Processing Aspectual Sematics

A computational treatment of aspect in English is presented. A set of aspectual values is introduced and discussed. The lexical and contextual clues for determining aspectual values are determined. The structure of the entry in the main dictionary supporting aspectual (as well as other types of) analysis is illustrated. A computational framework for an aspectual analyzer is described, in which the latter is conceived as one of a group of specialist analysis modules working together, in a distributed (blackboard-oriented) computational environment

Poetic Grounds of Epic Formulae

The study of oral formulae in the twentieth century had several phases. After the initial - very stimulating and influential - research by M. Parry and A. B. Lord, who focused on the technique of composing the poem and the mnemotechnic function of formulae, the focus at first shifted to the concept of performance (J. M. Foley), and then to the mental text (L. Honko), which introduced into research horizons social, ideological, psychological and mental conditions of improvisation, interaction between the singer and the audience, collective and individual factors of memorising, cultural representation, and the like. Although all the abovementioned aspects undoubtedly determine the structure of a specific variant, it should be kept in mind that formulae transcend concrete improvisations and connect different epic zones, different local traditions and different times. The formula precedes verbal improvisation both chronologically and logically. Therefore - before explaining the repeating of formulae by the needs and nature of improvisation (composition-in-performance) or the generating of formulae in specific variants by textualisation of mental text - we must explain the existence of the formula in the first place. This paper seeks to point out the complex system of factors that determine the genesis of formulae. Formulae are regarded as cultural codes, which combine elements from different spheres (the conceptualization of space, time, colour and so on, elements of rituals, customary norms, historical experience, life realities, ethics, etc.). Therefore, their structure is described in terms of hidden knowledge, hidden complexity, frame semantics, the tip of the iceberg, compressed meanings. Meanings 'compressed' in the formulae are upgraded with new 'income' in every new/concrete realisation (i.e. poem) and this is the area where aesthetics rivals poetics

Generating Effective Instructions: Knowing When to Stop

One aspect of Natural Language generation is describing entities so that they are distinguished from all other entities. Entities include objects, events, actions, and states. Much attention has been paid to objects and the generation of their referring expressions (descriptions meant to pick out or refer to an entity). However, a growing area of research is the automated generation of instruction manuals and an important part of generating instructions is distinguishing the actions that are to be carried out from other possible actions. One distinguishing feature is an action\u27s termination, or when the performance of the action is to stop. My dissertation work focuses on generating action descriptions from action information using the SPUD generation algorithm developed here at Penn by Matthew Stone. In my work, I concentrate on the generation of expressions of termination information as part of action descriptions. The problems I address include how termination information is represented in action information and expressed in Natural Language, how to determine when an action description allows the reader to understand how to perform the action correctly, and how to generate the appropriate description of action information

A way of life: Saranac Lake and the \u27Fresh Air\u27 cure for tuberculosis

In 1884, Edward Livingston Trudeau officially opened The Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium for the treatment of tuberculosis in Saranac Lake, New York. For the next seventy years, what became known as the Trudeau Sanatorium was the model of American sanatoria, promoting fresh air, rest, and nutritious food in the treatment of pulmonary tuberculosis. The introduction and use of antibiotic drugs in the treatment of disease effectively ended the sanatorium movement as well as demarcates an important juncture in American medical and scientific history. Trudeau\u27s treatment and the Sanatorium are interpreted as social and ideological constructs from the perspectives of verbal expression, material culture, written texts, and social behaviors. Within the context of American history and culture, the treatment was informed and influenced by medical history, feminism, religion, popular philosophy, and self-help movements. The medical, scientific, and cultural history of tuberculosis and its variant cures came to be encapsulated and institutionalized in the sanatorium setting. The subjective experience of disease as it was contained within a specific natural and built environment was so profound that many remember their time curing as the best days of their lives

Recognition Situations Using Extended Dempster-Shafer Theory

Weiser’s [111] vision of pervasive computing describes a world where technology seamlessly integrates into the environment, automatically responding to peoples’ needs. Underpinning this vision is the ability of systems to automatically track the situation of a person. The task of situation recognition is critical and complex: noisy and unreliable sensor data, dynamic situations, unpredictable human behaviour and changes in the environment all contribute to the complexity. No single recognition technique is suitable in all environments. Factors such as availability of training data, ability to deal with uncertain information and transparency to the user will determine which technique to use in any particular environment. In this thesis, we propose the use of Dempster-Shafer theory as a theoretically sound basis for situation recognition - an approach that can reason with uncertainty, but which does not rely on training data. We use existing operations from Dempster-Shafer theory and create new operations to establish an evidence decision network. The network is used to generate and assess situation beliefs based on processed sensor data for an environment. We also define two specific extensions to Dempster-Shafer theory to enhance the knowledge that can be used for reasoning: 1) temporal knowledge about situation time patterns 2) quality of evidence sources (sensors) into the reasoning process. To validate the feasibility of our approach, this thesis creates evidence decision networks for two real-world data sets: a smart home data set and an officebased data set. We analyse situation recognition accuracy for each of the data sets, using the evidence decision networks with temporal/quality extensions. We also compare the evidence decision networks against two learning techniques: Naïve Bayes and J48 Decision Tree

Epic formula : a Balkan perspective

Special Editions 130. Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art

A quantitative and typological study of Early Slavic participle clauses and their competition

This thesis investigates the semantic and pragmatic properties of Early Slavic participle constructions (conjunct participles and dative absolutes) to understand the principles motivating their selection over one another and over their main finite competitor (jegda-clauses). The issue is tackled by adopting two broadly different approaches, which inform the division of the thesis into two parts. The first part of the thesis uses detailed linguistic annotation on Early Slavic corpora at the morphosyntactic, dependency, information-structural, and lexical levels to obtain indirect evidence for different potential functions of participle clauses and their main finite competitor. The goal of this part of the thesis is to understand the roles of compositionality and default discourse reasoning as explanations for the distribution of participle constructions and jegda-clauses in the Early Slavic corpus. The investigation shows that the competition between conjunct participles, absolute constructions, and jegda-clauses occurs at the level of discourse organization, where the main determining factor in their distribution is the distinction between background and foreground content of an (elementary or complex) discourse unit. The analysis also shows that the major common denominator between the three constructions is that all of them can function as frame-setting devices (i.e. background clauses), albeit to very different extents. In fact, conjunct participles are more typically associated with the foreground constituent of a discourse unit, whereas dative absolutes and jegda-clauses are typically associated with the background content. The second part of the thesis uses massively parallel data, including Old Church Slavonic and Ancient Greek, and analyses typological variation in how languages express the semantic space of English when, whose scope encompasses that of Early Slavic participle constructions and jegda-clauses. To do so, probabilistic semantic maps are generated and statistical methods (including Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modelling, precision and recall analysis) are used to induce cross-linguistically salient dimensions from the parallel corpus and to study conceptual variation within the semantic space of the hypothetical concept when. Clear typological correspondences and differences with Early Slavic from linguistic phenomena in other languages are then exploited to corroborate and refine observations made on the core semantic-pragmatic properties of participle constructions and jegda-clauses on the basis of annotated Early Slavic data. The analysis shows that 'null’ constructions (juxtaposed clauses such as participles and converbs, or independent clauses) consistently cluster in particular regions of the semantic map cross-linguistically, which clearly indicates that participle clauses are not equally viable as alternatives to any use of when, but carry particular meanings that make them less suitable for some of its functions. The investigation helped identify genealogically and areally unrelated languages that seem typologically very similar to Old Church Slavonic in the way they divide the semantic space of when between overtly subordinated and 'null’ constructions. Comparison with these languages reveals great similarities between the functions of Early Slavic participle constructions and of linguistic phenomena in some of these languages (particularly clause chaining, bridging, insubordination, and switch reference). Crucially, new clear correspondences are found between these phenomena and 'non-canonical’ usages of participle constructions (i.e. coreferential dative absolutes, syntactically independent absolutes and conjunct participles, and participle constructions with no apparent matrix clause), which had often been written off as ‘aberrations’ by previous literature on Early Slavic

The Varieties of Tone Presence: On the Meanings of Musical Tone in Twentieth-Century Music

This dissertation is about tone presence, or how musical tone shows up for experience in twentieth-century music. In exploring the subject of tone presence, I rethink notions of “pitch structure” in post-tonal theory and offer an alternative that focuses on the question of what it is to be a musical interval for experience, drawing on a wide range of research from social theory, semiotics, theories of emotion, African American studies, literary theory, usage-based linguistics, post-colonial theory, and phenomenology. I begin by offering a critique of three basic assumptions that constrain understandings of what we mean by pitch structure in post-tonal theory: that pitch structure concerns “intrinsic” properties of collections, that pitch is an autonomous parameter, and that pitch structure is best analyzed at the “neutral level.” Following this critique, I offer an alternative account of musical intervals that suggests that intervals cannot be reduced to a discrete quantity measured in semitones. I argue instead, that what it is to be an interval are all those conditions (in terms of culture, expression, musical form, motivic behavior, etc.) under which an interval becomes intelligible as such for experience. Such conditions include our concerned involvement with holistic situations and, following ideas rooted in Bakhtinian dialogism, our responsive understanding of “alien” understandings of the “same” interval. The understanding of what I describe as the modes of being of musical intervals is illustrated in an extended analytical case study of what it is to be an “authentic” atonal tritone in tonal and modal environments. Building on this account of the modes of being of musical intervals, I reexamine semiotic approaches to musical meaning, exemplified by topic theory, that treat musical meaning as a represented entity (i.e., a sign) that associates the “music itself” with “extramusical” meaning. Specifically, I offer an account that treats musical meaning as a social process (rather than an entity) in which cultural forms of meaning act as the ground that helps make musical tones—the “figure” in this gestalt metaphor—intelligible as such. The last chapter features an extended analysis of tone presence in Messiaen’s “Demeurer dans l’Amour” from Éclairs sur l’au-delà

Perfekat u srpskom jeziku i njegovi ekvivalenti u francuskom jeziku

Predmet ovog rada predstavlja kontrastivna analiza perfekta u srpskom jeziku i njemu korelativnih glagolskih oblika u francuskom jeziku. Perfekat je centralno, nemarkirano glagolsko vreme u sistemu preteritalnih vremena u srpskom jeziku. Odlikuje se brojnim i raznovrsnim temporalnim i modalnim upotrebama, što doprinosi njegovoj polisemičnosti. Na planu kontrastiranja sa korelativnim oblicima u francuskom jeziku navedena svojstva perfekta imaju značajne konsekvence prilikom selekcije prevodnih ekvivalenata. Odnos prevodne ekvivalencije perfekat uspostavlja sa većim brojem glagolskih oblika u francuskom jeziku (preko dvadeset), čime se pomenuta korelacija svrstava u tip divergentne polisemije. Opšti cilj rada usmeren je ka identifikaciji i deskripciji kako sličnosti, tako i razlika između perfekta u srpskom i ekvivalentnih glagolskih oblika u francuskom jeziku. Zadatak ovog rada je da se utvrde lingvističke kategorije koje utiču na izbor prevodnog ekvivalenta u francuskom. U radu primenjujemo metodu kontrastivne analize primera ekscerpiranih iz paralelnog korpusa sačinjenog od trideset književnih dela na srpskom i njihovih prevoda na francuski. Osnovu metode kontrastivne analize čine tri koraka: identifikovanje ekvivalenata, poređenje, utvrđivanje sličnosti i kontrasta. Teorijsko-metodološki okvir deskripcije jezičkih datosti zasnovan je na sledećim teorijama: teoriji dvokomponentne aspektualnosti, zatim Rajhenbahovoj teoriji i teorijskim nadogradnjama Rajhenbahovog logičkog opisa glagolskih vremena, kao i na teoriji o narativnim planovima. Rezultati kontrastivne analize pokazuju da na selekciju prevodnih ekvivalenata srpskog perfekta među glagolskim oblicima francuskog jezika utiče veći broj faktora: a) aspektualne kategorije (im)perfektivno, (ne)ograničeno i (ne)telično, b) temporalne informacije odn. relacije između triju tačaka E, R i S, v) prisustvo fiktivnog momenta govora S’, g) način koncipovanja glagolske situacije (opozicija događajno/rezultativno), d)temporalna progresija: +TP (sukcesija), −TP (analepsa), 0TP (simultanost), đ)narativni planovi: prvi/drugi plan, e) retrospektivna/prospektivna vizura, ž)sintaksičke prinude, z) enuncijativna polifonija, i) modalna obojenost iskaza, j) doživljenost predstavljene radnje, k) funkcionalni stil (razgovorni/književni jezik), l) temporalna homogenizacija teksta, lj) različiti stilski efekti. Posebno se ističu sistemske razlike između srpskog i francuskog jezika u pogledu kodiranja različitih aspektualnih informacija. U srpskom jeziku, koji ima bogatu derivacionu morfologiju, polje aspekta je dominantnije, dok su glagolska vremena u francuskom mnogo specijalizovanija.This thesis is dedicated to the contrastive analysis of the perfect tense in Serbian language and the correlated verb forms in French. The perfect tense is a central, unmarked verb tense in the system of Serbian preterite tenses. Numerous and diverse temporal and modal uses of the perfect tense contribute to its polysemity. When it comes to contrasting with correlated forms in French, the aforementioned characteristics of the perfect tense are essential for selecting translation equivalents. The translation equivalence is established with a large number of (over twenty) verb forms in French, which categorizes this correlation as a type of divergent polysemy. The general objective of this thesis is to identify and describe both similarities and differences between the perfect tense and the equivalent verb forms in French. The purpose of the thesis, however, is to determine linguistic categories which influence the process of selecting an adequate translation equivalent in French. In this work we apply the method of contrastive analysis of the examples excerpted from a parallel corpus comprising thirty literary works in Serbian and their translation into French. Contrastive analysis method itself includes three steps: identification of equivalents, comparison, identification of similarities and differences. Theoretically-methodological framework of describing linguistic phenomena is based on the following theories: the Theory of two-component aspect, the Reichenbach’s Theory of Tense and theories building on the Reichenbach’s logical description of verb tenses,the Theory of Narrative Foreground and Background. The results of the performed contrastive analysis indicate that there is a large number of factors influencing the selection of translation equivalents among verbal forms in French for Serbian perfect tense: a) aspectual categories (im)perfective, (un)bounded,and (a)telic; b) temporal information, i.e. the relation among three points E, R and S; c)the presence of the fictive moment of speech S’; d) the manner of creating a verbal situation (the opposition: event/resultative state); e) temporal progression: +TP (succession), -TP (analepsis), 0TP (simultaneity); f) narrative plans: foreground/background; g) retrospective/ prospective viewpoint; h) syntactic constraints; i) enunciative polyphony; j) statement modality; k) emotional insight; l) functional style (conversational/literary language); m) temporal homogenization of a text; n) various stylistic effects. In this thesis we underline the systemic differences between Serbian and French in terms of encoding different pieces of aspectual information. In Serbian, characterized by rich derivational morphology, the field of aspect is more dominant,whereas in French verb tenses tend to be more specialized

Situations And Intervals

The PUNDIT system processes natural language descriptions of situations and the intervals over which they hold using an algorithm that integrates aspect and tene logic. It analyses the tense and aspect of the main verb to generate representations of three types of situations-- states, processes and events-- and to locate the situations with respect to the time at which the text was produced. Each situation type' has a dis- tinct temporal structure, represented in terms of one or more intervals. Further, every interval has two features whose different values capture the aspectual differences between the three different situation types. Capturing these differences makes it possible to represent very precisely the times for which predications are asserted to hold