13,817 research outputs found
A Biologically Informed Hylomorphism
Although contemporary metaphysics has recently undergone a neo-Aristotelian revival wherein dispositions, or capacities are now commonplace in empirically grounded ontologies, being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, a central Aristotelian concept has yet to be given serious attention â the doctrine of hylomorphism. The reason for this is clear: while the Aristotelian ontological distinction between actuality and potentiality has proven to be a fruitful conceptual framework with which to model the operation of the natural world, the distinction between form and matter has yet to similarly earn its keep. In this chapter, I offer a first step toward showing that the hylomorphic framework is up to that task. To do so, I return to the birthplace of that doctrine - the biological realm. Utilising recent advances in developmental biology, I argue that the hylomorphic framework is an empirically adequate and conceptually rich explanatory schema with which to model the nature of organism
Handling unknown words in statistical latent-variable parsing models for Arabic, English and French
This paper presents a study of the impact of using simple and complex morphological clues to improve the classification of rare and unknown words for parsing. We compare this approach to a language-independent technique
often used in parsers which is based solely on word frequencies. This study is applied to three languages that exhibit different levels of morphological expressiveness: Arabic, French and English. We integrate information
about Arabic affixes and morphotactics into a PCFG-LA parser and obtain stateof-the-art accuracy. We also show that these morphological clues can be learnt automatically
from an annotated corpus
Simple principles for a complex output: An experiment in early syntactic development
A set of iterative mechanisms, the Three-Step Algorithm, is proposed to account for the burst in the syntactic capacities of children over age two. These mechanisms are based on the childrenÂs perception, memory, elementary rule-like behavior and cognitive capacities, and do not require any specific innate grammatical capacities. The relevance of the Three-Step Algorithm is tested, using the large Manchester corpus in the CHILDES database. The results show that 80% of the utterances can be exactly reconstructed and that, when incomplete reconstructions are taken into account, 94% of all utterances are reconstructed. The Three-Step Algorithm should be followed by the progressive acquisition of syntactic categories and use of slot-and-frame structures which lead to a greater and more complex linguistic mastery
Phenomenology of retained refractoriness: On semi-memristive discrete media
We study two-dimensional cellular automata, each cell takes three states:
resting, excited and refractory. A resting cell excites if number of excited
neighbours lies in a certain interval (excitation interval). An excited cell
become refractory independently on states of its neighbours. A refractory cell
returns to a resting state only if the number of excited neighbours belong to
recovery interval. The model is an excitable cellular automaton abstraction of
a spatially extended semi-memristive medium where a cell's resting state
symbolises low-resistance and refractory state high-resistance. The medium is
semi-memristive because only transition from high- to low-resistance is
controlled by density of local excitation. We present phenomenological
classification of the automata behaviour for all possible excitation intervals
and recovery intervals. We describe eleven classes of cellular automata with
retained refractoriness based on criteria of space-filling ratio, morphological
and generative diversity, and types of travelling localisations
Learning morphological phenomena of Modern Greek an exploratory approach
This paper presents a computational model for the description of concatenative morphological phenomena of modern Greek (such as inflection, derivation and compounding) to allow learners, trainers and developers to explore linguistic processes through their own constructions in an interactive openâended multimedia environment. The proposed model introduces a new language metaphor, the âpuzzleâmetaphorâ (similar to the existing âturtleâmetaphorâ for concepts from mathematics and physics), based on a visualized unificationâlike mechanism for pattern matching. The computational implementation of the model can be used for creating environments for learning through design and learning by teaching
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