Typological parameters of genericity

Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.

Can humain association norm evaluate latent semantic analysis?

This paper presents the comparison of word association norm created by a psycholinguistic experiment to association lists generated by algorithms operating on text corpora. We compare lists generated by Church and Hanks algorithm and lists generated by LSA algorithm. An argument is presented on how those automatically generated lists reflect real semantic relations

From Texts to Prerequisites. Identifying and Annotating Propaedeutic Relations in Educational Textual Resources

openPrerequisite Relations (PRs) are dependency relations established between two distinct concepts expressing which piece(s) of information a student has to learn first in order to understand a certain target concept. Such relations are one of the most fundamental in Education, playing a crucial role not only for what concerns new knowledge acquisition, but also in the novel applications of Artificial Intelligence to distant and e-learning. Indeed, resources annotated with such information could be used to develop automatic systems able to acquire and organize the knowledge embodied in educational resources, possibly fostering educational applications personalized, e.g., on students' needs and prior knowledge. The present thesis discusses the issues and challenges of identifying PRs in educational textual materials with the purpose of building a shared understanding of the relation among the research community. To this aim, we present a methodology for dealing with prerequisite relations as established in educational textual resources which aims at providing a systematic approach for uncovering PRs in textual materials, both when manually annotating and automatically extracting the PRs. The fundamental principles of our methodology guided the development of a novel framework for PR identification which comprises three components, each tackling a different task: (i) an annotation protocol (PREAP), reporting the set of guidelines and recommendations for building PR-annotated resources; (ii) an annotation tool (PRET), supporting the creation of manually annotated datasets reflecting the principles of PREAP; (iii) an automatic PR learning method based on machine learning (PREL). The main novelty of our methodology and framework lies in the fact that we propose to uncover PRs from textual resources relying solely on the content of the instructional material: differently from other works, rather than creating de-contextualised PRs, we acknowledge the presence of a PR between two concepts only if emerging from the way they are presented in the text. By doing so, we anchor relations to the text while modelling the knowledge structure entailed in the resource. As an original contribution of this work, we explore whether linguistic complexity of the text influences the task of manual identification of PRs. To this aim, we investigate the interplay between text and content in educational texts through a crowd-sourcing experiment on concept sequencing. Our methodology values the content of educational materials as it incorporates the evidence acquired from such investigation which suggests that PR recognition is highly influenced by the way in which concepts are introduced in the resource and by the complexity of the texts. The thesis reports a case study dealing with every component of the PR framework which produced a novel manually-labelled PR-annotated dataset.openXXXIII CICLO - DIGITAL HUMANITIES. TECNOLOGIE DIGITALI, ARTI, LINGUE, CULTURE E COMUNICAZIONE - Lingue, culture e tecnologie digitaliAlzetta, Chiar

Formal approaches to number in Slavic and beyond (Volume 5)

The goal of this collective monograph is to explore the relationship between the cognitive notion of number and various grammatical devices expressing this concept in natural language with a special focus on Slavic. The book aims at investigating different morphosyntactic and semantic categories including plurality and number-marking, individuation and countability, cumulativity, distributivity and collectivity, numerals, numeral modifiers and classifiers, as well as other quantifiers. It gathers 19 contributions tackling the main themes from different theoretical and methodological perspectives in order to contribute to our understanding of cross-linguistic patterns both in Slavic and non-Slavic languages

Trauma Of Empire: Violence, Minor Affect, And The Cold War Transpacific

This dissertation turns to contemporary Asian American literature to examine how the aftereffects of U.S. Cold War violence and trauma manifest themselves in minor subjectivities. In the texts I explore, peripheral subjects, whose physical and psychic dislocations stem from Cold War dynamics between Asia and the United States, develop affective modes of reciprocity and intimacy and thereby collectively act out and work through historical damage. In these sites of wounded sociality, trauma appears not just as catastrophic but also as ordinary; rather than displaying itself as an individual psychic pathology, trauma is reconfigured as a collective affective labor that produces a set of minor historiographies. In rewriting the dominant U.S. Cold War historiography through a traumatic genealogy of American empire in Asia, the cultural productions this project discusses create an aesthetics of the periphery and reveal the forgotten historical sites that the progressive temporality of U.S. imperialism has occluded. The writers I explore, including Jessica Hagedorn, Jane Jeong Trenka, Aimee Phan, and Ruth Ozeki, engage multiple historical scenes of the Cold War across the Pacific, from the metropolitanization of Manila and the refugees and transnational adoptees produced by the Cold War\u27s hot wars in Korea and Vietnam to the economic alliance between Japan and the United States. This dissertation proposes that these historically, geographically broad and diverse sites are interlinked not simply through the shared experience of U.S. Cold War dominance and neoliberal governance, but also through literary mediations establishing an affective transnational zone: an alternative historical space that at once reveals the contradictions of liberal empire and produces an eccentric temporality disrupting its linear forms of progress

Religious interbeing : Buddhist pluralism and Thich Nhat Hanh

Introduction: Autism spectrum disorders are characterized by both social and non-social im-pairments, namely a triadic core of deficits in the social, communication and behavioural do-mains along with some strengths in perceptual functioning and the manifestation of “islets of abilities”. The weak central coherence account provides an explanatory model for the islets of perceptual competence and the tendency for detail and local processing in individuals with autism, as well as for some of the non-triadic features. A local processing bias, with inability to extract the gestalt, does therefore seem to be present in autistic individuals. Objectives: In this paper, we aim to review scientific evidence in favor of the weak central coherence in the visual processing domain and the position of this account in recent autism investigation in re-lation with other relevant theories. Scope of the discussion: Considerable evidence supporting weak central coherence account has been gathered by psychophysical, behavioral, clinical, electrophysiological and imaging studies; although findings are not consensual. We discuss the interpretation of these findings and methodological limitations that might contribute to diverging results. Additionally, we argue about the inadequacy of a single etiological model to explain autism in the light of current studies. Conclusion: An outstanding question remains: can a global perceptual deficit be identified in autism or can just a matter of a distinct cogni-tive style be invoked? Further research is needed to clarify the specificity and universality of weak central coherence in autism, as well as the underlying neurobiological mechanisms