Context-dependent Meaning Research Articles

Decision support from financial disclosures with deep neural networks and transfer learning

Company disclosures greatly aid in the process of financial decision-making; therefore, they are consulted by financial investors and automated traders before exercising ownership in stocks. While humans are usually able to correctly interpret the content, the same is rarely true of computerized decision support systems, which struggle with the complexity and ambiguity of natural language. A possible remedy is represented by deep learning, which overcomes several shortcomings of traditional methods of text mining. For instance, recurrent neural networks, such as long short-term memories, employ hierarchical structures, together with a large number of hidden layers, to automatically extract features from ordered sequences of words and capture highly non-linear relationships such as context-dependent meanings. However, deep learning has only recently started to receive traction, possibly because its performance is largely untested. Hence, this paper studies the use of deep neural networks for financial decision support. We additionally experiment with transfer learning, in which we pre-train the network on a different corpus with a length of 139.1 million words. Our results reveal a higher directional accuracy as compared to traditional machine learning when predicting stock price movements in response to financial disclosures. Our work thereby helps to highlight the business value of deep learning and provides recommendations to practitioners and executives.

The Expression of Modality in Tlingit: A Paucity of Grammatical Devices

This paper provides an in-depth description of the expression of modal categories in Tlingit (Na-Dene; Alaska). Epistemic, deontic, and circumstantial modal statements are examined, and for each I examine statements with strong and weak modal force. A notable feature of the Tlingit system is that—relative to other languages of the Pacific Northwest—Tlingit exhibits a striking paucity of grammaticalized modal expressions, and only a limited subset of the aforementioned modal categories can be expressed by the conventionalized, truth-conditional semantics of a statement. Nevertheless, speakers employ a variety of pragmatic strategies to communicate information about other modal categories. This situation is rather similar to that reported for Nez Perce, but different from cases such as St’át’imcets or Washo, in which modals exhibit a context-dependent meaning, allowing for a small set to denote all logically possible modal categories.

Finding features, figuratively

Object concepts refer to unique clusters of properties that can be selectively activated or inhibited depending on what information is currently relevant. This conceptual “stretching” enables limitless new meanings to be generated, and figurative language provides a useful framework in which to study this conceptual flexibility. Here we probe the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the comprehension of novel metaphors as a means of understanding the conceptual flexibility inherent to language processing more generally. We show that novel metaphor comprehension involves the activation or inhibition of conceptual properties that are either relevant or irrelevant to the metaphor, and that left inferior frontal gyrus is recruited in this process, supporting a role for this region in the fine-tuning of conceptual meaning. Our results are consistent with a flexible, compositional account of conceptual structure in which semantic control mechanisms operate over conceptual properties during figurative language comprehension in order to create context-dependent meaning.

Differential translation

Abstract Translators of German philosophy into English must often choose whether to express concrete or abstract meanings for polysemous German keywords. This article discusses “differential translation,” a widely underestimated strategy for representing polysemous words in translation. Disavowing both untranslatability and the necessity of terminological equivalence, this strategy integrates signs of polysemy into the reading experience by presenting foreign keywords in brackets after their differing, context-dependent meanings. The article discusses how translators have already responded and how they might respond even more constructively to passages where Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Blumenberg, respectively, choose words that link abstractions to images: by presenting existence as both foundational and ground-like (gründlich), time as both fluctuating and fluid (strömend), and common sense as both obvious and nearby (naheliegend). Encountering differentially translated texts would challenge future scholars to evaluate the unity of the concepts behind the words.

Context-Mediated Behavior

Context-mediated behavior (CMB) is an approach to giving intelligent agents the ability to recognize their context at all times and to behave appropriately for it. It is based on the idea that contexts—classes of situations—should be represented explicitly as first-class objects. These representations (contextual schemas) are then retrieved based on a diagnostic process of context assessment. Contextual schemas contain descriptive knowledge about the context, including predicted features and context-dependent meaning of concepts. They also include prescriptive features that tell the agent how to behave in the context. This approach has been implemented in several systems, including an intelligent controller for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and the author is now exploring distributing the process in multiagent systems.

Meaning of Staring and the Starer-Staree Relationship Related to Men Living With Acquired Spinal Cord Injuries.

When in public places, many individuals with physical disabilities experience staring. Although staring is typically seen as uncomplicated and something to be "ignored," it has consequences for the person being stared and the staree. Few studies have focused on staring experienced by men following spinal cord injury (SCI). Accordingly, this study explored how adult men with SCI give meaning to the staring from others, the consequences for them, and their responses to the staring and to the starer. Principles of modified grounded theory methods were used to conduct a secondary analysis of interview data for 30 male participants from a larger study of community-dwelling individuals with SCI. Themes revealed through analysis related to context-dependent meanings of staring, negative consequences of staring for some men, and positive opportunities for self-growth and interaction with the public. These findings contribute to a more complex understanding of staring and the relationship between the starer and staree in various social circumstances which can support people living with differences in their public interactions, and improve their quality of life.

؟adi as a Discourse Marker in Spoken Iraqi Arabic

The linguistic element ؟adi is extensively employed in the variety of Arabic spoken in Iraq to aid in communication and facilitate the cohesion and flow of conversation. ؟adi which roughly means no worries, okay, how dare you?, yeah I hear you, or I've gone through the same thing myself , displays properties typically displayed by discourse markers. For example, it occurs phrase-initially or phrase-finally, it is a grammatically optional lexical item, it is multi-functional and it is an essential feature of spontaneous oral discourse … oral - rather than formal written - discourse among Iraqi speakers of Arabic. The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of ؟adi , its distribution and its varied context-dependent meanings and functions. The description and investigation are based largely on speech samples which the author recorded. These recordings were then transcribed and analyzed in order to identify the functions associated with ؟adi from a discourse analytical perspective.

Differing contributions of inferior prefrontal and anterior temporal cortex to concrete and abstract conceptual knowledge

Semantic cognition is underpinned by regions involved in representing conceptual knowledge and executive control areas that provide regulation of this information according to current task requirements. Using distortion-corrected fMRI, we investigated the contributions of these two systems to abstract and concrete word comprehension. We contrasted semantic decisions made either with coherent contextual support, which encouraged retrieval of a rich conceptual representation, or with irrelevant contextual information, which instead maximised demands on control processes. Inferior prefrontal cortex was activated more when decisions were made in the presence of irrelevant context, suggesting that this region is crucial for the semantic control functions required to select appropriate aspects of meaning in the face of competing information. It also exhibited greater activation for abstract words, which reflects the fact that abstract words tend to have variable, context-dependent meanings that place higher demands on control processes. In contrast, anterior temporal regions (ATL) were most active when decisions were made with the benefit of a coherent context, suggesting a representational role. There was a graded shift in concreteness effects in this region, with dorsolateral areas particularly active for abstract words and ventromedial areas preferentially activated by concrete words. This supports the idea that concrete concepts are closely associated with visual experience and abstract concepts with auditory-verbal information; and that sub-regions of the ATL display graded specialisation for these two types of knowledge. Between these two extremes, we identified significant activations for both word types in ventrolateral ATL. This area is known to be involved in representing knowledge for concrete concepts; here we established that it is also activated by abstract concepts. These results converge with data from rTMS and neuropsychological investigations in demonstrating that representational content and task demands influence recruitment of different areas in the semantic network.

Action relevance in linguistic context drives word-induced motor activity.

Many neurocognitive studies on the role of motor structures in action-language processing have implicitly adopted a “dictionary-like” framework within which lexical meaning is constructed on the basis of an invariant set of semantic features. The debate has thus been centered on the question of whether motor activation is an integral part of the lexical semantics (embodied theories) or the result of a post-lexical construction of a situation model (disembodied theories). However, research in psycholinguistics show that lexical semantic processing and context-dependent meaning construction are narrowly integrated. An understanding of the role of motor structures in action-language processing might thus be better achieved by focusing on the linguistic contexts under which such structures are recruited. Here, we therefore analyzed online modulations of grip force while subjects listened to target words embedded in different linguistic contexts. When the target word was a hand action verb and when the sentence focused on that action (John signs the contract) an early increase of grip force was observed. No comparable increase was detected when the same word occurred in a context that shifted the focus toward the agent's mental state (John wants to sign the contract). There mere presence of an action word is thus not sufficient to trigger motor activation. Moreover, when the linguistic context set up a strong expectation for a hand action, a grip force increase was observed even when the tested word was a pseudo-verb. The presence of a known action word is thus not required to trigger motor activation. Importantly, however, the same linguistic contexts that sufficed to trigger motor activation with pseudo-verbs failed to trigger motor activation when the target words were verbs with no motor action reference. Context is thus not by itself sufficient to supersede an “incompatible” word meaning. We argue that motor structure activation is part of a dynamic process that integrates the lexical meaning potential of a term and the context in the online construction of a situation model, which is a crucial process for fluent and efficient online language comprehension.

Interactive Face Generation from Verbal Description Using Conceptual Fuzzy Sets

In this article, a human centered approach for interactive face generation is presented. The users of the system are given the possibility to interactively generate faces from verbal description. The system generates automatically an average face from the same race of the target face using anthropometric measurements of the face and the head and displays it to the user as an initial face. This face is then transformed to the desired face according to the verbal description given by the user. The user describes each facial feature using words, and then the feature changes according to the user’s description. Depending on the race of the user and the gender of the face drawn, the relation between the size of each facial feature and the set of the linguistic words used to describe it is obtained using Conceptual Fuzzy Sets(CFS), which are used to represent the meaning of the words. CFSs can represent context dependent meaning. The context here is the race of the user and the gender of the target face. We describe the encouraging results of the experiments and discuss future directions for our face generation system.

Context-dependent interpretation of words: Evidence for interactive neural processes

The meaning of a word usually depends on the context in which it occurs. This study investigated the neural mechanisms involved in computing word meanings that change as a function of syntactic context. Current semantic processing theories suggest that word meanings are retrieved from diverse cortical regions storing sensory–motor and other types of semantic information and are further integrated with context in left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). Our fMRI data indicate that brain activity in an area sensitive to motion and action semantics – the posterior middle temporal gyrus (PMTG) – is modulated by a word’s syntactic context. Ambiguous words such as bowl were presented in minimal disambiguating contexts indicating object (the bowl) or action (to bowl) meanings and were compared to low-ambiguity controls. Ambiguous words elicited more activity than low-ambiguity controls in LIFG and various meaning-related areas such as PMTG. Critically, ambiguous words also elicited more activity in to-contexts than the-contexts in PMTG and LIFG, suggesting that contextual integration strengthened the action meaning in both areas. The pattern of results suggests that the activation of lexical information in PMTG was sensitive to contextual disambiguating information and that processing context-dependent meanings may involve interactions between frontal and posterior areas.

Understanding words in context: The role of Broca's area in word comprehension

What role does meaning selection play in word comprehension, and what neural systems support this selection process? Most words have multiple meanings and are therefore ambiguous. This is true of both homonymous words (words that have multiple unrelated meanings) and polysemous words (words that have multiple related meanings). The extant evidence indicates that meaning selection is an integral part of homonym comprehension. However, it is not known whether meaning selection extends to polysemous words, or what neural systems support meaning selection during comprehension. Prior neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence suggest that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) may play a role in resolving competition during language processing. We therefore sought to test the hypotheses that meaning selection is part of polysemous word comprehension, and that the LIFG resolves meaning competition during word comprehension. We tested healthy participants on a version of the triplet lexical decision task, with polysemous and homonymous stimuli. Results suggest that the meanings of polysemous words, like the meanings of homonyms, are selected based on context. However, homonymous and polysemous words differed in how meaning frequency affected meaning selection. We then administered the triplet lexical decision task to patients with LIFG damage to examine whether this region plays a role in context-dependent meaning selection. Results support the hypothesis that the LIFG serves as a top-down biasing mechanism that facilitates rapid meaning selection during word comprehension. We conclude that context-dependent meaning selection is an integral part of word comprehension for both homonyms and polysemous words, and that the LIFG facilitates this selection process.

Generating Referring Expressions that Involve Gradable Properties

This article examines the role of gradable properties in referring expressions from the perspective of natural language generation. First, we propose a simple semantic analysis of vague descriptions (i.e., referring expressions that contain gradable adjectives) that reflects the context-dependent meaning of the adjectives in them. Second, we show how this type of analysis can inform algorithms for the generation of vague descriptions from numerical data. Third, we ask when such descriptions should be used. The article concludes with a discussion of salience and pointing, which are analyzed as if they were gradable adjectives.

“Imitar col canto chi parla”: Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language for Musical Theater

Abstract Conventional views of text/music relationships in early Italian opera focus on the imitation of affections. But by dealing exclusively with the referential meanings of texts (e.g., emotions, images, and concepts) these views overlook an important aspect of music's interaction with language. In opera, music also imitates language's contextual and communicative functions—i.e., discourse, as studied today by the subfield of linguistics called pragmatics. In his operas Monteverdi fully realized Peri's ideal of “imitating in song a person speaking” (“imitar col canto chi parla”) by musically emphasizing those context-dependent meanings that emerge especially in ordinary language and that are prominent in dramatic texts, as opposed to poetry and prose. Such meanings are manifest whenever words such as “I,” “here,” and “now” appear— words called “deictics”—with the function of situating the speaker/singer's utterances in a specific time and place. Monteverdi highlights deictics through melodic and rhythmic emphases, repetition, shifts of meter, style, and harmony, as part of a strategy to create a musical language suited to opera as a genre and to singers as actors. In Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria and L'incoronazione di Poppea, this strategy serves large-scale dramaturgical aims with respect to the relationships among space, time, and character identity, highlighting issues also discussed within the contemporary intellectual context.

On the interpretation of anaphoric noun phrases: towards a full understanding of partial matches

Starting from the assumption that NPs of all kinds can be anaphoric on antecedents in the linguistic context, we work towards a general theory of context-dependent NP meaning. Two complicating factors are that the relation between anaphors and antecedents is by no means unrestricted and that often there is a partial match between anaphor and antecedent. We argue that the presuppositions-as-anaphors approach of van der Sandt provides a natural starting point for our enterprise. Unfortunately, this theory has a number of deficiencies for our purposes, in particular where the treatment of partial matches is concerned. We propose a number of modifications of van der Sandt's formal theory and apply the modified algorithm first to definite NPs and later to NPs of all kinds. The resulting modified version of the presuppositions-as-anaphors theory is argued to be more general, formally more precise, and empirically more adequate than its predecessor.

Context-mediated behavior for intelligent agents

Humans and other animals are exquisitely attuned to their context. Context affects almost all aspects of behavior, and it does so for the most part automatically, without a conscious reasoning effort. This would be a very useful property for an artificial agent to have: upon recognizing its context, the agent's behavior would automatically adjust to fit it. This paper describescontext-mediated behavior(CMB), an approach to context-sensitive behavior we have developed over the past few years for intelligent autonomous agents. In CMB, contexts are represented explicitly ascontextual schemas(c-schemas). An agent recognizes its context by finding the c-schemas that match it, then it merges these to form a coherent representation of the current context. This includes not only a description of the context, but also information about how to behave in it. From that point until the next context change, knowledge for context-sensitive behavior is available with no additional effort. This is used to influence perception, make predictions about the world, handle unanticipated events, determine the context-dependent meaning of concepts, focus attention and select actions. CMB is being implemented in the Orca program, an intelligent controller for autonomous underwater vehicles.

The Use of Situation Theory in Context Modeling

At the heart of natural language processing is the understanding of context dependent meanings. This paper presents a preliminary model of formal contexts based on situation theory. It also gives a worked‐out example to show the use of contexts in lifting, i.e., how propositions holding in a particular context transform when they are moved to another context. This is useful in NLP applications where preserving meaning is a desideratum.

The Rise and Fall of Audience Research: An Old Story With a New Ending

Discusses theoretical and methodological opposition that dominate mass communications research. Critical versus administrative research; Study of texts versus the study of audiences; Use of qualitative versus quantitative methods; Focus on the mass communication audience; Theories of literary reception from high culture; Study of the notion of context-dependent meaning.

The pragmatics of interjections: The case of Polish no

The aim of this paper is to contrast the systems of interjections in English and Polish, with a particular emphasis on the analysis of Polish no and its English equivalents. First, interjections are discussed as a subclass of a wider category of discourse markers/particles, and the English and Polish approaches to the problem are juxtaposed in order to work out some uniform characteristics of the category in question. Secondly, the most frequently occuring English and Polish interjections are selected on the basis of the corpora taken from Schourop (1985) and Pisarkowa (1975), respectively, and certain equivalences between parallel forms are discussed. Finally, the Polish interjection no characterized by the highest frequency of occurrence is analyzed in terms of its English corresponding forms. The data reveal that although in many cases the Polish no is equivalent to the English well, it also carries many other context-dependent meanings, hence plays a multiple role in the organization of discourse.

Control Theory and Social Behavior in the Workplace

Recent theoretical statements by Lord and Hanges (1987) and by Carver and Scheier (1981) suggest that supervision in the workplace can be analyzed as a control system made up of supervisors and subordinates. Two experiments are described which raise doubts about this claim. Subjects were engaged as supervisors and asked to provide performance feedback to a subordinate. It was found that subjects did not respond to subordinate work performance in the straightforward way predicted by control theory, but instead responded based on analyses of the context-dependent meanings of that performance. Implications of these results for applying the control system metaphor to social behavior in the workplace more generally are discussed.