Use Of World Knowledge Research Articles

Investigating the Use of World Knowledge During On-line Comprehension in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The on-line use of world knowledge during reading was examined in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Both ASD and typically developed adults read sentences that included plausible, implausible and anomalous thematic relations, as their eye movements were monitored. No group differences in the speed of detection of the anomalous violations were found, but the ASD group showed a delay in detection of implausible thematic relations. These findings suggest that there are subtle differences in the speed of world knowledge processing during reading in ASD.

Benchmark eye movement effects during natural reading in autism spectrum disorder.

In 2 experiments, eye tracking methodology was used to assess on-line lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In Experiment 1, lexical identification was examined by manipulating the frequency of target words. Both typically developed (TD) and ASD readers showed normal frequency effects, suggesting that the processes TD and ASD readers engage in to identify words are comparable. In Experiment 2, syntactic parsing and semantic interpretation requiring the on-line use of world knowledge were examined, by having participants read garden path sentences containing an ambiguous prepositional phrase. Both groups showed normal garden path effects when reading low-attached sentences and the time course of reading disruption was comparable between groups. This suggests that not only do ASD readers hold similar syntactic preferences to TD readers, but also that they use world knowledge on-line during reading. Together, these experiments demonstrate that the initial construction of sentence interpretation appears to be intact in ASD. However, the finding that ASD readers skip target words less often in Experiment 2, and take longer to read sentences during second pass for both experiments, suggests that they adopt a more cautious reading strategy and take longer to evaluate their sentence interpretation prior to making a manual response. (PsycINFO Database Record

Evaluating Sentiment Analysis Methods and Identifying Scope of Negation in Newspaper Articles

Automatic detection of linguistic negation in free text is a demanding need for many text processing applications including Sentiment Analysis. Our system uses online news archives from two different resources namely NDTV and The Hindu. While dealing with news articles, we performed three subtasks namely identifying the target; separation of good and bad news content from the good and bad sentiment expressed on the target and analysis of clearly marked opinion that is expressed explicitly, not needing interpretation or the use of world knowledge. In this paper, our main focus was on evaluating and comparing three sentiment analysis methods (two machine learning based and one lexical based) and also identifying the scope of negation in news articles for two political parties namely BJP and UPA by using three existing methodologies. They were Rest of the Sentence (RoS), Fixed Window Length (FWL) and Dependency Analysis (DA). Among the sentiment methods the best F-measure was SVM with the values 0.688 and 0.657 for BJP and UPA respectively. On the other hand, the F measures for RoS, FWL and DA were 0.58, 0.69 and 0.75 respectively. We observed that DA was performing better than the other two. Among 1675 sentences in the corpus, according to annotator I, 1,137 were positive and 538 were negative whereas according to annotator II, 1,130 were positive and 545 were negative. Further we also identified the score of each sentence and calculated the accuracy on the basis of average score of both the annotators.

Integrating words that refer to typical sequences of events.

The organisation and processing of event concepts in semantic memory is an important issue in language processing and memory research. The present study tested whether pairs of words denoting events that can plausibly occur in sequence (marinate-grill) generate expectancies for a target that denotes a subsequently occurring event (chew). In Experiment 1, two events that tend to occur sequentially primed the third. In Experiment 2, the individual primes (i.e., marinate and grill separately) did not prime their related event targets. Experiments 1 and 2 used a lexical-decision task on the target. Therefore, information from both primes must be integrated to sufficiently activate knowledge of the subsequently occurring target. This is the first study to demonstrate priming among words denoting sequentially occurring events. In Experiment 3, a relatedness decision task, processing of these event triplets was facilitated when the first two event words were presented in a temporally correct order compared with when their order was reversed. These findings are not predicted by spreading activation theory and cannot be simulated by corpus-based models that do not include order-sensitive measures. We interpret the results as evidence for the role of situation models and the use of world knowledge during online language comprehension, even in the absence of sentential contexts.

The effect of semantic relatedness on syntactic analysis: An fMRI study

The sentences we process in normal conversation tend to refer to information that we are familiar with rather than abstract, unrelated information. This allows for the use of knowledge stores to help facilitate comprehension processes. In many sentence comprehension studies, the stimuli are designed such that the use of world knowledge is limited. Here, we investigated how the semantic relatedness of sentence constituents influences sentence processing. A three factor design was employed in which processing phase (sentence vs. probe), syntactic complexity (object-relative vs. conjoined active) and the semantic relatedness of the nouns within the sentence was examined. We found a differential effect in two sub-regions of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG). BA 44 revealed an effect of syntactic complexity while inferior portions of the LIFG (BA 47) revealed an effect of relatedness as well as an interaction between complexity and relatedness during the probe phase. In addition, significant differences in activation were observed when comparing the sentence processing and probe phases with the sentence phase eliciting stronger semantic related activation while the probe phase elicited stronger working memory related activation.

World Knowledge in Computational Models of Discourse Comprehension

Because higher level cognitive processes generally involve the use of world knowledge, computational models of these processes require the implementation of a knowledge base. This article identifies and discusses 4 strategies for dealing with world knowledge in computational models: disregarding world knowledge, ad hoc selection, extraction from text corpora, and implementation of all knowledge about a simplified microworld. Each of these strategies is illustrated by a detailed discussion of a model of discourse comprehension. It is argued that seemingly successful modeling results are uninformative if knowledge is implemented ad hoc or not at all, that knowledge extracted from large text corpora is not appropriate for discourse comprehension, and that a suitable implementation can be obtained by applying the microworld strategy.

Anaphora resolution without world knowledge

A typical problem in the resolution of pronominal anaphora is the presence of more than one candidate for the antecedent of the pronoun. Considering two English sentences like (1) "People buy expensive cars because they offer more status" and (2) "People buy expensive cars because they want more status" we can see that the two NPs "people" and "expensive cars", from a purely syntactic perspective, are both legitimate candidates as antecedents for the pronoun "they". This problem has been traditionally solved by using world knowledge (e.g. schema theory), where, through an internal representation of the world, we "know" that cars "offer" status and people "want" status. The assumption in this paper is that the use of world knowledge does not explain how the disambiguation process works and alternative explanations should be explored. Using a knowledge poor approach (explicit information from the text rather than implicit world knowledge) the study investigates to what extent syntactic and semantic constraints can be used to resolve anaphora. For this purpose, 1,400 examples of the word "they" were randomly selected from a corpus of 10,000,000 words of expository text in English. Antecedent candidates for each case were then analyzed and classified in terms of their syntactic functions in the sentence (subject, object, etc.) and semantic features (+ human, + animate, etc.). It was found that syntactic constraints resolved 85% of the cases. When combined with semantic constraints the resolution rate rose to 98%. The implications of the findings for Natural Language Processing are discussed.

A Scalable Architecture for Integrating Associative and Semantic Memory

Abstract Traditionally, semantic memory is considered to be composed of a single layer of knowledge. This layer can be thought of as encoding the systematic relations that underlie the regularities in our cognitive world. In this article, this notion is extended to include a second layer, so that semantic memory now consists of two tiers. The second tier asserts that each of our concepts has attached to it an associational cloud of knowledge that encodes the non-systematic knowledge associated with these concepts, or what Fillmore (1982) calls a concept's background frame knowledge. Semantic memory is constructed from co-occurrence statistics gathered from the Wall Street Journal text corpus. The associational knowledge is encoded from a set of semantic features extracted from the categories o/Roget's Thesaurus. This approach of the encoding and use of world knowledge is significant in that it supports an architecture that can scale up.

Incorporation versus compartmentalization in memory for discourse

Many experiments have shown that people use their world knowledge to aid in comprehension. The present paper addresses the issue of how this use of world knowledge is related to the equally important question of how and when newly learned information is incorporated into, and thereby alters, a person's world knowledge. The distinction between compartmentalized and incorporated information is characterized in terms of an associative network model, and this characterization is used to develop a measure of the degree of incorporation. This measure involves an examination of the ease with which subjects can recognize a newly learned concept as a function of the test context. Two experiments present evidence that the use of world knowledge in comprehension is correlated with this measure of the degree to which new information is incorporated into world knowledge.

Factors affecting the use of world knowledge to complete a linear ordering.

Factors affecting the use of world knowledge to complete a linear ordering.

Factors affecting the use of world knowledge to complete a linear ordering.

Factors affecting the use of world knowledge to complete a linear ordering.

The use of scripts in text comprehension

The use of world knowledge is an important aspect of comprehending stories. In recent years it has been assumed — especially in Artificial Intelligence research — that an important part of this world knowledge is organized in so-called ‘scripts’. A processing principle which is used in Artificial Intelligence research, says that scripts would facilitate understanding of script-related information in stories, because they make it possible to expect this information. An experiment was designed to investigate the psychological relevance of this principle. In this experiment stories were presented sentence by sentence on a display terminal, in which the script actualization-sentences were manipulated. Reading time of criterion-sentences, which were compatible or less compatible with the actualized script-sentences was measured. Sentences compatible with the script actualization-sentence were understood faster than less compatible sentences. It was concluded that actualization of a script facilitates comprehension of information related to that script. In the discussion, attention was paid to the problem that scripts are not sharply defined and to the notion of expectation in text processing.

The Role of Elaboration in the Comprehension and Retention of Prose: A Critical Review

A review is given of recent research done in the area of prose comprehension, broadly defined. Research in the areas of educational psychology, psychology, and artificial intelligence is represented, although no pretense is made that this review is complete. This review discusses work concerned with factors that affect amount of recall, with representations of text structures, and with use of world knowledge to aid comprehension. The need for more information processing models of comprehension is stressed and an argument is made for the importance of elaboration to comprehension and retention.