The Compositional Nature of Verb and Argument Representations in the Human Brain

How does the human brain represent simple compositions of objects, actors,and actions? We had subjects view action sequence videos during neuroimaging (fMRI) sessions and identified lexical descriptions of those videos by decoding (SVM) the brain representations based only on their fMRI activation patterns. As a precursor to this result, we had demonstrated that we could reliably and with high probability decode action labels corresponding to one of six action videos (dig, walk, etc.), again while subjects viewed the action sequence during scanning (fMRI). This result was replicated at two different brain imaging sites with common protocols but different subjects, showing common brain areas, including areas known for episodic memory (PHG, MTL, high level visual pathways, etc.,i.e. the 'what' and 'where' systems, and TPJ, i.e. 'theory of mind'). Given these results, we were also able to successfully show a key aspect of language compositionality based on simultaneous decoding of object class and actor identity. Finally, combining these novel steps in 'brain reading' allowed us to accurately estimate brain representations supporting compositional decoding of a complex event composed of an actor, a verb, a direction, and an object.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

The copula and existential verbs in Qiang

This paper discusses the copula and existential verb constructions in Qiang, a Tibeto-Burman language of northern Sichuan, China

Proceedings of the Workshop Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation (SCAR) 2007

This is the proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Content Acquisition and Representation, held in conjunction with NODALIDA 2007, on May 24 2007 in Tartu, Estonia.</p

Induction of First-Order Decision Lists: Results on Learning the Past Tense of English Verbs

This paper presents a method for inducing logic programs from examples that learns a new class of concepts called first-order decision lists, defined as ordered lists of clauses each ending in a cut. The method, called FOIDL, is based on FOIL (Quinlan, 1990) but employs intensional background knowledge and avoids the need for explicit negative examples. It is particularly useful for problems that involve rules with specific exceptions, such as learning the past-tense of English verbs, a task widely studied in the context of the symbolic/connectionist debate. FOIDL is able to learn concise, accurate programs for this problem from significantly fewer examples than previous methods (both connectionist and symbolic).Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

Word-class-changing derivations in Rawang

Rawang [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by people who live in the far north of Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma), particularly along the Mae Hka ('Nmai Hka) and Maeli Hka (Mali Hka) river valleys (see map on back page); population unknown, although Ethnologue gives 100,000. In the past they had been called ‘Nung’, or (mistakenly) ‘Hkanung’, and are considered to be a sub-group of the Kachin by the Myanmar government. Until government policies put a stop to the clearing of new land in 1994, the Rawang speakers still practiced slash and burn farming on the mountainsides (they still do a bit, but only on already claimed land), in conjunction with planting paddy rice near the river. They are closely related to people on the other side of the Chinese border in Yunnan classified as either Dulong or Nu(ng) (see LaPolla 2001, 2003 on the Dulong language). In this paper, I will be discussing the word-class-changing constructions found in Rawang, using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect of Rawang, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and inter-group communication

Questions on transitivity

This handout (it isn’t a paper) presents phenomena and questions, rather than conclusions, related to the concept of transitivity. The idea is to return to these questions at the end of the Workshop to see if we can have a clearer consensus about the best general analysis of phenomena associated with transitivity. Section 2 presents alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in three languages I have worked on. Section 3 discusses a few of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that might be relevant to our thinking about the questions related to these languages or that bring up further questions. Section 4 presents some general questions that might be asked of individual languages