In response to strict power constraints and diminishing single-core performance returns, the hardware industry has shifted en masse to parallel multicore chips. In theory, parallel processing can match historic performance gains while meeting modern power budgets, but as recent studies show, that this requires near-perfect application parallelization [7]. In practice, perfect or near-perfect pa...

Since Harnad (1990) pointed out the symbol grounding problem, cognitive science research has demonstrated that grounding in perceptual or sensorimotor experience is crucial to language. Recent embodied cognition theories have argued that language is more important for grounding abstract than concrete words; abstract words are grounded via language. Distributional semantics has recently addresse...

In this work we investigate commonalities and differences between the semantic representations of concrete and abstract words using human judgments and distributional semantics. We tackle the following questions: a) Does distributional similarity imply similarity in concreteness vs. abstractness? b) How do concrete and abstract context words co-occur with concrete and abstract words? c) Are our...

We introduce a novel approach for resolving coreference when the trigger word refers to multiple (sometimes non-contiguous) clauses. Our approach is completely unsupervised, and our experiments show that Neural Network models perform much better (about 20% more accurate) than traditional feature-rich baseline models. We also present a new dataset for Biomedical Language Processing which, with o...

(1) Dulbecco Telethon Institute, Department of Experimental Medicine and Biochemical Sciences, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", Via Montpellier, 1 00133 Rome, Italy. (2) Laboratory of Cell Signaling, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico (IRCCS) Fondazione Santa Lucia, 00179, Rome, Italy (3) Laboratory of Immunology and Signal Transduction, Department of Experimental Medicine and...

Language is usually considered as a set of arbitrary symbols that convey subjacent internal concepts. According to this traditional approach words are only words, mere external signals of internal processes. In contrast, we propose that Words are social Tools (WAT). This view allows us address one of the critical problems embodied views face, the problem of how abstract words are acquired and r...