The aim of this paper is to present a computational model of the dynamic composition and update of verb argument expectations using Distributional Memory, a state-of-the-art framework for distributional semantics. The experimental results conducted on psycholinguistic data sets show that the model is able to successfully predict the changes on the patient argument thematic fit produced by diffe...

Distributional models of semantics assume that the meaning of a word is a function of the contexts in which it occurs. In line with this, prior research suggests that a word’s semantic representation can be manipulated – pushed toward a target meaning, e.g. – by situating that word in distributional contexts frequented by the target. Left open to question is the role that sequence plays in the ...

Since synonyms are important lexical knowledge, various methods have been proposed for automatic synonym acquisition. Whereas most of the methods are based on the distributional hypothesis and utilize contextual clues, little attention has been paid to what kind of contextual information is useful for the purpose. As one of the ways to augment contextual information, we propose the use of indir...

Information about the syntactic category of a word can be derived from a number of complementary sources. We focus here on phonological and distributional cues for distinguishing nouns and verbs that have been proposed as useful for language acquisition. In this paper we assessed the extent to which this information affects lexical processing in adults. We hypothesised that the phonological or ...

Allophonic rules are responsible for the great variety in phoneme realizations. Infants can not reliably infer abstract word representations without knowledge of their native allophonic grammar. We explore the hypothesis that some properties of infants’ input, referred to as indicators, are correlated with allophony. First, we provide an extensive evaluation of individual indicators that rely o...

Several compositional distributional semantic methods use tensors to model multi-way interactions between vectors. Unfortunately, the size of the tensors can make their use impractical in large-scale implementations. In this paper, we investigate whether we can match the performance of full tensors with low-rank approximations that use a fraction of the original number of parameters. We investi...

MetaLab is a growing database of meta-analyses, shared in a github repository and via an interactive website. This website contains interactive tools for community-augmented metaanalyses, power analyses, and experimental planning. It currently contains a dozen meta-analyses spanning a number of phenomena in early language acquisition research, including infants’ vowel discrimination, acoustic w...

Distributional models of semantics capture word meaning very effectively, and they have been recently extended to account for compositionally-obtained representations of phrases made of content words. We explore whether compositional distributional semantic models can also handle a construction in which grammatical terms play a crucial role, namely determiner phrases (DPs). We introduce a new p...

Poetry is rarely a focus of linguistic investigation. This is far from surprising, as poetic language, especially in modern and contemporary literature, seems to defy the general rules of syntax and semantics. This paper assumes, however, that linguistic theories should ideally be able to account for creative uses of language, down to their most difficult incarnations. It proposes that at the s...

Distributional chaos was introduced in Schweizer and Smítal (Trans Am Math Soc 344:737–754, 1994) for continuous maps of the interval, as chaotic behavior based on development distances between orbits points system. In Balibrea et al. (Chaos Solitons Fractals 23(5):1581–1583, 2005), this phenomenon generalized to compact metric space distinguished into three different forms, DC1, DC2 DC3. Loran...