (chiefly West Caucasian) reshaped its sound system, aspects of its morphology, and its lexicon. The work is carefully done, with a large and systematic lexical survey, consideration of archaeological evidence, attention to evidence of contacts and migration, and extensive bibliography. PIE does indeed seem to have a curious typological mix of southwestern and north-central Eurasian traits. I have questions, however, about aspects of the linguistic geography, the Caucasian contacts, and the number and type of lexical resemblances

The underlying conditionality of conditionals which do not use 'if'

In addressing a question at the semantics-pragmatics interface of how conditionals in English should be categorised, this paper addresses the underlying question: what is a conditional? Conditionals in English are very often associated with the canonical pattern ‘if p then q’. But while the word 'if' provides a simple function to aid us in expressing our conditional thought, it goes without saying that conditional thought does not go hand in hand with the single word 'if'. This paper explores some of the ways that conditionals may be expressed in English without using if by presenting observations obtained from the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) combined with results from previous empirical studies (e.g. Declerck & Reed 2001). In doing so, this paper considers the question what exactly it is to be a conditional, proposing some criteria to guide the categorisation of conditional expressions. In turn, this paper aims to shed some light as to why conditionals using 'if' are so often focussed upon

Weakly-supervised appraisal analysis

This article is concerned with the computational treatment of Appraisal, a Systemic Functional Linguistic theory of the types of language employed to communicate opinion in English. The theory considers aspects such as Attitude (how writers communicate their point of view), Engagement (how writers align themselves with respect to the opinions of others) and Graduation (how writers amplify or diminish their attitudes and engagements). To analyse text according to the theory we employ a weakly-supervised approach to text classification, which involves comparing the similarity of words with prototypical examples of classes. We evaluate the method's performance using a collection of book reviews annotated according to the Appraisal theory