Speech register influences listeners’ word expectations

We utilized the N400 effect to investigate the influence of speech register on predictive language processing. Participants listened to long stretches (4 – 15 min) of naturalistic speech from different registers (dialogues, news broadcasts, and read-aloud books), totalling approximately 50,000 words, while the EEG signal was recorded. We estimated the surprisal of words in the speech materials with the aid of a statistical language model in such a manner that it reflected different predictive processing strategies; generic, register-specific, or recency-based. The N400 amplitude was best predicted with register-specific word surprisal, indicating that the statistics of the wider context (i.e., register) influences predictive language processing. Furthermore, adaptation to speech register cannot merely be explained by recency effects; instead, listeners adapt their word anticipations to the presented speech register

Broad expertise retrieval in sparse data environments

Expertise retrieval has been largely unexplored on data other than the W3C collection. At the same time, many intranets of universities and other knowledge-intensive organisations offer examples of relatively small but clean multilingual expertise data, covering broad ranges of expertise areas. We first present two main expertise retrieval tasks, along with a set of baseline approaches based on generative language modeling, aimed at finding expertise relations between topics and people. For our experimental evaluation, we introduce (and release) a new test set based on a crawl of a university site. Using this test set, we conduct two series of experiments. The first is aimed at determining the effectiveness of baseline expertise retrieval methods applied to the new test set. The second is aimed at assessing refined models that exploit characteristic features of the new test set, such as the organizational structure of the university, and the hierarchical structure of the topics in the test set. Expertise retrieval models are shown to be robust with respect to environments smaller than the W3C collection, and current techniques appear to be generalizable to other settings

Boards of Directors’ Contribution to Strategy: A Literature Review and Research Agenda

Manuscript Type: Literature review.Research Question/Issue: Over the last four decades, research on the relationship between boards of directors and strategy has proliferated. Yet to date there is little theoretical and empirical agreement regarding the question of how boards of directors contribute to strategy. This review assesses the extant literature by highlighting emerging trends and identifying several avenues for future research.Research Findings/Insights: Using a content-analysis of 150 articles published in 23 manage-ment journals until 2007, we describe and analyze how research on boards of directors and strategy has evolved over time. We illustrate how topics, theories, settings and sources of data interact and influence insights about board-strategy relationships during three specific periods.Theoretical/Academic Implications: Our study illustrates that research on boards of directors and strategy evolved from normative and structural approaches to behavioral and cognitive approaches. Our results encourage future studies (i) to examine the impact of institutional and context-specific factors on the (expected) contribution of boards to strategy, and (ii) to apply alternative methods to fully capture the impact of board processes and dynamics on strategy-making.Practical/Policy Implications: The increasing interest in boards of directors’ contribution to strategy echoes a movement towards more strategic involvement of boards of directors. However, best governance practices and the emphasis on board independence and control may hinder the board contribution to the strategic decision-making. Our study invites investors and policy-makers to consider the requirements for an effective strategic task when they nominee board members and develop new regulations.boards of directors;contribution to strategy;literature review

Schwarzschild models of the Sculptor dSph galaxy

We have developed a spherically symmetric dynamical model of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy using the Schwarzschild method. This type of modelling yields constraints both on the total mass distribution (e.g. enclosed mass and scale radius) as well as on the orbital structure of the system modelled (e.g. velocity anisotropy). Therefore not only can we derive the dark matter content of these systems, but also explore possible formation scenarios. Here we present preliminary results for the Sculptor dSph. We find that the mass of Sculptor within 1kpc is 8.5\times10^(7\pm0.05) M\odot, its anisotropy profile is tangentially biased and slightly more isotropic near the center. For an NFW profile, the preferred concentration (~15) is compatible with cosmological models. Very cuspy density profiles (steeper than NFW) are strongly disfavoured for Sculptor.Comment: 2 pages, 4 figures, to appear in the proceedings of "Assembling the Puzzle of the Milky Way", Le Grand Bornand (Apr. 17-22, 2011

Simulating code-switching using a neural network model of bilingual sentence production

Code-switching is the alternation from one language to the other during bilingual speech. We present a novel method of researching this phenomenon using computational cognitive modeling. We trained a neural network of bilingual sentence production to simulate early balanced Spanish–English bilinguals, late speakers of English who have Spanish as a dominant native language, and late speakers of Spanish who have English as a dominant native language. The model produced code-switches even though it was not exposed to code-switched input. The simulations predicted how code-switching patterns differ between early balanced and late non-balanced bilinguals; the balanced bilingual simulation code-switches considerably more frequently, which is in line with what has been observed in human speech production. Additionally, we compared the patterns produced by the simulations with two corpora of spontaneous bilingual speech and identified noticeable commonalities and differences. To our knowledge, this is the first computational cognitive model simulating the code-switched production of non-balanced bilinguals and comparing the simulated production of balanced and non-balanced bilinguals with that of human bilinguals

A theory on the vertical dispersal of splash-borne pathogen units influenced by arable crop characteristics

An analytical mechanistic model was proposed to study the vertical spread of splash-borne spores in arable crop canopies. Three crop types were considered, with different LAI distributions. The influences of crop characteristics and rain properties on vertical spread were investigated. The LAI affected the amount of rain being intercepted by the canopy and the vertical displacement of splashed spores. Splash dispersal was concentrated in the upper canopy layers in a crop having LAI constant or increasing with height. Splash probabilities were greatest and most spores were intercepted in the layers just beneath the upper layers in a crop having LAI decreasing with height

Simulating Spanish-English code-switching: El modelo está generating code-switches

Multilingual speakers are able to switch from one language to the other (“code-switch”) be- tween or within sentences. Because the under- lying cognitive mechanisms are not well un- derstood, in this study we use computational cognitive modeling to shed light on the pro- cess of code-switching. We employed the Bilingual Dual-path model, a Recurrent Neu- ral Network of bilingual sentence production (Tsoukala et al., 2017) and simulated sentence production in simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals. Our first goal was to investigate whether the model would code-switch with- out being exposed to code-switched training input. The model indeed produced code- switches even without any exposure to such input and the patterns of code-switches are in line with earlier linguistic work (Poplack, 1980). The second goal of this study was to investigate an auxiliary phrase asymmetry that exists in Spanish-English code-switched pro- duction. Using this cognitive model, we ex- amined a possible cause for this asymmetry. To our knowledge, this is the first computa- tional cognitive model that aims to simulate code-switched sentence production