Touch down in Pittsburghese

In standard American English, down may take a DP object only if the DP indicates a path, as in I walked down the street. However, for some speakers of Pittsburgh English, it is also grammatical for down to take a DP object indicating a location or goal, as in She works down Baltimore (meaning ‘She works down in Baltimore’). In this work, I describe the distributional properties of this usage, which I name “touch down.” Based on these properties, I propose the syntactic analysis that touch down licenses a silent preposition where standard American English has an overt preposition, and that this silent preposition incorporates into down

A Coherent Methodology For First Amendment Speech and Religion Clause Cases

It seems clear that any deliberate effort by government to impose religious orthodoxy will be held unconstitutional per se. A religiously motivated restriction on disfavored religious practices will be held to violate the Free Exercise Clause. Similarly, a religiously motivated attempt to promote or subsidize favored religious practices will be held to violate the Establishment Clause. These complimentary restrictions are now so ingrained in our political culture that the legislatures rarely transgress them. The problem that has bedeviled the Supreme Court for many years is that government regulatory schemes and benefit programs designed to serve purely nonreligious objectives inevitably impact on religion inadvertently. In applying the Free Exercise Clause to cases of inadvertent interference, the Court adopted one fundamental doctrinal construct, promptly overruled that construct, adopted a nearly opposite principle, and then years later resurrected the original approach. In applying the Establishment Clause, the Court consistently articulated the same principle or test over many years, but produced a series of apparently inconsistent results. Most recently, the Court has consciously avoided articulating any standard or test in finding that a governmental action violates the Establishment Clause. The task confronting the Court is to develop a coherent jurisprudence to deal with the frequent inadvertent collisions between governmental actions and the absolute prohibitions of the two religion clauses. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court appears unaware that this is precisely the same systemic jurisprudential question that is presented when similar regulations inadvertently affect the interests protected by the Free Speech Clause. It is the central thesis of this Article that the conceptual methodology developed by the Court for dealing with inadvertence in the free speech context is the only sensible approach to the inadvertence problem in the context of any of the absolutely worded prohibitions of the First Amendment, including the two religion clauses. This Article concludes with an argument that those current threads in religion clause jurisprudence that appear to parallel the free speech methodology should be refined and reinforced while those that diverge from the free speech methodology should be abandoned

Current State Action Theories, the Jackson Nexus Requirement, and Employee Discharges by Semi-Public and State-Aided Institutions

The purpose of this Article has been to reestablish the continued vitality of the several branches of the state action doctrine in the face of recent decisions that have strained noticeably to avoid implementation of one or more elements of the doctrine, often by an illogical insistence on the application of the Jackson nexus requirement. At least in the employment discharge cases, the regular findings of no state action should not be read as casting doubt upon the continued viability of the various elements of state action doctrine, much less as indications that all elements except state-action-by-state-regulation are so obviously defunct that they legitimately can be ignored. Nor should those cases be read as establishing a theoretically unsound distinction that would confine the various elements of the state action doctrine to cases alleging racial discrimination, thus leaving first amendment claimants such as those in Marsh substantially without protection. Rather, those cases should be read as instances of increasing judicial sophistication, albeit intuitive or instinctive, in the assessment of state action claims. They should be read as a rejection by the courts of the superficial assumption that if a private institution acts as the state with respect to one group of individuals in one context, it acts as the state with respect to all individuals in all contexts

RNNs Implicitly Implement Tensor Product Representations

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can learn continuous vector representations of symbolic structures such as sequences and sentences; these representations often exhibit linear regularities (analogies). Such regularities motivate our hypothesis that RNNs that show such regularities implicitly compile symbolic structures into tensor product representations (TPRs; Smolensky, 1990), which additively combine tensor products of vectors representing roles (e.g., sequence positions) and vectors representing fillers (e.g., particular words). To test this hypothesis, we introduce Tensor Product Decomposition Networks (TPDNs), which use TPRs to approximate existing vector representations. We demonstrate using synthetic data that TPDNs can successfully approximate linear and tree-based RNN autoencoder representations, suggesting that these representations exhibit interpretable compositional structure; we explore the settings that lead RNNs to induce such structure-sensitive representations. By contrast, further TPDN experiments show that the representations of four models trained to encode naturally-occurring sentences can be largely approximated with a bag of words, with only marginal improvements from more sophisticated structures. We conclude that TPDNs provide a powerful method for interpreting vector representations, and that standard RNNs can induce compositional sequence representations that are remarkably well approximated by TPRs; at the same time, existing training tasks for sentence representation learning may not be sufficient for inducing robust structural representations.Comment: Accepted to ICLR 201

A Unifying Theory for the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment

According to Justice Powell, the first amendment religion clauses are the source of some of the most perplexing questions that the Supreme Court confronts. In a long and rapidly expanding line of religion clause cases the Court has struggled, with a conspicuous lack of success, to articulate principles of broad applicability. The Court\u27s efforts to date have resulted in a jumble of tests, standards, and theoretical approaches from which predicting the outcome in future cases is very difficult. The conceptual problems that have frustrated the Court\u27s attempts at doctrinal development center in two broad areas: first,the meaning and effect of the establishment clause and second, the relationship between the establishment clause and the free exercise clause. In a third area, the meaning and effect of the free exercise clause, the Court has had somewhat less trouble articulating a doctrinal approach, but even here the Court has not applied the doctrine consistently and has not reached entirely predictable results. Perhaps the most telling measure of the Court\u27s doctrinal frustration in the religion clause area is the extent to which it recently has attempted to elevate its conspicuous lack of doctrinal consistency into an accepted methodology for decision making. Chief Justice Burger summarized current thinking on the relationship between the two religion clauses by noting that there is internal tension in the First Amendment between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. Finding a clearer acknowledgement of the Court\u27s failure to articulate a unifying theory underlying the two clauses would be difficult. Concerning the meaning and effect of the establishment clause, Chief Justice Burger has observed with apparent approval (or at least resignation) that the Court has been unwilling to tie establishment clause analysis to a single test. With the same apparent approval, Justice White has noted that our decisions have tended to avoid categorical imperatives and absolutist approaches .... This course sacrifices clarity and predictability for flexibility .. .., Describing the same phenomenon in another case, Justice O\u27Connor concluded that [e]very government practice must be judged in its unique circumstances to determine whether it constitutes an endorsement or disapproval of religion. In effect, the Court seems to have accepted the inevitability of an ad hoc approach with a final result in any case possible only after Supreme Court review... The thesis of this Article is that such a single overriding objective can be identified and articulated. This objective reflects the basic purpose of those who authored and adopted the religion clauses and, to a remarkable degree, harmonizes the Court\u27s apparently disparate results in religion clause cases. The Court\u27s conscious acceptance of the unifying theory proposed in this Article would provide a satisfying explanation for a large number of results arrived at by intuition in the past and would provide a theoretical basis from which to predict results in future cases

Bayes in the age of intelligent machines

The success of methods based on artificial neural networks in creating intelligent machines seems like it might pose a challenge to explanations of human cognition in terms of Bayesian inference. We argue that this is not the case, and that in fact these systems offer new opportunities for Bayesian modeling. Specifically, we argue that Bayesian models of cognition and artificial neural networks lie at different levels of analysis and are complementary modeling approaches, together offering a way to understand human cognition that spans these levels. We also argue that the same perspective can be applied to intelligent machines, where a Bayesian approach may be uniquely valuable in understanding the behavior of large, opaque artificial neural networks that are trained on proprietary data