The present study investigated simultaneous processing of language and music using visually presented sentences and auditorily presented chord sequences. Music-syntactically regular and irregular chord functions were presented synchronously with syntactically correct or incorrect words, or with words that had either a high or a low semantic cloze probability. Music-syntactically irregular chord...

A survey of randomly selected sample of television advertisements indicated that a significant number of these ads contain counterintuitive concepts. This makes sense in light of recent findings that suggest that minimally counterintuitive ideas are more memorable than intuitive ideas. However, a subsequent experiment performed to investigate the role of context in the memorability of such conc...

A headed relative clause is a syntactically complex modifier involving abstraction over an internal position of the clause (the relativization site) and connected to some constituent it modifies (the relative ''head''). In the standard approach, abstraction is syntactically implemented by means of an unbounded dependency between the relativization site and a relative operator taking scope over ...

This paper presents a system for querying treebanks. The system consists of a powerful query language with natural support for cross-layer queries, a client interface with a graphical query builder and visualizer of the results, a command-line client interface, and two substitutable query engines: a very efficient engine using a relational database (suitable for large static data), and a slower...

This thesis investigates the extraction of frequently used phrases (so called collocations) from biomedical text sources. The extraction of uninterrupted collocation candidates is introduced. For interrupted candidates, with gaps between their subcomponents, a new technique using suffix tries is developed. It is based on the iterative extension of frequent smaller patterns. This reduces computa...

The majority of the state-of-the-art approaches to recognizing textual entailment focus on defining a generic approach to RTE. A generic approach never works well for every single entailment pair: there are entailment pairs that are recognized poorly by all the generic systems. Automatic identification of such entailment pairs and applying to them an RTE algorithm that is specific to them could...

We describe a novel approach to statistical machine translation that combines syntactic information in the source language with recent advances in phrasal translation. We depend on a source-language dependency parser and a word-aligned parallel corpus. The only target language resource assumed is a word breaker. These are used to produce treelet (“phrase”) translation pairs as well as several m...

This paper introduces a description language for syntactically annotated corpora which allows for encoding both the syntactic annotation to a corpus and the queries to a syntactically annotated corpus. In terms of descriptive adequacy and computational efficiency, the description language is a compromise between script-like corpus query languages and high-level, typed unification-based grammar ...

Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984, 1996; Groenendijk 1999) provide a logically attractive theory of the semantics of natural language questions, commonly referred to as the partition theory. Two central notions in this theory are entailment between questions and answerhood. For example, the question Who is going to the party? entails the question Is John going to the party?, and John is going to th...