A Type-coherent, Expressive Representation as an Initial Step to Language Understanding

A growing interest in tasks involving language understanding by the NLP community has led to the need for effective semantic parsing and inference. Modern NLP systems use semantic representations that do not quite fulfill the nuanced needs for language understanding: adequately modeling language semantics, enabling general inferences, and being accurately recoverable. This document describes underspecified logical forms (ULF) for Episodic Logic (EL), which is an initial form for a semantic representation that balances these needs. ULFs fully resolve the semantic type structure while leaving issues such as quantifier scope, word sense, and anaphora unresolved; they provide a starting point for further resolution into EL, and enable certain structural inferences without further resolution. This document also presents preliminary results of creating a hand-annotated corpus of ULFs for the purpose of training a precise ULF parser, showing a three-person pairwise interannotator agreement of 0.88 on confident annotations. We hypothesize that a divide-and-conquer approach to semantic parsing starting with derivation of ULFs will lead to semantic analyses that do justice to subtle aspects of linguistic meaning, and will enable construction of more accurate semantic parsers.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 13th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2019

Spin Conductance in one-dimensional Spin-Phonon systems

We present results for the spin conductance of the one dimensional spin-1/2 Heisenberg and XY model coupled to phonons. We apply an approach based on the Stochastic Series Expansion (Quantum Monte Carlo) method to evaluate the conductance for a variety of phonon dispersions and values of spin-phonon coupling. From our numerical simulations and analytical arguments, we derive several scaling laws for the conductance.Comment: 7 pages, 9 figure

Stochastic Cluster Series expansion for quantum spin systems

In this paper we develop a cluster-variant of the Stochastic Series expansion method (SCSE). For certain systems with longer-range interactions the SCSE is considerably more efficient than the standard implementation of the Stochastic Series Expansion (SSE), at low temperatures. As an application of this method we calculated the T=0-conductance for a linear chain with a (diagonal) next nearest neighbor interaction.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figure

World Rabies Day - a decade of raising awareness

World Rabies Day was set up in 2007 to raise global awareness about rabies, to provide information on how to prevent the disease in at-risk communities and support advocacy for increased efforts in rabies control. It is held annually on September 28th, with events, media outreach and other initiatives carried out by individuals, professionals, organisations and governments from the local to the international level. The Global Alliance for Rabies Control coordinates World Rabies Day, amplifying the campaign's reach through the provision of a central event platform and resources to support events across the world, the promotion of messages through key rabies stakeholders, and the implementation of specific activities to highlight particular issues. Over the last decade, more than 1,700 registered events have been held across the world and shared with others in the global rabies community. Events in canine rabies endemic countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, have increased over time. Beyond the individual events, World Rabies Day has gained the support of governments and international agencies that recognise its value in supporting existing rabies control initiatives and advocating for improvements. As the rabies landscape has changed, World Rabies Day remains a general day of awareness but has also become an integral part of national, regional and global rabies elimination strategies. The global adoption of 2030 as the goal for the elimination of rabies as a public health threat has led to even greater opportunities for World Rabies Day to make a sustainable impact on rabies, by bringing the attention of policy makers and donors to the ongoing situation and elimination efforts in rabies-endemic countries

Montague Grammar Induction

We propose a computational model for inducing full-fledged combinatory categorial grammars from behavioral data. This model contrasts with prior computational models of selection in representing syntactic and semantic types as structured (rather than atomic) objects, enabling direct interpretation of the modeling results relative to standard formal frameworks. We investigate the grammar our model induces when fit to a lexicon-scale acceptability judgment dataset – Mega Acceptability – focusing in particular on the types our model assigns to clausal complements and the predicates that select them