Referential Transparency Research Articles

Referential transparency of verbs in child-directed input by Japanese and American caregivers.

Children acquiring Japanese differ from those acquiring English with regard to the rate at which verbs are learned (Fernald & Morikawa, ). One possible explanation is that Japanese caregivers use verbs in referentially transparent contexts, which facilitate the form-meaning link. We examined this hypothesis by assessing differences in verb usage by Japanese and American caregivers during dyadic play with their infants (5-22 months). We annotated verb-containing utterances for elements associated with referential transparency and compared across groups. Contrary to our hypotheses, we found that Japanese caregivers used verbs in fewer referentially transparent contexts than American caregivers, or did not significantly differ from American caregivers, depending on the measure. These findings cast doubt on cross-cultural differences in referential transparency between Japanese and American child-directed input.

Relating referential clarity and phonetic clarity in infant-directed speech.

Psycholinguistic research on children's early language environments has revealed many potential challenges for language acquisition. One is that in many cases, referents of linguistic expressions are hard to identify without prior knowledge of the language. Likewise, the speech signal itself varies substantially in clarity, with some productions being very clear, and others being phonetically reduced, even to the point of uninterpretability. In this study, we sought to better characterize the language-learning environment of American English-learning toddlers by testing how well phonetic clarity and referential clarity align in infant-directed speech. Using an existing Human Simulation Paradigm (HSP) corpus with referential transparency measurements and adding new measures of phonetic clarity, we found that the phonetic clarity of words' first mentions significantly predicted referential clarity (how easy it was to guess the intended referent from visual information alone) at that moment. Thus, when parents' speech was especially clear, the referential semantics were also clearer. This suggests that young children could use the phonetics of speech to identify globally valuable instances that support better referential hypotheses, by homing in on clearer instances and filtering out less-clear ones. Such multimodal "gems" offer special opportunities for early word learning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: In parent-infant interaction, parents' referential intentions are sometimes clear and sometimes unclear; likewise, parents' pronunciation is sometimes clear and sometimes quite difficult to understand. We find that clearer referential instances go along with clearer phonetic instances, more so than expected by chance. Thus, there are globally valuable instances ("gems") from which children could learn about words' pronunciations and words' meanings at the same time. Homing in on clear phonetic instances and filtering out less-clear ones would help children identify these multimodal "gems" during word learning.

The “musicality” of modern prose: Towards the genesis and typology of forms (part 1)

This article deals with the intermedial dialogue, a literary-musical transfer that has changed the idea of the novel and “prose” per se, the ideal of which in Western literature in the 18th and 19th centuries was referential transparency. Using the methods of intermedial and comparative studies, narratology and stylistics, the logic of the development of this dialogue is traced. Whereas the Bildungsroman, the career novel, and the novel of naturalism developed under the sign of “the individual’s rebellion against idealism” (Lukacs), the modernist novel seeks to return the individual to the intimate space of the self and abstract meditation. The character of modern novel tends to have a “terror of history” and seeks refuge from the rumble of technology and catastrophe, from the influence of the “ornament of the masses” (Kracauer) in myth, archetypes, and the codes of other arts. This utopian space for James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Bernhard is music, which they implement under the influence of the Romantic idea of an “absolute”, “autonomous” art that expresses the invisible and (un)possible. Music performs the function of a meta-poetic code in this context, with the specific embodiments of the dialogue between the novel and music taking various forms, from the imitation of early music genres (fugue, passion) to modern styles (jazz, atonal music). The influence of music leads to the complication of the structure of the novel, to the creation of a hermetic style, which turns the process of reading into a procedure of deciphering score. The novelty of the research consists in clarifying the typology of musical-literary dialogue, and in the historical-literary aspect in identifying the semiotic, epistemological and poetological foundations of modernist quasi-musical prose, which developed its own equivalents of musical techniques and styles on the way to deconstructing the bourgeois novel.

Referential transparency as the proper treatment for quantification

An important motivation for Montague’s work on quantification (Montague 1974) was to achieve uniformity with respect to referential and quantificational subjects. This was attained by type raising all NPs to denote sets of sets (indeed there are claims that such a move is theoretically necessary) and by giving up a subject–predicate semantics where the verbal predicate predicates of the nominal argument. In this paper we argue for essentially the opposite move whereby all predication is genuine predication and involves arguments -- witnesses of type individual or set of individuals (for plurals). We argue that such an approach is crucial if one is to capture a variety of fundamentally important phenomena involving anaphora, clarification interaction, and speech-gesture cross-references associated with the use of quantificational noun phrases in dialogue, and to explicate several recent key psycholinguistic results on quantifier processing -- all features of an NP semantics which give rise to what we call “Referential Transparency”. The discussion is couched in a new set-denotational framework for plural count nouns, namely sets of ordered set bipartitions. We argue that quantification happens entirely within the noun phrase and involves ref(erence)sets, comp(lement)sets, and max(imal)sets. As a corollary of this denotational foundation, the semantic conservativity universal is an immediate consequence and the range of quantifier denotations is significantly reduced. In addition to collecting empirical motivation for quantification from Referential Transparency Theory and to developing a count noun semantics, a theoretically grounded explanation for complement set anaphora is given. EARLY ACCESS

Perceptual alignment contributes to referential transparency in indirect learning

Young children can sometimes acquire new word meanings—even for property terms—through incidental learning (e.g. Carey & Bartlett, 1978). We propose that an important support for this process is spontaneous perceptual comparison processes that lead children to notice key commonalities and differences. Specifically, we hypothesize that when the target property appears as a difference between two highly similar and alignable objects, spontaneous comparison processes operate to highlight the property. The property may then be linked to an accompanying word, even if the child has no prior intention to learn the word. To test this, we revisited the Carey and Bartlett paradigm, varying the perceptual alignability of the objects that 3- and 4-year-olds saw while hearing a novel color word, chromium. In Experiments 1 and 2, children in the High Alignment condition were able to identify chromium objects in a subsequent task, whereas those in the Low Alignment condition were not. Experiment 3 showed that direct instructions to learn the word led to a different pattern of results. Experiment 4 showed that the incidental learning persisted over delay and transferred to new objects. We conclude that perceptual alignment contributes to referential transparency and to incidental learning of word meanings. Implications for hypothesis-testing theories of word learning are discussed.

Sealing pointer-based optimizations behind pure functions

Functional programming languages are particularly well-suited for building automated reasoning systems, since (among other reasons) a logical term is well modeled by an inductive type, traversing a term can be implemented generically as a higher-order combinator, and backtracking search is dramatically simplified by persistent datastructures. However, existing pure functional programming languages all suffer a major limitation in these domains: traversing a term requires time proportional to the tree size of the term as opposed to its graph size. This limitation would be particularly devastating when building automation for interactive theorem provers such as Lean and Coq, for which the exponential blowup of term-tree sizes has proved to be both common and difficult to prevent. All that is needed to recover the optimal scaling is the ability to perform simple operations on the memory addresses of terms, and yet allowing these operations to be used freely would clearly violate the basic premise of referential transparency. We show how to use dependent types to seal the necessary pointer-address manipulations behind pure functional interfaces while requiring only a negligible amount of additional trust. We have implemented our approach for the upcoming version (v4) of Lean, and our approach could be adopted by other languages based on dependent type theory as well.

Runtime verification and validation of functional reactive systems

Abstract Many types of interactive applications, including reactive systems implemented in hardware, interactive physics simulations and games, raise particular challenges when it comes to testing and debugging. Reasons include de facto lack of reproducibility and difficulties of automatically generating suitable test data. This paper demonstrates that certain variants of functional reactive programming (FRP) implemented in pure functional languages can mitigate such difficulties by offering referential transparency at the level of whole programs. This opens up for a multi-pronged approach for assisting with testing and debugging that works across platforms, including assertions based on temporal logic, recording and replaying of runs (also from deployed code), and automated random testing using QuickCheck. When combined with extensible forms of FRP that allow for constrained side effects, it allows us to not only validate software simulations but to analyse the effect of faults in reactive systems, confirm the efficacy of fault tolerance mechanisms and perform software- and hardware-in-the-loop testing. The approach has been validated on non-trivial systems implemented in several existing FRP implementations, by means of careful debugging using a tool that allows the test or simulation under scrutiny to be controlled, moving along the execution time line, and pin-pointing of violations of assertions on personal computers as well as external devices.

Referential Transparency of Motivated Public Authorities' Names in Translations

Abstract The paper focuses on adequacy and clarity of motivated public authorities' names in translation of constitutional acts. In order to assess the adequacy level of identification of the authorities' name references in the source legal system, a survey has been conducted. Its results allowed to conclude, that literal translation of authorities' names in incompatible systems can be referentially empty, even for persons with field knowledge. However, it can generally be assumed, that the sufficient identification is determined by an adequate level of knowledge about the given subject (entity) in the source legal system. It is functional translation that offers a significant simplification in the process of decoding the terms used to denote authorities' names.

Testing and debugging functional reactive programming

Many types of interactive applications, including video games, raise particular challenges when it comes to testing and debugging. Reasons include de-facto lack of reproducibility and difficulties of automatically generating suitable test data. This paper demonstrates that certain variants of Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) implemented in pure functional languages can mitigate such difficulties by offering referential transparency at the level of whole programs. This opens up for a multi-pronged approach for assisting with testing and debugging that works across platforms, including assertions based on temporal logic, recording and replaying of runs (also from deployed code), and automated random testing using QuickCheck. The approach has been validated on real, non-trivial games implemented in the FRP system Yampa through a tool providing a convenient Graphical User Interface that allows the execution of the code under scrutiny to be controlled, moving along the execution time line, and pin-pointing of violations of assertions on PCs as well as mobile platforms.

Futhark: purely functional GPU-programming with nested parallelism and in-place array updates

Futhark is a purely functional data-parallel array language that offers a machine-neutral programming model and an optimising compiler that generates OpenCL code for GPUs. This paper presents the design and implementation of three key features of Futhark that seek a suitable middle ground with imperative approaches. First, in order to express efficient code inside the parallel constructs, we introduce a simple type system for in-place updates that ensures referential transparency and supports equational reasoning. Second, we furnish Futhark with parallel operators capable of expressing efficient strength-reduced code, along with their fusion rules. Third, we present a flattening transformation aimed at enhancing the degree of parallelism that (i) builds on loop interchange and distribution but uses higher-order reasoning rather than array-dependence analysis, and (ii) still allows further locality-of-reference optimisations. Finally, an evaluation on 16 benchmarks demonstrates the impact of the language and compiler features and shows application-level performance competitive with hand-written GPU code.

A Design Level Optimization Approach for Functional Paradigm Software Designs Considering Low Resource Devices Development

Objectives: The main objective of this paper is to identify suitable programming concepts from Functional Programming paradigm concerning low resource devices development and eventually contribute an approach for design level optimization. Methods: Experiments have been conducted, CPU time and memory consumptions (Private Bytes) were measured. Findings: The research results indicated that Pattern Matching, Lazy, Curried, Tail Recursion, Functional Composition, Referential Transparency and Higher Order Functions with functions as parameters concepts consumed less CPU and memory resources compared to their alternative concepts. This paper suggests that the above mentioned concepts can be applied by any software engineering practitioners in designing resource efficient constructs for software applications. Applications: Using these guidelines substantial performance growth can be formed and at the same time, performance degradation issues can be easily avoided. Eventually, this paper contributes a way to optimize the Functional Programming design at design level.

Perceiving referential intent: Dynamics of reference in natural parent–child interactions

Two studies are presented which examined the temporal dynamics of the social-attentive behaviors that co-occur with referent identification during natural parent–child interactions in the home. Study 1 focused on 6.2h of videos of 56 parents interacting during everyday activities with their 14–18month-olds, during which parents uttered common nouns as parts of spontaneously occurring utterances. Trained coders recorded, on a second-by-second basis, parent and child attentional behaviors relevant to reference in the period (40s) immediately surrounding parental naming. The referential transparency of each interaction was independently assessed by having naïve adult participants guess what word the parent had uttered in these video segments, but with the audio turned off, forcing them to use only non-linguistic evidence available in the ongoing stream of events. We found a great deal of ambiguity in the input along with a few potent moments of word-referent transparency; these transparent moments have a particular temporal signature with respect to parent and child attentive behavior: it was the object’s appearance and/or the fact that it captured parent/child attention at the moment the word was uttered, not the presence of the object throughout the video, that predicted observers’ accuracy. Study 2 experimentally investigated the precision of the timing relation, and whether it has an effect on observer accuracy, by disrupting the timing between when the word was uttered and the behaviors present in the videos as they were originally recorded. Disrupting timing by only ±1 to 2s reduced participant confidence and significantly decreased their accuracy in word identification. The results enhance an expanding literature on how dyadic attentional factors can influence early vocabulary growth. By hypothesis, this kind of time-sensitive data-selection process operates as a filter on input, removing many extraneous and ill-supported word-meaning hypotheses from consideration during children’s early vocabulary learning.

Semantics and Pragmatics of Referentially Transparent and Referentially Opaque Belief Ascription Sentences

This essay takes a critical look at Jonathan Berg’s theory of direct belief. Berg’s analysis of the concept of direct belief is considered insightful, but doubts are raised concerning his generalization of the purely extensional truth conditional semantics of direct belief ascription sentences to the truth conditional semantics of all belief ascription sentences. Difficulties are posed that Berg does not discuss, but that are implied by the proposal that the truth conditional semantics of belief ascription sentences generally are those of direct belief ascription sentences, and that once mentioned must enter into an evaluation of the proposition that by implication all beliefs are direct. Another line of objection concerns Berg’s second main thesis that the pragmatics as distinct from the semantics of belief ascription sentences can explain away apparent substitution failure validity breakdowns in belief ascription sentences as inappropriate utterances according to rules of roughly Gricean conversational implicature, rather than correspondence or non-correspondence with the facts about such things as what it is that people actually believe. These two parts of Berg’s argument, that the truth conditional semantics of all belief ascription sentences are those exclusively of direct belief ascription sentences, and that apparent substitution failure is effectively salva propria rather than salva veritate, are explored within the general framework of Berg’s thought experiment, eventually arriving at diametrically opposed conclusions, reflecting on what we believe comic book character Lois Lane believes and does not believe about Superman, and what she believes and does not believe about Clark Kent.

Transparent quantification into hyperintensional objectual attitudes

We demonstrate how to validly quantify into hyperintensional contexts involving non-propositional attitudes like seeking, solving, calculating, worshipping, and wanting to become. We describe and apply a typed extensional logic of hyperintensions that preserves compositionality of meaning, referential transparency and substitutivity of identicals also in hyperintensional attitude contexts. We specify and prove rules for quantifying into hyperintensional contexts. These rules presuppose a rigorous method for substituting variables into hyperintensional contexts, and the method will be described. We prove the following. First, it is always valid to quantify into hyperintensional attitude contexts and over hyperintensional entities. Second, factive empirical attitudes (e.g. finding the site of Troy) validate, furthermore, quantifying over intensions and extensions, and so do non-factive attitudes, both empirical and non-empirical (e.g. calculating the last decimal of the expansion of \(\pi \)), provided the entity to be quantified over exists. We focus mainly on mathematical attitudes, because they are uncontroversially hyperintensional.

A Critical Evaluation on Programming Paradigms to Achieve Optimal Resource Utilization of Mobile Softwares in Mobile Devices

This paper evaluates the features of mainstream programming paradigms. Imperative, object oriented programming and functional programming concepts are considered here. This is an effort to identify the programming paradigms which consume less resource from mobile devices. Designers usually depend on the programming languages, language oriented programming design is in current practice. Choosing appropriate programming paradigms during the mobile application design is not in practice now; Failure to use the best approaches for mobile computing from programming paradigms will cause mobile applications to consume more mobile resources. Imperative paradigm concepts such as inheritance, creating redundant objects, unnecessary constructors, recursion, strings concatenation, thread synchronization, using global variables and abstract methods results in redundancy, memory leaks, stack overflow, low execution speed and consumes more memory. These features are relatively not suitable for mobile software development. Functional paradigm concepts such as higher order functions, tail recursion, lazy evaluation, referential transparency, parametric polymorphism, and list comprehension principles are suitable for mobile software development as they consume less memory and or use less processing power. Using appropriate paradigms will optimize the resource utilisation of mobile applications in mobile devices.

Quality of early parent input predicts child vocabulary 3 years later

Children vary greatly in the number of words they know when they enter school, a major factor influencing subsequent school and workplace success. This variability is partially explained by the differential quantity of parental speech to preschoolers. However, the contexts in which young learners hear new words are also likely to vary in referential transparency; that is, in how clearly word meaning can be inferred from the immediate extralinguistic context, an aspect of input quality. To examine this aspect, we asked 218 adult participants to guess 50 parents' words from (muted) videos of their interactions with their 14- to 18-mo-old children. We found systematic differences in how easily individual parents' words could be identified purely from this socio-visual context. Differences in this kind of input quality correlated with the size of the children's vocabulary 3 y later, even after controlling for differences in input quantity. Although input quantity differed as a function of socioeconomic status, input quality (as here measured) did not, suggesting that the quality of nonverbal cues to word meaning that parents offer to their children is an individual matter, widely distributed across the population of parents.

Chemf: A purely functional chemistry toolkit

BackgroundAlthough programming in a type-safe and referentially transparent style offers several advantages over working with mutable data structures and side effects, this style of programming has not seen much use in chemistry-related software. Since functional programming languages were designed with referential transparency in mind, these languages offer a lot of support when writing immutable data structures and side-effects free code. We therefore started implementing our own toolkit based on the above programming paradigms in a modern, versatile programming language.ResultsWe present our initial results with functional programming in chemistry by first describing an immutable data structure for molecular graphs together with a couple of simple algorithms to calculate basic molecular properties before writing a complete SMILES parser in accordance with the OpenSMILES specification. Along the way we show how to deal with input validation, error handling, bulk operations, and parallelization in a purely functional way. At the end we also analyze and improve our algorithms and data structures in terms of performance and compare it to existing toolkits both object-oriented and purely functional. All code was written in Scala, a modern multi-paradigm programming language with a strong support for functional programming and a highly sophisticated type system.ConclusionsWe have successfully made the first important steps towards a purely functional chemistry toolkit. The data structures and algorithms presented in this article perform well while at the same time they can be safely used in parallelized applications, such as computer aided drug design experiments, without further adjustments. This stands in contrast to existing object-oriented toolkits where thread safety of data structures and algorithms is a deliberate design decision that can be hard to implement. Finally, the level of type-safety achieved by Scala highly increased the reliability of our code as well as the productivity of the programmers involved in this project.

A generic complete dynamic logic for reasoning about purity and effects

Abstract For a number of programming languages, among them Eiffel, C, Java, and Ruby, Hoare-style logics and dynamic logics have been developed. In these logics, pre- and postconditions are typically formulated using potentially effectful programs. In order to ensure that these pre- and postconditions behave like logical formulae (that is, enjoy some kind of referential transparency), a notion of purity is needed. Here, we introduce a generic framework for reasoning about purity and effects. Effects are modelled abstractly and axiomatically, using Moggi’s idea of encapsulation of effects as monads. We introduce a dynamic logic (from which, as usual, a Hoare logic can be derived) whose logical formulae are pure programs in a strong sense. We formulate a set of proof rules for this logic, and prove it to be complete with respect to a categorical semantics. Using dynamic logic, we then develop a relaxed notion of purity which allows for observationally neutral effects such writing on newly allocated memory.

Experience report: Functional programming in C-Rules

AbstractC-Rules is a business rules management system developed by Constraint Technologies International (www.constrainttechnologies.com) that is designed for use in transport, travel and logistics problems. Individual businesses within these industries often need to solve the same kinds of problems related to scheduling of operations, resource allocation, staff rostering and so on, but each organisation has its own rules and procedures. Furthermore, these problems tend to be combinatorially challenging: before a final solution is chosen, many potential choices need to be generated, evaluated and compared. In C-Rules, users define rules that describe various aspects of a problem. These rules can be invoked from an application, which is typically either an optimising solver or an interactive planning tool. Rules can be used to encode evaluation criteria, such as the legality or cost of a proposed solution, or values like configuration parameters that may be used by the host application to tune or direct its progress. At its core, C-Rules provides a functional expression language that affords users power and flexibility when formulating rules. In this paper we will describe our experiences of using functional programming both at the end-user level and at the implementation level. We highlight some of the benefits of basing our rule system on features such as higher-order functions, referential transparency and static, polymorphic typing. We also outline some of our experiences in using Haskell to build an efficient compiler for the core language.

Experience report

C-Rules is a business rules management system developed by Constraint Technologies International 1 (CTI), designed for use in transportation problems. Users define rules describing various aspects of a problem, such as solution costs and legality, which are then queried from a host application, typically an optimising solver. At its core, C-Rules provides a functional expression language which affords users both power and flexibility when formulating rules. In this paper we will describe our experiences of using functional programming both at the end-user level, as well as at the implementation level. We highlight some of the benefits we, and the product's users, have enjoyed from the decision to base our rule system on features such as: higher-order functions, referential transparency, and static, polymorphic typing. We also outline some of our experiences in using Haskell to build an efficient compiler for the core language.