The present study examined how the updating, inhibiting, and shifting abilities underlying executive control influence spoken noun-phrase production. Previous studies provided evidence that updating and inhibiting, but not shifting, influence picture-naming response time (RT). However, little is known about the role of executive control in more complex forms of language production like generati...

In many knowledge based systems the application domain is modeled in an object centered formalism Research in knowledge acquisition has given evi dence that this approach allows one to adequately model the conceptual struc tures of human experts However when a novice user wants to describe a particular task to be solved by such a system he has to be well acquainted with the underlying domain mo...

In this paper, we describe the OPI system participating in the Semeval-2014 task 3 Cross-Level Semantic Similarity. Our approach is knowledge-poor, there is no exploitation of any structured knowledge resources as Wikipedia, WordNet or BabelNet. The method is also fully unsupervised, the training set is only used in order to tune the system. System measures the semantic similarity of texts usin...

Visual long-term memory in primates has been assessed by using the pair-association (PA) task, in which a subject retrieves and chooses the paired associate of a cue picture. Our previous studies on single neurons in the anterior inferotemporal (AIT) cortex suggested their roles in representing paired associates in the mind. To test the possibility that the delay activity of AIT neurons is rela...

The UC Berkeley team participated in the SemEval 2007 Task #4, with an approach that leverages the vast size of the Web in order to build lexically-specific features. The idea is to determine which verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions are used in sentences containing a target word pair, and to compare those to features extracted for other word pairs in order to determine which are most similar...

We explored the relations between task difficulty and speech time in picture description tasks. Six native speakers of Mandarin Chinese (CH group) and six native speakers or Indo-European languages (IE group) produced quick and accurate verbal descriptions of pictures in a self-paced manner. The pictures always involved two objects, a plate and one of the three objects (a stick, a fork, or a kn...

This research is carried out jointly by the Software Engineering Institute, a Federally Funded Research and Development Center, sponsored by the Department of Defense, and by the Department of Computer Science, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DOD), ARPA Order No. 4976, monitored by the Air Force Avionics Laboratory Under Contract F33615-84-K-1520. Additional support ...

Thanks to the profusion of freely available tools, it recently became fairly easy to built a statistical machine translation (SMT) engine given a bitext. The expectations we can have on the quality of such a system may however greatly vary from one pair of languages to another. We report on our experiments in building phrase-based translation engines for the four pairs of languages we had to co...

Robot systems must achieve high level goals while remaining reactive to contingencies and new opportunities. This typically requires robot systems to coordinate concurrent activities, monitor the environment, and deal with exceptions. We have developed a new language to support such task-level control. The language, TDL, is an extension of C++ that provides syntactic support for task decomposit...