Role Of Contextual Information Research Articles

The Role of Contextual Information in Classifying Spontaneous Social Laughter

Laughter is a ubiquitous and important social signal, but its nature is yet to be fully explored. One of the open empirical questions is about the role of context in the interpretation of laughter. Can laughs presented on their own convey specific feelings and social motives? How influential is social context when a person tries to understand the meaning of a laugh? Here we test the extent to which the classification of laughs produced in different situations is guided by knowing the context within which these laughs were produced. In the current study, stimuli were spontaneous laughs recorded in social situations engineered to elicit amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude. In a between-subjects design, participants classified these laughs being assigned to one of the four experimental conditions: audio only, audio-visual, side-by-side videos of two interactants, and side-by-side videos accompanied by a brief vignette. Participants’ task was to label each laugh as an instance of amusement, embarrassment, or schadenfreude laugh, or “other.” Laughs produced in situations inducing embarrassment were classified more accurately than laughs produced in other situations. Most importantly, eliminating information about the social settings in which laughs were produced decreased participants’ classification accuracy such that accuracy was no better than chance in the experimental conditions providing minimal contextual information. Our findings demonstrate the importance of context in the interpretation of laughter and highlight the complexity of experimental investigations of schadenfreude displays.

The role of contextual information in a virtual trolly problem: A psychophysiological investigation

ABSTRACT Trolley problems have persisted as a popular method to examine moral decision-making in the face of many criticisms. One such criticism is that thought experiments provide unrealistically abundant contextual information, leading to mental simulation. Recent work utilizing virtual reality technology has reduced contextual information with mixed results. However, this work has not departed entirely from the thought experiment tradition, often providing written or verbal descriptions of the trolley problem before or during the simulation. This approach may still allow for mental simulation prior to decision-making. The goal of the current study is to examine whether or not this criticism is relevant for the classic version of the trolley problem. One hundred and nineteen participants were randomly assigned to either receive prior contextual information about the trolley problem or receive no information. All participants then entered a virtual reality simulation of the classic trolley problem. We examined decision-making from an affective and autonomic nervous system perspective. We found no effect on any measure in response to the reduction of contextual information. There were, however, surprising gender differences in decision-making and autonomic response. Further, we discuss how these findings relate to competing dual-process models of moral decision-making.

Social context and culture influence judgments of non-Duchenne smiles

Extant evidence points toward the role of contextual information and related cross-cultural variations in emotion perception, but most of the work to date has focused on judgments of basic emotions. The current research examines how culture and situational context affect the interpretation of emotion displays, i.e. judgments of the extent to which ambiguous smiles communicate happiness versus polite intentions. We hypothesized that smiles associated with contexts implying happiness would be judged as conveying more positive feelings compared to smiles paired with contexts implying politeness or smiles presented without context. In line with existing research on cross-cultural variation in contextual influences, we also expected these effects to be larger in Japan than in the UK. In Study 1, British participants viewed non-Duchenne smiles presented on their own or paired with background scenes implying happiness or the need to be polite. Compared to face-only stimuli, happy contexts made smiles appear more genuine, whereas polite contexts led smiles to be seen as less genuine. Study 2 replicated this result using verbal vignettes, showing a similar pattern of contextual effects among British and Japanese participants. However, while the effects of vignettes describing happy situations was comparable in both cultures, the influence of vignettes describing polite situations was stronger in Japan than the UK. Together, the findings document the importance of context information in judging smile expressions and highlight the need to investigate how culture moderates such influences.

The role of contextual information during skilled anticipation.

In dynamic, temporally constrained tasks, individuals often need to anticipate what will happen next prior to information becoming available within the environment. In such situations, the availability of contextual information can facilitate anticipation, often in conjunction with postural information. While many researchers have identified the specific sources of postural information facilitating anticipation, few have investigated the specific sources of contextual information employed. In two experiments, we presented skilled and less-skilled tennis players with animations of rallies from real matches that omitted access to postural information from the opponent, constraining participants to anticipate based on contextual information alone. In Experiment 1, participants anticipated the outcome of an opponent's shot under three conditions in which the sequence length (i.e., number of shots in a rally) preceding the same occluded shot was varied. Participants anticipated shot direction more accurately when the preceding shot sequence was presented than not. In Experiment 2, we presented animations that depicted the ball, the players, or both, in either dynamic or still form. Those conditions in which only the ball was depicted yielded the lowest response accuracy scores. It appears that information from the player and ball motion is required to provide the context under which skilled performers can consciously pick up and utilise information to anticipate more accurately than their less-skilled counterparts.

Unifying Japanese relative clauses: copy-chains and context-sensitivity

We offer a new, unified approach to the derivation and interpretation of head-external, head-internal, and heretofore understudied doubly-headed relative clauses in Japanese. Our proposal is motivated by new data on the interpretation of these different forms of relative clauses with quantificational heads, in different contexts. Head-internal and doubly-headed relative clauses are interpreted as definite descriptions with their quantificational head interpreted in their surface, relative-clause-internal positions. We show that the complex patterns of possible interpretations, as well as the shape of observed inter-speaker variation, are derived by interpreting definite descriptions using a maximal informativeness semantics and a simple assumption regarding the role of contextual information, which we call the Salient Sets Restriction . Syntactically, we propose a novel DP head-raising derivation for relative clauses that takes advantage of the Copy Theory of movement and the late-merger of relative clauses. This allows for the unification of head-internal and doubly-headed relativization strategies with the familiar head-external form, which would otherwise not be possible. We believe this approach is suitable for head-raising relative clauses in other languages as well, including English. Our proposal avoids some complications of previous head-raising derivations, instead taking advantage of independently motivated mechanisms of copy-chain resolution at LF. This article is part of the special collection: Internally-headed Relative Clauses

Publishing and discovering context-dependent services

AbstractIn service oriented computing, service providers and service requesters are main interacting entities. A service provider publishes the services it wishes to make public using service registries. A service requester initiates a discovery process to find the service that meets its requirements using the service registries. Current approaches for the publication and discovery do not realize the essential relationship between the service contract and the conditions in which the service can guarantee its contract. Moreover, they do not use any formal methods for specifying services, contracts, and compositions. Without a formal basis it is not possible to justify through a rigorous verification the correctness conditions for service compositions and the satisfaction of contractual obligations in service provisions. In our recent works, we have identified the role of contextual information, trustworthiness information and legal rules in service provision. This paper focuses on the publication and discovery of trustworthy context-dependent services as supported by the novel framework FrSeC. It introduces a novel ranking algorithm that ranks trustworthy context-dependent services according to the degree they match service requesters requirements. Finally, this paper introduces a prototype implementation for the matching and ranking of services as supported by FrSeC.

Meaning and translation in linguistic fieldwork

This paper is set within the context of semantic typology, focusing on the collection of semantic data during fieldwork on under-described languages. The study explores central issues of meaning and translation through the example of the investigation of the lexical meaning and part of speech of property-denoting expressions in West Chadic languages, which demonstrated that these expressions are inchoative verbs. It focuses on identifying the various points where the meaning of translation equivalents intruded into the semantic analysis, thus obscuring the meaning of the expressions under investigation. The paper addresses the ambivalent nature of translations, the role of contextual information, and the (dis)advantages of different methods. It shows how the interaction of various sources of information enables us to move beyond translation equivalents towards a semantic analysis, and eventually to semantic comparisons.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

Optimality theoretic semantics

The aim of this article is to elucidate the processes that characterize natural language interpretation. The basic hypothesis is that natural language interpretation can be characterized as an optimization problem. This innovative view on interpretation is shown to account for the crucial role of contextual information while avoiding certain well-known problems associated withcompositionality. This will become particularly clear in the context of incomplete expressions. Our approach takes as a point of departure total freedom ofinterpretation in combination with the parallel application of soft constraints on possible interpretations. These constraints can be contextual, intonational or syntactic in nature. The integration of pragmatic andsyntactic/semantic information in a system of ranked constraints is proposed to correctly derive the optimal interpretations in cases of nominal anaphorization, determiner quantification and elliptical comparatives.