ARBITER is a Prolog program that extracts assertions about macromolecular binding relationships from biomedical text. We describe the domain knowledge and the underspecified linguistic analyses that support the identification of these predications. After discussing a formal evaluation of ARBITER, we report on its application to 491,000 MEDLINE ~ abstracts, during which almost 25,000 binding rel...

Extending learned patterns to previously unseen ones is a key hallmark of complex cognition. This paper presents evidence that learners are able to generalize learned patterns to novel stimuli with very different surface properties within and across modalities. Using a statistical learning paradigm, adult learners were exposed to a repetition (reduplication) pattern in which the first element o...

Dialectometric techniques analyze linguistic variation quantitatively, allowing one to aggregate over what are frequently rebarbative geographic patterns of individual linguistic variants, such as which word is used for a particular concept in a language area, or which sounds are used in particular words. This leads to general formulations of the relation between linguistic variation and explan...

Many studies have argued that language comprehension requires perceptual simulation. In previous work we have demonstrated that because language encodes perceptual relations, comprehenders can also rely on language statistics to bootstrap meaning through limited grounding. The extent comprehenders do this depends on the nature of the cognitive task, the stimulus, the individual, as well as the ...

Questions related to the evolution of language have recently known an impressive increase of interest (Briscoe, 2002). This short paper aims at questioning the scientific status of these models and their relations to attested data. We show that one cannot directly model non-linguistic factors (exogenous factors) even if they play a crucial role in language evolution. We then examine the relatio...