Download or read book A Study of Semantics Across Different Representations of Language written by Dhanush Dharmaretnam and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Semantics is the study of meaning and here we explore it through three major representations: brain, image and text. Researchers in the past have performed various studies to understand the similarities between semantic features across all the three representations. Distributional Semantic (DS) models or word vectors that are trained on text corpora have been widely used to study the convergence of semantic information in the human brain. Moreover, they have been incorporated into various NLP applications such as document categorization, speech to text and machine translation. Due to their widespread adoption by researchers and industry alike, it becomes imperative to test and evaluate the performance of di erent word vectors models. In this thesis, we publish the second iteration of BrainBench: a system designed to evaluate and benchmark word vectors using brain data by incorporating two new Italian brain datasets collected using fMRI and EEG technology. In the second half of the thesis, we explore semantics in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). CNN is a computational model that is the state of the art technology for object recognition from images. However, these networks are currently considered a black-box and there is an apparent lack of understanding on why various CNN architectures perform better than the other. In this thesis, we also propose a novel method to understand CNNs by studying the semantic representation through its hierarchical layers. The convergence of semantic information in these networks is studied with the help of DS models following similar methodologies used to study semantics in the human brain. Our results provide substantial evidence that Convolutional Neural Networks do learn semantics from the images, and the features learned by the CNNs correlate to the semantics of the object in the image. Our methodology and results could potentially pave the way for improved design and debugging of CNNs.

Download or read book Partitioned Representations written by J. Dinsmore and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-07 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cognitive science is a field that began with the realization that researchers in varied disciplines-psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, formal semantics, neuroscience, and others-had taken on a common set of problems in representation and meaning, in reasoning and language. Nevertheless, cognitive science as a whole enjoys no common methodology or theoretical framework, and is in danger of becoming even more fragmented with time. There are two reasons for this. First, cognitive science is built on existing methodologies that have different historical origins. AB a result, the psychologist's truth is different from the linguist's truth. The artificial intelligence researcher's truth is different from the philosopher's truth. The neuroscientist's truth is different from the formal semanticist's truth. All too often there is little or no recognition of the relevance of work in other disciplines to one's own concerns. Second, cognitive scientists tend to develop theories around isolated problems. For instance, there are theories about how humans categorize concepts, about how humans analyze linguistic expressions syntactically, about how the English tense system works semantically, about how humans reason about space or reason about time, about how goal-directed problem solving occurs, about how the brain computes, and so on.

Download or read book Knowledge Representation and the Semantics of Natural Language written by Hermann Helbig and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2005-12-19 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural Language is not only the most important means of communication between human beings, it is also used over historical periods for the pres- vation of cultural achievements and their transmission from one generation to the other. During the last few decades, the ?ood of digitalized information has been growing tremendously. This tendency will continue with the globali- tion of information societies and with the growing importance of national and international computer networks. This is one reason why the theoretical und- standing and the automated treatment of communication processes based on natural language have such a decisive social and economic impact. In this c- text, the semantic representation of knowledge originally formulated in natural language plays a central part, because it connects all components of natural language processing systems, be they the automatic understanding of natural language (analysis), the rational reasoning over knowledge bases, or the g- eration of natural language expressions from formal representations. This book presents a method for the semantic representation of natural l- guage expressions (texts, sentences, phrases, etc. ) which can be used as a u- versal knowledge representation paradigm in the human sciences, like lingu- tics, cognitive psychology, or philosophy of language, as well as in com- tational linguistics and in arti?cial intelligence. It is also an attempt to close the gap between these disciplines, which to a large extent are still working separately.

Download or read book Definiteness across languages written by Ana Aguilar-Guevara and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Definiteness has been a central topic in theoretical semantics since its modern foundation. However, despite its significance, there has been surprisingly scarce research on its cross-linguistic expression. With the purpose of contributing to filling this gap, the present volume gathers thirteen studies exploiting insights from formal semantics and syntax, typological and language specific studies, and, crucially, semantic fieldwork and cross-linguistic semantics, in order to address the expression and interpretation of definiteness in a diverse group of languages, most of them understudied. The papers presented in this volume aim to establish a dialogue between theory and data in order to answer the following questions: What formal strategies do natural languages employ to encode definiteness? What are the possible meanings associated to this notion across languages? Are there different types of definite reference? Which other functions (besides marking definite reference) are associated with definite descriptions? Each of the papers contained in this volume addresses at least one of these questions and, in doing so, they aim to enrich our understanding of definiteness.

Download or read book Semantics in Language Acquisition written by Kristen Syrett and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2018-08-02 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics), the papers in this volume introduce the reader to the variety of ways in which children come to realize that semantic content is encoded in word meaning (for example, in the event semantics of the verbal domain or the scope of logical operators), and at the level of the sentence, which requires the composition of semantic meaning. The authors represent some of the most established and promising researchers in this domain, demonstrating collective expertise in a range of methodologies and topics relevant to the acquisition of semantics. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for students and faculty, and junior and seasoned researchers alike.

Download or read book The Semantic Representation of Natural Language written by Michael Levison and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes robust onomasiological semantic formalism and applies it to a wide variety of linguistic phenomena.

Download or read book The Psychology of Language written by David Ludden and published by SAGE Publications. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking through the boundaries of traditional psycholinguistics textbooks, The Psychology of Language: An Integrated Approach takes an integrated, cross-cultural approach that weaves the latest developmental and neuroscience research into every chapter. Separate chapters on bilingualism and sign language and integrated coverage of the social aspects of language acquisition and language use provide a breadth of coverage not found in other texts. In addition, rich pedagogy in every chapter and an engaging conversational writing style help students understand the connections between core psycholinguistic material and findings from across the psychological sciences.

Download or read book Semantic differences in translation written by Lore Vandevoorde and published by Language Science Press. This book was released on with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the notion of meaning has always been at the core of translation, the invariance of meaning has, partly due to practical constraints, rarely been challenged in Corpus-based Translation Studies. In answer to this, the aim of this book is to question the invariance of meaning in translated texts: if translation scholars agree on the fact that translated language is different from non-translated language with respect to a number of grammatical and lexical aspects, would it be possible to identify differences between translated and non-translated language on the semantic level too? More specifically, this books tries to formulate an answer to the following three questions: (i) how can semantic differences in translated vs non-translated language be investigated in a corpus-based study?, (ii) are there any differences on the semantic level between translated and non-translated language? and (iii) if there are differences on the semantic level, can we ascribe them to any of the (universal) tendencies of translation? In this book, I establish a way to visually explore semantic similarity on the basis of representations of translated and non-translated semantic fields. A technique for the comparison of semantic fields of translated and non-translated language called SMM++ (based on Helge Dyvik’s Semantic Mirrors method) is developed, yielding statistics-based visualizations of semantic fields. The SMM++ is presented via the case of inchoativity in Dutch (beginnen [to begin]). By comparing the visualizations of the semantic fields on different levels (translated Dutch with French as a source language, with English as a source language and non-translated Dutch) I further explore whether the differences between translated and non-translated fields of inchoativity in Dutch can be linked to any of the well-known universals of translation. The main results of this study are explained on the basis of two cognitively inspired frameworks: Halverson’s Gravitational Pull Hypothesis and Paradis’ neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism.

Download or read book Cross linguistic Semantics written by Cliff Goddard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cross-linguistic semantics – investigating how languages package and express meanings differently – is central to the linguistic quest to understand the nature of human language. This set of studies explores and demonstrates cross-linguistic semantics as practised in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, originated by Anna Wierzbicka. The opening chapters give a state-of-the-art overview of the NSM model, propose several theoretical innovations and advance a number of original analyses in connection with names and naming, clefts and other specificational sentences, and discourse anaphora. Subsequent chapters describe and analyse diverse phenomena in ten languages from multiple families, geographical locations, and cultural settings around the globe. Three substantial studies document how the metalanguage of NSM semantic primes can be realised in languages of widely differing types: Amharic (Ethiopia), Korean, and East Cree. Each constitutes a lexicogrammatical portrait in miniature of the language concerned. Other chapters probe topics such as inalienable possession in Koromu (Papua New Guinea), epistemic verbs in Swedish, hyperpolysemy in Bunuba (Australia), the expression of "momentariness" in Berber, ethnogeometry in Makasai (East Timor), value concepts in Russian, and “virtuous emotions” in Japanese. This book will be valuable for linguists working on language description, lexical semantics, or the semantics of grammar, for advanced students of linguistics, and for others interested in language universals and language diversity.

Download or read book Ten Lectures on Field Semantics and Semantic Typology written by Jürgen Bohnemeyer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These lectures provide one of the first comprehensive introductions to semantic typology, the study of crosslinguistic variation in how languages represent reality. In addition, they survey research methods for field semantics, the study of linguistic meaning under fieldwork conditions.

Download or read book Introducing Semantics written by Nick Riemer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-25 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the study of meaning in language for undergraduate students.

Download or read book Meaning in Linguistic Interaction written by Katarzyna Jaszczolt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt's view represents the most radical stance on meaning to be found in the contextualist tradition and thereby the most radical take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary. It allows for the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry without being constrained by such distinctions as what is said/what is implicated or what is linguistic and what is extralinguistic. She argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. The analysis transcends the traditional distinctions drawn, and traditional questions posed, in post-Gricean pragmatics and philosophy of language. It heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool but at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality ? whereby aspects of meaning that enter this composition have very different provenance. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism as well as novel applications, focusing on the role of salience, the flexibility of word meaning, the literal/nonliteral distinction, and the dynamic nature of a character, as well as offering an entirely new perspective on the indexical/nonindexical distinction. It contains a state-of-the-art discussion of the semantics/pragmatics boundary disputes, focusing on varieties of semantic minimalism and contextualism and on the limitations of an indexicalism. Jaszczolt's work is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers some formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics.

Download or read book Semantics written by Igor A. Mel’?uk and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2012-06-06 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an innovative and novel approach to linguistic semantics, beginning with the idea that language can be described as a system for the expression of linguistic Meanings as particular surface forms or Texts. Semantics is specifically that system of rules that ensures a correct transition from a Semantic Representation of the Meaning of a family of synonymous sentences to the Deep Syntactic Representation of a particular sentence. Framed in the terms of Meaning-Text linguistics, this volume discusses in detail the problems of Semantic Representation —including the semantic structure of utterances, the semantics of Causation in English, and communicative, or information, structure. Based on the author’s life-long dedication to the study of the semantics and syntax of natural language, this book is a paradigm-shifting contribution to the language sciences whose originality and daring will make it essential reading for linguists, anthropologists, semioticians, and computational linguists.

Download or read book Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology written by James A. Hampton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Download or read book Semantics Volume 1 written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 989 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (MAIENBORN ET AL.) BD. 33.1 HSK E-BOOK".

Download or read book Properties Types and Meaning written by G. Chierchia and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers stems originally from a conference on Property Theory, Type Theory and Semantics held in Amherst on March 13-16 1986. The conference brought together logicians, philosophers, com puter scientists and linguists who had been working on these issues (of ten in isolation from one another). Our intent was to boost debate and exchange of ideas on these fundamental issues at a time of rapid change in semantics and cognitive science. The papers published in this work have evolved substantially since their original presentation at the conference. Given their scope, we thought it convenient to divide the work into two volumes. The first deals primarily with logical and philosophical foundations, the second with more empirical semantic issues. While there is a common set of issues tying the two volumes together, they are both self-contained and can be read independently of one another. Two of the papers in the present collection (van Benthem in volume 1 and Chierchia in volume II) were not actually read at the conference. They are nevertheless included here for their direct relevance to the topics of the volumes. Regrettably, some of the papers that were presented (Feferman, Klein, and Plotkin) could not be included in the present work due to timing problems. We nevertheless thank the authors for their contribu tion in terms of ideas and participation in the debate.

Download or read book Event Representation in Language and Cognition written by Jürgen Bohnemeyer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-23 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Event Representation in Language and Cognition examines new research into how the mind deals with the experience of events. Empirical research into the cognitive processes involved when people view events and talk about them is still a young field. The chapters by leading experts draw on data from the description of events in spoken and signed languages, first and second language acquisition, co-speech gesture and eye movements during language production, and from non-linguistic categorization and other tasks. The book highlights newly found evidence for how perception, thought, and language constrain each other in the experience of events. It will be of particular interest to linguists, psychologists, and philosophers, as well as to anyone interested in the representation and processing of events.