Uncovering Probabilistic Implications in Typological Knowledge Bases

The study of linguistic typology is rooted in the implications we find between linguistic features, such as the fact that languages with object-verb word ordering tend to have post-positions. Uncovering such implications typically amounts to time-consuming manual processing by trained and experienced linguists, which potentially leaves key linguistic universals unexplored. In this paper, we present a computational model which successfully identifies known universals, including Greenberg universals, but also uncovers new ones, worthy of further linguistic investigation. Our approach outperforms baselines previously used for this problem, as well as a strong baseline from knowledge base population.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of ACL 201

Critical Hermeneutics: The Intertwining of Explanation and Understanding as Exemplified in Legal Analysis

Understanding and explanation are often viewed as oppositional: understanding is considered a search for the meaning a text provides, while explanation employs a critical, analytic method that maintains a distance from the text it interrogates. This Article demonstrates that in legal interpretation, understanding and explanation are not opposed but inextricably interconnected. Drawing first on the work of Robert Bork and Justice Antonin Scalia, this Article shows how elements of critique are present even within forms of legal interpretation that seek to maintain fidelity to the understanding of authorial meaning. Second, it illuminates the converse, that theories drawn to methods of explanation—such as Judge Richard Posner\u27s invocation of the social sciences—must contextualize this evidence within larger, debatable theories of interpretive understanding. Third, critical hermeneutics provides a means to recast the interrelation of understanding and explanation in its portrayal of the circular intertwining between explanatory part and interpretive whole. Critical hermeneutics offers a method that accommodates the critiques Judge Posner has launched against top down (deductive) and bottom up (inductive) methods. Finally, this Article recovers a sense of law that encompasses both understanding and explanation. As in theories of evolutionary biology, law need not be based primordially on determinative explanation but can integrate explanation within a larger appeal to narrative understanding

Probabilidades Variacionales y Propensiones del Desarrollo: Un Estudio Filosófico del Azar en la Variación Evolutiva

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filosofía, leída el 09/11/2020The ongoing debate over a possible extension of the explanatory corpus of evolutionary biology touches many aspects of philosophical interest, among which is the role that chance plays in its models and explanations. In particular, how evolutionary variation relates to chance seems to differ under the classical and the evo-devo perspectives. While some tools of the philosophy of probability and chance have been incorporated into important aspects of evolutionary biology, this discrepancy has not been considered from this perspective. In this dissertation, Iintend to bridge part of this gap by endorsing a conception of chance in the generation of evolutionary variation that is the result of incorporating several conceptual tools from the philosophy of probability and chance into different views over the nature of evolutionary variation. My aim is to clarify the distinct roles that chance in variation plays in the field of evo-devo as compared with classical evolutionary genetics. I depart from the construction of a suitable philosophical framework about the representative role of probabilities in evolutionary disciplines and the type of explanatory causes that are responsible for them...El actual debate sobre una posible extensión del corpus explicativo de la biología evolutiva recoge muchos aspectos de interés filosófico, entre los que se encuentra el rol del azar en sus modelos y explicaciones. En particular, la relación entre la variación evolutiva y el azar parece ser muy distinto bajo las perspectivas clásica y dela evo-devo. Mientras que algunas herramientas de la filosofía de la probabilidad y el azar han sido incorporadas en aspectos importantes de la biología evolutiva, esta disparidad no ha sido considerada desde esta perspectiva. En esta tesis, mi intención es aliviar parcialmente esta carencia defendiendo una noción de azar en la generación de la variación evolutiva que es el resultado de incorporar varias herramientas conceptuales de la filosofía de la probabilidad a distintas perspectivas sobre su naturaleza. Mi objetivo es clarificar los distintos roles que el azar en la variación juega en el campo de la evo-devo en comparación con la genética evolutiva clásica. Comienzo con la construcción de un marco filosófico que considera el rol representativo de la probabilidad en las disciplinas evolutivas y el tipo de causas explicativas que son responsables de ella...Fac. de FilosofíaTRUEunpu

Discovering Unobserved Heterogeneity in Structural Equation Models to Avert Validity Threats

A large proportion of information systems research is concerned with developing and testing models pertaining to complex cognition, behaviors, and outcomes of individuals, teams, organizations, and other social systems that are involved in the development, implementation, and utilization of information technology. Given the complexity of these social and behavioral phenomena, heterogeneity is likely to exist in the samples used in IS studies. While researchers now routinely address observed heterogeneity by introducing moderators, a priori groupings, and contextual factors in their research models, they have not examined how unobserved heterogeneity may affect their findings. We describe why unobserved heterogeneity threatens different types of validity and use simulations to demonstrate that unobserved heterogeneity biases parameter estimates, thereby leading to Type I and Type II errors. We also review different methods that can be used to uncover unobserved heterogeneity in structural equation models. While methods to uncover unobserved heterogeneity in covariance-based structural equation models (CB-SEM) are relatively advanced, the methods for partial least squares (PLS) path models are limited and have relied on an extension of mixture regression—finite mixture partial least squares (FIMIX-PLS) and distance measure-based methods—that have mismatches with some characteristics of PLS path modeling. We propose a new method—prediction-oriented segmentation (PLS-POS)—to overcome the limitations of FIMIX-PLS and other distance measure-based methods and conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the ability of PLS-POS and FIMIX-PLS to discover unobserved heterogeneity in both structural and measurement models. Our results show that both PLS-POS and FIMIX-PLS perform well in discovering unobserved heterogeneity in structural paths when the measures are reflective and that PLS-POS also performs well in discovering unobserved heterogeneity in formative measures. We propose an unobserved heterogeneity discovery (UHD) process that researchers can apply to (1) avert validity threats by uncovering unobserved heterogeneity and (2) elaborate on theory by turning unobserved heterogeneity into observed heterogeneity, thereby expanding theory through the integration of new moderator or contextual variables

Ordinary explanations as discourse: a critical analysis

Extending recent advances in attribution theory, this thesis aims to develop and apply an analytic framework within which the social constitution of explanations might be better accommodated. To this end, Part I draws on three theoretical trends: generative social psychology; critical theory; and Foucauldlan discourse analysis. Respectively, these provide: the rationale for the critique of and the alternatives to orthodox social psychology, critical reflection on the social field, and the means to locate and analyze ordinary explanations. It is shown how: conventional cognitivist analyses tend to ignore the social contingency of explanations; intergroup theory cannot adequately deal with the influence of role; script theory does not address explanations' mediation of power. By contrast, the present thesis analyzes explanations in the context of numerous intertwined factors. Including role, intergroup and power relations, and institutional, representational and material influences. In this, role’. constituted in a network of discourses and practices, is the principal conceptual tool. Packaged with a repertoire of explanations, cognitions, identities and functions, role interacts with situational factors to shape explanations. It is suggested that, through their mediation of power, explanations serve to reproduce the explainer’s role and related roles and structures. Part II applies this approach to the explanation of rape. Detailed analysis of gender stereotypes, rape myths, the the professional, polemical and lay explanation of rape produced three ideal types: the dimensional, typological and schismatic. These served to tie particular explanatory forms to their corresponding frameworks of discourse/practice and to role. The function of such rape explanations was further explored with respect to 'traditional' and 'anti-sexist' male roles, and to the role of policeman- In the latter case, it was shown that explanations tended to distance rape from 'normal’ sexuality, thereby recursively conditioning the police role and its legal, organizational and cultural delineants

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

Kielen universaalit ja kielen kompleksisuus : Kolme tapaustutkimusta lauseen pääjäsenten merkinnästä

In this dissertation I study language complexity from a typological perspective. Since the structuralist era, it has been assumed that local complexity differences in languages are balanced out in cross-linguistic comparisons and that complexity is not affected by the geopolitical or sociocultural aspects of the speech community. However, these assumptions have seldom been studied systematically from a typological point of view. My objective is to define complexity so that it is possible to compare it across languages and to approach its variation with the methods of quantitative typology. My main empirical research questions are: i) does language complexity vary in any systematic way in local domains, and ii) can language complexity be affected by the geographical or social environment? These questions are studied in three articles, whose findings are summarized in the introduction to the dissertation. In order to enable cross-language comparison, I measure complexity as the description length of the regularities in an entity; I separate it from difficulty, focus on local instead of global complexity, and break it up into different types. This approach helps avoid the problems that plagued earlier metrics of language complexity. My approach to grammar is functional-typological in nature, and the theoretical framework is basic linguistic theory. I delimit the empirical research functionally to the marking of core arguments (the basic participants in the sentence). I assess the distributions of complexity in this domain with multifactorial statistical methods and use different sampling strategies, implementing, for instance, the Greenbergian view of universals as diachronic laws of type preference. My data come from large and balanced samples (up to approximately 850 languages), drawn mainly from reference grammars. The results suggest that various significant trends occur in the marking of core arguments in regard to complexity and that complexity in this domain correlates with population size. These results provide evidence that linguistic patterns interact among themselves in terms of complexity, that language structure adapts to the social environment, and that there may be cognitive mechanisms that limit complexity locally. My approach to complexity and language universals can therefore be successfully applied to empirical data and may serve as a model for further research in these areas.Väitöskirjani tarkastelee kielen rakenteellista kompleksisuutta. Tavoite on kaksitahoinen: 1) määrittää kompleksisuuden käsite siten, että tietyn osa-alueen (esim. taivutus, sanajärjestys) kompleksisuutta voidaan verrata maailman kielissä ja 2) selvittää empiirisesti, missä määrin kompleksisuus vaihtelee systemaattisesti kielen eri osa-alueilla ja missä määrin puheyhteisön sosiaaliset piirteet voivat siihen vaikuttaa. Lähestyn aihetta kielitypologisesta näkökulmasta. Kielitypologia on yleiskielitieteellinen ala, jossa kielten rakenteellisia yhtäläisyyksiä ja eroavaisuuksia vertaillaan maailmanlaajuisesti. Mielenkiinnon kohteina ovat kielten monimuotoisuus, eri osa-alueiden keskinäinen vaikutus sekä kielen rakenteen suhde sosiaalisiin, kognitiivisiin ja geneettisiin piirteisiin. Kompleksisuuden tutkimuksessa otan huomioon kielten maailmanlaajuisen vertailun tuomat rajoitteet. Pidän kompleksisuuden erillään kielenkäytön vaikeudesta ja määritän sen systeemin objektiivisena ominaisuutena informaatioteorian avulla. Mittaan kohteen kompleksisuutta tarkastelemalla kohteen rakenteesta tehdyn kuvauksen pituutta; lisäksi puran kompleksisuuden eri alalajeihin. Rajaan empiirisen tutkimuksen lauseen pääjäsenten merkintään. Kielissä käytetään kolmea muotokeinoa tekijän (subjekti) ja teon kohteen (objekti), erottelussa: kahta morfologista muotokeinoa, sijanmerkintää ja kongruenssia (esim. verbin persoonapääte), sekä sanajärjestystä. Tutkin näiden muotokeinojen kompleksisuuden vaihtelua tilastollisten (monimuuttuja)menetelmien avulla; aineistoni tulee kielioppikuvauksista, 50-850 kielen otoksista (riippuen osatutkimuksesta). Aineiston perusteella sijanmerkinnän kompleksisuus korreloi käänteisesti sanajärjestyksen kompleksisuuden kanssa ("enemmän sijoja vähemmän sanajärjestysrajoituksia"), ja morfologisen merkinnän puute korreloi subjekti-verbi-objekti sanajärjestyksen kanssa. Nämä tulokset vahvistavat aiempia alustavia käsityksiä ja antavat myös viitteitä kielen prosessoinnin mekanismeista, jotka voivat rajoittaa kielen kompleksisuutta. Lisäksi pääjäsenten merkinnän kompleksisuus korreloi käänteisesti puheyhteisön koon kanssa ("suurempi puhujayhteisö yksinkertaisempi merkintä"), mikä antaa viitteitä kielen rakenteen sopeutumisesta sosiaaliseen ympäristöön, vastoin yleisiä käsityksiä. Selitän tulokset ekonomia, erottuvuuden ja historiallisten tekijöiden avulla. Väitöskirjani nostaa kompleksisuuden tutkimusta kielitieteen reunamilta, selkiyttää kielen kompleksisuuden käsitettä ja luo pohjaa aiheen kielitieteelliselle jatkotutkimukselle. Erityisesti kompleksisuuden käsitteen selkiyttämisestä hyötyvät myös soveltavan kielitieteen alat, kuten kielen oppimisen ja opettamisen tutkimus

Probability, Populations, Phylogenetics and Hominin Speciation

A number of recent articles have appeared on the hominin Denisova fossil remains. Many of them focus on attempts to produce DNA sequences from the extracted samples. Often these project mtDNA sequences from the fossil remains of a number of Neandertal fossils and the Denisovans in an attempt to understand the evolution of Mid Pleistocene human ancestors. These papers, introduce a number of problems in the interpretation of speciation in hominins. One concerns the degradation of the ancient DNA and its interpretation as authentic genetic information. Another concerns the idea of “species” versus that of “population” and the use of these ideas in the building of evolutionary diagrams to indicate ancestry and extinction. Since I have dealt with the issue of degradation elsewhere (Caldararo,2016) I will limit this paper to ideas of probability, phylogenetics, species and population. A third issue concerns the theory of haplotypes in the mtDNA. Given the severe constraints on mutations in the mtDNA genome to maintain functionality and the purifying processes to reduce such mutations in the ovaries, putative geographic and historical variations seem contradictory. Local diversity and variations in supposed “macrohaplotypes” are explained as back migrations or back mutations which dilutes the robust nature of the theory. A central issue is what does human variation mean, how much population variation has there been in the past and how does this variation distinguish hominid speciation or simply a process of anagenesis. Some businesses today claim to be able to use DNA analysis to discover past ethnic identities and a new niche in restaurants is producing “DNA” menus. Perhaps some caution is in order