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Recent work suggests that cultural transmission can lead to the emergence of linguistic structure as speakers' weak individual biases become amplified through iterated learning. However, to date no published study has demonstrated a similar emergence of linguistic structure in children. The lack of evidence from child learners constitutes a problematic gap in the literature: if such learning biases impact the emergence of linguistic structure, they should also be found in children, who are the primary learners in real-life language transmission. However, children may differ from adults in their biases given age-related differences in general cognitive skills. Moreover, adults' performance on iterated learning tasks may reflect existing (and explicit) linguistic biases, partially undermining the generality of the results. Examining children's performance can also help evaluate contrasting predictions about their role in emerging languages: do children play a larger or smaller role than adults in the creation of structure? Here, we report a series of four iterated artificial language learning studies (based on Kirby, Cornish & Smith, 2008) with both children and adults, using a novel child-friendly paradigm. Our results show that linguistic structure does not emerge more readily in children compared to adults, and that adults are overall better in both language learning and in creating linguistic structure. When languages could become underspecified (by allowing homonyms), children and adults were similar in developing consistent mappings between meanings and signals in the form of structured ambiguities. However, when homonimity was not allowed, only adults created compositional structure. This study is a first step in using iterated language learning paradigms to explore child-adult differences. It provides the first demonstration that cultural transmission has a different effect on the languages produced by children and adults: While children were able to develop systematicity, their languages did not show compositionality. We focus on the relation between learning and structure creation as a possible explanation for our findings and discuss implications for children's role in the emergence of linguistic structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different methods are proposed to learn phrase embedding, which can be mainly divided into two strands. The first strand is based on the distributional hypothesis to treat a phrase as one non-divisible unit and to learn phrase embedding based on its external context similar to learn word embedding. However, distributional methods cannot make use of the information embedded in component words and they also face data spareness problem. The second strand is based on the principle of compositionality to infer phrase embedding based on the embedding of its component words. Compositional methods would give erroneous result if a phrase is non-compositional. In this paper, we propose a hybrid method by a linear combination of the distributional component and the compositional component with an individualized phrase compositionality constraint. The phrase compositionality is automatically computed based on the distributional embedding of the phrase and its component words. Evaluation on five phrase level semantic tasks and experiments show that our proposed method has overall best performance. Most importantly, our method is more robust as it is less sensitive to datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consonantal diphones differ as to their ambiguity (whether or not they indicate morphological complexity reliably by occurring exclusively either within or across morphemes) and lexicality (how frequently they occur within morphemes rather than across morpheme boundaries). This study empirically investigates the influence of ambiguity and lexicality on the processing speed of consonantal diphones in speech perception. More specifically, its goal is to test the predictions of the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis, which asserts that phonotactic processing is influenced by morphological structure, and to clarify the two conceptions thereof present in extant research. In two discrimination task experiments, it is found that the processing speed of cross-morpheme diphones decreases with their ambiguity, but there is no processing difference between primarily cross-morphemic and morpheme-internal diphones. We conclude that the predictions of the Strong Morphonotactic Hypothesis are borne out only partially, and we discuss the discrepancies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is meaning-preserving, compositionality can be approximated as the semantic similarity between a phrase and a version of that phrase where words have been replaced by their synonyms. Different ways of representing such phrases exist (e.g., vectors (Kiela and Clark, 2013) or language models (Lioma, Simonsen, Larsen, and Hansen, 2015)), and the choice of representation affects the measurement of semantic similarity. We propose a new compositionality detection method that represents phrases as ranked lists of term weights. Our method approximates the semantic similarity between two ranked list representations using a range of well-known distance and correlation metrics. In contrast to most state-of-the-art approaches in compositionality detection, our method is completely unsupervised. Experiments with a publicly available dataset of 1048 human-annotated phrases shows that, compared to strong supervised baselines, our approach provides superior measurement of compositionality using any of the distance and correlation metrics considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key feature of human thought and language is compositionality, the ability to bind pre-existing concepts or word meanings together in order to express new ideas. Here we ask how newly composed complex concepts are mentally represented and matched to the outside world, by testing whether it is harder to verify if a picture matches the meaning of a phrase, like big pink tree, than the meaning of a single word, like tree. Five sentence-picture verification experiments provide evidence that, in fact, the meaning of a phrase can often be checked just as fast as the meaning of one single word (and sometimes faster), indicating that the phrase's constituent concepts can be represented and checked in parallel. However, verification times were increased when matched phrases had more complex modification structures, indicating that it is costly to represent structural relations between constituent concepts. This pattern of data can be well-explained if concepts are composed together using two different mechanisms, binding by synchrony and binding by asynchrony, which have been suggested as solutions to the "binding problem" faced in both vision science and higher-level cognition. Our results suggest that they can also explain aspects of compositional language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vector representation is a common approach for expressing the meaning of a relational pattern. Most previous work obtained a vector of a relational pattern based on the distribution of its context words (e.g., arguments of the relational pattern), regarding the pattern as a single ‘word’. However, this approach suffers from the data sparseness problem, because relational patterns are productive, i.e., produced by combinations of words. To address this problem, we propose a novel method for computing the meaning of a relational pattern based on the semantic compositionality of constituent words. We extend the Skip-gram model ( Mikolov et al., 2013 ) to handle semantic compositions of relational patterns using recursive neural networks. The experimental results show the superiority of the proposed method for modeling the meanings of relational patterns, and demonstrate the contribution of this work to the task of relation extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Male Putty-nosed monkeys have two main alarm calls, pyows and hacks . While pyows have a broad distribution suggestive of a general call, hacks are often indicative of eagles. In a series of articles, Arnold and Zuberbühler showed that Putty-nosed monkeys sometimes produce distinct pyow-hack sequences made of a small number of pyows followed by a small number of hacks ; and that these are predictive of group movement. Arnold and Zuberbühler claimed that pyow-hack sequences are syntactically combinatorial but not semantically compositional because their meaning cannot be derived from the meanings of their component parts. We compare two theories of this phenomenon. One formalizes and modifies the non-compositional theory. The other presents a semantically compositional alternative based on weak meanings for pyow (‘general alarm’) and hack (‘non-ground movement’), combined with pragmatic principles of competition; a crucial one is an ‘Urgency Principle’ whereby calls that provide information about the nature/location of a threat must come before calls that do not. Semantically, pyow-hack sequences are compatible with any kind of situation involving (moving) aerial predators or (arboreal) movement of the monkeys themselves. But in the former case, hacks provide information about the location of a threat, and hence should appear at the beginning of sequences. As a result, pyow-hack sequences can only be used for non-threat-related situations involving movement, hence a possible inference that they involve group movement. Without adjudicating the debate, we argue that a formal analysis can help clarify competing theories and derive new predictions that might decide between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imprecise manipulation of source code (semi-parsing) is useful for tasks such as robust parsing, error recovery, lexical analysis, and rapid development of parsers for data extraction. An island grammar precisely defines only a subset of a language syntax (islands), while the rest of the syntax (water) is defined imprecisely. Usually water is defined as the negation of islands. Albeit simple, such a definition of water is naïve and impedes composition of islands. When developing an island grammar, sooner or later a language engineer has to create water tailored to each individual island. Such an approach is fragile, because water can change with any change of a grammar. It is time-consuming, because water is defined manually by an engineer and not automatically. Finally, an island surrounded by water cannot be reused because water has to be defined for every grammar individually. In this paper we propose a new technique of island parsing — bounded seas. Bounded seas are composable, robust, reusable and easy to use because island-specific water is created automatically. Our work focuses on applications of island parsing to data extraction from source code. We have integrated bounded seas into a parser combinator framework as a demonstration of their composability and reusability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cognitive and neural systems that enable conceptual processing must support the ability to combine (and recombine) concepts to form an infinite number of ideas. Two candidate neural systems for conceptual combination—the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) and the left angular gyrus (AG)—have been characterized as “semantic hubs” due to both functional and anatomical properties; however, these two regions likely support different aspects of composition. Here we consider two hypotheses for the role of AG in conceptual combination, both of which differ from a putative role for the ATL in “feature-based” combinatorics (i.e., meaning derived by combining concepts' features). Firstly, we examine whether AG is more sensitive to function-argument relations of the sort that arise when a predicate is combined with its arguments. Secondly, we examine the non-mutually exclusive possibility that AG represents information carried on a verb in particular, whether this be information about event composition or about thematic relations denoted uniquely by verbs. We identified voxels that respond differentially to two-word versus one-word stimuli, and we measured the similarity of the patterns in these voxels evoked by (1) pairs of two-word phrases that shared a noun that was an argument, thus sharing function-argument composition (e.g. eats meat and with meat ), in comparison with two-word phrases that shared only a noun, not an argument (e.g., eats meat and tasty meat ); and (2) stimulus pairs that shared only an event (operationalized here as sharing a verb; e.g. eats meat and eats quickly ), in comparison to both of the above. We found that activity patterns in left AG tracked information relating to the presence of an event-denoting verb in a pair of two-word phrases. We also found that the neural similarity in AG voxel patterns between two phrases sharing a verb correlated with subjects’ ratings of how similar the meanings of those two verb phrases were. These findings indicate that AG represents information specific to verbs, perhaps event structure or thematic relations mediated by verbs, as opposed to argument structure in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a concise but comprehensive overview of some fundamental properties required from component-based frameworks, namely compositionality , incrementality , flattening , modularity and expressiveness , we review three modifications of the semantics of glue operators in the Behaviour–Interaction–Priority (BIP) framework. We provide theoretical results and examples illustrating the degree to which the three semantics meet these requirements. In particular, we show that the most recent semantics, based on the offer predicate is the only one that satisfies all of them. The classical and offer semantics are not comparable: there are systems that can be assembled in the classical semantics, but not in the offer one. We present a strict characterisation of the behaviour hierarchy determining the conditions, under which systems in the classical semantics can be transposed into the offer semantics: directly, with minor modifications, by introducing a new type of synchronisation or cannot be transposed at all. The offer semantics allows us to extend the algebras, which are used to model glue operators in BIP, to encompass priorities. This extension uses the Algebra of Causal Interaction Trees, T ( P ) , as a pivot: existing transformations automatically provide the extensions for the Algebra of Connectors. We then extend the axiomatisation of T ( P ) , since the equivalence induced by the new operational semantics is weaker than that induced by the interaction semantics. This extension leads to canonical normal forms for all structures and to a simplification of the algorithm for the synthesis of connectors from Boolean coordination constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on morphological phenomena found mostly in Japanese, a highly agglutinative language, this paper investigates how we might approach intra-word compositionality in a manner faithful to lexical integrity. First, we observe some word-formation phenomena that seem to apparently contradict lexical (or morphological) integrity and ‘direct compositionality’. These involve mismatches -- bracketing paradoxes -- between morphological constituency vis-à-vis syntactic or semantic constituency. We also survey how researchers have dealt or would deal with instances of such mismatches. Upon concluding that these mismatches are not obstacles to direct compositionality or lexical integrity, an even more drastic bracketing paradox, namely, the one involving the sized inalienable possession construction is introduced as a case study to give the concept of direct compositionality a further stress test. The viability and, arguably, advantage of a direct compositional semantically-oriented (as opposed to syntactic) approach to word-formation is demonstrated. Finally, after a summary of the paper, further conceptual issues regarding compositionality and word-formation are taken up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated-time Markovian process calculi rely on actions whose durations are quantified by exponentially distributed random variables. The Markovian bisimulation equivalences defined so far for these calculi treat exponentially timed internal actions like all the other actions, because each such action has a nonzero duration and hence can be observed if it is executed between a pair of exponentially timed noninternal actions. However, no difference may be noted, at stationary state, between a sequence of exponentially timed internal actions and a single exponentially timed internal action, if their expected durations and execution probabilities coincide, a fact exploited in Hillston's weak isomorphism. We show that Milner's approach can be adapted on the basis of this fact, so to derive a weak bisimulation equivalence for integrated-time Markovian process calculi, up to a tradeoff between compositionality and exactness inherent to the Markovian setting. The resulting weak Markovian bisimulation equivalence induces a pseudo-aggregation that is exact at stationary state for all the considered processes, but turns out to be a congruence only over sequential processes. To achieve compositionality over concurrent processes, we need to enhance the abstraction capability of the equivalence in the presence of interleaved computations. However, the corresponding pseudo-aggregation turns out to be exact at stationary state only for a subset of concurrent processes. In addition to this tradeoff, we present, for the first equivalence, a sound and complete axiomatization over sequential processes, which is instrumental to characterize pseudo-aggregations, and a polynomial-time equivalence-checking algorithm, which can be exploited for the compositional minimization of concurrent processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the development of critical systems, it is common practice to make use of redundancy in order to achieve higher levels of reliability. There are well established design patterns that introduce redundancy and that are widely documented and adopted by the industry. However there have been few attempts to formally verify them. In this work, we modelled in the HOL4 system such design patterns, which we call here fault tolerant patterns. We illustrate our approach by modelling three classical fault tolerant patterns: Homogeneous Redundancy, Heterogeneous Redundancy and Triple Modular Redundancy. Our model takes into account that the original system (without redundancy) computes a certain function with some delay and is amenable to random failures. We proved that our fault tolerant patterns preserve the behaviour of its replicated subsystems. The notion of correctness adopted makes use of interval arithmetic and is restricted to functional behaviour. Timing is not regarded as part of the functional behaviour in this work. Therefore, real-time systems are not the focus of our approach. We also proved that our fault tolerant patterns are compositional in the sense that we can apply fault tolerant patterns consecutively and for an arbitrary number of times. The consecutive application of our patterns still results in a system that computes a certain function with some delay and amenable to random failures. We developed a case study that verifies that a fault tolerant pattern applied to a simplified avionic Elevator Control System preserves its original behaviour. This work was done in collaboration with the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Embraer. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Not all instances of composition are saturating in the sense of functional application (McNally, in press). For example, intersective modification with adjectives or relative clauses requires a non-saturating mode of composition (cf., e.g., Chung and Ladusaw, 2004). To account for such semantic configurations, composition rules like Predicate Modification (Heim and Kratzer, 1998) or Restrict (Chung and Ladusaw, 2004) have been posited. In Tagalog, wherever we find instances of non-saturating composition, we also find the element na /- ng , known in the Austronesian literature as linker . Sabbagh (2009, fn.31) points out that linker may be analyzed either as a semantically vacuous element serving as a “morphological flag” for non-saturating composition (in the style of Chung and Ladusaw, 2004, or as an operator of type 〈 et , et 〉 that composes with a predicate and adds the “instruction” to compose its output with another predicate via a non-saturating composition rule. Both options leave us with the need for a specialized composition rule in addition to functional application so that two properties may compose in the semantics. Alternatively, Rubin (1994) proposes that the grammar supplies a functional head of type 〈 et , 〈 et , et 〉〉 that composes with two predicates and returns a single predicate denoting the intersection of both – a head that does the work of modification. Following Rubin, we argue that in Tagalog this element is realized overtly as linker . Adopting this latter proposal allows us to simplify the compositional mechanism so that it need not rely on specific processes for modification in addition to functional application. It also makes strong predictions, consistent with the data, about the environments in which we expect linker to appear. We explore the possibility of expanding the predictive power of our account of linker such that modification is implicated wherever it surfaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We formulate a compositional specification theory for interface automata, where a component model specifies the allowed sequences of input and output interactions with the environment. A trace-based linear-time refinement is provided, which is the weakest preorder preserving substitutivity of components, and is weaker than the classical alternating simulation defined on interface automata. Since our refinement allows a component to be refined by refusing to produce any output, we also define a refinement relation that guarantees safety and progress. The theory includes the operations of parallel composition to support the structural composition of components, logical conjunction and disjunction for independent development, hiding to support abstraction of interfaces, and quotient for incremental synthesis of components. Our component formulation highlights the algebraic properties of the specification theory for both refinement preorders, and is shown to be fully abstract with respect to observation of communication mismatches. Examples of independent and incremental component development are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: One of the characteristic marks of Gricean implicatures in general, and scalar implicatures in particular, examples of which are given in (1), is that they are the result of a defeasible inference. [(1a)] John had some of the cookies [(1b)] John had some of the cookies. In fact he had them all. (1a) invites the inference that John didn’t have all the cookies, an inference that can be defeated by additional information, as in (1b). Scalar inferences like that in (1a) thus depend upon some sort of nonmonotonic reasoning over semantic contents. They share this characteristic of defeasiblility with inferences that result in the presence of discourse relations that link discourse segments together into a discourse structure for a coherent text or dialogue—call these inferences discourse or D inferences. I have studied these inferences about discourse structure, their effects on content and how they are computed in the theory known as Segmented Discourse Representation Theory or SDRT. In this paper I investigate how the tools used to infer discourse relations apply to what Griceans and others call scalar or quantity implicatures. The benefits of this investigation are three fold: at the theoretical level, we have a unified and relatively simple framework for computing defeasible inferences both of the quantity and discourse structure varieties; further, we can capture what's right about the intuitions of so called “localist” views about scalar implicatures; finally, this framework permits us to investigate how D-inferences and scalar inferences might interact, in particular how discourse structure might trigger scalar inferences, thus explaining the variability (Chemla, 2008) or even non-existence of embedded implicatures noted recently (e.g., Geurts and Pouscoulous, 2009), and their occasional noncancellability. The view of scalar inferences that emerges from this study is also rather different from the way both localists and Neo- Griceans conceive of them. Both localists and Neo-Griceans view implicatures as emerging from pragmatic reasoning processes that are strictly separated from the calculation of semantic values; where they differ is at what level the pragmatic implicatures are calculated. Localists take them to be calculated in parallel with semantic composition, whereas Neo-Griceans take them to have as input the complete semantic content of the assertion. My view is that scalar inferences depend on discourse structure and large view of semantic content in which semantics and pragmatics interact in a complex way to produce an interpretation of an utterance or a discourse. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: With the crystallization of the “generative enterprise” half a century ago, two concepts became salient: the initial state and final states of the language faculty, respectively, UG (the genetic component) and I-languages. Since then inquiry has gained far greater scope and depth. It has also led to sharpening of fundamental principles of language. At first, descriptive adequacy appeared to require rich and complex assumptions about UG. A primary goal has always been to overcome this deficiency. Core properties of concern have included compositionality, order, projection (labeling), and displacement. Early work assigned the first three to phrase structure rules and the last to the transformational component. Simplification of computational procedures suggests that compositionality and displacement (along with the “copy theory”) fall together while order may be a reflex of sensorimotor externalization, conclusions that have far-reaching consequences. As for labeling, minimal computation restricts options to the few that have considerable empirical support. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Based on compositionality, this paper proposes a three-grade hierarchy to classify 108 Chinese idioms (comparatively familiar and literally plausible) into three groups. With 36 non-idiomatic literal phrases as the control group, the present study used the event-related (brain) potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course of Chinese idiom comprehension and the effects of compositionality on this process. Primed by their literal interpretations, Chinese idioms with varying degrees of compositionality and non-idiomatic phrases were visually presented to subjects for performing a semantic judgment task. The results showed a graded modulation of two ERP components (i.e., the N250 and the N400): for the Chinese idioms, stimuli with high compositionality elicited the smallest ERP effects, while stimuli with low compositionality the largest; compared with idioms, literal non-idioms induced larger amplitudes with regard to both the components. The N250 has been reported for the first time in ERP studies of the Chinese language. In view of unique features of Chinese characters, the functional significance of the two components provides converging evidence for distinct effects of compositionality on activating figurative meanings in processing Chinese idioms, and that language users attempted to do some compositional analysis in this process. Moreover, putative cognitive processes reflected by the two components contribute to an interim model specified for processing Chinese idioms: prelexical form recognition coinciding with early meaning retrieval, followed by postlexical semantic integration with contextual constraints. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Objective: To evaluate the usability of a large compositional interface terminology based on SNOMED CT and the terminology application for registration of the reasons for intensive care admission in a Patient Data Management System. Design: Observational study with user-based usability evaluations before and 3 months after the system was implemented and routinely used. Measurements: Usability was defined by five aspects: effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, overall user satisfaction, and experienced usability problems. Qualitative (the Think–Aloud user testing method) and quantitative (the System Usability Scale questionnaire and Time-on-Task analyses) methods were used to examine these usability aspects. Results: The results of the evaluation study revealed that the usability of the interface terminology fell short (SUS scores before and after implementation of 47.2 out of 100 and 37.5 respectively out of 100). The qualitative measurements revealed a high number (n =35) of distinct usability problems, leading to ineffective and inefficient registration of reasons for admission. The effectiveness and efficiency of the system did not change over time. About 14% (n =5) of the revealed usability problems were related to the terminology content based on SNOMED CT, while the remaining 86% (n =30) was related to the terminology application. The problems related to the terminology content were more severe than the problems related to the terminology application. Conclusions: This study provides a detailed insight into how clinicians interact with a controlled compositional terminology through a terminology application. The extensiveness, complexity of the hierarchy, and the language usage of an interface terminology are defining for its usability. Carefully crafted domain-specific subsets and a well-designed terminology application are needed to facilitate the use of a complex compositional interface terminology based on SNOMED CT. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper discusses the unaccusative case pattern of ergative transitive predicates in Hindi, and attempts to derive it from a split between the workings of V and the head that introduces the subject. I adopt a system in which object case requires the joint work of v and V (). Following work by , I explore the idea that the ergative marker in Hindi is a P, which I view as a type of Voice head that combines with the v that introduces and case-marks the ergative subject with inherent Case. This overall approach bears directly on Mahajan''s contention that ergative case-marking and the aspectual auxiliary have are two sides of the same phenomenon. Within a compositional analysis, have is be +P (). Drawing from these works, I sketch an approach to the have-be alternation that links the aspectual component of have to features encoded on v. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This article discusses the question of compositionality by examining whether the indiscriminacy reading of the collocation of just with any can be shown to be a consequence of the schematic meaning-potential of each of these two items. A comparison of just with other restrictive focus particles allows its schematic meaning to be defined as that of goodness of fit. Any is defined as representing an indefinite member of a set as extractable from the set in exactly the same way as each of the other members thereof. The collocation just any often gives rise to a scalar reading oriented towards the lowest value on the scale due to the fact that focus on the unconstrained extractability of a random indefinite item brings into consideration even marginal cases and the latter tend to be interpreted as situated on the lower end of the scale. The attention to low-end values also explains why just any is regularly found with the adjective old, the prepositional phrase at all and various devaluating expressions. It is concluded that the meanings of the component parts of this collocation do indeed account for the meaning of the whole, and that an appropriate methodology allows identification of linguistic meanings and their interrelations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We argue that the debate on language universals should be directed away from the discussion as to whether typological diversity is or is not an argument against the existence of language universals. Instead, given our growing awareness of the fact that the neural mechanisms underlying language use are the same as those underlying other cognitive functions in both humans and mammals, the central question for cognitive neuroscientists and linguists is what neural mechanisms can facilitate compositional interactions, and how the range of grammatical structures and the ability to use language creatively emerges from a much narrower range of neural mechanisms. We suggest two complementary methods for investigating these issues, one more linguistically oriented and one more computationally oriented, and present preliminary results from investigations concerning the expression of the mass-count distinction crosslinguistically, using both methodologies. These results suggest that universality in language might express itself at the deeper level of the computational operations involved in the processing of language, rather than in the results of those computations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This review brings together two fundamental, but unreconciled, aspects of human language: embodiment and compositionality. One major scientific advance in recent decades has been Embodiment – the realization that scientific understanding of mind and language entails detailed modeling of the human brain and how it evolved to control a physical body in a social community. The ability to learn and use language is one of the most characteristically human traits. Many animals signal, but only people can express and understand an essentially unbounded range of messages. The technical term for the ability of human language to support all these messages from a few dozen alphabetic symbols is Compositionality. Rigor is essential for the advancement of any science, but there has been essentially no overlap between efforts to formalize language compositionality and the manifest embodiment of thought. Recent developments suggest that it is feasible to formalize the compositionality of embodied language, but that this requires a focus on conceptual composition and better understanding of contextual best-fit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Modal transition system (MTS) is a formalism which extends the classical notion of labelled transition systems by introducing transitions of two types: must transitions that have to be present in any implementation of the MTS and may transitions that are allowed but not required. The MTS framework has proved to be useful as a specification formalism of component-based systems as it supports compositional verification and stepwise refinement. Nevertheless, there are some limitations of the theory, namely that the naturally defined notions of modal refinement and modal composition are incomplete with respect to the semantic view based on the sets of the implementations of a given MTS specification. Recent work indicates that some of these limitations might be overcome by considering deterministic systems, which seem to be more manageable but still interesting for several application areas. In the present article, we provide a comprehensive account of the MTS framework in the deterministic setting. We study a number of problems previously considered on MTS and point out to what extend we can expect better results under the restriction of determinism. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Using three idiom characteristics (familiarity, literality, and compositionality), an idiom-processing model is advanced and applied to an advertising setting. Specifically, we propose that idioms of varying characteristics lead to one of six processing outcomes that can be differentiated based on processing time and comprehension. Further, we posit that consumers will exhibit different recall and attitude responses for advertisements using different types of idioms. Results from two studies provide some preliminary support for these predictions. Implications of the proposed framework for idiom research as well as for marketing theory and practice are discussed, and future research directions suggested. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents an automatic acquisition process to acquire the semantic meaning for the words. This process obtains the representation vectors for stemmed words by iteratively improving the vectors, using a trained Elman network. Experiments performed on a corpus composed of Shakespeare''s writings show its linguistic analysis and categorization abilities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Modal logic has a good claim to being the logic of choice for describing the reactive behaviour of systems modelled as coalgebras. Logics with modal operators obtained from so-called predicate liftings have been shown to be invariant under behavioural equivalence. Expressivity results stating that, conversely, logically indistinguishable states are behaviourally equivalent depend on the existence of separating sets of predicate liftings for the signature functor at hand. Here, we provide a classification result for predicate liftings which leads to an easy criterion for the existence of such separating sets, and we give simple examples of functors that fail to admit expressive normal or monotone modal logics, respectively, or in fact an expressive (unary) modal logic at all. We then move on to polyadic modal logic, where modal operators may take more than one argument formula. We show that every accessible functor admits an expressive polyadic modal logic. Moreover, expressive polyadic modal logics are, unlike unary modal logics, compositional. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents the framework of switched probabilistic input/output automata (or switched PIOA), augmenting the original PIOA framework with an explicit control exchange mechanism. Using this mechanism, we model a network of processes passing a single token among them, so that the location of this token determines which process is scheduled to make the next move. This token structure therefore implements a distributed scheduling scheme: scheduling decisions are always made by the (unique) active component. Distributed scheduling allows us to draw a clear line between local and global nondeterministic choices. We then require that local nondeterministic choices are resolved using strictly local information. This eliminates unrealistic schedules that arise under the more common centralized scheduling scheme. As a result, we are able to prove that our trace-style semantics is compositional. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We investigate properties for allocation rules on directed communication networks and the formation of such networks under these payoff properties. We study allocation rules satisfying two appealing properties, Component Efficiency (CE) and the Hierarchical Payoff Property (HPP). We show that such allocation rules exist if and only if we restrict ourselves to a class of weakly hierarchical networks. Strengthening the hierarchical payoff property provides a similar result regarding the class of (strongly) hierarchical networks. Such hierarchical networks possess an explicit top-down structure. Subsequently, we discuss several possibilities to model the formation of such hierarchical networks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on quality characteristics, chemical composition and sensory properties of butter from cows on pasture versus indoor feeding systems and the fatty acids α-linolenic acid and the calculations that include them are affected, the overall trend for these have not changed.