The objectives of the work described in this paper are: 1. To list the differences between a general language resource (namely FrameNet) and a domain-specific resource; 2. To devise solutions to merge their contents in order to increase the coverage of the general resource. Both resources are based on Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1985; Fillmore and Baker 2010) and this raises specific challenges s...

This  qualitative  study  investigates  the  uses  of  be  in  Contemporary  English.  Based  on  this  study, one  easy  claim  and  one  more  difficult  claim  are  proposed.  The  easy  claim  is  that  the  traditional distinction between be as a lexical verb and be as an auxiliary is faulty. In particular, 'copular-be', traditionally considered to be a lexical verb, is in fact a prototypi...

Can a subtle linguistic cue that invokes the self motivate children to help? In two experiments, 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 149) were exposed to the idea of "being a helper" (noun condition) or "helping" (verb condition). Noun wording fosters the perception that a behavior reflects an identity-the kind of person one is. Both when children interacted with an adult who referenced "being a hel...

Qualitative Process theory provides a formal representation for human-like models of continuous processes. However, qualitative reasoning systems frequently rely on hand-made models which inhibits expansion into new domains. A representation that unifies QP theory with natural language expressions would allow these systems to expand their models by reading and interaction, thus greatly increasi...

Aphasic patients often have more difficulty retrieving verbs than nouns. We present data from eight aphasics demonstrating that they have a selective impairment for verb retrieval. We then explore the role of semantic complexity (i.e., the number of semantic features) in verb retrieval using a delayed repetition/story completion task. The results indicate that six of the patients are better at ...

This thesis focuses on robust analysis of natural language semantics. A primary bottleneck for semantic processing of text lies in the scarcity of high-quality and large amounts of annotated data that provide complete information about the semantic structure of natural language expressions. In this dissertation, we study statistical models tailored to solve problems in computational semantics, ...

A development of a verb valency lexicon for Latvian has been recently started. The chosen approach combines and supplements the experience of similar lexical resources developed for other languages. The paper describes our approach to the verb valency annotation—the valency layers (syntactic and semantic valency, selectional restrictions) and the set of the semantic roles. The annotation proces...

©FFPRHC J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2007: 33(3) Introduction The terms ‘repeat abortion’ and ‘repeat aborter’ appear in the scientific literature from the early 1970s onwards. To begin with, the pejorative term ‘abortion recidivism’ was used by some.1 The initial concern appeared to be that women might be using abortion instead of contraception as a means of fertility control, with connotati...

Verbs fall into a variety of semantic classes. In particular, change of state verbs express events where an “affected” grammatical object undergoes a change of state. Properties of the object as expressed by adjectival modification hold true at the start of the event. The problem of determining if such properties are preserved at event culmination is a sub-case of the well-studied Frame Problem...