scholarly journals Dissociable effects of prediction and integration during language comprehension: Evidence from a large-scale study using brain potentials

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mante S. Nieuwland ◽  
Dale J. Barr ◽  
Federica Bartolozzi ◽  
Simon Busch-Moreno ◽  
Emily Darley ◽  
...  

AbstractComposing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale (N= 334) replication study, by investigating the effects of word predictability and sentence plausibility on the N400, the brain’s electrophysiological index of semantic processing. A spatiotemporally fine-grained mixed effects multiple regression analysis revealed overlapping effects of predictability and plausibility on the N400, albeit with distinct spatiotemporal profiles. Our results challenge the view that the predictability-dependent N400 reflects the effects ofeitherpredictionorintegration, and suggest that semantic facilitation of predictable words arises from a cascade of processes that activate and integrate word meaning with context into a sentence-level meaning.

2019 ◽  
Vol 375 (1791) ◽  
pp. 20180522 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mante S. Nieuwland ◽  
Dale J. Barr ◽  
Federica Bartolozzi ◽  
Simon Busch-Moreno ◽  
Emily Darley ◽  
...  

Composing sentence meaning is easier for predictable words than for unpredictable words. Are predictable words genuinely predicted, or simply more plausible and therefore easier to integrate with sentence context? We addressed this persistent and fundamental question using data from a recent, large-scale ( n = 334) replication study, by investigating the effects of word predictability and sentence plausibility on the N400, the brain's electrophysiological index of semantic processing. A spatio-temporally fine-grained mixed-effect multiple regression analysis revealed overlapping effects of predictability and plausibility on the N400, albeit with distinct spatio-temporal profiles. Our results challenge the view that the predictability-dependent N400 reflects the effects of either prediction or integration, and suggest that semantic facilitation of predictable words arises from a cascade of processes that activate and integrate word meaning with context into a sentence-level meaning. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition’.


Author(s):  
Yifan Gao ◽  
Yang Zhong ◽  
Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro ◽  
Junyi Jessy Li

In computational linguistics, specificity quantifies how much detail is engaged in text. It is an important characteristic of speaker intention and language style, and is useful in NLP applications such as summarization and argumentation mining. Yet to date, expert-annotated data for sentence-level specificity are scarce and confined to the news genre. In addition, systems that predict sentence specificity are classifiers trained to produce binary labels (general or specific).We collect a dataset of over 7,000 tweets annotated with specificity on a fine-grained scale. Using this dataset, we train a supervised regression model that accurately estimates specificity in social media posts, reaching a mean absolute error of 0.3578 (for ratings on a scale of 1-5) and 0.73 Pearson correlation, significantly improving over baselines and previous sentence specificity prediction systems. We also present the first large-scale study revealing the social, temporal and mental health factors underlying language specificity on social media.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meg Cychosz ◽  
Alejandrina Cristia ◽  
Elika Bergelson ◽  
Marisa Casillas ◽  
Gladys Baudet ◽  
...  

This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio-recordings of 49 children (1-36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., "ba'' versus "ee''). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to contain canonical transitions increased with age. Further, this proportion exceeded 0.15 by around 7 months, replicating and extending previous findings on canonical vocalization development but using data from the natural environments of a culturally and linguistically diverse sample. This work explores how crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping establish developmental milestones relevant to multiple languages and cultures. Lower inter-annotator reliability on the crowdsourcing platform, relative to more traditional in-lab expert annotators, means that a larger number of unique annotators and/or annotations are required and that crowdsourcing may not be a suitable method for more fine-grained annotation decisions. Audio clips used for this project are compiled into a large-scale infant vocal corpus that is available for other researchers to use in future work.


Author(s):  
S. Bhattacharya ◽  
C. Braun ◽  
U. Leopold

Abstract. In this paper, we address the curse of dimensionality and scalability issues while managing vast volumes of multidimensional raster data in the renewable energy modeling process in an appropriate spatial and temporal context. Tensor representation provides a convenient way to capture inter-dependencies along multiple dimensions. In this direction, we propose a sophisticated way of handling large-scale multi-layered spatio-temporal data, adopted for raster-based geographic information systems (GIS). We chose Tensorflow, an open source software library developed by Google using data flow graphs, and the tensor data structure. We provide a comprehensive performance evaluation of the proposed model against r.sun in GRASS GIS. Benchmarking shows that the tensor-based approach outperforms by up to 60%, concerning overall execution time for high-resolution datasets and fine-grained time intervals for daily sums of solar irradiation [Wh.m-2.day-1].


Author(s):  
Nicola Messina ◽  
Giuseppe Amato ◽  
Andrea Esuli ◽  
Fabrizio Falchi ◽  
Claudio Gennaro ◽  
...  

Despite the evolution of deep-learning-based visual-textual processing systems, precise multi-modal matching remains a challenging task. In this work, we tackle the task of cross-modal retrieval through image-sentence matching based on word-region alignments, using supervision only at the global image-sentence level. Specifically, we present a novel approach called Transformer Encoder Reasoning and Alignment Network (TERAN). TERAN enforces a fine-grained match between the underlying components of images and sentences (i.e., image regions and words, respectively) to preserve the informative richness of both modalities. TERAN obtains state-of-the-art results on the image retrieval task on both MS-COCO and Flickr30k datasets. Moreover, on MS-COCO, it also outperforms current approaches on the sentence retrieval task. Focusing on scalable cross-modal information retrieval, TERAN is designed to keep the visual and textual data pipelines well separated. Cross-attention links invalidate any chance to separately extract visual and textual features needed for the online search and the offline indexing steps in large-scale retrieval systems. In this respect, TERAN merges the information from the two domains only during the final alignment phase, immediately before the loss computation. We argue that the fine-grained alignments produced by TERAN pave the way toward the research for effective and efficient methods for large-scale cross-modal information retrieval. We compare the effectiveness of our approach against relevant state-of-the-art methods. On the MS-COCO 1K test set, we obtain an improvement of 5.7% and 3.5% respectively on the image and the sentence retrieval tasks on the Recall@1 metric. The code used for the experiments is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/mesnico/TERAN .


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Zhen Liu ◽  
XiaoQiang Di ◽  
Wei Song ◽  
WeiWu Ren

Relation classification is an important semantic processing task in the field of natural language processing (NLP). Data sources generally adopt remote monitoring strategies to automatically generate large-scale training data, which inevitably causes label noise problems. At the same time, another challenge is that important information can appear at any place in the sentence. This paper presents a sentence-level joint relation classification model. The model has two modules: a reinforcement learning (RL) agent and a joint network model. In particular, we combine bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) and attention mechanism as a joint model to process the text features of sentences and classify the relation between two entities. At the same time, we introduce an attention mechanism to discover hidden information in sentences. The joint training of the two modules solves the noise problem in relation extraction, sentence-level information extraction, and relation classification. Experimental results demonstrate that the model can effectively deal with data noise and achieve better relation classification performance at the sentence level.


NASPA Journal ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Clark ◽  
Joan Hirt

The creation of small communities has been proposed as a way of enhancing the educational experience of students at large institutions. Using data from a survey of students living in large and small residences at a public research university, this study does not support the common assumption that small-scale social environments are more conducive to positive community life than large-scale social environments.


2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Olthaar ◽  
Wilfred Dolfsma ◽  
Clemens Lutz ◽  
Florian Noseleit

In a competitive business environment at the Bottom of the Pyramid smallholders supplying global value chains may be thought to be at the whims of downstream large-scale players and local market forces, leaving no room for strategic entrepreneurial behavior. In such a context we test the relationship between the use of strategic resources and firm performance. We adopt the Resource Based Theory and show that seemingly homogenous smallholders deploy resources differently and, consequently, some do outperform others. We argue that the ‘resource-based theory’ results in a more fine-grained understanding of smallholder performance than approaches generally applied in agricultural economics. We develop a mixed-method approach that allows one to pinpoint relevant, industry-specific resources, and allows for empirical identification of the relative contribution of each resource to competitive advantage. The results show that proper use of quality labor, storage facilities, time of selling, and availability of animals are key capabilities.


Author(s):  
Paul Oehlmann ◽  
Paul Osswald ◽  
Juan Camilo Blanco ◽  
Martin Friedrich ◽  
Dominik Rietzel ◽  
...  

AbstractWith industries pushing towards digitalized production, adaption to expectations and increasing requirements for modern applications, has brought additive manufacturing (AM) to the forefront of Industry 4.0. In fact, AM is a main accelerator for digital production with its possibilities in structural design, such as topology optimization, production flexibility, customization, product development, to name a few. Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) is a widespread and practical tool for rapid prototyping that also demonstrates the importance of AM technologies through its accessibility to the general public by creating cost effective desktop solutions. An increasing integration of systems in an intelligent production environment also enables the generation of large-scale data to be used for process monitoring and process control. Deep learning as a form of artificial intelligence (AI) and more specifically, a method of machine learning (ML) is ideal for handling big data. This study uses a trained artificial neural network (ANN) model as a digital shadow to predict the force within the nozzle of an FFF printer using filament speed and nozzle temperatures as input data. After the ANN model was tested using data from a theoretical model it was implemented to predict the behavior using real-time printer data. For this purpose, an FFF printer was equipped with sensors that collect real time printer data during the printing process. The ANN model reflected the kinematics of melting and flow predicted by models currently available for various speeds of printing. The model allows for a deeper understanding of the influencing process parameters which ultimately results in the determination of the optimum combination of process speed and print quality.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document