944 research outputs found
Semantic transfer in Verbmobil
This paper is a detailed discussion of semantic transfer in the context of the Verbmobil Machine Translation project. The use of semantic transfer as a translation mechanism is introduced and justified by comparison with alternative approaches. Some criteria for evaluation of transfer frameworks are discussed and a comparison is made of three different approaches to the representation of translation rules or equivalences. This is followed by a discussion of control of application of transfer rules and interaction with a domain description and inference component
The effect of pre-exposure on family resemblance categorization for stimuli of varying levels of perceptual difficulty
This study investigated the effect that pre-exposure to a set of stimuli has on the prevalence of family resemblance categorization. 64 participants were tested to examine the effect that pre-exposure type (same-stimuli vs unrelated-stimuli) and the perceptual difficulty of the stimuli (perceptually similar vs perceptually different) has on categorization strategy. There was a significant effect of perceptual difficulty, indicating that perceptually different stimuli evoked a higher level of family resemblance sorting than perceptually similar stimuli. There was no significant main effect of pre-exposure type; however, there was a significant interaction between pre-exposure type and level of perceptual difficulty. Post-hoc tests revealed that this interaction was the result of an increase in family resemblance sorting for the perceptually different stimuli under relevant preexposure but no such effect for perceptually similar stimuli. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed
Case selection for robust generalisation in impact evaluation:lessons from QuIP impact evaluation studies
What wider lessons can be drawn from a single impact evaluation study? This article examines how case study and source selection contribute to useful generalisation. Practical suggestions for making these decisions are drawn from a set of qualitative impact studies. Generalising about impact is a deliberative process of building, testing and refining useful theories about how change happens. To serve this goal, purposive selection can support more credible generalisation than random selection by systematically and transparently drawing upon prior knowledge of variation in actions, contexts, and outcomes to test theory against diverse, deviant and anomalous cases
Functional Distributional Semantics
Vector space models have become popular in distributional semantics, despite the challenges they face in capturing various semantic phenomena. We propose a novel probabilistic framework which draws on both formal semantics and recent advances in machine learning. In particular, we separate predicates from the entities they refer to, allowing us to perform Bayesian inference based on logical forms. We describe an implementation of this framework using a combination of Restricted Boltzmann Machines and feedforward neural networks. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by training it on a parsed corpus and evaluating it on established similarity datasets
Afterglow? The long-term influence of development finance institutions on firmsâ environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies.
Pragmatics and word meaning
In this paper, we explore the interaction between lexical semantics
and pragmatics.
We argue that linguistic processing is informationally encapsulated and
utilizes
relatively simple âtaxonomicâ lexical semantic knowledge. On
this basis, defeasible
lexical generalisations deliver defeasible parts of logical form. In contrast,
pragmatic
inference is open-ended and involves arbitrary real-world knowledge. Two
axioms
specify when pragmatic defaults override lexical ones. We demonstrate that
modelling
this interaction allows us to achieve a more refined interpretation of
words in a
discourse context than either the lexicon or pragmatics could do on their
own.</jats:p
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