Language Alicia Abella John R. Kender Department of Computer Science Columbia University New York, NY 10027 Abstract Technology has made it possible to gather a great deal of data in the form of images, and at the same time it has created a demand for extracting what is conveyed in these images. To extract what is in these images requires vision, and to convey what is extracted requires natural...

There are either morphological cases or cases asigned by word order and prepositions which determine function and semantic role of the arguments. We propose to lead parser by prepositional case to analize semifree order languages. In Spanish, word order and agreement will identify subject and inanimate direct object whereas prepositions will do the rest. Prepositions express grammatical relatio...

This article presents the idea of the PrepNet.Br, a semantic network consisting of synsets of prepositions to be built for Brazilian Portuguese along the lines of the French PrepNet [Saint-Dizier 2005]. This enterprise is of relevance to the linguistic description of the class of prepositions as well as to Natural Language Processing resource-building. The construction of this network also brin...

We set out to distinguish level 1 (VPT-1) and level 2 (VPT-2) perspective taking with respect to the embodied nature of the underlying processes as well as to investigate their dependence or independence of response modality (motor vs. verbal). While VPT-1 reflects understanding of what lies within someone else's line of sight, VPT-2 involves mentally adopting someone else's spatial point of vi...

Cognitive linguistics and experimental psychology have produced tantalizing hints that a substantial portion of language is encoded in the mind in the form of spatial representations that are grounded in perception and action. Researchers represent these spatial aspects using "image schemas" that depict verbs of motion or spatial prepositions via a 2-D layout of generic icons. In two experiment...

In relation to inanimates, nouns that normally denote body parts when constructed in relation to an animate whole (pied ‘foot’, tête ‘head’, etc.) lose their literal meaning in French and acquire instead a spatial interpretation. This paper argues that spatial part Ns in French divide into two coherent groups with distinct properties: fixed spatial part terms, which denote concrete, perceptible...

We present a developmental approach towards a) pre-linguistic learning of grounded spatial schemas, and b) the acquisition of spatial prepositions based on association from these pre-linguistic concepts. We learn from sentential data, picking out the words most frequently associated with the concept, and show that simple associative structures are adequate for learning object names, or distinct...