Syntactic Model Research Articles

The effect of enhanced working memory on language

AlthoughweareinalmostcompleteagreementwithMarti´n-Loeches (2006), his critique of our argument presents us withan opportunity for clarification. We commend his descriptionof the possible neural basis for enhanced working memory(EWM), especially the possible role of parallel activation. Ashe makes clear (clearer than we did), EWM need not havebeen based in a massive increase in the number of neurons.We differ from Marti´n-Loeches primarily in our treatmentof language. One of our motivations for advancing theEWM hypothesis was a desire to challenge the heavy (andoften uncritical) reliance that many anthropologists place onlanguage as the key to cognitive modernity. Language issuch a powerful ability, and our understanding of it is somuch more comprehensive than that of many other cognitiveabilities, that it tends to eclipse our understanding of all otherdevelopments. Marti´n-Loeches’reworking of our argument forthe phonological loop reflects, we believe, this ‘‘bullying’’ ef-fect of language, and syntax in particular. We suggest thatmuch of what Marti´n-Loeches attributes to a language proces-sor might be more parsimoniously explained by elements ofBaddeley’s original model of working memory. One compo-nent of WM mentioned, but not emphasized, by Marti´n-Loeches is its access to long term memory (LTM). Ericsson(Ericsson and Delaney, 1999), for example, has built a power-ful explanation of expert performance based on facilitatedaccess to LTM via WM. In essence, cues held in and manipu-lated by WM provide quick access to much longer and morecomplex encodings held in LTM. This strikes us as being pre-cisely what happens in Waters and Caplan’s (1996) ‘‘psycho-linguistic resource pool,’’ when the ‘‘more automatic’’ accessto complex syntax occurs. In other words, this cognitive abilitymay be a general feature of WM tapping into a long term storeof syntactical models, rather than anything specific to lan-guage. And the ‘‘post-interpretive processing’’ used in verbalreasoning strikes us as a function of the episodic buffer ofthe central executive, rather than a separate module.It is interesting that our differing accounts of the relation-ship between language and WM ultimately take us to thesame place, for we too would argue for Marti´n-Loches’secondevolutionary scenario e that the developments in WM thatproduced the modern mind enhanced the capabilities of analready-existing language (syntactical) processor. Recursionprovides a telling example of how this would have worked(and especially pertinent as some linguists now maintain thatrecursion is the crucial piece to syntax [Hauser et al.,2002]). Recursion is the mechanism in grammar that enablesa speaker to use an entire phrase as an object of a higher levelphrase (e.g., ‘‘He said that she said.’’). It is this feature thatsupplies native speakers of a language with the ability to pro-duce, in principle, an infinite number of meaningful sentences.In practice, the size of this ‘‘infinity’’ is constrained by severalpractical limitations, one of which is WM. The number of re-cursions must be held and processed in attention if they are tobe understood. ‘‘He said that she said that they said that wesaidthat IsaidthatGeorge W.BushisatrueTexan,’’isagram-matically correct sentence, but one that just about exhausts thecapacity of WM to analyze. Add two more levels of recursionand few native speakers could keep track. The recursive rule,held presumably in a syntactical processor, has not changed,but the sheer size of the task has. Perhaps the simplest inter-pretation of the effect EWM had on linguistic communicationis to conclude that it enlarged the recursive capacity of lan-guage. An enhancement of WM would yield immediate resultsin the length and complexity of sentences. Marti´n-Loechesmay well be correct in arguing that the phonological loop,sensu strictu, is too specialized (or too encapsulated) to ade-quately encompass this increased capacity (TW and FC them-selves disagree amicably on this point). However, we are alsoreluctant to subdivide WM into smaller and smaller subsys-tems if features of the general model can account for theexperimental results.

Exemplar-based syntax: How to get productivity from examples

Exemplar-based models of language propose that human language production and understanding operate with a store of concrete linguistic experiences rather than with abstract linguistic rules. While exemplar-based models are well acknowledged in areas like phonology and morphology, common wisdom has it that they are intrinsically flawed for syntax where infinite generative capacity is needed. This article shows that this common wisdom is wrong. It starts out by reviewing an exemplar-based syntactic model, known as Data-Oriented Parsing, or DOP, which operates on a corpus of phrase-structure trees. While this model is productive, it is inadequate from the point of grammatical productivity. We therefore extend it to the more sophisticated linguistic representations proposed by Lexical-Functional Grammar theory, resulting in the model known as LFG-DOP, which does allow for meta-linguistic judgments of acceptability. We show how DOP deals with first language acquisition, suggesting a unified model for language learning and language use, and go into a number of syntactic phenomena that can be explained by DOP but that challenge rule-based models. We argue that if there is anything innate in language cognition it is not Universal Grammar but “Universal Representation”.

A Tutorial for Competent Memetic Algorithms: Model, Taxonomy, and Design Issues

The combination of evolutionary with local search was named memetic algorithms (MAs) (Moscato, 1989). These methods are inspired by models of natural systems that combine the evolutionary adaptation of a population with individual learning within the lifetimes of its members. Additionally, MAs are inspired by Richard Dawkin's concept of a meme, which represents a unit of cultural evolution that can exhibit local refinement (Dawkins, 1976). In the case of MA's, memes refer to the strategies (e.g., local refinement, perturbation, or constructive methods, etc.) that are employed to improve individuals. In this paper, we review some works on the application of MAs to well-known combinatorial optimization problems, and place them in a framework defined by a general syntactic model. This model provides us with a classification scheme based on a computable index D, which facilitates algorithmic comparisons and suggests areas for future research. Also, by having an abstract model for this class of metaheuristics, it is possible to explore their design space and better understand their behavior from a theoretical standpoint. We illustrate the theoretical and practical relevance of this model and taxonomy for MAs in the context of a discussion of important design issues that must be addressed to produce effective and efficient MAs.

On the computational power of probabilistic and quantum branching program

In this paper, we show that one-qubit polynomial time computations are as powerful as NC 1 circuits. More generally, we define syntactic models for quantum and stochastic branching programs of bounded width and prove upper and lower bounds on their power. We show that any NC 1 language can be accepted exactly by a width-2 quantum branching program of polynomial length, in contrast to the classical case where width 5 is necessary unless NC 1 = ACC. This separates width-2 quantum programs from width-2 doubly stochastic programs as we show the latter cannot compute the middle bit of multiplication. Finally, we show that bounded-width quantum and stochastic programs can be simulated by classical programs of larger but bounded width, and thus are in NC 1 . For read-once quantum branching programs (QBPs), we give a symmetric Boolean function which is computable by a read-once QBP with O (log n ) width, but not by a deterministic read-once BP with o ( n ) width, or by a classical randomized read-once BP with o ( n ) width which is “stable” in the sense that its transitions depend on the value of the queried variable but do not vary from step to step. Finally, we present a general lower bound on the width of read-once QBPs, showing that our O (log n ) upper bound for this symmetric function is almost tight.

A Neural Syntactic Language Model

This paper presents a study of using neural probabilistic models in a syntactic based language model. The neural probabilistic model makes use of a distributed representation of the items in the conditioning history, and is powerful in capturing long dependencies. Employing neural network based models in the syntactic based language model enables it to use efficiently the large amount of information available in a syntactic parse in estimating the next word in a string. Several scenarios of integrating neural networks in the syntactic based language model are presented, accompanied by the derivation of the training procedures involved. Experiments on the UPenn Treebank and the Wall Street Journal corpus show significant improvements in perplexity and word error rate over the baseline SLM. Furthermore, comparisons with the standard and neural net based N-gram models with arbitrarily long contexts show that the syntactic information is in fact very helpful in estimating the word string probability. Overall, our neural syntactic based model achieves the best published results in perplexity and WER for the given data sets.

Modelling artificial life by attributed eco-array grammars

For modelling agents and their actions, as well as their interactions with the environment, we propose eco-array grammars (multilevel n-dimensional parallel array grammars). Even complex system behavior can be captured by adding attributes to this syntactic description model.

A Framework to Evaluate the Quality of Information System Models

This paper presents a framework for the quality evaluation of information system models and applies it to a selection of twenty relatively large real-world enterprise models. The framework is based on the distinction between the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic model aspects. The specific evaluation metrics for each aspect are drawn from an extensive literature survey. The paper concludes with an attempt to integrate all the proposed metrics into a composite quality score. The particular strength of the paper is that it presents a practical way of comparing and evaluating models from different reference disciplines and using widely different notations.

Recent developments of the syntactic pattern recognition model based on quasi-context sensitive languages

A new, generalised model of DPLL( k) grammars and DPLL( k) parsers is presented. DPLL( k) grammars and parsers can be used as an efficient tool for inference support in syntactic pattern recognition-based expert systems. The new model has been developed in order to improve both discriminative power and computational properties of recognition algorithms.

Integrated Semantic–Syntactic Video Modeling for Search and Browsing

Video processing and computer vision communities usually employ shot-based or object-based structural video models and associate low-level (color, texture, shape, and motion) and semantic descriptions (textual annotations) with these structural (syntactic) elements. Database and information retrieval communities, on the other hand, employ entity-relation or object-oriented models to model the semantics of multimedia documents. This paper proposes a new generic integrated semantic-syntactic video model to include all of these elements within a single framework to enable structured video search and browsing combining textual and low-level descriptors. The proposed model includes semantic entities (video objects and events) and the relations between them. We introduce a new "actor" entity to enable grouping of object roles in specific events. This context-dependent classification of attributes of an object allows for more efficient browsing and retrieval. The model also allows for decomposition of events into elementary motion units and elementary reaction/interaction units in order to access mid-level semantics and low-level video features. The instantiations of the model are expressed as graphs. Users can formulate flexible queries that can be translated into such graphs. Alternatively, users can input query graphs by editing an abstract model (model template). Search and retrieval is accomplished by matching the query graph with those instantiated models in the database. Examples and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed integrated modeling and querying framework.

A framework for modeling and implementing visual notations with applications to software engineering

We present a framework for modeling visual notations and for generating the corresponding visual programming environments. The framework can be used for modeling the diagrammatic notations of software development methodologies, and to generate visual programming environments with CASE tools functionalities. This is accomplished through an underlying modeling process based on the visual notation syntactic model of eXtended Positional Grammars (XPG, for short), and the associated parsing methodology, XpLR. In particular, the process requires the modeling of the basic elements (visual symbols) of a visual notation, their syntactic properties, the relations between them, the syntactic rules to formally define the set of feasible visual sentences, and a set of semantic routines performing additional checks and translation tasks. Such a process is completely supported by the VLDesk system, which enables the automatic generation of an editor for drawing visual sentences, as well as a processor for their recognition, parsing, and translation into other notations.The proposed framework also provides the basis for the definition of a meta-CASE technology. In fact, we can customize the generated visual programming environment in terms of the supported visual notation, its syntactic properties, and the translation rules. We have used this framework to model several diagrammatic notations used in software development methodologies, including those of the Unified Modeling Language.

Drawing learners’ attention to syntactic context aids gender-like category induction

According to noun-cue models, arbitrary linguistic categories, like those associated with case and gender systems, are difficult to learn unless members of the target category (i.e., nouns) are marked with phonological or semantic cues that reliably co-occur with grammatical morphemes (e.g., determiners) that exemplify the categories. Syntactic context models do not require noun cues. Five experiments used an artificial grammar with gender-like noun subcategories and locative postpositions with gender agreement to test the hypothesis that syntactic context models were sufficient for category induction if they included processes for drawing learners’ attention to the related subsets of grammatical morphemes that defined the gender categories. Experiment 1 validated a computer-based experimental paradigm for artificial language learning. Experiment 2 showed that direct instruction was one way to draw learners’ attention to the defining morphemes and bring about category induction. Experiments 3–5 showed that blocking learning trials using nouns as the blocking factor drew learners’ attention to the correlated subsets of grammatical morphemes and led to category induction. Experiments 2–5 provided support for syntactic context models under specific learning conditions. The implications for first- and second-language learning are discussed.

Saying What it Means: Semi-Automated (News) Media Annotation

This paper considers the automated and semi-automated annotation of audiovisual media in a new type of production framework, A4SM (Authoring System for Syntactic, Semantic and Semiotic Modelling). We present the architecture of the framework, describe a prototypical camera, a handheld device for basic semantic annotation, and an editing suite to demonstrate how video material can be annotated in real time and how this information can not only be used for retrieval but also can be used during the different phases of the production process itself. We then outline the underlying XML Schema based content description structures of A4SM and discuss the pros and cons of our approach of evolving semantic networks as the basis for audio-visual content description.

The Tajik Language and the Socio-linguistic situation in the Mountainous Badakhshan

The population of the Autonomous Region of Mountainous Badakhshan speaks different Pamir languages: Shughni, Rushani, Khufi, Bartangi, Roshorvi, Sariqoli, Yazghulami, Wakhi and Ishkashimi. These are spoken languages par excellence, having no script and written tradition. Nearly all Pamir languages to a certain extent can be characterised as endangered. Some of them are already extinct. These languages live in close interaction with the state language of Tajikistan-Tajik. Almost the whole population of Badakhshan is multilingual or bilingual. The second language is usually the official language of the state, Tajik. It is used in Badakhshan as the language of education, press, media, and culture. By early 20th century, the Tajik literary language had considerably deviated from the colloquial usage. The vocabulary was rather archaic and overloaded with Arabic loan words. Forms widely used in literary language were not used in colloquial speech, or were only partly used in dialects and local idioms. At the same time, numerous lexical forms and grammatical models that were used in the most local dialects were not part of literary language, whether written, oral or colloquial. Only after the October Revolution, work began on bringing the literary Tajik language closer to colloquial speech and dialects. In the late 1920's, the language started being purified of its archaisms and Arabic borrowings. Instead, variants of words were introduced to literary Tajik, along with grammatical and even some syntactical models, from dialects. The first Tajik newspaper Owozi Tojik appeared not long after the formation of the Tajik Autonomous Republic in November 1924. On the pages of this newspaper, discussion arose over problems of literary Tajik language, in particular, whether the language of press should be based on the standards of commonly spoken speech, which was closer to local dialects. Among the requirements for the newspaper writers were: the bringing of the literary language closer to the

Word Order Change in Icelandic: From OV to VO (review)

Reviewed by: Word order change in Icelandic: From OV to VO by Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir Benji Wald Word order change in Icelandic: From OV to VO. By Thorbjörg Hróarsdóttir. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. xii, 385. ISBN 1556192096. $114 (Hb). In this revision of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Tromsø, Hróarsdóttir combines sophisticated discussion of theoretical syntax with valuable new textual data on the rigidification of VO syntax in the history of Icelandic. H notes in passing that Icelandic has received widest attention as a case in which OV syntax has been lost in favor of VO syntax while maintaining a fully functioning nominal case system (in contrast to English, for example, where a similar word order shift was accompanied by, and has often been attributed to, the decline of its case system). However, her overriding concern is with characterizing what happened in the history of Icelandic word order and not with why it happened. After three general theoretical background chapters, H’s original contribution begins with Ch. 4 (the decline of OV word order, 53–78). Here she introduces her historical database (personal letters, when available), beginning with the fourteenth century and continuing up to 1870. She analyzes the data for each successive century, with the additional detail of separate analyses for each of seven successive age groups between 1730 and 1870, the critical period during which OV syntax was completely eliminated in most contexts, contexts in which OV syntax is judged unacceptable/ungrammatical by current speakers. The many tables presenting the statistical results of her analyses show that OV and VO syntax were both present from the earliest documented period (fourteenth century), with OV syntax gradually declining until the critical period (1730–1870) when it was rapidly eliminated. The tables also indicate that the word order variation was subject to consistent grammatical conditioning until the demise of OV syntax, most notably conditioning by the nature of the objects, for example, whether definite or indefinite, light or heavy, and so on. Discussion of representative examples and of tables of statistical data, and the historical trends they exhibit, continues through Ch. 7 (word order patterns, 177–223). In Ch. 8 (object positions, 227–55) H turns to applying generative syntactic models to the historical trends discussed in the preceding chapters. She rejects the less conventional model of alternating bases (proposed by Anthony Kroch and Susan Pintzuk for early English), arguing that generation from two separate bases is implausible for single clauses in which word order is ‘split’ between a preposed and postposed object (e.g. Indirect Object-Verb-Direct Object). Instead, she adopts a version of principles and parameters syntax (proposed by Richard Kayne) in which all constituent movements are leftward. Here, universal implications of the Kaynian model aside, H proposes, contrary to the book’s subtitle, that Icelandic has been a basic VO language throughout its recorded history and that the changes in word order reflect the loss of optional leftward movements of postverbal constituents. Implications for the history of English and the other Scandinavian languages are sometimes alluded to in passing. In Ch. 9 (parameter change, 257–343) she refines her model to unite into a single parameter the two optional movements that were simultaneously lost during the nineteenth century. One of the lost options allowed OV order; the other allowed Main V-Aux V order. She labels the single parameter ‘remnant VP-preposing’. Thus, H illustrates the interesting theme that sometimes historical considerations can be useful in selecting among competing synchronic descriptions, in this case one in which a single rule is preferable to one in which object preposing and auxiliary ‘postposing’ are analyzed as independent movements. H’s book advances knowledge of the Icelandic word order change, and it is clearly written and well-organized. It is worth further scrutiny by anyone interested in the details of word order change, even for its data if not for its particular theoretical conclusions. Copyright © 2003 Linguistic Society of America

A bit progress on word-based language model

A good language model is essential to a postprocessing algorithm for recognition systems. In the past, researchers have presented various language models, such as character based language models, word based language model, syntactical rules language model, hybrid models, etc. The word N-gram model is by far an effective and efficient model, but one has to address the problem of data sparseness in establishing the model. Katz and Kneser et al. respectively presented effective remedies to solve this challenging problem. In this study, we proposed an improvement to their methods by incorporating Chinese language-specific information or Chinese word class information into the system.

Designing a rule-based classifier using syntactical approach

In this research, a rule-based system has been developed for pattern recognition, making use of both statistical and syntactical approaches in classifying remote sensing data. This system attempts to automate the process of recognizing the output patterns from the unsupervised classifier based on a developed syntactic model. In the first phase of this work, a library of statistics of spectral characteristics of different land-use features in six bands of Thematic Mapper (TM) data (bands: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7) has been constructed. The statistical library is based on a prior knowledge (ground data) of the concerned pattern features, namely: maize, cotton, trees, soil, urban, water and salty water. The second phase is designing a grammar rule tree for recognizing each pattern, based on the outcome of this library, using waveform peak method. The developed system has a builtin intelligence so as to accept the unlabelled output spectral classes from the unsupervised classifier, parsing the pattern for each, and outputting descriptive classes.

Time–Space Tradeoffs for Branching Programs

We obtain the first non-trivial time–space tradeoff lower bound for functions f:{0, 1}n→{0, 1} on general branching programs by exhibiting a Boolean function f that requires exponential size to be computed by any branching program of length (1+ε)n, for some constant ε>0. We also give the first separation result between the syntactic and semantic read-k models (A. Borodin et al., Comput. Complexity3 (1993), 1–18) for k>1 by showing that polynomial-size semantic read-twice branching programs can compute functions that require exponential size on any semantic read-k branching program. We also show a time–space tradeoff result on the more general R-way branching program model (Borodin et al., 1993): for any k, we give a function that requires exponential size to be computed by length knq-way branching programs, for some q=q(k). This result gives a similar tradeoff for RAMs, and thus provides the first nontrivial time–space tradedoff for decision problems in this model.

Understanding the Constraints on Syntactic Generation: Lexical Bias and Discourse Congruency Effects on Eye Movements

We measured eye movements as people read short stories. The target sentences contained noun/verb homographs (e.g., duck) and were preceded by a biasing context sentence. The homograph in the target sentence was always disambiguated by a case-marked pronoun, e.g., She saw his/him duck. Lexical bias effects (reflecting the relative frequency of the noun and verb forms) were found in the initial fixations on the homograph. In contrast, discourse congruency effects were first observed several words downstream in the probability of a regressive eye movement. Strong discourse congruency effects were also observed in the second pass reading times. We concluded that the lexical bias effects reflect processing difficulty during the initial generation of syntactic structure, while the discourse congruency effects reflect later anomaly detection. Thus, the data challenge syntactic processing models in which all relevant and available constraints are brought to bear uniformly and simultaneously.

Addressing distance in the space syntax syntactical model

This paper discusses pedestrian movement and the criteria pedestrians use when selecting a route. The source of the material was an investigation into the pedestrian environment in the city centre of Cairo. Resulting from this investigation the paper seeks to provide a model for pedestrian movement using the attributes suggested by Space Syntax and transportation planning literature. Both of these fields attempt to understand and predict pedestrian movement, but they diverge in their selection of the factors that have a major effect on route choice. Space Syntax uses the number of changes in direction as a key factor, whereas transport engineering focuses mainly on the criterion of distance. The paper reviews the main issues considered in both fields before examining the results from a questionnaire used in Cairo that asked pedestrians to identify their reasons for route choice. A graphic model (the Metric Axial Model) was developed based on the concept of axial lines (Hillier and Hanson, 1984) but including modifications to account for distance. The resultant model (MAM) requires further research to explore its validity and potential use. However, from the evidence presented, it appears to offer an empirical method to measure the variable of Universal Distance in movement related models. Universal Distance was first proposed by Hillier (1996), but to date has not been developed beyond the hypothetical simplified model that Hillier used in his proposal.

Addressing distance in the space syntax syntactical model

Addressing distance in the space syntax syntactical model