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Copyright of TESL Canada Journal / Revue TESL du Canada is the property of TESL Canada Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Differential object marking (DOM) interacts with nominal structure in complex ways across Romance languages. For example, in Spanish, it has been claimed to ban bare nominals. For Romanian, in turn, two main restrictions have been discussed: (i) ban on overt definiteness on unmodified nominals; and (ii) ban on bare nominals, if the structure contains an overt modification. This paper has two main goals. First, it examines some contexts where these types of restrictions can be lifted for some speakers; such contexts allow us to grasp a better understanding of the limits of variation permitted by DOM in its interaction with nominal structure and determiner systems. Secondly, it proposes that a theory under which DOM signals a licensing strategy beyond Case can derive the variation patterns observed in the data. Subsequently, various parameters are examined, which encode (i) how specifications responsible for DOM interact with other features in the composition of nominals; and (ii) how the resulting complex containing DOM as well as other features is resolved at PF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a parallel corpus study on the expression of the temporal construction 'not...until' in a sample of European languages. We use data from the Europarl corpus and create semantic maps by multidimensional scaling, in order to analyze cross-linguistic and language-internal variation. This paper builds on formal semantic and typological work, extending it by including conditional constructions, as well as connectives of the type as long as. In an investigation of 7 languages, we find that (i) languages use many more different constructions to convey this meaning than was expected from the literature; and (ii) the combination of polarity marking (negation/assertion) strongly correlates with the type of connective. We corroborate our results in a larger sample of 21 European languages. An analysis of clusters and dimensions of the semantic maps based on the enlarged dataset shows that connectives are not randomly distributed across the semantic space of the 'not...until'-domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Estudios de Filosofía is the property of Universidad de Antioquia, Instituto de Filosofia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Compositionality is undoubtedly one of the hardest problems in linguistics. In decoding theories, the speaker occupies a leading role, having to carefully choose the form that better encodes the meaning to be communicated. In contrast, in inferential theories, the burden is shifted from speaker to hearer: linguistic information typically underspecifies meaning and the hearer must make a number of inferences to bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant. In this article, I argue that constructional meaning can aid the process of sentence meaning formation by providing a scaffold that can help the hearer with the construal operations. Constructions, by providing an additional layer of meaning, constrain the range of possible meanings activated by words thereby reducing the combinatorial explosion when several words are joined together. This process is examined here by analysing the meanings associated with the grammatical construction [from X to Y], which is connected to a polysemy network of related senses, using examples extracted from a multimodal corpus. A preliminary analysis of the gesturing behaviour associated with the different senses proposed is also included, which can be seen to contribute to the characterisation of the different senses of the polysemy network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research paper is a comprehensive analysis of Mishing verb inflection and its implementation in a DM-based Morphological Analyser. In this paper we try to sketch a descriptive idea of Mishing verbal inflection within the framework of Distributed morphology. For this we basically discuss the categories that are associated with the verb stems and the verb suffixes. Here, we are also put an emphasis to see how we can analyse a language in detailed including its producing morpheme. With this how does the framework of distributed morphology allows for morphology to work in tandem with syntax to analyse will draw processes of the DMbased Mishing Morphological Analyser. After all description this paper figure out the main postulating purpose behind this compositional study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a review of Paweł Grabarczyk's latest book, Directival Theory of Meaning: From Syntax and Pragmatics to Narrow Linguistic Content. I focus mostly on two concepts constitutive for the directival theory of meaning--that of linguistic trial and that of meaning directive. These two concepts, while ingeniously developed by Grabarczyk, are not free of problems and somewhat controversial assumptions. I start with describing the basis of Grabarczyk's proposal, as well as of the historical background from which it originated. Then, I move on to the analysis of the notion of linguistic trial. After that I focus on the concept of meaning directive, criticising certain assumptions that come with it. The conclusion is that while Grabarczyk's version of the directival theory of meaning is an interesting proposal, most of its shortcomings stem from the fact that for a theory that is supposed to work well on natural languages, too many examples pertain to artificial languages. Until an analysis of a natural language in the style of the directival theory of meaning is conducted, it is not possible to properly judge the value of this theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two uses of según are analyzed: the one in which this particle has a complement with interrogative value (según quién venga; según si Juan viene o no, ‘depending on who comes; depending on whether John comes or not’) and the one in which the term includes a scalar change (Los árboles van perdiendo sus hojas según avanza el otoño, ‘The trees lose their leaves as autumn progresses’). The latter construction is interpreted in a similar way to proportional comparatives; however, they are not formally equivalent. It is argued that in both uses según has the same interpretation so that the differences come from the formal and interpretive properties of its arguments. In fact, según is a dependency predicate (Bosque 2010) that expresses a logical instruction according to which the set of alternatives contained in its internal argument (be it an interrogative sequence or a scalar change) must be replicated in its external argument in order to establish a distributive relationship between the elements of each of these sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the syntactic structure, semantic-functional potential and verse division of Pushkin's introductions. Less than 10th part of verse Pushkin's opening lines (62 representations out of 737) coincide with frames of a whole mono‒ or polypredicative unit. Initial lines coinciding with the frames of simple constructions make up only 6% from the total number of first verses and whole complicated binary structures form Pushkin's first line ‒ only in 10 cases. Asyndetic binary and multi-component structures are typical for poetic introductions and make up the one fourth of all Pushkin's introductions. As an introduction makes a syntactic composition of the following text, it is possible to expand this tendency to the polypredicative asyndetic structure of initial phrases to the whole lyric discourse at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a multitude of empirical studies, little consensus exists on whether neural networks are able to generalise compositionally, a controversy that, in part, stems from a lack of agreement about what it means for a neural model to be compositional. As a response to this controversy, we present a set of tests that provide a bridge between, on the one hand, the vast amount of linguistic and philosophical theory about compositionality of language and, on the other, the successful neural models of language. We collect different interpretations of compositionality and translate them into five theoretically grounded tests for models that are formulated on a task-independent level. In particular, we provide tests to investigate (i) if models systematically recombine known parts and rules (ii) if models can extend their predictions beyond the length they have seen in the training data (iii) if models' composition operations are local or global (iv) if models' predictions are robust to synonym substitutions and (v) if models favour rules or exceptions during training. To demonstrate the usefulness of this evaluation paradigm, we instantiate these five tests on a highly compositional data set which we dub PCFG SET and apply the resulting tests to three popular sequence-to-sequence models: a recurrent, a convolution-based and a transformer model. We provide an in-depth analysis of the results, which uncover the strengths and weaknesses of these three architectures and point to potential areas of improvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nominal compounds such as red wine and nut case display a continuum of compositionality, with varying contributions from the components of the compound to its semantics. This article proposes a framework for compound compositionality prediction using distributional semantic models, evaluating to what extent they capture idiomaticity compared to human judgments. For evaluation, we introduce data sets containing human judgments in three languages: English, French, and Portuguese. The results obtained reveal a high agreement between the models and human predictions, suggesting that they are able to incorporate information about idiomaticity. We also present an in-depth evaluation of various factors that can affect prediction, such as model and corpus parameters and compositionality operations. General crosslingual analyses reveal the impact of morphological variation and corpus size in the ability of the model to predict compositionality, and of a uniform combination of the components for best results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is twofold; first, it aims to explore the variety of interpretations of the partially schematic Hebrew construction kexol as in kexol she'ratsiti ('as much as I wanted') within the framework of construction grammar; second, it aims to account for this variety through a demonstration of the interrelation between the grammaticalization of the construction and the process of (inter)subjectification or speech-act orientation. The analysis will show that this interrelation has resulted in considerable internal variation in meaning and function in the present day. Corpus findings reveal that initially kexol functioned as a compound consisting of a preposition and a universal quantifier to denote a relation of similarity and comparison. As a result of speaker orientation, the construction has come to exhibit a higher degree of grammaticality in its function as a scalar modifier. Additional schematic and procedural meanings which developed later seem to be the result of hearer-orientation and discourse-orientation tendencies all subsumed under the cover term speech-act orientation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weak distribution bisimilarity is an equivalence notion on probabilistic automata, originally proposed for Markov automata. It has gained some popularity as the coarsest behavioral equivalence enjoying valuable properties like preservation of trace distribution equivalence and compositionality. This holds in the classical context of arbitrary schedulers, but it has been argued that this class of schedulers is unrealistically powerful. This paper studies a strictly coarser notion of bisimilarity, which still enjoys these properties in the context of realistic subclasses of schedulers: Trace distribution equivalence is implied for partial information schedulers, and compositionality is preserved by distributed schedulers. The intersection of the two scheduler classes thus spans a coarser and still reasonable compositional theory of behavioral semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides insight into the life of Nikolay Blatov, a Russian professor of accounting who was active in the early 20th century. However, this is not a biographical study in the usual sense. It attempts to apply contextual analysis to one of the aspects of Blatov's career, i.e., writing reviews for the educational literature. The paper shows that Blatov's individual style as a reviewer was determined by his cultural environment: his education and his passion for theater journalism in his young years. The study compares the figures of speech that Blatov employed in his theatrical reviews with those in his later scientific reviews. His rhetoric and style as a theater reviewer enriched his scientific reviewing. The paper also considers Blatov's contribution to developing the rules that governed the narrative of textbooks. He influenced their composition, references, style, and the boundaries within which a textbook's language would remain literary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Domínios de Lingu@gem is the property of Dominios de Lingu@gem and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article presents an in-depth study of the Frisian loan pindakaas from Dutch pindakaas. This word can be literally glossed as 'peanut cheese', but it translates into English as 'peanut butter'. The translation illustrates that the compound pindakaas is not compositional in Dutch and Frisian, that is, pindakaas is not a kind of kaas ('cheese'). Because of its non-compositional nature, Dutch pindakaas, we argue, has not been borrowed into Frisian as pindatsiis, even though Dutch kaas in Frisian is tsiis. In contrast, compositional compounds featuring Dutch -kaas surface in Frisian with -tsiis, such as Dutch schapenkaas, Frisian skieppetsiis. The non-compositional nature of pindakaas is shown to have a historical explanation. Independent evidence is cited from psycholinguistics supporting the claim that compositional compounds behave in a way that differs from non-compositional ones. Thus evidence is provided that borrowing is sensitive to compositionality in that elements of compounds are more easily left untranslated when their meaning is not predictable by compositionality from their usage elsewhere in the language. [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]

We propose a Curry-Howard correspondence between a language for programming multiparty sessions and a generalisation of Classical Linear Logic (CLL). In this framework, propositions correspond to the local behaviour of a participant in a multiparty session type, proofs to processes, and proof normalisation to executing communications. Our key contribution is generalising duality, from CLL, to a new notion of n-ary compatibility, called coherence. Building on coherence as a principle of compositionality, we generalise the cut rule of CLL to a new rule for composing many processes communicating in a multiparty session. We prove the soundness of our model by showing the admissibility of our new rule, which entails deadlock-freedom via our correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is a naturalistic account of reference possible? Here is a simple argument to the effect that it is not: Let R be the relation that allegedly naturalizes reference, and consider the predicate "being an object that does not stand in the relation R to this expression". Call this predicate "P". On the face of it, P is a counterexample to the alleged naturalization, since it appears to refer to all and only those objects that do not stand in the relation R to it. Actually, an argument like this was advanced more than twenty years ago by the late Paolo Casalegno. Although for various reasons it has not been given due attention by the philosophical community, the argument is interesting in its structure and remarkable in its conclusion. In this paper I shall reconstruct it in detail and discuss it. Then, I shall show that the argument fails, since, contrary to what Casalegno claimed, under certain conditions P is paradoxical, hence not a referring expression. My rejection builds on the fundamental distinction between simple and compound expressions, namely on the compositional structure of natural languages. If I am right, whether any attempt at naturalizing reference that takes care of this distinction will succeed remains an open empirical question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generalised dissimilarity modelling ( GDM) applies pairwise beta diversity as a measure of species turnover with the purpose of explaining changes in species composition under changing environments or along environmental gradients. Beta diversity only captures turnover across pairs of sites and, therefore, disproportionately represents turnover in rare species across communities. By contrast, zeta diversity, the average number of shared species across multiple sites, captures the full spectrum of rare, intermediate and widespread species as they contribute differently to compositional turnover., We show how integrating zeta diversity into GDMs (which we term multi-site generalised dissimilarity modelling, MS- GDM), provides a more information rich approach to modelling how communities respond to environmental variation and change. We demonstrate the value of including zeta diversity in biodiversity assessment and modelling using BirdLife Australia Atlas data. Zeta diversity values for different numbers of sites (the order of zeta) are regressed against environmental differences and distance using two kinds of regressions: shape constrained additive models and a combination of I-splines and generalised linear models., Applying MS- GDM to different orders of zeta revealed shifts in the importance of environmental variables in explaining species turnover, varying with the order of zeta and thus with the level of co-occurrence of the species and, by extension, their commonness and rarity. In particular, precipitation gradients emerged as drivers in the turnover of rare species, whereas temperature gradients were more important drivers of turnover in widespread species., Appreciation of the factors that drive compositional turnover across multiple sites is necessary for accommodating the full spectrum of compositional turnover across rare to common species. This extends beyond understanding drivers for pairwise beta diversity only. MS- GDM provides a valuable addition to the toolkit of GDM, with further potential for survey gap analysis and prediction of species composition in unsampled sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrative priming refers to the facilitated recognition of a target word (bench) as a real word following a prime (park). Prior integrative priming studies have used a wide variety of integrative relations including temporal (summer rain), topical (travel book), locative (forest river), and compositional (peach pie) relations. Yet differences in the types of integrative relations may yield differences in the underlying explanatory processes of integrative priming. In this study, we compared the magnitude, time course, and three theoretically based correlates of integrative priming for compositional (stone table) and locative (patio table) pairs in a lexical decision task across four stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; 50, 300, 800, and 1,600 ms). Based on the Complementary Role Activation theory, integrative ratings (the extent to which the prime and target can be combined into a meaningful phrase) were predicted to facilitate target RTs. Based on the Embodied Conceptual Combination (ECCo) theory, the local co-occurrence of the prime and target, and the ability to perceptually simulate (visually experience) the prime-target pair were tested as predictors. In comparison to unrelated pairs (nose table), target RTs were faster for the compositional and locative pairs, though did not differ between these relations. In support of the Complementary Role Activation theory, integrative ratings predicted target RTs above and beyond our control variables. In support of the ECCo theory, co-occurrence emerged as an early predictor of target RTs, and visual experience ratings was a reliable predictor at the 300ms SOA, though only for the compositional relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1960s, many years prior to the advent of personal computers and mainstream cultural accessibility to them, Emmett Williams devised a method that he felt reflected the expressive potential of algorithmic processes within a printed page's confines. Williams' "IBM" method serves as a "muse's assistant," in which a user-contrived vocabulary is employed to construct poems in which letters of words in one line are used to create subsequent lines. This article introduces the imposed conditions of Williams' invention, comparing and placing them within a range of digital writings that appear during subsequent decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I aim to create a compiled analytical description of electroacoustic works by the untimely deceased composer Vladimir Jovanović. created between 2002, when he was appointed as manager of the Electronic Studio of III program of Radio Belgrade, and 2015, when he left this post. During this time, the author created seven studio compositions, almost exclusively using a computer. Thus, the focus of this paper will be placed on peculiarities of his compositional techniques-especially when working with MIDI and samples. The base for the formation of the narrative about Jovanovic's works will be his statements, recorded in a radio interview and program notes he wrote as accompaniment to his compositions, together with the musicological and theoretical writings of Serbiain authors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore an integration of a formal semantic approach to lexical meaning and an approach based on distributional methods. First, we outline a formal semantic theory that aims to combine the virtues of both formal and distributional frameworks. We then proceed to develop an algebraic interpretation of that formal semantic theory and show how at least two kinds of distributional models make this interpretation concrete. Focusing on the case of adjective-noun composition, we compare several distributional models with respect to the semantic information that a formal semantic theory would need, and we show how to integrate the information provided by distributional models back into the formal semantic framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new framework for compositional distributional semantics in which the distributional contexts of lexemes are expressed in terms of anchored packed dependency trees. We show that these structures have the potential to capture the full sentential contexts of a lexeme and provide a uniform basis for the composition of distributional knowledge in a way that captures both mutual disambiguation and generalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces RELPRON, a large data set of subject and object relative clauses, for the evaluation of methods in compositional distributional semantics. RELPRON targets an intermediate level of grammatical complexity between content-word pairs and full sentences. The task involves matching terms, such as "wisdom," with representative properties, such as "quality that experience teaches." A unique feature of RELPRON is that it is built from attested properties, but without the need for them to appear in relative clause format in the source corpus. The article also presents some initial experiments on RELPRON, using a variety of composition methods including simple baselines, arithmetic operators on vectors, and finally, more complex methods in which argument-taking words are represented as tensors. The latter methods are based on the Categorial framework, which is described in detail. The results show that vector addition is difficult to beat--in line with the existing literature--but that an implementation of the Categorial framework based on the Practical Lexical Function model is able to match the performance of vector addition. The article finishes with an in-depth analysis of RELPRON, showing how results vary across subject and object relative clauses, across different head nouns, and how the methods perform on the subtasks necessary for capturing relative clause semantics, as well as providing a qualitative analysis highlighting some of the more common errors. Our hope is that the competitive results presented here, in which the best systems are on average ranking one out of every two properties correctly for a given term, will inspire new approaches to the RELPRON ranking task and other tasks based on linguistically interesting constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compositional “language of thought” models have recently been proposed to account for a wide range of children’s conceptual and linguistic learning. The present work aims to evaluate one of the most basic assumptions of these models: children should have an ability to represent and compose functions. We show that 3.5–4.5 year olds are able to predictively compose two novel functions at significantly above chance levels, even without any explicit training or feedback on the composition itself. We take this as evidence that children at this age possess some capacity for compositionality, consistent with models that make this ability explicit, and providing an empirical challenge to those that do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on the article "Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls" by T.N. Suzuki, published in a 2016 issue of the journal. Topics discussed include first evidence of combinatorial syntax and semantics in non-humans especially in Japanese great tits, and importance of studies of language-like behavior in non-humans to establish missing link in the evolutionary story of human language.

In Icelandic there are two different types of modifiers within compounds, inflected and uninflected, and the inflected modifiers appear to be peripheral to the uninflected ones. In this article, it is proposed that this is an effect of compounding being required to combine elements of the same type or size. The inflected modifiers, containing more structure than the uninflected ones, cannot be merged at the same level as uninflected modifiers. This article also explores two other issues of domainhood within the compound. One being the establishment of domains for morphophonological processes, where it is proposed that the boundaries of morphophonological domains are determined by the edge of the extended projection of the root. The second one being that of special meaning, where it is shown that exocentric compounds with inflected modifiers have exclusively non-compositional meaning, whereas exocentric compounds with uninflected modifiers could have either compositional or non-compositional meaning. [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]

The extent to which the linguistic system--its architecture, the representations it operates on, the constraints it is subject to--is specific to language has broad implications for cognitive science and its relation to evolutionary biology. Importantly, a given property of the linguistic system can be "specific" to the domain of language in several ways. For example, if the property evolved by natural selection under the pressure of the linguistic function it serves then the property is domain-specific in the sense that its design is tailored for language. Equally though, if that property evolved to serve a different function or if that property is domain-general, it may nevertheless interact with the linguistic system in a way that is unique. This gives a second sense in which a property can be thought of as specific to language. An evolutionary approach to the language faculty might at first blush appear to favor domain-specificity in the first sense, with individual properties of the language faculty being specifically linguistic adaptations. However, we argue that interactions between learning, culture, and biological evolution mean any domain-specific adaptations that evolve will take the form of weak biases rather than hard constraints. Turning to the latter sense of domain-specificity, we highlight a very general bias, simplicity, which operates widely in cognition and yet interacts with linguistic representations in domain-specific ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Catalan Journal of Linguistics is the property of Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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]

This essay presents evidence that the design of Beethoven's Leonore relies on tonal symmetry. The central key of the opera is C major; pairs of keys symmetrically disposed around C in terms of musical space-such as Ab and E, Bb and D, A and Eb-are shown to share in dramaturgical and emotional meaning. What is also demonstrated is that Beethoven organized the tonalities of Leonore in terms of mirror-like structures in time. To show the philosophic significance of these astonishing technical facts, the author employs the philosophy of Aesthetic Realism, founded by the great American scholar Eli Siegel. It declares: »In reality opposites are one; art shows this.« [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]

One of the basic tenets of cognitive grammar, as developed by Langacker (1987, 1991), is that the meaning of complex lexemes can be described in terms of partial rather than full compositionality, resulting from the fact that composite expressions are frequently created by schema extension. This paper is based on the assumption that forming new words by derivation is characterised by the accommodation of the base and the affix, i.e. their reciprocal adjustment in the process of integrating them into the composite structure (Langacker 1987). The article focuses on two aspects of accommodation: profiling semantic roles and establishing new cognitive domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After introducing semantic anti-realism and the paradox of knowability, the paper offers a reconstruction of the anti-realist argument from understanding. The proposed reconstruction validates an unrestricted principle to the effect that truth requires the existence of a certain kind of "demonstration". The paper shows that that principle fails to imply the problematic instances of the original unrestricted feasible-knowability principle but that the overall view underlying the new principle still has unrestricted epistemic consequences. Appealing precisely to the paradox of knowability, the paper also argues, against the BHK semantics, for the non-constructive character of the demonstrations envisaged by semantic anti-realism, and contends that, in such setting, one of the most natural arguments for a broadly intuitionist revision of classical logic loses all its force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in learning a distributed representation of word sense. Traditional context clustering based models usually require careful tuning of model parameters, and typically perform worse on infrequent word senses. This paper presents a novel approach which addresses these limitations by first initializing the word sense embeddings through learning sentence-level embeddings from WordNet glosses using a convolutional neural networks. The initialized word sense embeddings are used by a context clustering based model to generate the distributed representations of word senses. Our learned representations outperform the publicly available embeddings on half of the metrics in the word similarity task, 6 out of 13 sub tasks in the analogical reasoning task, and gives the best overall accuracy in the word sense effect classification task, which shows the effectiveness of our proposed distributed distribution learning model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Informatica (03505596) is the property of Slovene Society Informatika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Figurative idioms constitute a large proportion of multi-word expressions in everyday language. Contrary to the traditional view of idioms as non-compositional units, numerous studies in cognitive linguistics show that most idioms are not arbitrary but motivated by conceptual metaphors and metonymies that provide a link between literal and figurative meanings. Familiarity with particular source domains and conceptual mappings is regarded as a source of idiom transparency. In this article, we report on a study in which 85 Slovak students participated. Their task was to guess the meanings of English idioms containing three body parts: the eye, the hand and the heart. These body parts are not equally productive metaphorical source domains in English and Slovak. The research results which we present indicate that different prominence of the source domains in students' mother tongue and the target language is one of the factors that influence idiom comprehension in a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The lexical representation of complex words in Indo-European languages is generally assumed to depend on semantic compositionality. This study investigated whether semantically compositional and noncompositional derivations are accessed via their constituent units or as whole words. In an overt visual priming experiment (300 ms stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA), event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded for verbs (e.g., ziehen, "pull") that were preceded by purely semantically related verbs (e.g., zerren, "drag"), by morphologically related and semantically compositional verbs (e.g., zuziehen, "pull together"), by morphologically related and semantically noncompositional verbs (e.g., erziehen, "educate"), by orthographically similar verbs (e.g., zielen, "aim"), or by unrelated verbs (e.g., tarnen, "mask"). Compared to the unrelated condition, which evoked an N400 effect with the largest amplitude at centro-parietal recording sites, the N400 was reduced in all other conditions. The rank order of N400 amplitudes turned out as follows: morphologically related and semantically compositional ≈ morphologically related and semantically noncompositional < purely semantically related < orthographically similar < unrelated. Surprisingly, morphologically related primes produced similar N400 modulations—irrespective of their semantic compositionality. The control conditions with orthographic similarity confirmed that these morphological effects were not the result of a simple form overlap between primes and targets. Our findings suggest that the lexical representation of German complex verbs refers to their base form, regardless of meaning compositionality. Theories of the lexical representation of German words need to incorporate this aspect of language processing in German. [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]

The ability to write a successful conference abstract seems to be one barrier preventing new researchers from disseminating their research work in their particular disciplinary community. However, very few studies on how conference abstracts are structured have been conducted in order to help such novice researchers. This study, thus, aims to examine the rhetorical structure of conference abstracts in two TESOL conferences in Asia with the purpose of informing a particular group of new researchers in Asian settings about the actual practice of writing this particular genre. The findings from the open-ended questions and the move analysis of 137 abstracts indicated that there was a mismatch between these potential conference abstract writers' knowledge and the actual composition of these conference abstracts. Besides the rhetorical structures of conference abstracts, this paper also provided some pedagogical suggestions on dealing with this mismatch. [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]

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]