Specific Sentences Research Articles

Multiple topic identification in human/human conversations

The paper deals with the automatic analysis of real-life telephone conversations between an agent and a customer of a customer care service (ccs). The application domain is the public transportation system in Paris and the purpose is to collect statistics about customer problems in order to monitor the service and decide priorities on the intervention for improving user satisfaction.Of primary importance for the analysis is the detection of themes that are the object of customer problems. Themes are defined in the application requirements and are part of the application ontology that is implicit in the ccs documentation.Due to variety of customer population, the structure of conversations with an agent is unpredictable. A conversation may be about one or more themes. Theme mentions can be interleaved with mentions of facts that are irrelevant for the application purpose. Furthermore, in certain conversations theme mentions are localized in specific conversation segments while in other conversations mentions cannot be localized. As a consequence, approaches to feature extraction with and without mention localization are considered.Application domain relevant themes identified by an automatic procedure are expressed by specific sentences whose words are hypothesized by an automatic speech recognition (asr) system. The asr system is error prone. The word error rates can be very high for many reasons. Among them it is worth mentioning unpredictable background noise, speaker accent, and various types of speech disfluencies.As the application task requires the composition of proportions of theme mentions, a sequential decision strategy is introduced in this paper for performing a survey of the large amount of conversations made available in a given time period. The strategy has to sample the conversations to form a survey containing enough data analyzed with high accuracy so that proportions can be estimated with sufficient accuracy.Due to the unpredictable type of theme mentions, it is appropriate to consider methods for theme hypothesization based on global as well as local feature extraction. Two systems based on each type of feature extraction will be considered by the strategy. One of the four methods is novel. It is based on a new definition of density of theme mentions and on the localization of high density zones whose boundaries do not need to be precisely detected.The sequential decision strategy starts by grouping theme hypotheses into sets of different expected accuracy and coverage levels. For those sets for which accuracy can be improved with a consequent increase of coverage a new system with new features is introduced. Its execution is triggered only when specific preconditions are met on the hypotheses generated by the basic four systems.Experimental results are provided on a corpus collected in the call center of the Paris transportation system known as ratp. The results show that surveys with high accuracy and coverage can be composed with the proposed strategy and systems. This makes it possible to apply a previously published proportion estimation approach that takes into account hypothesization errors.

Tense and Intensionality in Specificational Copular Sentences

No abstract.

A Semantic Logic-Based Approach to Determine Textual Similarity

This paper presents a semantic logic-based approach to determine textual similarity. Three logic form transformations taking into account semantic structure of sentences are proposed. Logic proofs are obtained using an adapted resolution step that drops predicates when a proof cannot be found with standard resolution. Features are extracted from proofs and combined using supervised machine learning to obtain the final similarity scores. Experimental results show that taking into account semantic relations to determine textual similarity yields performance improvements with respect to both baselines and third-party state-of-the-art systems. Specific sentence pairs that benefit from considering semantic relations are discussed. Detailed results provide empirical evidence that either proof direction offers a strong baseline although considering both is beneficial, and that ignoring concepts that are not an argument of a semantic relation is not sound.

El De secretis mulierum en La Celestina y en la biblioteca de Fernando de Rojas

Fernando de Rojas’ will contained a list of the books he owned and therefore has helped to determine the sources of La Celestina. Among his books was a copy of De secretis mulierum (of the secrets of women), a late thirteenth-century manual falsely attributed to Albert the Great, which contains a combination of medical knowledge and superstition about conception and sexuality, especially women’s sexuality. Although this book has been presented as a possible source for the scene in act 7 in which Celestina and Areusa talk about menstrual pain, no specific references have been identified. In this article, the early acquisition of this book by Rojas during his years as a student of law in Salamanca—before or while he wrote La Celestina—is defended. To confirm that this book was in the possession of Rojas when he wrote his masterpiece, two specific sentences in act 7 of LaCelestina are identified as borrowings from De secretis mulierum. Finally, the role that this manual of sexuality played in the library of Rojas is explained: his work as a lawyer probably implied dealing with cases, such as wedding contracts, etc., in which establishing the virginal status of a woman was part of the process. For this purpose, De secretis mulierum contained valuable technical information that could be used in the trials.

Learning event patterns from news text using bootstrapping

This paper presents a novel method for discovering events described in a news text. In order to determine event specific sentences, it uses a semantic graph representation to express the event semantics. The event specific patterns from the semantic graph are considered as seed examples to identify the example patterns. To extract and learn event patterns, a semi-supervised bootstrapping approach is used for event identification, which requires minimal human supervision. Our aim is to train the event identification system, using a small set of seed patterns for each event, and to find the relationship between the events using instance overlapping between the learned event patterns. Unlike other approaches, this approach uses flexible seed examples, in which it has any number of nodes/concepts and relations. It also differs in acquiring conceptually related event constraints and relations as its features, and additionally, it considers a concept hierarchy of both patterns matching and scoring. We have tested our system on a corpus consisting of 5,000 Tamil news documents, and tested the accuracy of each iteration and achieved an average accuracy of 0.574. We have also tested our approach with the existing MUC-4 dataset and achieved good precision for each event type.

On Translation Quality of Mongolian Intangible Cultural Heritages: The Mausoleum of Genghis Khan as a Case Study

With the globalization of tourist industry, cultural and historical heritages are seen as the basic tourism resources. The quality of English translation of those resources plays an important role in valid cultural exchanges and boom of tourism industry. Mongolian cultural heritage presents a rich cultural resource and unique tourism value. Quite often it contains many terms and notions with specialized connotation which are rather difficult for target readers to comprehend and interpret. This paper takes the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan as a case study to analyze the translations of specific cultural words and sentences. Based on the current translation problems arising from the practical English translation of the materials about the Mausoleum, it aims to put forward some suggestions and to explore the effective translation strategies to further improve translation quality.

Processing multimedia material: Does integration of text and pictures result in a single or two interconnected mental representations?

We investigated whether individuals construct either two interconnected mental representations or a single mental representation that merges information from two representations when processing multimedia materials. Individuals memorized text-picture stimuli in four different versions that differed in the specificity of information contained in either text or pictures: general pictures/general sentences, general pictures/specific sentences, specific pictures/general sentences, and specific pictures/specific sentences. Afterwards, individuals decided whether they had previously seen the specific or the general version of the sentences and the pictures. Across two experiments, individuals more frequently falsely recognized the specific sentences after having seen general sentences/specific pictures. This indicates that individuals had integrated the specific picture information with the general sentence information into a single mental representation. No such effects were observed for picture recognition. The implications of these results for multimedia learning are discussed.

Children's recall of generic and specific labels regarding animals and people

Although children tend to categorize objects at the basic level, we hypothesized that generic sentences would direct children's attention to different levels of categorization. We tested children's and adults’ short-term recall (Study 1) and longer-term recall (Study 2) for labels presented in generic sentences (e.g., Kids like to play jimjam) versus specific sentences (e.g., This kid likes to play jimjam). Label content was either basic level (e.g., cat, boy) or superordinate (e.g., animal, kid). As predicted, participants showed better memory for label content in generic than specific sentences (short-term recall for children; both short and longer-term recall for adults). Errors typically involved recalling specific noun phrases as generic, and recalling superordinate labels as basic. These results demonstrate that language influences children's representations of new factual information, but that cognitive biases also lead to distortions in recall.

Korean anaphora recognition system to develop healthcare dialogue-type agent.

ObjectivesAnaphora recognition is a process to identify exactly which noun has been used previously and relates to a pronoun that is included in a specific sentence later. Therefore, anaphora recognition is an essential element of a dialogue agent system. In the current study, all the merits of rule-based, machine learning-based, semantic-based anaphora recognition systems were combined to design and realize a new hybrid-type anaphora recognition system with an optimum capacity.MethodsAnaphora recognition rules were encoded on the basis of the internal traits of referred expressions and adjacent contexts to realize a rule-based system and to serve as a baseline. A semantic database, related to predicate instances of sentences including referred expressions, was constructed to identify semantic co-relationships between the referent candidates (to which semantic tags were attached) and the semantic information of predicates. This approach would upgrade the anaphora recognition system by reducing the number of referent candidates. Additionally, to realize a machine learning-based system, an anaphora recognition model was developed on the basis of training data, which indicated referred expressions and referents. The three methods were further combined to develop a new single hybrid-based anaphora recognition system.ResultsThe precision rate of the rule-based systems was 54.9%. However, the precision rate of the hybrid-based system was 63.7%, proving it to be the most efficient method.ConclusionsThe hybrid-based method, developed by the combination of rule-based and machine learning-based methods, represents a new system with enhanced functional capabilities as compared to other pre-existing individual methods.

Apparent Generalisations about Fictional Characters

AbstractThis essay will be concerned with an evaluation, modification, and critique of van Inwagen’s famous argument for the existence of fictional characters. In the first section a reconstruction of the original argument will be provided, and three different challenges for this version of the argument will be pointed out. The first challenge concerns van Inwagen’s commitment to first-order predicate logic as a canonical language for the formal representation of truth-conditions of assertoric sentences in natural languages, and the problematic semantic complexity of van Inwagen’s original example sentences of quantifications about fictional objects. The second challenge concerns his commitment to a Quinean conception of ordinary language quantifications that conceives of first-order quantifiers as existentially loaded. The third challenge concerns van Inwagen’s tendency to interpret our ordinary intuitions about the truth-values of specific sentences as intuitions about the truth-values of the literal contents of these sentences. In the second section, a more detailed investigation of these three challenges will be provided; and a modified, and less problematic, alternative version of the argument will be proposed. It will be shown that the truth-conditions of van Inwagen’s original example sentences cannot be adequately represented on the basis of first-order predicate logic. I will propose alternative and less complex example sentences that are sufficient for the required purpose. Additionally, a reformulation of the argument will be proposed that avoids a commitment to a specific sort of formal framework. After that, it will be shown why the assumption of a Quinean conception of quantification unnecessarily increases the burden of proof. A reformulation of the argument will be proposed that avoids the commitment to a Quinean conception of quantification. Furthermore, I will make a third and final adjustment of the argument that allows us to remain neutral concerning the specific status of our truth-value intuitions concerning the proposed example sentences of generalisations about fictional objects. In the third and final section, three possible responses of an irrealist concerning fictional objects will be evaluated. The first option makes use of a recent semantic analysis of the modifying adjective ›fictional‹ proposed by Sainsbury. According to this analysis, a sentence like ›There are fictional mice that talk‹ is semantically equivalent with the claim ›There are fictional works according to which it is the case that at least one mouse talks‹. The second option additionally makes use of Sainsbury’s conception of spotty scope for ordinary language quantifiers and other related sentential operators. It will be shown why both options cannot account for the desired true readings of our example sentences. Finally, a third solution will be proposed and defended. This solution makes use of a substitutional interpretation of specific fictional generalisations based on a negative free logic to undermine the modified argument. It will be shown how this solution allows us to provide a correct analysis of the desired readings of our example sentences of generalisations about fictional characters. After that, two problems of this account will be discussed. The first problem concerns the extension of the proposed strategy to more complicated and sophisticated example sentences. The second problem concerns the independent motivation of a substitutional treatment of at least certain natural language quantificational expressions.

The Topic-Comment Structure in Copular Sentences: Evidence from Wolof

This paper investigates the syntax of information structure of Double-DP copular sentences in Wolof, a Niger-Congo language spoken primarily in Senegal. English copular sentences of the structure DP be DP are classified into several types. The most discussed distinction is the one between predicational sentences and specificational sentences. The two sentences differ in several ways. First, while the post-copular DP (DP2) in a predicational sentence predicates a certain property of a discourse referent es-tablished by the pre-copular DP (DP1), in a specificational sentence DP2 provides a value for a variable introduced by DP1. Furthermore, it is proposed that different copular sentences are associated with different information-structural properties. In particular, specificational sentences are claimed to obligatorily focus the post-copular constituent (Higgins 1979; Declerck 1988; Mikkelsen 2005, etc.), while predicational sentences carry no such requirements.

A Deviation from the Former Adversarial Trial: The Concept of Plea Bargaining and its Contemporary Relevance

In its most conventional and general sense, plea bargaining refers to pre-trial negotiations between the prosecution and the defence during which the accused agrees to plead guilty in return for certain concessions promised by the prosecutor: usually to drop or reduce some charges, or to recommend a specific sentence or to refrain from making any sentence recommendation. Since ultimately both affect the dispositional phase of the criminal proceedings by affecting the sentence, plea bargaining in this project will be taken to imply the waiver of the right to a trial in exchange for reduction in sentence.Plea bargaining is widely resorted to in the United States of America, so much so that ninety to ninety five percent of the criminal cases end with negotiated agreements rather than courtroom trials. By virtue of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2005, plea bargaining has been introduced in India by way of insertion of Chapter XXIA into the Criminal Procedure Code of 1973 [hereinafter Cr. P.C.], which has come into effect from July 5, 2006.The introduction of plea bargaining in the Indian criminal justice system is largely a response to the deplorable status quo, reflected in the delay in disposal of criminal cases and appeals, the huge arrears of cases and the appalling plight of under trial prisoners in jails. Critics of the plea bargaining system, however, allege that the system leads to excessive and undeserved leniency in the sentencing of admitted criminals, dilutes the deterrent effect of law and is coercive insofar as it induces the accused either to plead guilty in return for a lighter sentence or to waive the right to a trial in return for some other advantage. Others simply contend that the outcome of a criminal case should not be affected by lack of resources and that haggling over the price of a guilty plea is in principle wrong.No doubt efficiency and speedy disposal of cases are important and desirable goals. The question that is considered in this note is whether they are worth the perceived costs of plea bargaining. To this end, an attempt is made to examine whether there is any inherent impropriety in the system of plea negotiation, as also to understand the Indian avatar of plea bargaining and appraise it in view of the traditional objections to any system of plea bargaining.

Is Spanish Becoming more Gender Fair? A Historical Perspective on the Interpretation of Gender-specific and Gender-neutral Expressions

During the last three decades, many recommendations for a gender fair Spanish language have been proposed, but, generally speaking, it has been the substitution of the so-called 'masculine generic' (e.g. los profesores 'the teachers [masc.]') by gender neutral (e.g. el pro¬fesorado 'the staff of teachers) or explicit references (e.g. los profesores y (las) profesoras 'the teachers [masc. and fem., resp.]') which has been favoured. Two important assumptions are implicit in these recommendations. First, the sentences containing the masculine forms would lead to associations primarily to men (thus leaving women 'invisible'), whereas sentences containing either the gender-neutral forms or the gender-explicit references would evoke a generic association. Second, the associations between form and mental representation are considered inalterable and unlikely to change over time. This paper intends to interrogate these assumptions by means of two questionnaire investigations that were carried out in Spain in 1995 and 2005 in which native speakers of Spanish were asked to complete specific filler sentences. The results of both investigations demonstrate that there is no clear-cut correspondence between certain linguistic forms and the mental (gender-) representations evoked in peoples' minds. For example, a masculine form is not automatically connected with a male image. The investigation also shows that some associations significantly change over time; for example, a clear male bias of the masculine form in the first study seems to have vanished within a time span of ten years. With respect to another aim of the gender fair recommendations - namely to make women more visible in public discourse – the investigations show that this, indeed, is best achieved by explicitly referring to women. Interestingly, this result appears to be stable over time. Altogether, it seems justifiable to conclude that the assumptions underlying the recommendations for a gender fair language can be challenged. At any rate, it is important to point out that these assumptions are subject to change over time - at least within politically influenced language matters – and perhaps faster than has been expected.

Clefts and their relatives by Matthew Reeve (review)

Matthew Reeve. Clefts and their relatives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2012. 236 pp. [Linguistik Aktuell, 185.] The book Clefts and their relatives by Matthew Reeve offers a new account of the syntax and semantics of clefts in English and Russian. The book tries to solve a number of puzzles in a uniform way and raises the theoretically important issue of compositionality, which according to the author should be formulated in a non-traditional way. However, the Russian data used in the book are often debatable, so that some of the arguments for the proposed analysis are not convincing. The book consists of six chapters. In the first chapter the author notes the lack of a thorough analysis of clefts in English and Russian. In the second he proposes a syntactic analysis of English clefts. The third chapter discusses the licensing of relative clauses in English clefts. The fourth offers an analysis of clefts in Russian similar to that proposed for English. In the fifth chapter the syntax of specificational sentences is discussed, and some remaining issues with the syntax of clefts are resolved. Chapter 6 concludes the book. The main focus of this review is the analysis of Russian clefts, since this topic is of particular interest to JSL readers. However, in order to present the theory that Reeve proposes for Russian clefts we must first discuss his analysis of clefts in English, at least in outline. The discussion of the Russian clefts will contain more details, critical points, and counterexamples. Examples in this review come from various sources. Some are taken from the book under review (listed as [R] and the page number). Most of the other examples come from the Russian National Corpus (RNC) (http://ruscorpora.ru/en/index.html) and from a small survey I created online to confirm my intuition on constructed examples. My respondents' judgments are reported for the relevant examples and are marked [Q]. 1. Clefts in English Clefts in English, such as (1), consist of a pronoun (it), a copula (was), a focused XP (John), and a restrictive relative clause, also known as the cleft clause (that Mary saw). The main question is what the syntactic relation is between these elements. Reeve proposes that the cleft pronoun is non-expletive, that the cleft clause is adjoined to the clefted XP, and that the cleft clause semantically modifies the initial pronoun. Reeve argues against other theories of clefts which either analyze the pronoun it as an expletive, thus unifying clefts with focus-fronting (Kiss 1998), or treat the cleft clause as extraposed from the cleft pronoun (Percus 1997). He also argues that the relative clause has to be licensed syntactically and semantically, but that in the case of clefts there are two separate licensers, each satisfying one of the conditions. (1) It was JOHN that Mary saw. [R 1] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In chapter 2 Reeve provides arguments in favor of two of his claims, namely, that the pronoun in clefts is non-expletive and that the cleft clause is adjoined to the clefted XP and not to the pronoun. Evidence for the non-expletive nature of the clause-initial pronoun is both syntactic and semantic. The first piece of syntactic evidence is that cleft it, but not expletive it (such as weather pronouns and raising it), can be replaced by a demonstrative pronoun this. Second, cleft it can control PRO, which is unexpected if it is an expletive, as in (2). (2) a. It was THE FURNITURE that annoyed John on Sunday [despite PRO being THE DECOR the day before]. b. It seemed that John was wrong [without it/*PRO seeming that Mary was right]. [R 12, 11] Third, evidence from Germanic languages suggests that there are different kinds of expletives and that languages can allow the use of pro for some expletives but not for others (Vikner 1995). However, in these languages pro is never allowed for referential pronouns. …

Political PR, media and spin doctoring

Along with political organizations and the citizens, the media are also participants in the political communication. The phenomena of the influence of the media and the influence on the media are obvious. Political stakeholders need to use the media in order to make sure that their messages are transmitted to the targeted public. So, in time, politicians become more and more of actors striving to present themselves to the public in their best possible light. The executors of the propaganda activities are not only propaganda experts who shape the propaganda messages but also the technical staff who ensure that the propaganda messages are transmitted to recipients through information technologies - they are spin doctors as well. 'To spin' (to turn, to roll, to rotate), and so a 'spin doctor' - an image consultant, a political consultant, but also a person who is skilled and trained to manage information and manipulate the mass media; spin control - dressing of the information, public announcements, event directors and information dispensers. The term 'spin doctoring' refers to a set of activities: defense of journalists, approval or disapproval of interviews, instructing those who give interviews on what to say or not to say, as well as commenting of the stories and journalists' writings and underlying specific sentences and interpretations. Spin doctors claim that they only accelerate the process of expanding specific news and information. Spin doctors have a lot in common with a special media councilor - a person in charge of media releases and public relations. Spin-doctoring is the art of 'plotting' the strategies of public relations to give the news a desired direction of interpretation.

The ADHD debate: being mindful of complexity and wary of reductionist explanations and polarization

The editor of this journal has asked for our opinion on the article by Wilson (2012). In the interests of open dialogue we have agreed. We do not intend to critique the article in detail or to select specific sentences that we agree or disagree with. Our aim is to highlight what we consider important relevant issues.

Context identification of sentences in research articles: Towards developing intelligent tools for the research community

AbstractScientific literature is an important medium for disseminating scientific knowledge. However, in recent times, a dramatic increase in research output has resulted in challenges for the research community. An increasing need is felt for tools that exploit the full content of an article and provide insightful services with value beyond quantitative measures such as impact factors and citation counts. However, the intricacies of language and thought, and the unstructured format of research articles present challenges in providing such services. The identification of sentence contexts that encode the role of specific sentences in advancing an article's scientific argument can facilitate in developing intelligent tools for the research community. This paper describes our research work in this direction. First, we investigate the possibility of identifying contexts associated with sentences and propose a scheme of thirteen context type definitions for sentences, based on the generic rhetorical pattern found in scientific articles. We then present the results of our experiments using sequential classifiers – conditional random fields – for achieving automatic context identification. We also describe our Semantic Web application developed for providing citation context based information services for the research community. Finally, we present a comparison and analysis of our results with similar studies and explain the distinct features of our application.

Specification, equation, and agreement in copular sentences

AbstractThis article presents new data from a number of Germanic languages concerning the agreement patterns found in copular clauses that contain two nominais; in both clauses with specificational readings (such as The problem is your parents) and those with what are here termed readings of assumed identity (such as If I were you or In my dream I was you). It is argued that the specificational sentences involve asymmetric equative structures where one nominal is interpreted as in a concealed question, and that the cross-linguistic differences in agreement patterns found in the languages considered follow from the copula lexicalizing either Tense or a lower head.

REFERENTIALITY OF THE PRONOUNS IT AND THAT IN COPULAR SENTENCES

The aim of this paper is to clarify the referential status of it and that used as the subject of specificational sentences. Whether considered to be referential or non-referential, these pronouns are often treated similarly in the literature, their functional differences being hardly recognized. After a brief survey of recent literature, it will be argued that both pronouns are connected with the notion of a noun phrase involving a variable, as proposed by Nishiyama (2003), and are considered to be non-referential. It will then be suggested that a specificational sentence with it as its subject assigns the value for a variable, while a specificational sentence with that as its subject confirms the identity of the value which has already been assigned.

Beyond Discontent:

Beyond Discontent: