An attention-based explanation for some exhaustivity operators

NWO360-20-260FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

Where the air is thin, but the view so much clearer

NWO360-20-260FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

Personalised learning: a familiar concept to secondary teachers? And which teachers?

This paper presents the main results of a questionnaire survey that sought to evaluate secondary school teachers’ familiarity with the notion of personalised learning and to relate it to personal, sociological and professional characteristics. The outcomes of this work are both an exploratory study aimed at defining more focused questions about the theme of personalisation, and the first tryout of the questionnaire designed to gather data. Although this was thus a preliminary study which did not lay claim to any more general scope, it still enables some hypotheses to be framed and examined in the light of the answers of 43 practitioners. The appendix provides the full questionnaire on personalisation, as distributed to participants.Peer reviewe

Initial Mass Function Effects on the Colour Evolution of Disk Galaxies

Aims. In this work, we want to find out if the IMF can be determined from colour images, integrated colours, or mass-to-light ratios, especially at high redshift, where galaxies cannot be resolved into individual stars, which would enable us to investigate dependencies of the IMF on cosmological epoch. Methods. We use chemo-dynamical models to investigate the influence of the Initial Mass Function (IMF) on the evolution of a Milky Way-type disk galaxy, in particular of its colours. Results. We find that the effect of the IMF on the internal gas absorption is larger than its effect on the light from the stellar content. However, the two effects work in the opposite sense: An IMF with more high mass stars leads to brighter and bluer star-light, but also to more interstellar dust and thus to more absorption, causing a kind of “IMF degeneracy”. The most likely wavelength region in which to detect IMF effects is the infrared (i.e., JHK). We also provide photometric absorption and inclination corrections in the SDSS ugriz and the HST WFPC2 and NICMOS systems

Ignorance in context: the interaction of modified numerals and QUDs

NWO360-20-260FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

Don't blame distributional semantics if it can't do entailment

Distributional semantics has had enormous empirical success in Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science in modeling various semantic phenomena, such as semantic similarity, and distributional models are widely used in state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing systems. However, the theoretical status of distributional semantics within a broader theory of language and cognition is still unclear: What does distributional semantics model? Can it be, on its own, a fully adequate model of the meanings of linguistic expressions? The standard answer is that distributional semantics is not fully adequate in this regard, because it falls short on some of the central aspects of formal semantic approaches: truth conditions, entailment, reference, and certain aspects of compositionality. We argue that this standard answer rests on a misconception: These aspects do not belong in a theory of expression meaning, they are instead aspects of speaker meaning, i.e., communicative intentions in a particular context. In a slogan: words do not refer, speakers do. Clearing this up enables us to argue that distributional semantics on its own is an adequate model of expression meaning. Our proposal sheds light on the role of distributional semantics in a broader theory of language and cognition, its relationship to formal semantics, and its place in computational models.Horizon 2020(H2020)715154FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

The many faces of early-type dwarf galaxies

We present a study of 413 early-type dwarf (dE) galaxies in the Virgo Cluster with SDSS multicolour imaging. Several dE subclasses show systematic differences in shape, clustering properties, and stellar content. We find different colour-magnitude relations for nucleated and non-nucleated dEs, as well as for dE samples populating regions of different densitie