We report on interoperability of different sentiment lexica with each other and with the linguistic notions negation and modality for sentiment analysis of tweets in a comprehensive ablation study and in competition results for SemEval 2015. Our approach performed well at the tweet level, but excelled in the presence of figurative language.

The role of sensory-motor components in language processing is a central topic in cognitive neuroscience. Recent studies showed that the processing of action words recruits cortical motor regions involved in the planning and execution of the described actions. However, it remains unclear to what extent the abstract versus concrete nature of the described motion modulates the activation of premo...

Idiom comprehension of 15 patients with mild probable Alzheimer's disease was examined by means of a sentence-to-picture matching task. Patients had to choose between two pictures, one representing the figurative and the other the literal interpretation. They were also submitted to a literal sentence comprehension test and to a pencil-and-paper dual task. Whereas literal comprehension was norma...

We propose a formal criterion for delineating literal from figurative speech (metonymies, metaphors, etc.). It is centered around the notion of categorization conflicts that follow from the context of the utterance. In addition, we consider the problem of granularity, which is posed by the dependence of our approach on the underlying ontology, and compare our distinction with alternative refere...

This paper is an artist statement describing a manipulation of the Mandelbrot Set equation as the basis for creating semi-figurative images, using a genetic algorithm. Modernist painting is referenced in terms of the play between representation and abstraction. The Platonic implications of the Mandelbrot Set are considered as a point of departure for manipulation of the complex function.