Are all the triangles blue? – ERP evidence for the incremental processing of German quantifier restriction

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 603-636 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETRA AUGURZKY ◽  
OLIVER BOTT ◽  
WOLFGANG STERNEFELD ◽  
ROLF ULRICH

abstractThe present ERP study investigates the neural correlates of pictorial context effects on compositional-semantic processing. We examined whether the incremental processing of questions involving quantifier restriction is modulated by the reliability of pictorial information. Contexts either allowed for an unambiguous meaning evaluation at an early sentential position or were ambiguous with respect to whether a further restrictive cue could trigger later meaning revisions. Attention was either guided towards (Experiment 1) or away from (Experiment 2) the picture–question mapping. In both experiments, negative answers elicited a broadly distributed negativity opposed to affirmative answers as soon as an unambiguous truth evaluation was possible. In the presence of ambiguous context information, the truth evaluation initially remained underspecified, as an early commitment would have resulted in the risk of a semantic reanalysis. The negativity was followed by a late positivity in Experiment 1, but not in Experiment 2, suggesting that attention towards the mismatch affected semantic processing, but only at a later time window. The current results are consistent with the notion that an incremental meaning evaluation is dependent on the reliability of contextual information.

2015 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 17-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. C. Alewijnse ◽  
E.J.A.T. Mattijssen ◽  
R.D. Stoel

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the increasing awareness about the potential bias on the interpretation and conclusions of forensic handwriting examiners (FHEs) by contextual information. We briefly provide the reader with an overview of relevant types of bias, the difficulties associated with studying bias, the sources of bias and their potential influence on the decision making process in casework, and solutions to minimize bias in casework. We propose that the limitations of published studies on bias need to be recognized and that their conclusions must be interpreted with care. Instead of discussing whether bias is an issue in casework, the forensic handwriting community should actually focus on how bias can be minimized in practice. As some authors have already shown (e.g., Found & Ganas, 2014), it is relatively easy to implement context information management procedures in practice. By introducing appropriate procedures to minimize bias, not only forensic handwriting examination will be improved, it will also increase the acceptability of the provided evidence during court hearings. Purchase Article - $10


Author(s):  
Huimin Lu ◽  
Rui Yang ◽  
Zhenrong Deng ◽  
Yonglin Zhang ◽  
Guangwei Gao ◽  
...  

Chinese image description generation tasks usually have some challenges, such as single-feature extraction, lack of global information, and lack of detailed description of the image content. To address these limitations, we propose a fuzzy attention-based DenseNet-BiLSTM Chinese image captioning method in this article. In the proposed method, we first improve the densely connected network to extract features of the image at different scales and to enhance the model’s ability to capture the weak features. At the same time, a bidirectional LSTM is used as the decoder to enhance the use of context information. The introduction of an improved fuzzy attention mechanism effectively improves the problem of correspondence between image features and contextual information. We conduct experiments on the AI Challenger dataset to evaluate the performance of the model. The results show that compared with other models, our proposed model achieves higher scores in objective quantitative evaluation indicators, including BLEU , BLEU , METEOR, ROUGEl, and CIDEr. The generated description sentence can accurately express the image content.


2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 1667-1678 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regine Oberecker ◽  
Manuela Friedrich ◽  
Angela D. Friederici

Event-related brain potential (ERP) studies of sentence processing in adults have shown that phrase-structure violations are associated with two ERP components: an early left anterior negativity (ELAN) and a late, centro-parietal positivity (P600). Although the ELAN reflects highly automatic first-pass sentence parsing, the P600 has been interpreted to reflect later, more controlled processes. The present ERP study investigates the processing of phrase-structure violations in children below three years of age. Both children (mean age of 2.8 years) and adults passively listened to short active sentences that were either correct or syntactically incorrect. Adults displayed an ELAN that was followed by a P600 to the syntactic violation. Children also demonstrated a biphasic ERP pattern consisting of an early left hemispheric negativity and a late positivity. Both components, however, started later and persisted longer than those observed in adults. The left lateralization of the children's negativity suggests that this component can be interpreted as a child-specific precursor to the ELAN observed in adults. The appearance of the early negativity indicates that the neural mechanisms of syntactic parsing are present, in principle, during early language development.


2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (6) ◽  
pp. 1114-1134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiufeng Cheng ◽  
Jinqing Yang ◽  
Lixin Xia

PurposeThis paper aims to propose an extensible, service-oriented framework for context-aware data acquisition, description, interpretation and reasoning, which facilitates the development of mobile applications that provide a context-awareness service.Design/methodology/approachFirst, the authors propose the context data reasoning framework (CDRFM) for generating service-oriented contextual information. Then they used this framework to composite mobile sensor data into low-level contextual information. Finally, the authors exploited some high-level contextual information that can be inferred from the formatted low-level contextual information using particular inference rules.FindingsThe authors take “user behavior patterns” as an exemplary context information generation schema in their experimental study. The results reveal that the optimization of service can be guided by the implicit, high-level context information inside user behavior logs. They also prove the validity of the authors’ framework.Research limitations/implicationsFurther research will add more variety of sensor data. Furthermore, to validate the effectiveness of our framework, more reasoning rules need to be performed. Therefore, the authors may implement more algorithms in the framework to acquire more comprehensive context information.Practical implicationsCDRFM expands the context-awareness framework of previous research and unifies the procedures of acquiring, describing, modeling, reasoning and discovering implicit context information for mobile service providers.Social implicationsSupport the service-oriented context-awareness function in application design and related development in commercial mobile software industry.Originality/valueExtant researches on context awareness rarely considered the generation contextual information for service providers. The CDRFM can be used to generate valuable contextual information by implementing more reasoning rules.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Valdés Kroff ◽  
Patricia Roman ◽  
Paola E. Dussias

Prior studies using the event-related potential (ERP) technique show that integrating sentential code-switches in online processing lead to a broadly distributed late positivity component while processing semantically unexpected continuations instead lead to the emergence of an N400 effect. While the N400 is generally assumed to index lexico-semantic processing, the LPC has two different interpretations. One account suggests that it reflects the processing of an improbable or unexpected event while an alternative account proposes sentence-level reanalysis. To investigate the relative costs of semantic to language-based unexpectancies (i.e., code-switches), the current study tests 24 Spanish-English bilinguals in an ERP reading study. Semantically constrained Spanish frames either varied in their semantic expectancy (high vs low expectancy) and/or their language continuation (same language vs code-switch) while participants’ electrophysiological responses were recorded. The Spanish-to-English switch direction provides a more naturalistic test for integration costs to code-switching as it better approximates the code-switching practices of the target population. Analyses across three time windows show a main effect for semantic expectancy in the N400 time window and a main effect for code-switching in the LPC time window. Additional analyses based on the self-reported code-switching experience of the participants suggested an early positivity linked to less experience with code-switching. The results suggest that not all code-switches lead to similar integration costs and that prior experience with code-switching is an important additional factor that modulates online processing.


Author(s):  
Vsevolod Kapatsinski

This chapter introduces the debate between elemental and configural learning models. Configural models represent both a whole pattern and its parts as separate nodes, which are then both associable, i.e. available for wiring with other nodes. This necessitates a kind of hierarchical inference at the timescale of learning and motivates a dual-route approach at the timescale of processing. Some patterns of language change (semanticization and frequency-in-a-favourable-context effects) are argued to be attributable to hierarchical inference. The most prominent configural pattern in language is argued to be a superadditive interaction. However, such interactions are argued to often be unstable in comprehension due to selective attention and incremental processing. Selective attention causes the learner to focus on one part of a configuration over others. Incremental processing favors the initial part, which can then overshadow other parts and drive the recognition decision. Only with extensive experience, can one can learn to integrate multiple cues. When cues are integrated, the weaker cue can cue the outcome directly or can serve as an occasion-setter to the relationship between the outcome and the primary cue. The conditions under which occasion-setting arises in language acquisition is a promising area for future research.


Complexity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Hui Ning ◽  
Qian Li

Collaborative filtering technology is currently the most successful and widely used technology in the recommendation system. It has achieved rapid development in theoretical research and practice. It selects information and similarity relationships based on the user’s history and collects others that are the same as the user’s hobbies. User’s evaluation information is to generate recommendations. The main research is the inadequate combination of context information and the mining of new points of interest in the context-aware recommendation process. On the basis of traditional recommendation technology, in view of the characteristics of the context information in music recommendation, a personalized and personalized music based on popularity prediction is proposed. Recommended algorithm is MRAPP (Media Recommendation Algorithm based on Popularity Prediction). The algorithm first analyzes the user’s contextual information under music recommendation and classifies and models the contextual information. The traditional content-based recommendation technology CB calculates the recommendation results and then, for the problem that content-based recommendation technology cannot recommend new points of interest for users, introduces the concept of popularity. First, we use the memory and forget function to reduce the score and then consider user attributes and product attributes to calculate similarity; secondly, we use logistic regression to train feature weights; finally, appropriate weights are used to combine user-based and item-based collaborative filtering recommendation results. Based on the above improvements, the improved collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm in this paper has greatly improved the prediction accuracy. Through theoretical proof and simulation experiments, the effectiveness of the MRAPP algorithm is demonstrated.


2009 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence J. Taylor ◽  
Rolf A. Zwaan

AbstractEmpirical research has shown that the processing of words and sentences is accompanied by activation of the brain's motor system in language users. The degree of precision observed in this activation seems to be contingent upon (1) the meaning of a linguistic construction and (2) the depth with which readers process that construction. In addition, neurological evidence shows a correspondence between a disruption in the neural correlates of overt action and the disruption of semantic processing of language about action. These converging lines of evidence can be taken to support the hypotheses that motor processes (1) are recruited to understand language that focuses on actions and (2) contribute a unique element to conceptual representation. This article explores the role of this motor recruitment in language comprehension. It concludes that extant findings are consistent with the theorized existence of multimodal, embodied representations of the referents of words and the meaning carried by language. Further, an integrative conceptualization of “fault tolerant comprehension” is proposed.


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