Verbs are the centerpiece of the sentence, and understanding of verb meanings is essential for language acquisition. Yet verb learning is said to be more challenging than noun learning for young children for several reasons. First, while nouns tend to denote concrete objects, which are perceptually stable over time, verbs tend to refer to action events, which are temporally ephemeral, and the b...

Systematic cross-linguistic studies of verbs syntactic-semantic behaviors for typologically distant languages such as Mandarin Chinese and French are difficult to conduct. Such studies are nevertheless necessary due to the crucial role that verbal constructions play in the mental lexicon. This paper addresses the problem by combining psycho-linguistics and computational methods. Psycho-linguist...

This paper proposes an approach to reference resolution in situated dialogues by exploiting extra-linguistic information. Recently, investigations of referential behaviours involved in situations in the real world have received increasing attention by researchers (Di Eugenio et al., 2000; Byron, 2005; van Deemter, 2007; Spanger et al., 2009). In order to create an accurate reference resolution ...

This article presents a novel syntactic parser architecture, in which a linguistic formalism can be enriched with all sorts of constraints, included extra-linguistic ones, thanks to the seamless coupling of the formalism with a programming language.

It is agreed that infants require pre-existing conceptual meanings to learn language, although little is known about what those meanings are. By default they have been assumed to be the sensorimotor schemas described by Piaget. However, sensorimotor schemas are not concepts and are not the right sort of representation for learning language. Recent research shows that along with sensorimotor sch...

Cím: Exploiting extra-textual and linguistic information in keyphrase extraction

People possess a great deal of knowledge about how the world works, and it is undoubtedly true that adults use this knowledge when understanding and producing language. However, psycholinguistic theories differ regarding whether this extra-linguistic pragmatic knowledge can be activated and used immediately, or only after a delay. The authors present research that investigates whether people im...

the issue of speech act is a significant issue in pragmatics. speech acts encapsulate lectionary, illocutionary and perloctionary forces. i have dealt with what is said in speech. what is said is an achieved action. to be achieved, this action depends on presuppositions or prior assumptions between the speaker and the recipient of speech. the speaker discusses his previous references to make hi...