The correct translation of verb tenses ensures that the temporal ordering of events in the source text is maintained in the target text. This paper assesses the utility of automatically labeling English Simple Past verbs with a binary discursive feature, narrative vs. non-narrative, for statistical machine translation (SMT) into French. The narrativity feature, which helps deciding which of the...

Autism is characterized by language and communication deficits. We investigated grammatical and lexical processes in high-functioning autism by contrasting the production of regular and irregular past-tense forms. Boys with autism and typically-developing control boys did not differ in accuracy or error rates. However, boys with autism were significantly faster than controls at producing rule-g...

By using recent results from graph theory, including the Strong Perfect Graph Theorem, we obtain a unifying framework for a number of tractable classes of constraint problems. These include problems with chordal microstructure; problems with chordal microstructure complement; problems with tree structure; and the “all-different” constraint. In each of these cases we show that the associated mic...

A graph G is perfect if for every induced subgraph H, the chromatic number of H equals the size of the largest complete subgraph of H, and G is Berge if no induced subgraph of G is an odd cycle of length at least 5 or the complement of one. The “strong perfect graph conjecture” (Berge, 1961) asserts that a graph is perfect if and only if it is Berge. A stronger conjecture was made recently by C...

This study focuses on (1) Turkic languages in the Altaic branch of Ural-Altaic language group Asian languages, and also (2) Kurdish Indo-Iranian dialects which are spoken Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, as well (3) English Germanic European group. The syntax-cases tenses investigated. Four simple tenses, namely present, present continuous, past future tense examined individually...

The formation of the past tense of verbs in English has been the focus of the debate concerning connectionist vs. symbolic accounts of language. Brain-injured patients differ with respect to whether they are more impaired in generating irregular past tenses (TAKE-TOOK) or past tenses for nonce verbs (WUG-WUGGED). Such dissociations have been taken as evidence for distinct "rule" and "associativ...

In the aspectual linguistic literature, a connection between imperfective aspect and modality/subjectivity is quite often mentioned. This article investigates a possible counterargument to this connection by analyzing modal readings of tenses in Russian. Two types of uses of tenses are described: (1) temporal reading of the tense with a modal inference and (2) strictly modal reading of the tens...

Tense of one sentence can indicate the time when an event takes place. Therefore, it is very useful for natural language processing tasks such as Machine Translation (MT). However, the mapping of tense in MT is a very challenging problem as the usage of tenses varies from one language to another. Aiming at translating one language (source) which lacks overt tense markers into another language (...

Our proof (with Robertson and Thomas) of the strong perfect graph conjecture ran to 179 pages of dense matter; and the most impenetrable part was the final 55 pages, on what we called “wheel systems”. In this paper we give a replacement for those 55 pages, much easier and shorter, using “even pairs”. This is based on an approach of Maffray and Trotignon.