Heads and Adjuncts: an experimental study of subextraction from participials and coordination in English, German and Norwegian

In recent years, attempts to simplify the grammatical mechanisms used in syntax have led to proposals to reduce the relationships between elements in a sentence to relations between heads and complements, doing away with free adjunction. For the analysis of modifying relations one consequence has been the rise of analyses that use the properties of selecting heads to stipulate unexpected syntactic behaviour, such as the use of light verbs to derive transparency in complex verb constructions. This thesis shows that such accounts are empirically inadequate and argues that the relationship between heads and adjuncts provides a more empirically-satisfactory model of modifying relations, such as complex verb constructions, than one restricted to the selection relation between heads and complements in the syntax. In support of the adjunct relation, I show how a modular approach to adjuncts in which the position of adjunction is licensed in the semantics and long-distance dependencies are licensed in the syntax can provide a more unified account of subextraction from two separate types of island configurations, viz. asymmetric subextraction from coordination and subextraction from participial adjuncts, either than analyses involving complementation in the syntax (Borgonovo and Neeleman, 2000; Fabregas and Jiménez-Fernández, 2016; Wiklund, 2007), or hybrid analyses mixing processing filters with syntactic licensing of long-distance dependencies (Truswell, 2009, 2011). The first part of the thesis shows that Chomsky’s (2000; 2001) phase theory gives rise to blackholes in the specifier positions of phases from which movement cannot take place. I provide a theoretical account in terms of feature-licensing, where blackholes are formed by the impossibility of licensing at least one unlicensed feature on a phase head, and show how this account derives the distinction between canonical adjuncts from which subextraction is not permitted and subextraction from single event constructions in which subextraction is permitted. The section speculatively concludes with a demonstration of how blackholes might provide a unified analysis of islandhood in general. The second part of the thesis concentrates on the empirical phenomenon of subextraction from coordination and participial adjuncts. I report the results of a series of judgement experiments run in parallel across two sets of constructions, coordination and participial adjuncts, in three languages, English, German and Norwegian. The aim was to test whether acceptability of subextraction from within coordination and participial adjuncts varied depending on the aspectual or grammatical type of matrix predicate. The results show that acceptability of subextraction does depend on the type of matrix predicate. The crucial factor is intransitivity, partially confirming the bias towards unaccusatives in subextraction from participial adjuncts observed informally in Borgonovo and Neeleman (2000); Fabregas and Jiménez-Fernández (2016); Truswell (2011) whilst providing evidence against theoretical accounts that rely primarily on unaccusativity (Borgonovo and Neeleman, 2000; Fabregas and Jiménez-Fernández, 2016), primarily on aspectual distinctions (Truswell, 2007b) or primarily on agentivity (Truswell, 2009, 2011). Interestingly, the hierarchy in acceptability between the four types of matrix predicates stays constant across all three languages, despite both pseudocoordination and subextraction from within participials being ungrammatical in German

The ciao prolog system

Ciao is a public domain, next generation multi-paradigm programming environment with a unique set of features: Ciao offers a complete Prolog system, supporting ISO-Prolog, but its novel modular design allows both restricting and extending the language. As a result, it allows working with fully declarative subsets of Prolog and also to extend these subsets (or ISO-Prolog) both syntactically and semantically. Most importantly, these restrictions and extensions can be activated separately on each program module so that several extensions can coexist in the same application for different modules. Ciao also supports (through such extensions) programming with functions, higher-order (with predicate abstractions), constraints, and objects, as well as feature terms (records), persistence, several control rules (breadth-first search, iterative deepening, ...), concurrency (threads/engines), a good base for distributed execution (agents), and parallel execution. Libraries also support WWW programming, sockets, external interfaces (C, Java, TclTk, relational databases, etc.), etc. Ciao offers support for programming in the large with a robust module/object system, module-based separate/incremental compilation (automatically -no need for makefiles), an assertion language for declaring (optional) program properties (including types and modes, but also determinacy, non-failure, cost, etc.), automatic static inference and static/dynamic checking of such assertions, etc. Ciao also offers support for programming in the small producing small executables (including only those builtins used by the program) and support for writing scripts in Prolog. The Ciao programming environment includes a classical top-level and a rich emacs interface with an embeddable source-level debugger and a number of execution visualization tools. The Ciao compiler (which can be run outside the top level shell) generates several forms of architecture-independent and stand-alone executables, which run with speed, efficiency and executable size which are very competive with other commercial and academic Prolog/CLP systems. Library modules can be compiled into compact bytecode or C source files, and linked statically, dynamically, or autoloaded. The novel modular design of Ciao enables, in addition to modular program development, effective global program analysis and static debugging and optimization via source to source program transformation. These tasks are performed by the Ciao preprocessor ( ciaopp, distributed separately). The Ciao programming environment also includes lpdoc, an automatic documentation generator for LP/CLP programs. It processes Prolog files adorned with (Ciao) assertions and machine-readable comments and generates manuals in many formats including postscript, pdf, texinfo, info, HTML, man, etc. , as well as on-line help, ascii README files, entries for indices of manuals (info, WWW, ...), and maintains WWW distribution sites

The ciao system

Abstract is not available

Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science

A collection of papers presented at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, July 1994, including the following papers: ** Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Barry Smith ** The Bounds of Axiomatisation, Graham White ** Rethinking Boundaries, Wojciech Zelaniec ** Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition, Jean Petitot ** A Mereotopological Definition of 'Point', Carola Eschenbach ** Discreteness, Finiteness, and the Structure of Topological Spaces, Christopher Habel ** Mass Reference and the Geometry of Solids, Almerindo E. Ojeda ** Defining a 'Doughnut' Made Difficult, N .M. Gotts ** A Theory of Spatial Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries, A.G. Cohn and N.M. Gotts ** Mereotopological Construction of Time from Events, Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi ** Computational Mereology: A Study of Part-of Relations for Multi-media Indexing, Wlodek Zadrozny and Michelle Ki

Facilitating teacher participation in intelligent computer tutor design : tools and design methods.

This work addresses the widening gap between research in intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) and practical use of this technology by the educational community. In order to ensure that ITSs are effective, teachers must be involved in their design and evaluation. We have followed a user participatory design process to build a set of ITS knowledge acquisition tools that facilitate rapid prototyping and testing of curriculum, and are tailored for usability by teachers. The system (called KAFITS) also serves as a test-bed for experimentation with multiple tutoring strategies. The design includes novel methodologies for tutoring strategy representation (Parameterized Action Networks) and overlay student modeling (a layered student model), and incorporates considerations from instructional design theory. It also allows for considerable student control over the content and style of the information presented. Highly interactive graphics-based tools were built to facilitate design, inspection, and modification of curriculum and tutoring strategies, and to monitor the progress of the tutoring session. Evaluation of the system includes a sixteen-month case study of three educators (one being the domain expert) using the system to build a tutor for statics (forty topics representing about four hours of on-line instruction), testing the tutor on a dozen students, and using test results to iteratively improve the tutor. Detailed throughput analysis indicates that the amount of effort to build the statics tutor was, surprisingly, comparable to similar figures for building (non-intelligent) conventional computer aided instructional systems. Few ITS projects focus on educator participation and this work is the first to empirically study knowledge acquisition for ITSs. Results of the study also include: a recommended design process for building ITSs with educator participation; guidelines for training educators; recommendations for conducting knowledge acquisition sessions; and design tradeoffs for knowledge representation architectures and knowledge acquisition interfaces

Aspects of Coherence for Entity Analysis

Natural language understanding is an important topic in natural language proces- sing. Given a text, a computer program should, at the very least, be able to under- stand what the text is about, and ideally also situate it in its extra-textual context and understand what purpose it serves. What exactly it means to understand what a text is about is an open question, but it is generally accepted that, at a minimum, un- derstanding involves being able to answer questions like “Who did what to whom? Where? When? How? And Why?”. Entity analysis, the computational analysis of entities mentioned in a text, aims to support answering the questions “Who?” and “Whom?” by identifying entities mentioned in a text. If the answers to “Where?” and “When?” are specific, named locations and events, entity analysis can also pro- vide these answers. Entity analysis aims to answer these questions by performing entity linking, that is, linking mentions of entities to their corresponding entry in a knowledge base, coreference resolution, that is, identifying all mentions in a text that refer to the same entity, and entity typing, that is, assigning a label such as Person to mentions of entities. In this thesis, we study how different aspects of coherence can be exploited to improve entity analysis. Our main contribution is a method that allows exploiting knowledge-rich, specific aspects of coherence, namely geographic, temporal, and entity type coherence. Geographic coherence expresses the intuition that entities mentioned in a text tend to be geographically close. Similarly, temporal coherence captures the intuition that entities mentioned in a text tend to be close in the tem- poral dimension. Entity type coherence is based in the observation that in a text about a certain topic, such as sports, the entities mentioned in it tend to have the same or related entity types, such as sports team or athlete. We show how to integrate features modeling these aspects of coherence into entity linking systems and esta- blish their utility in extensive experiments covering different datasets and systems. Since entity linking often requires computationally expensive joint, global optimi- zation, we propose a simple, but effective rule-based approach that enjoys some of the benefits of joint, global approaches, while avoiding some of their drawbacks. To enable convenient error analysis for system developers, we introduce a tool for visual analysis of entity linking system output. Investigating another aspect of co- herence, namely the coherence between a predicate and its arguments, we devise a distributed model of selectional preferences and assess its impact on a neural core- ference resolution system. Our final contribution examines how multilingual entity typing can be improved by incorporating subword information. We train and make publicly available subword embeddings in 275 languages and show their utility in a multilingual entity typing tas

Aesthetics of Resistance : An investigation into the performative politics of contemporary activism – as seen in 5 events in Scandinavia and beyond

This Ph.D. submission deals with contemporary demonstration culture and political activism, seen as performance through performance. It consists of both a practical and a theoretical part. These are intertwined on various levels of the project. My submission, however, is made up of the two following parts: 1: A textual part, divided into 8 parts. Each part contains a script, an analysis and a number of commentaries. In these, 8 moments in the recent history of activism in Scandinavia and beyond, are reflected. The 8 research performances at the core of this project are reflected here as well. 2: An exhibition based on visual and sonic footage from the 8 performances, here transformed into an installation that present an aesthetic introduction to the project as a whole. The exhibition will be an attempt at re-staging the visual and sonic material as a new sense-event. The claim of ’Aesthetics of Resistance’ is that in recent examples of Direct Activism, politics are constituted by the aesthetic; as performance, form and style. This assumption is argued for by selecting 8 specific moments where this seems to be the case. These moments are chosen from 5 sequences of events, from a small incident in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2006 to the Egyptian uprising that gained global significance in 2011. The core part of the project is two sequences of confrontations between activists and authorities that both took place in Copenhagen, Denmark –The Youth House Movement 2007/08 and the large scale actions surrounding the UN Climate Summit COP15 in 2009 respectively. Central to the project is an idea of ’thinking with the senses’. In order to facilitate this, an experimental set-up was created, where a sensorial reflection could be compared with an analytical interpretation of the topic in question. This experimental set-up was constituted by the two figures: The artist/researcher and the sense-event. These two figures intertwine and in various ways stage the gap between discursive and nondiscursive thinking that lies at the core of this project. The use of performance is three-fold: A: The specific moments chosen are interpreted as performance. B: The ’thinking with the senses’ takes place as performance C: As a kind of meta-reflection, the project is performing art-research by using an artistic medium as the research tool to investigate the chosen topics. The 8 research experiments were set up as performances. These 8 performances took place at various locations in Denmark, Sweden and China in the period 2009 to 2012. The aesthetic reflection at the core of this project evolved in these senseevents. Video documentation of the performances is included here in the Appendix, but it is important to understand that neither this video documentation nor the texts in this part of my submission can give a full account of the sense-events. These accounts will per definition only be approximations. It is in this gap – or drama – between two levels of understanding this project revolves