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The present research aims to analyze the root q-s-s (ق-ص-ص) used in the Holy Qur'an from the perspective of semantics. First of all, we provide illustrative information about semantics and semantic analysis, which form the core of our research. Then we determine the basic meaning of the intended root and analyze the meanings of the derivatives of the root q-s-s ق-ص-ص)) used in the poetry of the pre-Islamic era, the era of the revelation of the Qur'an, the poetry of the Islamic era, and the old and new Arabic dictionaries, and we determine their meanings. In order to understand whether there is a connection between its basic meaning and its derivatives, we explain the relationships between the meanings of the words derived from the root q-s-s (ق-ص-ص) and the basic meaning of the root in question. When analyzing the derivatives of the q-s-s (ق-ص-ص) root in the Jahiliyyah period, we consider the context of the verse couplets and the books that explain the pre-Islamic poetry collections. When identifying and analyzing the meanings of the derivatives derived from the root q-s-s (ق-ص-ص) and used in the Qur'an, we also consider the context of the verses, the reasons for the revelation of the verses, and the tafsir books written to explain these verses. We have also considered the context of the verses from the period from the revelation of the Qur'an to the emergence of ancient Arabic dictionaries. In order to avoid repetition, we also take into account the new derivatives registered in the old and new Arabic dictionaries, without mentioning the derivatives derived from the root q-s-s (ق-ص-ص), used in the poems of ignorance, the Qur'an, and the poems belonging to the period starting after the revelation of the Qur'an and extending until the emergence of the Arabic dictionaries. At the end of the research, we present the conclusions we reached. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this interview, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht visits some of his groundbreaking theoretical contributions, providing an ample archeological gaze towards the emergence of Digital Humanities. The key concepts proposed by Gumbrecht are discussed as well as the new theoretical framework he developed over the past two decades towards an understating of Humanities not primarily focused on the semantic attribution of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to tolerate ambiguity is an important attribute of successful leaders. In this article the metaphor of off-road motorcycling is used to introduce the concept of ambiguity and the virtues of becoming tolerant and comfortable with the uncertainty that has become a hallmark of information age organizations. Tolerance of Ambiguity is a known leadership concept that also extends to employees. Many employees want to be involved earlier in the planning and decision making process of the organization, but may be uncomfortable with the ambiguity characteristic of early stage planning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study contributes to the history of poster connected with interdisciplinary conceptualization, where poster is examined as a design object and core advertising medium in the context of cross-cultural interaction, cultural integration and national identification. Artistic and stylistic features of famous poster schools (Swiss, German, Austrian, Polish, Japanese, French, Italian, Baltic, Ukrainian, etc.) are analyzed and theoretically summarized on the example of cultural-imagery and tourist posters from different countries. Communicative and aesthetic aspects of image creation are presented in socio-cultural dynamics according to certain stages of social development. Colour is highlighted as the most important and attractive means among compositional factors. Scientific novelty of this study is to justify the world's cultural heritage of poster. It is proved that poster actively shapes public consciousness and has a powerful influence on public opinion. Also, poster is included in social sign system and represents past or present creative experience. Semantic role of poster is a visualization of relevant idea, general rendering of advertised object in visual form and content, perfect reflection of real or imaginary objects and phenomena in mind. The results of study indicate that present-day poster, as a product of culture should have accentuated aesthetics, non-standard vision, and variability of graphic communication and be interesting for the target audience. As advertising often borrows images from different arts, their creative interpretation and preservation of symbolic meanings are of great importance. Particular attention is focused on the relationship between art imagery and functionality in the process of poster designing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of semantic technologies and ontologies is becoming more and more popular in engineering applications and particularly in product modelling. Still, the use is limited in academia and applications are of a small scale. In this paper we present the research work done by the closed-loop life cycle management (CL2M) team of the Laboratory for Computer-Aided Design and Production (LICP) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, on the use of ontology-based technologies for the life cycle management of products and engineering assets. This research has been performed through a number of PhD works partially financed by the European Framework Program for research. It aims at providing both a wider understanding of the benefits of applying such technologies in the complex environment of asset life cycle management (ALM) and at providing a platform for implementing ontology models in industrial environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do people evaluate sequentially presented items? Prior research suggests that sequential evaluations are subject to anchoring biases, such that the values of subsequently evaluated alternatives are assimilated toward the initially considered option. The present research argues, however, that sequential valuations often lead to contrast rather than assimilation effects^ whereby values of the subsequently estimated alternatives are distanced from the initially evaluated option. These contrast effects are attributed to semantic anchoring, which stems from evaluating conceptually related options classified into opposing categories (e.g., vices and virtues). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to assess the influence of words either looking like the target word (orthographic distractors) or semantically related to the target word (semantic distractors) on visual search for words within lists by adolescents of 11, 13, and 15 years of age. In Experiment 1 (literal search task), participants saw the target word before the search (e.g., "raven"), whereas in Experiment 2 (categorical task) the target word was only defined by its semantic category (e.g., "bird"). In both experiments, participants' search times decreased from fifth to ninth grade, both because older adolescents gazed less often at non-target words during the search and because they could reject non-target words more quickly once they were fixated. Progress in visual search efficiency was associated with a large increase in word identification skills, which were a strong determinant of average gaze durations and search times for the categorical task, but much less for the literal task. In the literal task, the presence of orthographic or semantic distractors in the list increased search times for all age groups. In the categorical task, the impact of semantic distractor words was stronger than in the literal task because participants needed to gaze at the semantic distractors longer than at the other words before rejecting them. Altogether, the data support the assumption that the progressive automation of word decoding up until the age of 12 and the better quality of older adolescents' lexical representations facilitate a flexible use of both the perceptual and semantic features of words for top-down guidance within the displays. In particular, older adolescents were better prepared to aim at or reject words without gazing at them directly. Finally, the overall similar progression of the maturation of single word visual search processes and that of more real-life information search within complex verbal documents suggests that the young adolescents' difficulties in searching the Web effectively could be due to their insufficiently developed lexical representations and word decoding abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study has two goals. First, we present much‐needed empirical linguistic data and systematic analyses on the spatial semantic systems in English and Korean, two languages that have been extensively compared to date in the debate on spatial language and spatial cognition. We conduct our linguistic investigation comprehensively, encompassing the domains of tight‐ and loose‐fit as well as containment and support relations. The current analysis reveals both cross‐linguistic commonalities and differences: From a common set of spatial features, each language highlights a subset of those features for its principal categorization, and those primary features are importantly different between English and Korean: English speakers categorize events predominantly by containment and support relations (and do so with prepositions), whereas Korean speakers categorize them by tight‐fit and loose‐fit relations (and do so with verbs), with a further distinction of containment and support within the loose‐fit relation. The analysis also shows that the tight‐fit domain is more cross‐linguistically diverse in categorization than is the loose‐fit domain. Second, we test the language data against the nonlinguistic categorization results reported in Choi and Hattrup (2012). The results show a remarkable degree of convergence between the patterns predicted from the current linguistic analysis and those found in C&H's nonlinguistic study and thus provide empirical and strong evidence for an influence of language on nonlinguistic spatial cognition. At the same time, the study reveals areas where the two systems closely interact with each other as well as those where one is independent from the other. Taking both parts of the study together, we identify the specific roles that language and spatial perception/cognition play in spatial categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to review treatment studies of semantic feature analysis (SFA) for persons with aphasia. The review documents how SFA is used, appraises the quality of the included studies, and evaluates the efficacy of SFA. Method: The following electronic databases were systematically searched (last search February 2017): Academic Search Complete, CINAHL Plus, E-journals, Health Policy Reference Centre, MEDLINE, PsycARTICLES, PsycINFO, and SocINDEX. The quality of the included studies was rated. Clinical efficacy was determined by calculating effect sizes (Cohen's d) or percent of nonoverlapping data when d could not be calculated. Results: Twenty-one studies were reviewed reporting on 55 persons with aphasia. SFA was used in 6 different types of studies: confrontation naming of nouns, confrontation naming of verbs, connected speech/ discourse, group, multilingual, and studies where SFA was compared with other approaches. The quality of included studies was high (Single Case Experimental Design Scale average [range] = 9.55 [8.0-11]). Naming of trained items improved for 45 participants (81.82%). Effect sizes indicated that there was a small treatment effect. Conclusions: SFA leads to positive outcomes despite the variability of treatment procedures, dosage, duration, and variations to the traditional SFA protocol. Further research is warranted to examine the efficacy of SFA and generalization effects in larger controlled studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retractions solicited by authors following the discovery of an unintentional error—what we henceforth call a “self-retraction”—are a new phenomenon of growing importance, about which very little is known. Here we present results of a small qualitative study aimed at gaining preliminary insights about circumstances, motivations and beliefs that accompanied the experience of a self-retraction. We identified retraction notes that unambiguously reported an honest error and that had been published between the years 2010 and 2015. We limited our sample to retractions with at least one co-author based in the Netherlands, Belgium, United Kingdom, Germany or a Scandinavian country, and we invited these authors to a semi-structured interview. Fourteen authors accepted our invitation. Contrary to our initial assumptions, most of our interviewees had not originally intended to retract their paper. They had contacted the journal to request a correction and the decision to retract had been made by journal editors. All interviewees reported that having to retract their own publication made them concerned for their scientific reputation and career, often causing considerable stress and anxiety. Interviewees also encountered difficulties in communicating with the journal and recalled other procedural issues that had unnecessarily slowed down the process of self-retraction. Intriguingly, however, all interviewees reported how, contrary to their own expectations, the self-retraction had brought no damage to their reputation and in some cases had actually improved it. We also examined the ethical motivations that interviewees ascribed, retrospectively, to their actions and found that such motivations included a combination of moral and prudential (i.e. pragmatic) considerations. These preliminary results suggest that scientists would welcome innovations to facilitate the process of self-retraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grouping episodes into semantically related categories is necessary for better mnemonic structure. However, the effect of grouping on memory of subordinate details was not clearly understood. In an fMRI study, we tested whether attending superordinate during semantic association disrupts or enhances subordinate episodic details. In each cycle of the experiment, five cue words were presented sequentially with two related detail words placed underneath for each cue. Participants were asked whether they could imagine a category that includes the previously shown cue words in each cycle, and their confidence on retrieval was rated. Participants were asked to perform cued recall tests on presented detail words after the session. Behavioral data showed that reaction times for categorization tasks decreased and confidence levels increased in the third trial of each cycle, thus this trial was considered to be an important insight where a semantic category was believed to be successfully established. Critically, the accuracy of recalling detail words presented immediately prior to third trials was lower than those of followed trials, indicating that subordinate details were disrupted during categorization. General linear model analysis of the trial immediately prior to the completion of categorization, specifically the second trial, revealed significant activation in the temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus, areas of semantic memory networks. Representative Similarity Analysis revealed that the activation patterns of the third trials were more consistent than those of the second trials in the temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus. Our research demonstrates that semantic grouping can cause memories of subordinate details to fade, suggesting that semantic retrieval during categorization affects the quality of related episodic memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims and objectives: This study aims to redress the paucity of research on the semantics of loanwords, by extending and empirically testing Backus's ((2001). The role of semantic specificity in insertional codeswitching: Evidence from Dutch-Turkish. Jacobson, Rodolfo (Hg): Codeswitching Worldwide. Bd, 2, 125-154) Specificity Hypothesis - 'Embedded language elements in codeswitching have a high degree of semantic specificity' (p. 128). Approach: Adopting a concept-based approach to examine loanwords in a large, reliable corpus, the study pursues the following question: Do loanwords have a high degree of semantic specificity relative to their receiving-language equivalents? Specificity is operationalized as an entropy measure of the target word's environment, the assumption being that more specific words have less variety in their surrounding context. Data and analysis: To test this hypothesis, Anglicisms in a 24-million-word newspaper corpus of Argentine Spanish were processed in three stages: detecting loanwords, selecting semantic equivalents, and measuring specificity. Findings/conclusions: A Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test revealed that loanwords receive significantly lower entropy scores, that is, they are more specific than their Spanish equivalents. The results suggest a possible motive for adopting loanwords when terms already exist in the source language, namely, to utilize words that provide more nuanced meaning. Originality: Methodologically, this study offers innovative applications of computational methods to loanword research, employing a distributional model to measure entropy. Theoretically, it addresses an underrepresented aspect of loanword adoption, semantics, by extending Backus's hypothesis to loanwords and increasing its scope to data often viewed as 'monolingual'. Significance/implications: The conclusions offer novel perspectives on loanwords with existing semantic equivalents, often viewed as 'unnecessary' when compared to loanwords that introduce new concepts into the recipient language (e.g. blog). With the notion of specificity, we may understand these loanwords as disruptors to the semantic system of the recipient language, dividing up the semantic space formerly occupied solely by the native equivalent, thus increasing the level of nuance expressed in the original concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Research on language planning in adult stuttering is relatively sparse and offers diverging arguments about a potential causative relationship between semantic and phonological encoding and fluency breakdowns. This study further investigated semantic and phonological encoding efficiency in adults who stutter (AWS) by means of silent category and phoneme identification, respectively. Method: Fifteen AWS and 15 age- and sex-matched adults who do not stutter (ANS) participated. The groups were compared on the basis of the accuracy and speed of superordinate category (animal vs. object) and initial phoneme (vowel vs. consonant) decisions, which were indicated manually during silent viewing of pictorial stimuli. Movement execution latency was accounted for, and no other cognitive, linguistic, or motor demands were posed on participants' responses. Therefore, category identification accuracy and speed were considered indirect measures of semantic encoding efficiency and phoneme identification accuracy and speed of phonological encoding efficiency. Results: For category decisions, AWS were slower but not less accurate than ANS, with objects eliciting more errors and slower responses than animals in both groups. For phoneme decisions, the groups did not differ in accuracy, with consonant errors outnumbering vowel errors in both groups, and AWS were slower than ANS in consonant but not vowel identification, with consonant response time lagging behind vowel response time in AWS only. Conclusions: AWS were less efficient than ANS in semantic encoding, and they might harbor a consonantspecific phonological encoding weakness. Future independent studies are warranted to discover if these positive findings are replicable and a marker for persistent stuttering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Cognitive reserve (CR) is one factor that helps to maintain cognitive function in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Whether the effects of CR depend on the semantic/executive components of the task remains unknown.Methods: 470 patients (138 with AD, 332 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI)) were selected from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database. Linear regression models were used to determine the effects of CR (years of education) on cognitive performance after controlling for demographic factors and regional cortical atrophy. First, we assessed memory tasks with low (Auditory Verbal Learning Test (AVLT) discriminability), moderate (AVLT delayed recall) and high (Logical Memory Test (LMT) delayed recall) executive/semantic components. Next, we assessed tasks with lower (digit span forward, Trails A) or higher (digit span backwards, Trails B) executive demands, and lower (figure copying) or higher (naming, semantic fluency) semantic demands.Results: High CR was significantly associated with performance on the LMT delayed recall, approached significance in the AVLT delayed recall and was not significantly associated with performance on AVLT discriminability. High CR was significantly associated with performance on the Trails B and digit span backwards, mildly associated with Trails A performance and was not associated with performance on digit span forwards. High CR was associated with performance on semantic but not visuospatial tasks. High CR was associated with semantic tasks in patients with both MCI and AD, but was only associated with executive functions in patients with MCI.Conclusion: CR may relate to executive functioning and semantic knowledge, leading to preserved cognitive performance in patients with AD pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students’ ability to build knowledge, and transfer it within and between contexts is crucial to cumulative learning and to academic success. This has long been a concern of higher education research and practice. A central part of this concern for educators is creating the conditions that enable their students' deep learning, as this is an area of significant struggle for many students. Legitimation Code Theory, in particular the dimension of Semantics, is proving useful in examining the kinds of conditions that may be necessary for students to build disciplinary knowledge cumulatively over time. Using illustrative data from one case study, this paper suggests that the conceptual tools offered by Semantics can provide academic lecturers and academic development staff with a set of conceptual and analytical tools which can enable them to ‘see’ and understand the ways in which knowledge can be cumulatively acquired and used, as well as the possible gaps between what they are teaching and what their students may be learning. The hope is that these new insights will provide new directions for change in teaching and learning where these may be needed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Motivated by the lack of a consensus on the basic judgment data on gapless (or indirect exclusive) bei passives in Chinese, in this study we used quantitative methods to test the weak NP analysis, proposed by Lin (2009, Licensing "gapless" bei passives. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 18(2). 167-177), which is constructed on informally collected acceptability judgment data. Three experiments were designed to obtain a comprehensive body of judgments that followed the rigorous data collection standards as advocated by Gibson and Fedorenko (2013, The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research. Language and Cognitive Processes 28(1-2). 88-124). The experimental results showed that despite acceptable indirect exclusive bei sentences observed in the literature, the generation of such bei passives is limited. The results also cast doubt on the weak NP hypothesis for gapless bei passives given that the test items all received low acceptability irrespective of the presence of the alleged weak NP licensor. In addition, the experimental results revealed that the retained object in indirect bei passives cannot be licensed by any pragmatically significant relation, such as a direct kinship relation manipulated in the experiments. Taken together, the experimental findings were shown to draw implications for the affectedness typology of passives. We argue that the continuity approach (Shibatani 1985, Passives and related constructions: A prototype analysis. Language 61(4). 821-848; Washio 1993, When causatives mean passive. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 2. 45-90) fares better than the core syntax/semantic approach (Oshima 2006, Adversity and Korean/Japanese passives: Constructional analogy. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 15. 137-166) to capturing the affectedness patterns of passives in Korean, Japanese and Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of knowledge formalization is an essential part of decision support systems development. Creating a technological knowledge base in the field of metallurgy encountered problems in acquisition and codifying reusable computer artifacts based on text documents. The aim of the work was to adapt the algorithms for classification of documents and to develop a method of semantic integration of a created repository. Author used artificial intelligence tools: latent semantic indexing, rough sets, association rules learning and ontologies as a tool for integration. The developed methodology allowed for the creation of semantic knowledge base on the basis of documents in natural language in the field of metallurgy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: People with aphasia (PWA) face significant challenges in verbally expressing their communicative intentions. Different types of gestures are produced spontaneously by PWA, and a potentially compensatory function of these gestures has been discussed. The current study aimed to investigate how much information PWA communicate through 3 types of gesture and the communicative effectiveness of such gestures. Method: Listeners without language impairment rated the information content of short video clips taken from PWA in conversation. Listeners were asked to rate communication within a speech-only condition and a gesture + speech condition. Results: The results revealed that the participants’ interpretations of the communicative intentions expressed in the clips of PWA were significantly more accurate in the gesture + speech condition for all tested gesture types. Conclusion: It was concluded that all 3 gesture types under investigation contributed to the expression of semantic meaning communicated by PWA. Gestures are an important communicative means for PWA and should be regarded as such by their interlocutors. Gestures have been shown to enhance listeners’ interpretation of PWA’s overall communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the research on semantic change in the borrowed Arabic words in Urdu. It states that borrowed words from other language will often change meaning. It notes the several types of semantic change including widening, narrowing, and amelioration. It mentions that a borrowed word lose part of former meaning or take on a new meaning.

To test the separate and combined abilities of the two cerebral hemispheres to perform controlled semantic selection and integration processes, Hebrew readers saw pairs of words and had to decide whether the two words were semantically related. The first word in each pair was presented centrally. The second word was presented in the left, right, or central visual field (LVF, RVF, and CVF). We compared response latencies for related pairs in two conditions: In the ambiguous condition, the first word was a homograph (either homophonic or heterophonic) and the second word was related to either its dominant or subordinate meaning. In the unambiguous condition, homographs were replaced with unambiguous control words. Irrespective of VF or homograph type, response times for ambiguous pairs were significantly longer than for unambiguous pairs only when targets were related to the subordinate meaning of the homograph. In the left hemisphere (RVF/LH), this ambiguity effect was larger for heterophones than for homophones, whereas in the right hemisphere (LVF/RH), similar patterns were observed for both types of homographs. Finally, performance patterns in the CVF revealed the same patterns as those in the RVF/LH, and were different from those in the LVF/RH. The implications of these results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate children's use of semantic context to facilitate foreignaccented word recognition in noise. Method: Monolingual American English speaking 5- to 7-year-olds (n = 168) repeated either Mandarinor American English-accented sentences in babble, half of which contained final words that were highly predictable from context. The same final words were presented in the low- and high-predictability sentences. Results: Word recognition scores were better in the high- than low-predictability contexts. Scores improved with age and were higher for the native than the Mandarin accent. The oldest children saw the greatest benefit from context; however, context benefit was similar regardless of speaker accent. Conclusion: Despite significant acoustic-phonetic deviations from native norms, young children capitalize on contextual cues when presented with foreign-accented speech. Implications for spoken word recognition in children with speech, language, and hearing differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Current auditory training methods typically result in improvements to speech recognition abilities in quiet, but learner gains may not extend to other domains in speech (e.g., recognition in noise) or self-assessed benefit. This study examined the potential of training involving multiple talkers and training emphasizing discourse-level top-down processing to produce more generalized learning. Method: Normal-hearing participants (N = 64) were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 auditory training protocols using noise-vocoded speech simulating the processing of an 8-channel cochlear implant: sentence-based singletalker training, training with 24 different talkers, passagebased transcription training, and a control (transcribing unvocoded sentence materials). In all cases, participants completed 2 pretests under cochlear implant simulation, 1 hr of training, and 5 posttests to assess perceptual learning and cross-context generalization. Results: Performance above the control was seen in all 3 experimental groups for sentence recognition in quiet. In addition, the multitalker training method generalized to a context word-recognition task, and the passage training method caused gains in sentence recognition in noise. Conclusion: The gains of the multitalker and passage training groups over the control suggest that, with relatively small modifications, improvements to the generalized outcomes of auditory training protocols may be possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The aims of the study were to investigate the use of semantic associative relationships as primes in treating naming deficits, or anomia, in aphasia and to determine if differential treatment effects would be found if 1 or 3 primes were presented. Method: Ten individuals with varying degrees of anomia participated in the study. A single-subject, A-B treatment design with a cross-over component was used. A 1-PRIME condition (use of 1 prime) was compared with a 3-PRIMES condition (use of 3 primes) for each participant. Results: Visual analyses of treatment data revealed improvements in 8 of 10 participants. Meaningful effect sizes were obtained in at least 1 of the conditions for 6 of the 10 participants. Slightly more participants demonstrated meaningful effect sizes in the 3-PRIMES condition than in the 1-PRIME condition. Correlation analyses revealed a positive correlation between the number of teaching episodes and 3-PRIMES probe performance. Conclusions: The results support a protocol that uses semantic associative primes to increase naming accuracy in aphasia. The 3-PRIMES condition was slightly more beneficial than the 1-PRIME condition in terms of improving naming abilities in these participants, but there was no overwhelming advantage in using one or the other condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the ability of persons with aphasia (PWA) to resolve different types of ambiguous words (homophones, metaphors, and metonyms) in discourse contexts. Method: Six PWA and 10 controls listened to short discourses that biased either the dominant (more frequent) or subordinate (less frequent) version of an ambiguous word as well as nonsense (filler) discourses. Participants then indicated whether or not the final sentence, which contained the ambiguity, made sense in the discourse. Data for both accuracy and reaction time were collected. Results: There was no significant Group × Word Type × Frequency interaction in the reaction time data. In the accuracy analysis, there was a significant Group × Frequency × Word Type interaction, which appeared to be driven by the PWA’s relative accuracy with subordinate homophones and relative inaccuracy with subordinate metaphors. Conclusions: These results suggest that PWA were able to use discourse contexts to resolve subordinate versions of literal ambiguous words but have difficulty resolving metaphoric ambiguous words. Further investigations should be done to clarify how much context PWA require to successfully resolve lexical ambiguities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a fundamental task of natural language processing, semantic role labeling (SRL) have attracted much attention of researchers in recent years. However, with increasing features being added into the studies, the performance growth trend of SRL is gradually slowing down. So new ways must be found to improve the performance of semantic analysis. Word sense information is useful for SRL task. But how to effectively make use of word sense information is a key issue. Referring to synergetics, we can regard semantic analysis process as competitive process of many semantics order parameters under coherent action and interactive collaboration of semantic role-related features and word sense-related features. Accordingly, we propose a semantic role labeling model with word sense information based on improved synergetic neural network (SNN). Our contributions are three-fold. Firstly, role-related features and word sense-related features are used to configure semantic order parameters of SNN. Secondly, network parameters are reconstructed which can reflect the relationship of driving and restraining each other between various linguistic features. Finally, we use an improved quantum particle swarm algorithm (QPSO) to realize the optimization of network parameter which has stronger search ability and faster convergence speed. By evaluating our model on the OntoNotes 2.0 corpus, the experiment results show the proposed model in this paper leads to a higher performance for SRL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The degree of similarity between sentences is assessed by sentence similarity methods. Sentence similarity methods play an important role in areas such as summarization, search, and categorization of texts, machine translation, etc. The current methods for assessing sentence similarity are based only on the similarity between the words in the sentences. Such methods either represent sentences as bag of words vectors or are restricted to the syntactic information of the sentences. Two important problems in language understanding are not addressed by such strategies: the word order and the meaning of the sentence as a whole. The new sentence similarity assessment measure presented here largely improves and refines a recently published method that takes into account the lexical, syntactic and semantic components of sentences. The new method was benchmarked using Li–McLean, showing that it outperforms the state of the art systems and achieves results comparable to the evaluation made by humans. Besides that, the method proposed was extensively tested using the SemEval 2012 sentence similarity test set and in the evaluation of the degree of similarity between summaries using the CNN-corpus. In both cases, the measure proposed here was proved effective and useful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays natural language processing plays an important and critical role in the domain of intelligent computing, pattern recognition, semantic analysis and machine intelligence. For Chinese information processing, to construct the predictive models of different semantic word-formation patterns with a large-scale corpus can significantly improve the efficiency and accuracy of the paraphrase of the unregistered or new word, ambiguities elimination, automatic lexicography, machine translation and other applications. Therefore it is required to find the relationship between word-formation patterns and different influential factors, which can be denoted as a classification problem. However, due to noise, anomalies, imprecision, polysemy, ambiguity, nonlinear structure, and class-imbalance in semantic word-formation data, multi-criteria optimization classifier (MCOC), support vector machines (SVM) and other traditional classification approaches will give the poor predictive performance. In this paper, according to the characteristic analysis of Chinese word-formations, we firstly proposed a novel layered semantic graph of each disyllabic word, the layer-weighted graph edit distance (GED) and its similarity kernel embedded into a new vector space, then on the normalized data MCOC with kernel, fuzzification and penalty factors (KFP-MCOC) and SVM are employed to predict Chinese semantic word-formation patterns. Our experimental results and comparison with SVM show that KFP-MCOC based on the layer-weighted semantic graphs can increase the separation of different patterns, the predictive accuracy of target patterns and the generalization of semantic pattern classification on new compound words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study is a product-oriented investigation into the translation of metaphor in four modern English versions of a stretch of text from Dante's Inferno. Its first aim is to establish the extent of equivalence of semantic field between the metaphors of the source text and their realizations in the target texts. This then provides the basis for exploring the mediation of metaphor by the translators and for analyzing the strategies they use. Toury's norms model is the frame of reference drawn on to explain the patterns of equivalence that emerge in the group. The discussion analyzes the findings of the data collection, as well as individual examples of mediation from the translated texts, for what they reveal about orientations towards ST- or TT-norms. Though there are interesting correspondences across the English versions, the study focuses on divergent mediations of source text metaphor because this is the perspective that enables features of the praxis of individual translators to emerge most clearly. The data are presented in a detailed table in an appendix to the study to supplement the material under discussion and provide a point of reference for it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UML has become a de-facto standard for design and development of object-oriented systems. On the other hand, UML includes various diagrams and notations which are missing of formal semantics. There does not exist much work to transform completely UML models to executable codes by any of the computer-aided software engineering tools because of the hidden semantics under the UML diagrams. Moreover, UML models cannot be used for automated analysis for validation and verification of the systems. Therefore, an integration of UML and semantics-based techniques such as formal methods is required to overcome such type of issues. Further, proof of correctness of software models plays a key role to ensure the quality of the final system to be developed. This paper presents a systematic method for transformation and verification of UML sequence diagrams into Z specification. The method works by translating and analysing few important combined fragments of sequence diagrams using Z notation. At first, formal specification of primary constructs is provided by capturing the hidden semantics under the diagram. Formal analysis of interaction operators namely options, alternatives, loops and break of the fragments is provided. The combined fragments are important because it allows multiple scenarios to increase an expressive power of sequence diagram by various control flows. Finally, formal analysis is provided by Z/Eves tool to check the syntax, type and proof for consistency and correctness of the specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explore how the sentence contexts affect self-positivity bias, we presented the participants with negation and affirmation sentences. Each sentence was ended with an adjective word describing human being's personality. The participants were asked to judge whether the sentences correctly described their own personalities. In affirmation sentences, the behavioral data showed that self-positivity bias occurred when participants considered the sentences to be in accordance with their personality; the ERP data showed that P200 amplitude was consistent with this behavioral result. In negation sentences, behavioral data showed self-positivity bias, regardless of whether the sentences were in accordance with participants' personality or not. However, the self-positivity bias was not observed in the ERP results from negation sentence. In summary, sentence type modulated the effect of self-positivity bias. The reason could be that processing affirmation and negation sentences requires different amount of cognitive resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an eye-tracking experiment, we examined the processing of the nominal control construction. Participants' eye-movements were monitored while they read sentences that included either giver control nominals (e.g. promise in Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph himself) or recipient control nominals (e.g. plea in Luke's plea to Sophia to photograph herself). In order to examine both the initial access of control information, and its later use in on-line processing, we combined a manipulation of nominal control with a gender match/mismatch paradigm. Results showed that there was evidence of processing difficulty for giver control sentences (relative to recipient control sentences) at the point where the control dependency was initially created, suggesting that control information was accessed during the early parsing stages. This effect is attributed to a recency preference in the formation of control dependencies; the parser prefers to assign a recent antecedent to PRO. In addition, readers slowed down after reading a reflexive pronoun that mismatched with the gender of the antecedent indicated by the control nominal (e.g. Luke's promise to Sophia to photograph herself). The mismatch cost suggests that control information of the nominal control construction was used to constrain dependency formation involving a controller, PRO and a reflexive, confirming the use of control information in on-line interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The situation for post-challenge continuous auxiliary input leakage has not been considered in the cryptography schemes for previous literature. We present a semantic-security model with post-challenge continuous auxiliary inputs for identity-based encryption. In this model, the adversary is permitted to obtain some information of the private keys constantly and to query more information after seeing the challenge ciphertext through the side-channel attacks. Furthermore, we present an identity-based encryption scheme resilient to leakage under composite order groups. Our scheme is secure against post-challenge continuous auxiliary input, adaptive chosen-identity, and adaptive chosen plaintext attacks under three static assumptions in the standard model. Compared with existing identity-based encryption schemes under security properties and performance, our scheme is practical. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explain why general techniques from formal linguistics can and should be applied to the analysis of monkey communication - in the areas of syntax and especially semantics. An informed look at our recent proposals shows that such techniques needn't rely excessively on categories of human language: syntax and semantics provide versatile formal tools that go beyond the specificities of human linguistics. We argue that 'formal monkey linguistics' can yield new insights into monkey morphology, syntax, and semantics, as well as raise provocative new questions about the existence of a pragmatic, competition-based component in these communication systems. Finally, we argue that evolutionary questions, which are highly speculative in human language, can be addressed in an empirically satisfying fashion in primate linguistics, and we lay out problems that should be addressed at the interface between evolutionary primate linguistics and formal analyses of language evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Only a handful of studies have extended our understanding of retrieval induced forgetting (RIF) during development and even fewer have tested for RIF effects outside word-list paradigms. The purpose of these experiments was to: (i) examine how partial retrieval of a witnessed event would impact subsequent retrieval of that event in school-aged children; and (ii) examine the robustness of semantic integration as a boundary condition on RIF. Two experiments were conducted using the three traditional phases of the RIF paradigm: study phase, practice phase, and test phase. We found clear evidence of RIF in event memory. There was also evidence of the robust impact that integration instructions have on minimizing RIF. Integration appears to not only have a dampening effect on RIF, but integration instructions may also influence how children process all aspects of an experience, regardless of whether a person is passively or actively part of the experience.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the grammaticalization of agreement markers from possessive pronouns, which has two different dimensions: loss of referentiality (function) and loss of morpho-phonological independence (form). I examine the referential potential and formal expression type of possessive person markers in a worldwide sample of 39 languages with an alienability distinction. Referential potential is measured independently of expression type by applying a new typology of person markers. First, I demonstrate that inalienable possessive marking is at least as referential and formally independent as alienable possessive marking, and often less referential and less independent. Unlike explanations in terms of frequency and iconicity, I argue that this asymmetry is essentially semantics-based: the presence of a possessive relationship is inherent to the meaning of the inalienable noun, which is therefore in less need of expressive marking than alienable nouns. Second, I show that loss of referentiality correlates with loss in form, but in a relative rather than an absolute sense: in individual languages, higher referential markers never show a greater degree of bonding with the possessee than lower referential markers. These results suggest that function and form evolve in the same direction, but need not evolve at the same pace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data exchange is the process of generating an instance of a target schema from an instance of a source schema such that source data is reflected in the target. Generally, data exchnge is performed using schema mapping, representing high level relations between source and target schemas. In this paper, we argue that data exchange solely based on schema level information limits the ability to express semantics in data exchange. We show such schema level mappings not only may result in entity fragmentation, they are unable to resolve some ambiguous data exchange scenarios. To address this problem, we propose Scalable Entity Preserving Data Exchange (SEDEX), a hybrid method based on data and schema mapping that employs similarities between relation trees of source and target relations to find the best relations that can host source instances. Our experiments show SEDEX outperforms other methods in terms of quality and scalability of data exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The secrecy capacity of the type II wiretap channel (WTC II) with a noisy main channel is currently an open problem. Herein its secrecy-capacity is derived and shown to be equal to its semantic-security (SS) capacity. In this setting, the legitimate users communicate via a discrete-memoryless (DM) channel in the presence of an eavesdropper that has perfect access to a subset of its choosing of the transmitted symbols, constrained to a fixed fraction of the blocklength. The secrecy criterion is achieved simultaneously for all possible eavesdropper subset choices. The SS criterion demands negligible mutual information between the message and the eavesdropper’s observations even when maximized over all message distributions. A key tool for the achievability proof is a novel and stronger version of Wyner’s soft covering lemma. Specifically, a random codebook is shown to achieve the soft-covering phenomenon with high probability. The probability of failure is doubly exponentially small in the blocklength. Since the combined number of messages and subsets grows only exponentially with the blocklength, SS for the WTC II is established by using the union bound and invoking the stronger soft-covering lemma. The direct proof shows that rates up to the weak-secrecy capacity of the classic WTC with a DM erasure channel (EC) to the eavesdropper are achievable. The converse follows by establishing the capacity of this DM wiretap EC as an upper bound for the WTC II. From a broader perspective, the stronger soft-covering lemma constitutes a tool for showing the existence of codebooks that satisfy exponentially many constraints, a beneficial ability for many other applications in information theoretic security. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theories of embodied cognition propose that sensorimotor information is simulated during language processing (e.g., Barsalou, 1999). Previous studies have demonstrated that differences in simulation can have implications for word processing; for instance, lexical processing is facilitated for verbs that have relatively more embodied meanings (e.g., Sidhu et al., 2014). Here we examined the effects of these differences on memory for verbs. We observed higher rates of recognition (Experiments 1a-2a) and recall accuracy (Experiments 2b-3b) for verbs with a greater amount of associated bodily information (i.e., an embodiment effect). We also examined how this interacted with the imagined enactment effect: a memory benefit for actions that one imagines performing (e.g., Ditman et al., 2010). We found that these two effects did not interact (Experiment 3b), suggesting that the memory benefits of automatic simulation (i.e., the embodiment effect) and deliberate simulation (i.e., the imagined enactment effect) are distinct. These results provide evidence for the role of simulation in language processing, and its effects on memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While research on affective word processing in adults witnesses increasing interest, the present paper looks at another group of participants that have been neglected so far: pupils (age range: 6-12 years). Introducing a variant of the Berlin Affective Wordlist (BAWL) especially adapted for children of that age group, the "kidBAWL," we examined to what extent pupils process affective lexical semantics similarly to adults. In three experiments using rating and valence decision tasks in both the visual and auditory modality, it was established that children show the two ubiquitous phenomena observed in adults with emotional word material: the asymmetric U-shaped function relating valence to arousal ratings, and the inversely U-shaped function relating response times to valence decision latencies. The results for both modalities show large structural similarities between pupil and adult data (taken from previous studies) indicating that in the present age range, the affective lexicon and the dynamic interplay between language and emotion is already well-developed. Differential effects show that younger children tend to choose less extreme ratings than older children and that rating latencies decrease with age. Overall, our study should help to develop more realistic models of word recognition and reading that include affective processes and offer a methodology for exploring the roots of pleasant literary experiences and ludic reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of the associative character of the lexicon of Old English from two angles. From a morphological perspective, it is concerned with the derivation of previously derived lexical items, while on the semantic side it deals with meaning continuity and change throughout derivation. The corpus comprises around 400 nouns and adjectives that qualify as recursive derivatives, that is, derivatives with a derived base. Lexical recursivity is understood as the repetition of a process, in other words, prefixation as input to prefixation, and suffixation as input to suffixation. Affix distribution is analyzed exhaustively, as well as the positional restrictions on affix combination. The change of meaning caused by derivation is explained by means of an inventory of lexical functions based on paradigmatic morphology and structural-functional grammars. The analysis indicates that lexical recursivity in Old English is a suffixal rather than a prefixal phenomenon. The main conclusion is that the function of recursivity depends on the output category. Whereas in adjective formation recursivity conveys more expressivity, in noun formation the main function of recursivity is to create abstract nouns. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Distributional semantic models, deriving vector-based word representations from patterns of word usage in corpora, have many useful applications (Turney and Pantel 2010). Recently, there has been interest in compositional distributional models, which derive vectors for phrases from representations of their constituent words (Mitchell and Lapata 2010).Often, the values of distributional vectors are pointwise mutual information (PMI) scores obtained from raw co-occurrence counts. In this article we study the relation between the PMI dimensions of a phrase vector and its components in order to gain insights into which operations an adequate composition model should perform. We show mathematically that the difference between the PMI dimension of a phrase vector and the sum of PMIs in the corresponding dimensions of the phrase's parts is an independently interpretable value, namely, a quantification of the impact of the context associated with the relevant dimension on the phrase's internal cohesion, as also measured by PMI. We then explore this quantity empirically, through an analysis of adjective--noun composition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present study, we explored the influence of emotional words on the semantic integration of their following neutral nouns during sentence comprehension. We manipulated the emotionality of verbs and the semantic congruity of their following (neutral) object nouns in sentences. Event-related potentials were recorded to the verbs, which were either negative or neutral, and to the object nouns, which were either semantically congruent or incongruent relative to the preceding contexts. We found an N400 and a P600 effect in response to the semantic congruity of the nouns when they followed the neutral verbs. However, the P600 (but not the N400) semantic congruity effect may have been attenuated when the nouns followed the negative verbs. Meanwhile, the negative verbs elicited a larger P2 and N400 than did the neutral verbs. The results indicate that the attention captured by emotional words impaired reanalysis of the following incongruent information, demonstrating a dynamic influence of emotional words on the semantic processing of following information during sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically discusses MacIntyre's thesis that education is essentially a contested concept. In order to contextualise my discussion, I discuss both whether rival educational traditions of education found in MacIntyre's work – which I refer to as instrumental and non-instrumental justifications of education – can be rationally resolved using MacIntyre's framework, and whether a shared meaning of education is possible as a result. I conclude that MacIntyre's synthesis account is problematic because the whole notion that there arerationally negotiableways in which to compromise or harmonise opposing justifications of education found in instrumental and non-instrumental forms of education is troubling – the reason being that these are cultural disagreements about human flourishing that are not neutral-free, and due to a lack of care distinguishing between the common uses of the term ‘education’, and its looser usages to mean something like school learning that embraces a range of aims and goals that are often incompatible. In this light, it is argued that the contestability card has been unnecessarily overemphasised, and brings to our attention the complex ways in which we interpret education and what it means to be educated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Textual requirements are very common in software projects. However, this format of requirements often keeps relevant concerns (e.g., performance, synchronization, data access, etc.) from the analyst's view because their semantics are implicit in the text. Thus, analysts must carefully review requirements documents in order to identify key concerns and their effects. Concern mining tools based on NLP techniques can help in this activity. Nonetheless, existing tools cannot always detect all the crosscutting effects of a given concern on different requirements sections, as this detection requires a semantic analysis of the text. In this work, we describe an automated tool called REAssistant that supports the extraction of semantic information from textual use cases in order to reveal latent crosscutting concerns. To enable the analysis of use cases, we apply a tandem of advanced NLP techniques (e.g, dependency parsing, semantic role labeling, and domain actions) built on the UIMA framework, which generates different annotations for the use cases. Then, REAssistant allows analysts to query these annotations via concern-specific rules in order to identify all the effects of a given concern. The REAssistant tool has been evaluated with several case-studies, showing good results when compared to a manual identification of concerns and a third-party tool. In particular, the tool achieved a remarkable recall regarding the detection of crosscutting concern effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social online communities and platforms play a significant role in the activities of software developers either as an integral part of the main activities or through complimentary knowledge and information sharing. As such techniques become more prevalent resulting in a wealth of shared information, the need to effectively organize and sift through the information becomes more important. Top-down approaches such as formal hierarchical directories have shown to lack scalability to be applicable to these circumstanes. Light-weight bottom-up techniques such as community tagging have shown promise for better organizing the available content. However, in more focused communities of practice, such as software engineering and development, community tagging can face some challenges such as tag explosion, locality of tags and interpretation differences, to name a few. To address these challenges, we propose a semantic tagging approach that benefits from the information available in Wikipedia to semantically ground the tagging process and provide a methodical approach for tagging social software engineering content. We have shown that our approach is able to provide high quality tags for social software engineering content that can be used not only for organizing such content but also for making meaningful and relevant content recommendation to the users both within a local community and also across multiple social online communities. We have empirically validated our approach through four main research questions. The results of our observations show that the proposed approach is quite effective in organizing social software engineering content and making relevant, helpful and novel content recommendations to software developers and users of social software engineering communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]