Margery Vosse, Ralph Pemberton, June 3, 1684

Letter dated June 3, 1684 (May 24, 1684 Old Style) from Margery Vosse to Ralph Pemberton

Margery Vosse and Richard Mather , Ralph Pemberton, June 18, 1683; June 19, 1683

Letter dated June 18 and 19, 1683 (June 8 and 9, 1683 Old Style) from Richard Mather and Margery Vosse to Ralph Pemberton

Margery Vosse, Ralph Pemberton, August 28, 1684

Letter dated August 28, 1684 (August 18, 1684 Old Style) from Margery Vosse to Ralph Pemberton

Syntactic structure assembly in human parsing: A computational model based on competitive inhibition and a lexicalist grammar

We present the design, implementation and simulation results of a psycholinguistic model of human syntactic processing that meets major empirical criteria. The parser operates in conjunction with a lexicalist grammar and is driven by syntactic information associated with heads of phrases. The dynamics of the model are based on competition by lateral inhibition ('competitive inhibition'). Input words activate lexical frames (i.e. elementary trees anchored to input words) in the mental lexicon, and a network of candidate 'unification links' is set up between frame nodes. These links represent tentative attachments that are graded rather than all-or-none. Candidate links that, due to grammatical or 'treehood' constraints, are incompatible, compete for inclusion in the final syntactic tree by sending each other inhibitory signals that reduce the competitor's attachment strength. The outcome of these local and simultaneous competitions is controlled by dynamic parameters, in particular by the Entry Activation and the Activation Decay rate of syntactic nodes, and by the Strength and Strength Build-up rate of Unification links. In case of a successful parse, a single syntactic tree is returned that covers the whole input string and consists of lexical frames connected by winning Unification links. Simulations are reported of a significant range of psycholinguistic parsing phenomena in both normal and aphasic speakers of English: (i) various effects of linguistic complexity (single versus double, center versus right-hand self-embeddings of relative clauses; the difference between relative clauses with subject and object extraction; the contrast between a complement clause embedded within a relative clause versus a relative clause embedded within a complement clause); (ii) effects of local and global ambiguity, and of word-class and syntactic ambiguity (including recency and length effects); (iii) certain difficulty-of-reanalysis effects (contrasts between local ambiguities that are easy to resolve versus ones that lead to serious garden-path effects); (iv) effects of agrammatism on parsing performance, in particular the performance of various groups of aphasic patients on several sentence types

The Unification Space implemented as a localist neural net: predictions and error-tolerance in a constraint-based parser

We introduce a novel computer implementation of the Unification-Space parser (Vosse and Kempen in Cognition 75:105–143, 2000) in the form of a localist neural network whose dynamics is based on interactive activation and inhibition. The wiring of the network is determined by Performance Grammar (Kempen and Harbusch in Verb constructions in German and Dutch. Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2003), a lexicalist formalism with feature unification as binding operation. While the network is processing input word strings incrementally, the evolving shape of parse trees is represented in the form of changing patterns of activation in nodes that code for syntactic properties of words and phrases, and for the grammatical functions they fulfill. The system is capable, at least qualitatively and rudimentarily, of simulating several important dynamic aspects of human syntactic parsing, including garden-path phenomena and reanalysis, effects of complexity (various types of clause embeddings), fault-tolerance in case of unification failures and unknown words, and predictive parsing (expectation-based analysis, surprisal effects). English is the target language of the parser described

Incremental syntactic tree formation in human sentence processing: A cognitive architecture based on activation decay and simulated annealing

A new cognitive architecture is proposed for the syntactic aspects of human sentence processing. The architecture, called Unification Space, is biologically inspired but not based on neural nets. Instead it relies on biosynthesis as a basic metaphor. We use simulated annealing as an optimization technique which searches for the best configuration of isolated syntactic segments or subtrees in the final parse tree. The gradually decaying activation of individual syntactic nodes determines the ‘global excitation level’ of the system. This parameter serves the function of ‘computational temperature’ in simulated annealing. We have built a computer implementation of the architecture which simulates well-known sentence understanding phenomena. We report successful simulations of the psycholinguistic effects of clause embedding, minimal attachment, right association and lexical ambiguity. In addition, we simulated impaired sentence understanding as observable in agrammatic patients. Since the Unification Space allows for contextual (semantic and pragmatic) influences on the syntactic tree formation process, it belongs to the class of interactive sentence processing models

A language-sensitive text editor for Dutch

Modern word processors begin to offer a range of facilities for spelling, grammar and style checking in English. For the Dutch language hardly anything is available as yet. Many commercial word processing packages do include a hyphenation routine and a lexicon-based spelling checker but the practical usefulness of these tools is limited due to certain properties of Dutch orthography, as we will explain below. In this chapter we describe a text editor which incorporates a great deal of lexical, morphological and syntactic knowledge of Dutch and monitors the orthographical quality of Dutch texts. Section 1 deals with those aspects of Dutch orthography which pose problems to human authors as well as to computational language sensitive text editing tools. In section 2 we describe the design and the implementation of the text editor we have built. Section 3 is mainly devoted to a provisional evaluation of the system

Mathematical modelling of the cardiovascular system

This paper is an introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Engineering Mathematic (Volume 47/3–4, 2003) on the mathematical modelling of the cardiovascular system. This issue includes the 2003 James Lighthill Memorial Paper written by Pedley [1] on the mathematical modelling of arterial fluid dynamics. This introduction is written to bring cardiovascular biomechanics to readers with a background in mathematical modelling and computational mechanics. The importance of mathematical modelling for physiological understanding, diagnostics, prosthesis development, patient selection and medical planning is indicated and discussed shortly. A subdivision into models for cardiac mechanics, pressure- and flow-wave propagation, mass transfer and fully three-dimensional fluid-structure interaction is made and references are given to the different contributions of the issue

Middle Power, Civilian Power, or New Power?: Comparing Underlying Factors of the Security Policy in Japan and Germany

Japan and Germany, two countries with very similar constraints concerningtheir defense and security policy, have often been described as middle poweror civilian powers. While Germany has began to increase its international rolefirst in Europe and later in out-of-area missions, Japan seems to be somehowbehind Germany and is often described as in the process of “normalization”.However, what does “normalization” mean for Japan? Under Prime MinisterKoizumi, cooperation with the US was intensified and broadened, Japan becamea partner in the “coalition of the willing” and agreed to co-develop and employa missile defense system. Since 2001, it seemed that even the widely acceptedbelief in the general public support for anti-militarist values was weakening,while support to abandon article 9 of the constitution was rising. This articleargues that Japan, despite some differences in terms of its alliance obligationsas well as the structure and practice of its political system, has still manycommonalities with Germany. While Germany has relatively quickly becomemore internationally engaged and has gradually abandoned its overly strongunwillingness to send troops abroad after the end of the Cold War, Japan hastaken longer and is still at the stage Germany might have been in the mid 1990s,hence before the Kosovo War. For Japan, public support for its armed forces andpride about its achievements over the last ten to fifteen years might indicate anincreased willingness to play a more active international role, without givingup its still strong preference for non-military and diplomatic solutions in bothGermany and Japan. Rather than calling them “normal” states, it might be betterto call them new powers