This article discusses the importance of using decontextualized language, or language that is removed from the here and now including pretend, narrative, and explanatory talk, with preschool children. The literature on parents' use of decontextualized language is reviewed and results of a longitudinal study of parent decontextualized language input in relation to child vocabulary development ar...

We propose that qualitative physics can provide an important component of natural language semantics. Specifically, we describe how qualitative process theory can be recast in terms of frame semantics, as used in the Berkeley FrameNet project. This reformulation is important because it could allow the techniques of qualitative reasoning to be harnessed for natural language understanding and it ...

In this paper, it is argued that negotiation can be regarded as a sociocognitive process for the transformation of joint commitments in multi-agent environments. To this end, a quantified multi-modal logical language is developed for reasoning about and representing agents’ mental attitudes. Drawing on this language, negotiation is formalised using the classical axiomatic-deductive methodology ...

Several sets of explanatory variables – including shallow, language modeling, POS, syntactic, and discourse features – are compared and evaluated in terms of their impact on predicting the grade level of reading material for primary school students. We find that features based on in-domain language models have the highest predictive power. Entity-density (a discourse feature) and POS-features, ...

The essay was written on the occasion of 80th anniversary Bulgarian Language Institute. prof. Lyubomir Andreichin BAN (Sofia), which created in 1942 to form an explanatory dictionary literary language. article acquaints reader with main milestones formation and development Institute, areas scientific research, individual significant works. Institute is famous for outstanding achievements field ...

A method is proposed to process ECD brain SPECT images representing epileptic hot spots inside the brain. For validation 35 ictal interictal patient image data were processed. The images were registered by a normalized mutual information method, then the separation of the suspicious and normal brain areas were performed by two thresholdbased segmentations. Normalization between the images was p...

Computational models have played a central role in the debate over language learnability. This article discusses how they have been used in different ‘stances’, from generative views to more recently introduced explanatory frameworks based on embodiment, cognitive development and cultural evolution. By digging into the details of certain specific models, we show how they organize, transform and...

objects—‘Santa Claus is fat’ has one kind of semantic interpretation, while ‘Bob is fat’ has another. Meanwhile ‘pretense’ theories face the problem (among others) that no pretense seems to be going on at all when we say ‘Santa Claus doesn’t exist’. See Ludlow 1999 pg. 71, and also Brown, 2009, ch. 2. (Even so, such theories may actually be providing the most objectively simple 50 explanations ...

Mode declarations are a successful form of language bias in explanatory ILP. But, while they are heavily used in Horn systems, they have yet to be similarly exploited in more expressive clausal settings. This paper presents a mode-directed ILP procedure for full clausal logic. It employs a first-order inference engine to abductively and inductively explain a set of examples with respect to a ba...

After a difficult initial period in which connectionism was perceived as either irrelevant or antithetical to linguistic theory, connectionist concepts are now beginning to be brought to bear on basic issues concerning the structure, acquisition, and processing of language, both normal and disordered. This article describes some potential points of further contact between connectionism and ling...