We present an unsupervised method for canonicalizing joshi (postpositions) in Japanese. Some postpositions in Japanese do not specify semantic roles explicitly as case markers do, although those postpositions syntactically behave as the case markers. Such postpositions includes “wa,” which topicalizes noun phrases, and “mo,” which emphasizes noun phrases. For this paper, we replaced these postp...

To understand a sentence, the meanings of the words in the sentence must be retrieved and combined. Are these meanings represented within the language system (the lexical hypothesis) or are they represented in a general conceptual system that is not restricted to language (the conceptual hypothesis)? To evaluate these hypotheses, sentences were presented in which a pictured object replaced a wo...

Children as young as two use sentence structure to learn the meanings of verbs. We probed the generality of sensitivity to sentence structure by moving to a different semantic and syntactic domain, spatial prepositions. Twenty-six-month-olds used sentence structure to determine whether a new word was an object-category name (This is a corp!) or a spatial-relational term (This is acorp my box!)....

Childhood socioeconomic status (SES) has a broad impact on cognitive development including nearly every aspect of language ability. In infancy, lower SES is associated with delays in real-time language processing skills, but it is not known whether or how this relationship carries into adulthood. We explore these questions by assessing the timecourse of anticipatory sentence interpretation in a...

Through the manipulation of the syntactic cue of word order and the semantic cues of noun animacy and noun size order, this study explores how different cue strength affects a child’s interpretation of a sentence. Subjects included 36 children [Mean age=50.72 mo.; SD=7.3 mo.]. A sentence interpretation test was administered to participants who would choose the “doer” of the sentence. Significan...

Identifying mathematical relations expressed in text is essential to understanding a broad range of natural language text from election reports, to financial news, to sport commentaries to mathematical word problems. This paper focuses on identifying and understanding mathematical relations described within a single sentence. We introduce the problem of Equation Parsing – given a sentence, iden...

Event-related potentials were used to examine the role of grammatical gender in auditory sentence comprehension. Native Spanish speakers listened to sentence pairs in which a drawing depicting a noun was either congruent or incongruent with sentence meaning, and agreed or disagreed in gender with the immediately preceding spoken article. Semantically incongruent drawings elicited an N400 regard...

In two picture-word interference experiments we examined whether phrase boundaries affected how far in advance speakers plan the sounds of words during sentence production. Participants produced sentences of varying lengths (short determiner + noun + verb or long determiner + adjective + noun + verb) while ignoring phonologically related and unrelated words to the verb of the sentence. Response...

This paper presents a predicate-argument structure analysis that simultaneously conducts zero-anaphora resolution. By adding noun phrases as candidate arguments that are not only in the sentence of the target predicate but also outside of the sentence, our analyzer identifies arguments regardless of whether they appear in the sentence or not. Because we adopt discriminative models based on maxi...

To understand a sentence, the meanings of the words in the sentence must be retrieved and combined. Are these meanings represented within the language system (the lexical hypothesis) or are they represented in a general conceptual system that is not restricted to language (the conceptual hypothesis)? To erraluate these hypotheses, sentences were presented in which a pictued object replaced a wo...