4,293 research outputs found

    Towards Linguistically-Grounded Spatial Logics

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    We propose a method to analyze the amount of coverage and adequacy of spatial calculi by relating a calculus to a linguistic ontology for space by using similarities and linguistic corpus data. This allows evaluating whether and where a spatial calculus can be used for natural language interpretation. It can also lead to \u27more appropriate\u27 spatial logics for spatial language

    Between Sense and Sensibility: Declarative narrativisation of mental models as a basis and benchmark for visuo-spatial cognition and computation focussed collaborative cognitive systems

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    What lies between `\emph{sensing}' and `\emph{sensibility}'? In other words, what kind of cognitive processes mediate sensing capability, and the formation of sensible impressions ---e.g., abstractions, analogies, hypotheses and theory formation, beliefs and their revision, argument formation--- in domain-specific problem solving, or in regular activities of everyday living, working and simply going around in the environment? How can knowledge and reasoning about such capabilities, as exhibited by humans in particular problem contexts, be used as a model and benchmark for the development of collaborative cognitive (interaction) systems concerned with human assistance, assurance, and empowerment? We pose these questions in the context of a range of assistive technologies concerned with \emph{visuo-spatial perception and cognition} tasks encompassing aspects such as commonsense, creativity, and the application of specialist domain knowledge and problem-solving thought processes. Assistive technologies being considered include: (a) human activity interpretation; (b) high-level cognitive rovotics; (c) people-centred creative design in domains such as architecture & digital media creation, and (d) qualitative analyses geographic information systems. Computational narratives not only provide a rich cognitive basis, but they also serve as a benchmark of functional performance in our development of computational cognitive assistance systems. We posit that computational narrativisation pertaining to space, actions, and change provides a useful model of \emph{visual} and \emph{spatio-temporal thinking} within a wide-range of problem-solving tasks and application areas where collaborative cognitive systems could serve an assistive and empowering function.Comment: 5 pages, research statement summarising recent publication

    Grounded in Relationships of Support: Indigenous Teacher Mentorship in the Rural West

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    This article explores the power of Indigenous teacher mentorship as essential to address “the change in point of view” long called for in Indigenous education. Drawing from a longitudinal, ethnographic study of an Indigenous teacher education program in a predominantly rural, high need region, we examine the basic questions: What do Indigenous master teachers uniquely bring to teacher education? In what ways do Indigenous master teachers support the development of socially, culturally, linguistically, and place-responsive teachers? Using the theoretical frameworks of Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) and situated learning, our findings elucidate the importance of Indigenous mentorship for re-membering and re-claiming Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies, and axiologies in relational and intergenerational learning—practices that interrupt coloniality in teacher education and school leadership. Discussion of Indigenous teacher mentorship centers the importance of relationships between people and place in teaching and learning and asks educators and school leaders to conceptualize Indigenous teacher education as a long-term project of tribal nation building and community wellbeing

    Critical Aspirations: Disability, Education, and Community Cultural Wealth in a Sanctuary City

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    This study explores the needs and experiences of refugee parents of emergent bilingual students labeled as disabled (EB/LADs) and their networks of interpreters and community-based educators. This investigation focuses on the relationships (and disconnects) within these networks related to language, migration, culture, race, disability, and special education experiences in formal and community-based schooling contexts. The bulk of extant scholarship regarding parental experiences in special education typically centers school-based experiences rather than community- and home-based experiences, such as daily acts of nurturing and communication (e.g., Cioè-Peña, 2018). However, school-based spaces, processes, and resources are in many ways inaccessible to EB/LAD families because they implement and uphold expectations and protocols which are rigidly defined by white, Western, middle-class norms for participation and discourse (Ijalba, 2015). As such, this project centers the home- and community-based experiences of refugee EB/LAD parents and community-based educators of EB/LADs through exploring how and under what circumstances they cultivate and engage Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) in support of their children labeled as disabled, as well as their needs related to the formal schooling context.Using an integrative theoretical framework, this study addresses the following research questions: (1) What are the needs and experiences of refugee parents of EB/LADs as they navigate disability, education, and institutional processes; and (2) How do community-based education networks assess and address the needs and experiences of refugee parents of EB/LADs? By addressing these questions, this study contributes to the field of education at the crossroads of emergent bilingual education, special education, and critical culturally sustaining practice through qualitative case study. Further, by focusing on the perspectives of members of a refugee community in a sanctuary city in Upstate New York, this study sheds light on the lived realities of the educational programs in which most EB/LADs are enrolled in New York State, as well as the dark patterns which suspend parents and families in surreptitious, proxemic interactions with educators and policymakers. Finally, this study offers recommendations for cultivating supportive critical partnerships between schools and parents of EB/LADs through engaging in a critical reflexive praxis of sanctuary for EB/LADs, their families, and communities

    From Narrative to Visual Narrative to Audiovisual Narrative: the Multimodal Discourse Theory Connection (Invited Talk)

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    Models of narrative have been proposed from many perspectives and most of these nowadays promote further the notion that narrative is a transmedial phenomenon: i.e., stories can be told making use of distinct and multiple forms of expressions. This raises a range of theoretical and practical questions, as well as rendering the task of providing computational models of narrative both more interesting and more challenging. Central to this endeavour are issues concerned with the potential mutual conditioning of narrative forms and the media employed. Methods are required for isolating narrative properties and mechanisms that may be generalised across media, while at the same time appropriately respecting differences in medial affordances. In this discussion paper I set out a corresponding approach to characterising narrative that draws on a fine-grained formal characterisation of multimodal discourse developed on the basis of both functional and formal linguistic models of discourse, generalised to the multimodal case. After briefly setting out the theoretical principles on which the account builds, I position narrative with respect to the framework and give an example of how audiovisual narratives such as film are accounted for. It will be suggested that a common anchoring in a well specified notion of discourse as an intrinsically multimodal phenomenon offers beneficial new angles on how narratives can be modelled, as well as establishing bridges between humanistic understandings of narrative and complementary computational accounts of narratives involving communicative goal-based planning

    A Biopsychological Foundation for Linguistics

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    In this dissertation, I defend the view that natural languages are concrete biopsychological phenomena to be studied empirically. In Section One, I begin with an historical explanation. Some analytic philosophers, I argue, misapply formal logic as an analysis of natural language, when it was in fact originally developed as an alternative to natural language, employed for scientific purposes. Abstract, quasi-mathematical philosophies of language, I argue, are partially a result of this misunderstanding. I respond to Jerrold Katz’ argument that a proper understanding of analytic truth requires this quasi-mathematical philosophy of language through a model-theoretical analysis of analytic truth in modal and intuitionist logics. In Section Two, I offer a positive argument for a biopsychological philosophy of language. While Chomsky and others have emphasized the metaphysical basis of natural languages in psychological representations, I further contribute to understanding by emphasizing the basis of natural language in psychological representations of relevant properties of a specifically constrained biological implementation base. I defend this ontological perspective through a thorough engagement with the subfield of linguistic phonology and its important relations to physiological articulation and perception, along with an analysis of crucial interface relations among phonology, morphology and syntax. In the final section, I engage with the objections to this biopsychological philosophy of language stemming from concerns related to linguistic normativity and communication. If natural language is based metaphysically in the biopsychological representations of individuals, there are apparent paradoxes in the notion of public rules for language use, and in the notion of shared content for the purpose of communication. Drawing on David Forrest Wallace’s pragmatic conception of linguistic prescription, together with analogies from anti-realist metaethical systems, I defend the intelligibility of public linguistics norms without the need for abstract ontological commitment. Drawing on Ray Jackendoff’s internalist semantic and metasemantic analysese, together with Burtrand Russell’s analogy argument on other minds, I also defend intelligibility of linguistic communication equally without need for abstract ontological commitment
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