Words Nouns Research Articles

Fostering the generic interpretation of grammatically masculine forms: When my aunt could be one of the mechanics

The masculine plural form in French (e.g., musiciens [musicians]), as in other grammatical gender languages, though interpretable as a generic form (e.g., musicians are men and women), has been shown to more likely activate a specific interpretation (e.g., musicians are mainly men). In this study, we presented participants with female or male kinship—role noun word pairs (e.g., oncle or tante—musiciens [uncle or aunt—musicians]) and asked them if the person represented by the kinship term could be part of the group represented by the role noun. Most importantly, within the experiment, we gradually increased participants' exposure to pairs including a female kinship. We found that our exposure manipulation did increase readers' general acceptance of female kinship—role noun word pairs, supporting the idea that implicit exposure to particular stimuli might be quite effective in changing associated representations.

A Method for Chinese Noun Phrase Recognition Base on Word Co-Occurrence Directed Graph

This paper proposes a recognition method for Chinese Noun Phrase based on word co-occurrence directed graph. An input document is firstly scanned in which noun word string is retrieved. Atomic word table and word co-occurrence directed graph is then generated according to the word strings. A search is performed on the graph to find the longest paths with priority weight satisfying certain criteria. The word strings corresponding to the paths are considered as noun phrases. As dimensionality reduction is applied, the scale of the word co-occurrence directed graph is reduced significantly, and thus the efficiency of the algorithm is improved. Experimental results demonstrate that the precision of noun phrase recognition reaches 95.4%.

The Neuromechanism Underlying Language Analogical Reasoning: Evidence from An ERP Study

Analogical reasoning as the mechanism of acquisition of new information by inspection of specific instances, is clearly at the heart of advanced human cognitive capabilities and creativity. Especially, language analogical reasoning, as an important part of everyday discourse, is the most common one. Only a few brain imaging studies have used verbal analogies to explore the neural substrates of analogical thinking. Nevertheless, hemodynamic techniques have excellent spatial resolution but poor temporal resolution; hence, these results could not clearly reflect different substeps of analogical processes. Compared with hemodynamic techniques, event-related potentials (ERPs), as an electromagnetic technique, are sensitive to the time course of cognitive processes. However, there has no ERP study on this matter so far. Using the A:B::C:D paradigm, this study investigated the neuromechanism underlying language analogical reasoning by ERPs. Six hundred two-character Chinese noun words were chosen from the Contemporary Chinese Dictionary (the fifth edition) to serve as experimental stimuli. One hundred fifty trials consisting of four noun words were used in three analogy tasks with three semantic relations: metaphor, category and isomorphism, each analogy task had 50 trials. Fourteen undergraduate students participated in the study. Subjects were asked to judge whether one word pair was semantically analogous to another word pair. The EEG was recorded from 64 scalp channels using electrodes mounted in an elastic cap. ERPs were calculated for a 3200 ms epoch including a 200 ms pre-stimulus baseline. Results showed that the schema induction stage elicited N400 and P300 components, which possibly attributable to semantic processing of word pairs and the formation of a relational category. The analogy mapping stage elicited a N400, which might indicate the semantic retrieval of the antecedent word of target domain. The N400 was then followed by a late negative component (LNC), which might indicate the processing of analogical transfer the schema from the source domain to the target domain and reasoning the suitable answer. The study also compared processing of the analogy mapping under different conditions. The results showed that the amplitude of LNC component was smaller and distributed over anterior scalp sites when the relations of analogy mapping were simpler, while the amplitude of LNC component was larger and widely distributed when the relations of analogy mapping were complex. The results suggest that the substages of analogical reasoning, schema induction, analogy mapping, are complex processes. The processing of the analogy mapping stage is close with the LNC component. The amplitude and scalp distribution of the LNC are modulated by the complexity degree of the relations of analogy mapping.

Distributional Learning of Appearance

Opportunities for associationist learning of word meaning, where a word is heard or read contemperaneously with information being available on its meaning, are considered too infrequent to account for the rate of language acquisition in children. It has been suggested that additional learning could occur in a distributional mode, where information is gleaned from the distributional statistics (word co-occurrence etc.) of natural language. Such statistics are relevant to meaning because of the Distributional Principle that ‘words of similar meaning tend to occur in similar contexts’. Computational systems, such as Latent Semantic Analysis, have substantiated the viability of distributional learning of word meaning, by showing that semantic similarities between words can be accurately estimated from analysis of the distributional statistics of a natural language corpus. We consider whether appearance similarities can also be learnt in a distributional mode. As grounds for such a mode we advance the Appearance Hypothesis that ‘words with referents of similar appearance tend to occur in similar contexts’. We assess the viability of such learning by looking at the performance of a computer system that interpolates, on the basis of distributional and appearance similarity, from words that it has been explicitly taught the appearance of, in order to identify and name objects that it has not been taught about. Our experiment tests with a set of 660 simple concrete noun words. Appearance information on words is modelled using sets of images of examples of the word. Distributional similarity is computed from a standard natural language corpus. Our computation results support the viability of distributional learning of appearance.

TRANSFORMING NOUN PHRASE STRUCTURE FORM INTO RULES TO DETECT COMPOUND NOUNS IN MALAY SENTENCES

This paper addresses the process of transforming the noun phrase structure form into a list of rules to detect compound noun words in Malay sentences. Rules are collection of word syntax that are derived from a specific resource (as defined in our study). Comprehension of the concept rule used in a system is important (i.e. using rules to find a list of compound nouns that may exist in a sentence). The noun phrase frame structure is a form that contains a list of noun modifier categories. The list of noun modifier categories is then divided into several sub-categories such as numeral, numeral classifier, appellation, etc. All categories are arranged in sequence based on correct grammar. The noun phrase frame structure is then used to analyse the sentence. The words in the sentence will be arranged according to their suitable noun modifier category as defined by the noun phrase frame structure. In terms of data requirements, we will only focus on examples of sentences that combine two noun phrases.

Strong systematicity through sensorimotor conceptual grounding: an unsupervised, developmental approach to connectionist sentence processing

Connectionist language modelling typically has difficulty with syntactic systematicity, or the ability to generalise language learning to untrained sentences. This work develops an unsupervised connectionist model of infant grammar learning. Following the semantic boostrapping hypothesis, the network distils word category using a developmentally plausible infant-scale database of grounded sensorimotor conceptual representations, as well as a biologically plausible semantic co-occurrence activation function. The network then uses this knowledge to acquire an early benchmark clausal grammar using correlational learning, and further acquires separate conceptual and grammatical category representations. The network displays strongly systematic behaviour indicative of the general acquisition of the combinatorial systematicity present in the grounded infant-scale language stream, outperforms previous contemporary models that contain primarily noun and verb word categories, and successfully generalises broadly to novel untrained sensorimotor grounded sentences composed of unfamiliar nouns and verbs. Limitations as well as implications to later grammar learning are discussed.

Word order does not constrain phonological activation in single word production

It has recently been claimed that the canonical word order of a given language constrains phonological activation processes even in single word production (Janssen, Alario, & Caramazza, 2008). This hypothesis predicts for languages with canonical adjective–noun word order that naming an object (i.e., noun production) is facilitated if the task-irrelevant colour of the object (i.e., adjective) is phonologically similar to the object name (e.g., blue–boat as compared to red–boat). By contrast, there should be no corresponding effect in naming the colour of the object (i.e., adjective production). In an experiment with native speakers of German, however, we observed exactly the opposite pattern. Phonological congruency facilitated colour naming but had no effect on object naming. Together with extant data from other languages our results suggest that object colour naming is affected by the phonology of the object name but not vice versa, regardless of the canonical word order in the given language.

A Video Semantic Mining Scheme

In this paper, we present a method for video semantic mining. Speech signal, video caption text and video frame images are all key factors for a person to understand the video content. Through above observation, we bring forward a method which integrating continuous speech recognition, video caption text recognition and object recognition. The video is firstly segmented to a serial of shots by shot detection. Then the caption text and speech recognition results are treated as two paragraphs of text. The object recognition results are presented by bag of words. The above three aspects of texts are processed by part of speech and stemming. Then only the noun words are kept. At last a video is represented by three bags of words. The words are further depicted as a graph. The graph vertices stand for the words and the edges denote the semantic distance between two neighboring words. In the last step, we apply the dense sub graph finding method to mine the video semantic meaning. Experiments show that our video semantic mining method is efficient.

Context Information on the McGurk Effect

We examined whether the McGurk effect depends on context. A syllable that is expected to produce the effect was embedded in Japanese simple sentences containing a three-syllable noun. The noun was either a real word or a non-word, including /ba/, /da/, or /ga/ as the second syllable. A stimulus consisted of an auditory speech sentence with a simultaneous video of its production by a speaker. Participants were asked to report the noun as they heard it by filling in the blanks in printed sentences. The error rates in reporting the nouns were low when only the audio stimuli were presented. In the critical conditions, a voice and a video were congruently or incongruently combined and shown to participants, who judged the noun word by hearing. McGurk effect occurred in both real- and non-word conditions, but the error rates were larger for the real words. For the real words, the error rate was higher when the visual syllable matched the context. The rate of this context-matched errors was higher than the rate ...

Stimulus sets can induce shifts in descriptor meanings in product evaluation tasks

The meaning of adjectives is often ambiguous and may be susceptible to contextual changes. Nonetheless, response scales with adjectives are often employed in product evaluation research. Because context-dependent changes in descriptor meanings may threaten the validity of research outcomes, the present study tried to demonstrate empirically whether such shifts may occur. The variation between stimuli in two stimulus sets (either 10 cups or 10 drinks) created two experimental contexts that were expected to activate different descriptor meanings in a product evaluation task. A single ballot with 7 descriptors was used in both conditions. In a subsequent property verification task, participants were presented with adjective–noun word pairs exemplifying the different descriptor meanings. Responses for adjective–noun pairs whose meanings had been primed were faster and more accurate than for non-primed pairs. These findings suggest that between-participants comparisons over conditions with different stimulus sets may not be valid, due to differences in interpretations of descriptor meanings.

Differential effects of grammatical gender and gender inflection in bare noun production

In a new series of experiments with the picture-word interference paradigm, we replicated the grammatical gender interference effect in bare noun production in Italian: naming times are slower to picture-word noun pairs sharing the same gender. This effect is independent from the morphological transparency for gender, but responses are significantly slower when the distracters are transparent for gender. Overall, the pattern of results supports the assumption that in bare noun production grammatical gender is always selected, at least in languages like Italian. We assume that the differential effects of the nominal endings are due to the mechanisms involved in the recognition of grammatical gender of the distracter nouns which are sensitive to the morphological transparency for gender: lexical representation of transparent written words leads to a higher level of activation, thus resulting in stronger gender interference.

Nativização e manutenção de acento oxítono em Português

The aim of this paper is to investigate stress maintenance in a corpus of finalstress words (also known as oxytone) in Portuguese. The corpus contains 10.494noun words with final stress and their respective phonetic transcriptions fromthe Houaiss Dictionary. We argue that there is a tendency to keep the finalstress as in their source language, especially Latin, ‘Tupi’, French, Arabic,Ioruba, English, Spanish, Greek and Concani. We also discuss the quality ofthe final element (if vowel, glide or consonant) and the connexion with thedocumented century of the lexical borrowing.

The Mechanism of Language Switching in Language Comprehension: Evidence from the Sub-lexical Level

When bilinguals switch from using one language to another (in laboratory tasks),there is generally a transient cost to performance,namely,the switching cost.Switching cost is the main aspect which is always mentioned in exploring the essence of the language switching mechanism.Such cost might be caused by different mechanisms.Therefore,the researchers focused on where this cost arises from.Two perspectives are involved in this issue:one argues that language switching cost emerges from the word-recognition system itself whereas the other holds the view that it is externally caused,i.e.according to the task control processes.If it is consistent to the externally-caused view,it might reflect that language switching cost is no different from task switching cost in general.In other words,the language switching process is the same as task switching process.Up to now,most research focused on alphabetic characters and their orthographic specificity,i.e.letters unique to one language.This study focused on ideogram characters such as Mandarin characters and language specificity.Letters with language specificity contain a certain degree of semantic information(analogous to orthographic specificity,such as YiFu in Mandarin characters,i.e. "口" \ "扌".).The study aimed to explore the mechanism of language switching at the sub-lexical level while Chinese-English bilinguals were performing semantic categorization tasks.56 undergraduates participated in each experiment.The participants in experiment 1 were asked to judge if an action which was described by a verb presented on a screen was performed with mouth or with hand.In experiment 2,the participants were asked to classify the sex of the person described by a noun word presented as "male" or "female".There were two kinds of words,either with-marker words (with a semantic radical)or without-marker words (without a semantic radical).All the participants were tested individually on computers,and each session lasted for 15～20 minutes.Reaction time for correct responses and error rates were analyzed by subject and item variance.The results showed shorter reaction time and lower error rates with the with-marker Mandarin characters,no matter whether the word was a verb or a noun.It indicates that the semantic radical had an influence on the process of stimulus with a marker.However,the switching cost of with-marker words was not significantly different from that of without-marker words.This result indicates that the semantic radical did not affect the process of language switching.For alphabetic characters,the semantic radical also differentially affected the process of with-marker words and without-marker words;however,there is no influence on the switching cost of these two kinds of stimuli.In short,the study showed that switching cost is not affected by semantic specificity.On a sub-lexical level,the switching cost does not come from the word-recognition system but is caused by external sources.Because language information did not affect the language switching cost,the mechanism of a language switch is the same as that of a task switch in general,both for Mandarin and alphabetic characters.

UM ESTUDO ESTATÍSTICO SOBRE AS OXÍTONAS NO PORTUGUÊS

The aim of this paper is to analyse a corpus of final stress words (also knownas oxytone) in Portuguese. Based on a corpus of 10.494 noun words with finalstress and their respective phonetic transcriptions from the Houaiss Dictionary,we argue that the majority of the final stress words in Portuguese are lexicalborrowings. Latin, “Tupi”, French, Arabic, Ioruba are the majors sources,however, Portuguese borrowed from more than one hundred languages. Wealso discuss the quality of the final element (if vowel, glide or consonant) andthe overall frequency of these final stress words.

Using ontology to improve precision of terminology extraction from documents

In this paper, we proposed a new approach using ontology to improve precision of terminology extraction from documents. Firstly, a linguistic method was used to extract the terminological patterns from documents. Then, similarity measures within the framework of ontology were employed to rank the semantic dependency of the noun words in a pattern. Finally, the patterns at a predefined proportion according to their semantic dependencies were retained and regarded as terminologies. Experiments on Retuers-21578 corpus has shown that WordNet ontology, that we adopted for the task of extracting terminologies from English documents, can improve the precision of classical linguistic method on terminology extraction significantly.

A Text Clustering System based on k-means Type Subspace Clustering and Ontology

This paper presents a text clustering system developed based on a k-means type subspace clustering algorithm to cluster large, high dimensional and sparse text data. In this algorithm, a new step is added in the k-means clustering process to automatically calculate the weights of keywords in each cluster so that the important words of a cluster can be identified by the weight values. For understanding and interpretation of clustering results, a few keywords that can best represent the semantic topic are extracted from each cluster. Two methods are used to extract the representative words. The candidate words are first selected according to their weights calculated by our new algorithm. Then, the candidates are fed to the WordNet to identify the set of noun words and consolidate the synonymy and hyponymy words. Experimental results have shown that the clustering algorithm is superior to the other subspace clustering algorithms, such as PROCLUS and HARP and kmeans type algorithm, e.g., Bisecting-KMeans. Furthermore, the word extraction method is effective in selection of the words to represent the topics of the clusters. Keywords—Subspace Clustering, Text Mining, Feature Weighting, Cluster Interpretation, Ontology

On a combination of probabilistic and boolean ir models for WWW document retrieval

Even though a Boolean query can express the information need precisely enough to select relevant documents, it is not easy to construct an appropriate Boolean query that covers all relevant documents. To utilize a Boolean query effectively, a mechanism to retrieve as many as possible relevant documents is therefore required. In accordance with this requirement, we propose a method for modifying a given Boolean query by using information from a relevant document set. The retrieval results, however, may deteriorate if some important query terms are removed by this reformulation. A further mechanism is thus required in order to use other query terms that are useful for finding more relevant documents, but are not strictly required in relevant documents. To meet this requirement, we propose a new method that combines the probabilistic IR and the Boolean IR models. We also introduce a new IR system---called appropriate Boolean query reformulation for information retrieval (ABRIR)---based on these two methods and the Okapi system. ABRIR uses both a word index and a phrase index formed from combinations of two adjacent noun words. The effectiveness of these two methods was confirmed according to the NTCIR-4 Web test collection.

The effects of early manual instruction on the oral language development of two deaf children

The speech and language training for deaf children at our clinic is performed using a multisensory method, which consists of reception and expression training for sign language and fingerspelling as well as auditory training, lip reading, and written language training (the Kanazawa Method). We have already reported that acquisition of written language is not dependent on oral language, and that written language is easier to learn than oral language for deaf children. In the present investigation, we analyzed the acquisition of comprehensible and expressive vocabulary in sign language and fingerspelling. The subjects were two children congenitally deaf at levels higher than 105dB. Recorded language samples by the age of 48 months were analyzed. Acquisition of sign language was found to be significantly easier than acquisition of oral language. The development of expressive noun words, function words, and Wh-question words in sign language at the early period was almost equivalent to that of hearing peers, and then the sign language appeared transfer to the oral language. These results suggest that early presentation of sign language with written and oral language is effective in the acquisition of communicative attitudes, function words and interrogative sentences which are most difficult for the hearing-impaired. It was shown that early presentation of sign language with written and oral language serves to promote acquisition of oral language.

I Want a Word

I want a word. A noun. I don't even care what it is any more. Girlfriend. Bitch. Wife. Slavegirl. It doesn't matter. I can no longer live without a word for myself. I sit in a bar across from a woman with whom I've done most of what there is for people to do in pairs. She calls me Kyle. She says: is my . .. to people we meet. I can stand this only because I truly love the word. Kyle is a very full word. It has a lot of meaning on its own, because, considering the time, place, and circumstances of my birth, it really ought to be Debbie. My personality has spent twenty-eight years training itself to meet the demands of the word Kyle, not the word Debbie. This, combined with the slight inappropriateness of a woman's being named Kyle, usually elicits for me the word Yes. It's a word. But it's an adjective. I want a noun. I used to love it when people thought I was different or special, until I realized that this jazz has aced me out of what I really want, which is a word. A noun word. You're a very special person, Kyle. I don't think there is a word that can really describe what you are to me. This is the familiar anthem of each and every one with whom I become involved. It makes me love them. It makes me hate them. It

An examination on the relationship between elaboration and to-be-elaborated items in human memory

Two experiments were designed to examine the relationship between elaboration and to-be-elaborated items in paired-associate learning. In the first task of both experiments, 20 subjects were presented with a sequence of 32 noun words to be elaborated, and instructed either to generate sentences or to produce associates. In second task, the subjects were asked to remember pairs of words either incidentally (Exp. I) or intentionally (Exp. II). The first word of the pairs, referred to as the context word, was used later as a cue for cued recall, while the second word, as the target word, was to be recalled. Three different types of pairs were constructed: (i) C pairs, in which the context word was elaborated and the target word was not, (ii) T pairs, in which the target word was elaborated and the context word was not, and (iii) CT pairs, in which both words were elaborated. Subjects who generated sentences remembered the items better than subjects who produced associations. Both T and CT pairs were more recalled than C pairs, while there was no difference in recall between T and CT pairs. The results suggest that the type of to-be-elaborated items is an important factor in elaborative process.