BACKGROUND: Formal linguistic properties of sentences-both lexical, i.e., argument structure, and syntactic, i.e., movement-as well as what is known about normal and disordered sentence processing and production, were considered in the development of Treatment of Underlying Forms (TUF), a linguistic approach to treatment of sentence deficits in patients with agrammatic aphasia. TUF is focused o...

We argue that Cognitive Science can profit from the study of language evolution. Research in language evolution is concerned with the question of how complex linguistic structures can emerge from the interactions between many communicating individuals. As such it complements psycholinguistics which investigates the processes involved in individual adult language processing, and child language d...

Visual question answering is fundamentally compositional in nature—a question like where is the dog? shares substructure with questions like what color is the dog? and where is the cat? This paper seeks to simultaneously exploit the representational capacity of deep networks and the compositional linguistic structure of questions. We describe a procedure for constructing and learning neural mod...

The idea that optimization plays a key role in linguistic cognition is supported by an increasingly large body of research. Building on this research, we describe a new approach to parsing distributed representations via optimization over a set of soft constraints on the wellformedness of parse trees. This work extends previous research involving the use of constraintbased or “harmonic”’ gramma...

Linguistic acceptability judgments are a critical part of the toolkit for linguistic investigation. An implicit assumption of much work using these judgments is that the data are stable, presumably reflecting the underlying nature of grammatical representation. Here, I demonstrate that for a range of constructions — including so-called island-violating sentences, those with resumptive pronouns,...

In computational linguistics, large tree databases tagged with morpho-syntactic information are in need of fast retrieval of multiway tree structures. To tackle this problem, we present a generalization of the classical n-gram indexing technique called Treegram indexing. As an application of treegram indexing, we describe the Venona retrieval system, which handles the BH t treebank containing 5...

Research in language evolution is concerned with the question of how complex linguistic structures can emerge from the interactions between many communicating individuals. As such it complements psycholinguistics which investigates the processes involved in individual adult language processing, and child language development studies, investigating how children learn a given (fixed) language. We...

In this chapter we discuss the theory of complex projective structures on compact surfaces and its connections with Teichmüller theory, 2-and 3-dimensional hyperbolic geometry, and representations of surface groups into PSL 2 (C). Roughly speaking, a complex projective structure is a type of 2-dimensional geometry in which Möbius transformations play the role of geometric congru-ences (this is ...

Biomedical domain ontologies could be better put to use for automatic semantic linguistic processing if we could map them to lexical resources that model the linguistic phenomena encountered in this domain, e.g., complex noun phrase structures that reference specific biological entity names and processes. In this paper, we introduce BioFrameNet – a domain-specific FrameNet extension. BioFrameNe...

In this paper, we propose a new linguistic approach for sentiment analysis of Korean. In order to overcome shortcomings of previous works confined to statistical methods, we make effective use of various linguistic features reflecting the nature of Korean such as contextual intensifiers, contextual shifters, modal affixes, and the morphological dependency chunk structures. Moreover, unlike comp...