The case of fragment answers

This paper investigates the case of bare-(pro)nominal fragment answers, and specifically the issues that arise in analyzing the case of fragment DPs from subject questions. I adopt a middle ground approach between competing theories of nonsententials—namely the Ellipsis Approach (Merchant 2004) and the approach of Direct Interpretation (Barton & Progovac 2005)—and propose fragment DPs to be derived from a null vP. For their case forms, I compare two different theories of case—assignment by functional heads and Dependent Case Theory—and hypothesize that fragment DPs construed as the internal argument are realized in dependent case for nominative-accusative languages. Fragment DPs construed as the external argument would be found in their default case form, which is language-specific. Fragment answer data from English, Korean, and Serbian is used to provide crosslinguistic support for this null vP analysis and discussion of case

Syntactic Category Learning as Iterative Prototype-Driven Clustering

We lay out a model for minimally supervised syntactic category acquisition which combines concepts from standard NLP part-of-speech tagging applications with cognitively motivated distributional statistics. The model assumes a small set of seed words (Haghighi and Klein, 2006), an approach with motivation in (Pinker, 1984)’s semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, and repeatedly constructs hierarchical agglomerative clusterings over a growing lexicon. Clustering is performed on the basis of word-adjacent syntactic frames alone (Mintz, 2003) with no reference to word-internal features, which has been shown to yield qualitatively coherent POS clusters (Redington et al., 1998). A prototype-driven labeling process based on tree-distance yields results comparable to unsupervised algorithms based on complex statistical optimization while maintaining its cognitive underpinnings

Consumer-directed services: lessons and implications for integrated systems of care

Over the past decade, policy makers in developed countries have begun to pay increasing attention to reform of the long-term care system for the frail elderly and younger people with disabilities. A continuum of strategies have generated interest, including integrated systems of care with agency/professionally managed service packages on the one end, and programs offering cash benefits along with the flexibility to decide how to best use these funds to meet individual needs and preferences, on the other. The latter approach, known as “consumer-directed care,” is found in various forms and degrees in Europe and North America. Primarily organised around the provision of home and community care, consumer-directed services are aimed at empowering clients and family carers, giving them major control over the what, who and when of needed care. Consumer-directed care appears to be the antithesis of integrated care. However, it actually holds important lessons and implications for the latter. This policy paper explores the rationale and models of consumer-directed services at home, reviews developments, designs and outcomes of programs in the Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US. It also discusses how this experience could be helpful in shaping better and more responsive integrated models of care for vulnerable long term care populations