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Abstract In linguistics and in the philosophy of language it is standardly assumed that know is a factive verb, meaning that a sentence such as X knows that p , when uttered in its positive declarative form, presupposes, in fact entails, the truth of its complement. A problem for this analysis is the fact that the verb know can be used non-factively in contexts where it is evident that the proposition expressed by the subordinate clause is not true. In order to account for non-factive uses of know , two main solutions have been advanced in the literature. Hazlett (2009, 2010, 2012) proposes that know is not semantically factive and a sentence such as X knows that p does not entail, but only pragmatically implies p. On the other hand, Tsohatzidis (2012) argues that know is lexically ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense: when know is used in its factive sense, a sentence such as X knows that p entails p , whereas, when know occurs in its non-factive sense, it does not. As shown in recent works by Colonna Dahlman (2015, 2016, 2017b), the phenomenon at issue—the possibility for a speaker to use know in cases where the proposition expressed by the clause embedded under 'knows' is not true—is not unique to English, but occurs, for instance, also in Italian. We carried out a Truth Judgment Task to test the hypothesis that the Italian lexical item 'sa' (' knows ') is ambiguous. Our findings are consistent with the lexical ambiguity hypothesis, and cannot be explained by Hazlett's pragmatic solution. Highlights • Italian sapere is lexically ambiguous between a factive and a non-factive sense. • The results of a Truth Judgment Task confirm the lexical ambiguity hypothesis. • Our findings are not compatible with the predictions outlined by a pragmatic view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work in the areas of organizational trust repair and crisis communication has provided conflicting answers to the question of whether denial can be more effective than apology in repairing stakeholder trust in a company following an integrity-based violation. This article reports the results of an experiment designed to (i) test the effects of these two strategies on individuals’ trust in a company accused of corruption, and (ii) determine whether and how evidence of the company’s guilt influences stakeholder reactions to its trust repair message. The results demonstrate that, when evidence against the company is weak, trust is restored more successfully with a denial than an apology. Contrary to our hypothesis, denial was found to outperform apology in repairing perceptions of the company’s integrity and benevolence even in the face of strong evidence, and it was as effective as apology in restoring perceived ability and trusting intentions. These results provide empirical evidence for the ‘paradoxical effect’ that an open and honest attitude can, in the short term, be more detrimental to organizations than a defensive strategy. More research on the factors that determine the credibility and persuasiveness of corporate denial is called for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few years, the traditional analysis of know as a factive verb has been lively debated by linguists and philosophers of language: several scholars have pointed out that know may be used non-factively in ordinary language. The aim of the present study is to expand this inquiry to other cognitive factive verbs than know , such as discover , realize , etc., and to investigate cross-linguistically the question of whether know and other cognitive factive verbs may occur in non-factive contexts, that is, in contexts where it is clear that the embedded proposition is false. Moreover, we investigate whether so-called evidential uses of cognitive factive verbs are acceptable across languages. We administered an online survey to native speakers of nine different languages (English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, Spanish, and Swedish), and we found considerable cross-linguistic variation in the acceptability of the use of know and other cognitive factive verbs in non-factive contexts. For Italian and English, we put forward the claim that non-factive uses of cognitive factives instantiate a case of polysemy resulting from a process of semantic change that moves along a three-step pattern: from a factive sense to a more general non-factive sense to a non-factive sense characterized by an evidential function. • Cognitive factive verbs are investigated cross-linguistically. • Know and other cognitive factive verbs are used non-factively in ordinary language. • Cognitive factive verbs may be used to fulfill an evidential strategy. • An Acceptability Judgment Task was submitted to native speakers of nine languages. • Evidential uses may be a step in a process of defactivization of factive verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Speech variation of speakers is a crucial issue for speaker recognition and identification, especially for forensic practice. Greater intra-speaker variation is one main reason for incorrect speaker identification in real forensic situations. Understanding the stability of acoustic parameters and their variation in speech is therefore significant for the evaluation of effective parameters for speaker identification. In this paper, all vowels in Standard Chinese including five monophthongs, eight diphthongs and four triphthongs were combined with lateral /l/. Finally, 15 lateral syllables with different tones for 10 speakers were selected and acoustically analyzed. Central frequencies of the first four formants for each syllable were measured for quantitative comparison of intra- and inter-speaker variation in order to provide a general idea of speaker variation in Standard Chinese, and finally serving for forensic application. Results show that the overall intra-speaker variation is less than the inter-speaker variation in great extent under laboratory condition though occasionally they are contrary. This supports the basis for forensic speaker identification, that is, intra-speaker variation should be less than inter-speaker variation in many acoustic features, and further validates the probability and reliability of forensic speaker identification. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• We investigated the role of saliency on improving the classification accuracy when the training data is scarce. • We considered adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture (AlexNet, ResNet-50 and ResNet-152). • We validated our approach on the fine-grained object recognition problem. • Experimental results confirmed that our approach is useful for the case when the available training data is scarce. • Our experiments show that there exists a clear correlation (Pearson coefficient) between the performance of saliency methods on standard saliency benchmarks and the performance gain that is obtained when incorporating them in a object recognition pipeline. This paper investigates the role of saliency to improve the classification accuracy of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for the case when scarce training data is available. Our approach consists in adding a saliency branch to an existing CNN architecture which is used to modulate the standard bottom-up visual features from the original image input, acting as an attentional mechanism that guides the feature extraction process. The main aim of the proposed approach is to enable the effective training of a fine-grained recognition model with limited training samples and to improve the performance on the task, thereby alleviating the need to annotate a large dataset. The vast majority of saliency methods are evaluated on their ability to generate saliency maps, and not on their functionality in a complete vision pipeline. Our proposed pipeline allows to evaluate saliency methods for the high-level task of object recognition. We perform extensive experiments on various fine-grained datasets (Flowers, Birds, Cars, and Dogs) under different conditions and show that saliency can considerably improve the network's performance, especially for the case of scarce training data. Furthermore, our experiments show that saliency methods that obtain improved saliency maps (as measured by traditional saliency benchmarks) also translate to saliency methods that yield improved performance gains when applied in an object recognition pipeline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Spatial pyramids have been successfully applied to incorporating spatial information into bag-of-words based image representation. However, a major drawback is that it leads to high dimensional image representations. In this paper, we present a novel framework for obtaining compact pyramid representation. First, we investigate the usage of the divisive information theoretic feature clustering (DITC) algorithm in creating a compact pyramid representation. In many cases this method allows us to reduce the size of a high dimensional pyramid representation up to an order of magnitude with little or no loss in accuracy. Furthermore, comparison to clustering based on agglomerative information bottleneck (AIB) shows that our method obtains superior results at significantly lower computational costs. Moreover, we investigate the optimal combination of multiple features in the context of our compact pyramid representation. Finally, experiments show that the method can obtain state-of-the-art results on several challenging data sets. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study addresses the postulate of non-conventionality of pantomime, inherent in pantomimic scenarios of language origin. Since lack of semiotic conventions does not preclude micro-conventions resulting from cultural differences, pantomimes should be easier to interpret when the actor and recipient share the same culture than between two different cultures. In the study, Italian and Polish amateur "actors" re-enacted transitive events from a matrix of cartoon-like drawings. Randomly selected clips were matched by Polish and Italian participants to the corresponding drawings. We found no difference in the number of correct guesses when the actors and matchers were from the same versus from different cultures. We discuss this result in the context of the core assumptions of pantomimic scenarios of language origin. • Pantomimic scenarios of language origins assume that pantomime is robustly iconic and free from communicative conventions. • Lack of conventions does not preclude micro-conventions, thus pantomime should be more successful within cultures. • This was tested in a study with Italian and Polish participants. • Communicative success of pantomimes did not differ between same-culture and different-culture conditions. • Italian pantomimes were better guessed by both Italian and Polish participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We argue for the need to compare semiotic vehicles and ostensive cues in object-choice studies. [•] We describe such a study with 3 age-groups of children, estimating vocabulary. [•] We compare with 4 chimpanzees, including the variable “familiar/unfamiliar helper”. [•] Pointing/Marker was understood better than Picture/Replica. [•] A similar tendency for chimpanzees, but no group effect or for helper-familiarity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]