To understand how muscle cell spreading and survival are mediated by integrins, we studied the signaling events initiated by the attachment of muscle cells to fibronectin (FN). We have previously demonstrated that muscle cell spreading on FN is mediated by alpha5beta1 integrin, is associated with rapid phosphorylation of focal adhesion kinase and is dependent on activation of protein kinase C (...

Spreading activation search is an approach to determine similarity of graph vertices based on energy distribution. Computation of such energy distribution is defined by a simple, but time-expensive recurrent procedure. This paper introduces a caching strategy, which can speed up computation of energy distribution of vertices that are closely connected to already calculated vertices.

Connectionist models based on activation spreading and attractor dynamics are functionally limited by representational and processing flexibility constraints, the ‘feature binding problem’ and the need to balance accurately activation and inhibition. We suggest an alternative approach, in which network units are characterized by two variables: activation and phase. Whereas activation evolves ac...

One of the most difficult parts of the natural language understanding process is forming a semantic interpretation of the text. A reader must often make multiple inferences to understand the motives of actors and to causally connect actions that are unrelated on the basis of surface semantics alone. The inference process is complicated by the fact that text is often ambiguous both lexically and...

We want computer systems that can help us assess the similarity or relevance of existing objects (e.g., documents, functions, commands, etc.) to a statement of our current needs (e.g., the query). Towards this end, a variety of similarity measures have been proposed. However, the relationship between a measure’s formula and its performance is not always obvious. A geometric analy sis is advance...

The ASKNet project uses a combination of NLP tools and spreading activation to transform natural language text into semantic knowledge networks. Network fragments are generated from input sentences using a parser and semantic analyser, then these fragments are combined using spreading activation based algorithms. The ultimate goal of the project is to create a semantic resource on a scale that ...

In this paper we propose a system to solve a language game, called Guillotine, which requires a player with a strong cultural and linguistic background knowledge. The player observes a set of five words, generally unrelated to each other, and in one minute she has to provide a sixth word, semantically connected to the others. Several knowledge sources, such as a dictionary and a set of proverbs...

We present a software tool for examplet reuse. We define examplets to be goal-directed snippets of source code, often written for tutorial purposes, that show how to use program library facilities to achieve some task. Our tool allows users to specify both their goal (in free text) and their ‘situation’ (the source code on which they are working). The system combines text retrieval and spreadin...

This paper presents a system that performs skill extraction from text documents. It outputs a list of professional skills that are relevant to a given input text. We argue that the system can be practical for hiring and management of personnel in an organization. We make use of the texts and the hyperlink graph of Wikipedia, as well as a list of professional skills obtained from the LinkedIn so...