GROUNDING LANGUAGE IN PERCEPTION: A CONNECTIONIST MODEL OF SPATIAL TERMS AND VAGUE QUANTIFIERS

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANGELO CANGELOSI ◽  
KENNY R. COVENTRY ◽  
ROHANA RAJAPAKSE ◽  
DAN JOYCE ◽  
ALISON BACON ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Connectionist Model ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
Vague Quantifiers

THE HUMAN SEMANTIC POTENTIAL: SPATIAL LANGUAGE AND CONSTRAINED CONNECTIONISM.Terry Regier. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Pp. xvi + 220. $37.50 paper.

1997 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-518
Author(s):  
Barbara Abbott
Keyword(s):  
Mutual Exclusion ◽  
Spatial Relations ◽  
Spatial Language ◽  
Connectionist Model ◽  
Structural Constraints ◽  
System Function ◽  
Negative Evidence ◽  
Connectionist Network ◽  
Closed Class ◽  
Spatial Terms

The semantic potential referred to in the title of this book is the ability of humans to learn the (closed-class) terms for basic spatial relations, such as (for English) onto, above, and through. Regier presents a modified connectionist model of this ability designed to address three questions: (a) What kind of system can learn spatial terms? (b) How can this system function without negative evidence? and (c) What are the universal constraints on learnable spatial terms? The answers suggested to these questions are: (a) a modified connectionist network—one which incorporates structural constraints motivated by human physiology; (b) the assumption of mutual exclusion, that is, that different terms have mutually exclusive denotations; and (c) the structural constraints that are incorporated into the network.

Spatial Terms Convey Distance Information

2000 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric S. Covey ◽  
Laura A. Carlson-Radvansky
Keyword(s):  
Distance Information ◽  
Spatial Terms

Using Connectionist Modules for Decision Support

1990 ◽  
Vol 29 (03) ◽  
pp. 167-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Hripcsak
Keyword(s):  
Decision Support ◽  
Standard Deviation ◽  
Confidence Interval ◽  
Posterior Probability ◽  
Back Propagation ◽  
Connectionist Model ◽  
Test Set ◽  
The Third ◽  
Independent Test ◽  
Better Than

AbstractA connectionist model for decision support was constructed out of several back-propagation modules. Manifestations serve as input to the model; they may be real-valued, and the confidence in their measurement may be specified. The model produces as its output the posterior probability of disease. The model was trained on 1,000 cases taken from a simulated underlying population with three conditionally independent manifestations. The first manifestation had a linear relationship between value and posterior probability of disease, the second had a stepped relationship, and the third was normally distributed. An independent test set of 30,000 cases showed that the model was better able to estimate the posterior probability of disease (the standard deviation of residuals was 0.046, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.046-0.047) than a model constructed using logistic regression (with a standard deviation of residuals of 0.062, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.062-0.063). The model fitted the normal and stepped manifestations better than the linear one. It accommodated intermediate levels of confidence well.

Marketing Responsible Drinking Effectively to Young Adults

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Colby Doyle ◽  
Matthew Gaudet ◽  
Dominic Lay ◽  
Amber McLeod ◽  
Robert Schaeffer
Keyword(s):  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Drinking Patterns ◽  
Major Question ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Current Consumption ◽  
Sample Data ◽  
Vague Quantifiers ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Alberta Health

The primary goal of this research is to identify and examine the components of responsible drinking advertisements. We will examine industry and government related advertisements as we try to understand one of our major questions: does the source influence the validity of the message? The next group of major questions that we will be looking to answer is how are the vague quantifiers used in responsible drinking campaigns interpreted by the public?  How many drinks do people consider “too much?” What does “drink responsibly” really mean? The third major question is whether or not an individual’s current consumption patterns of alcohol have any effect on how individuals assess responsible drinking campaigns. Our qualitative research has indicated that social influences can be strongly related with drinking patterns; this will be further examined in our quantitative research. Also, we will be looking into some of the psychology behind industry and government sponsored advertisements as well as gathering and interpreting information from a sample of our target demographic. Our target demographic consists of both male and females between the ages 18-24. Our literature review and qualitative analysis gave us good insight into some of the potential answers to our questions. We will use these potential answers from our previous research to guide us as we attempt to conduct conclusive research based on a sample data of 169 individuals. Our findings will aid us in developing conclusions and recommendations for Alberta Health Services.

Reflections on Death by Spiritually Mature Elders

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Eugene Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Sex Differences ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
Present Life

Beliefs and feelings about death are excerpted from interviews conducted with elderly English men and women, who were viewed as spiritually mature by those in their community. Respondents reported a wide range of beliefs about death, reflecting their personal experience, but none reported fear of death. Subtle sex differences were noted: men tended to picture death in spatial terms, of moving into a new dimension, while women tended to describe death in terms of relationships. Overall the respondents indicated that they placed a positive value on death, viewing it as a continuation of, and source of meaning for their present life.

scholarly journals How Much Are “Many People” on Facebook? Interpretations of Vague Quantifiers in Online and Offline Contexts

SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 215824402110322
Author(s):  
Ricarda Moll ◽  
Anna Jori Lücke ◽  
Rainer Bromme
Keyword(s):  
Social Networking ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Large Audience ◽  
Vague Quantifiers ◽  
Open Question

In an increasingly interconnected world, many people handle large parts of their communication online, often via social networking sites (SNS). In contrast to face-to-face communication, messages on SNS are accessible by potentially unknown and large audiences. However, it is an open question what users actually perceive as a large audience, or else as many people in SNS contexts. Exploring this question from a psycholinguistic perspective, we investigated the meaning of vague quantifiers such as “few” or “many” with regard to audiences in different contexts in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants assigned numbers to quantifiers describing audiences in online versus offline and private versus public contexts. In Experiment 2, including the same items as Experiment 1, participants rated the appropriateness of specific numbers of people that were described by a quantifier. Our results show, for example, that people assigned larger numbers to quantifiers for online than for offline contexts. This was also true when access to the information was supposed to be restricted which implies a (scalar) change of privacy expectations.

Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
General Public ◽  
Early History ◽  
Physical Isolation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

scholarly journals General location across languages: On the division of labour between functional and lexical items in spatial categories

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco-Alessio Ursini
Keyword(s):  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Small Sample ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Case Markers ◽  
At Home

AbstractIn many languages, it is possible to describe the location of any entity with respect to a landmark object without specifying the exact place that the locatum occupies (e.g. English at in at home). Such vocabulary items usually contrast with items that belong to the same categories but have more restricted senses (e.g. on top of in on top of the shelf). Thus, the degree of “abstractness” that such spatial case markers can convey usually depends on the organization of the lexicon and grammar of spatial terms in each language. The goal of this paper is to explore these properties across a small sample of languages and offer an account of this variation that is connected to previous theories of spatial case markers (e.g. adpositions). Our key proposal is that the morpho-syntactic structure of spatial case markers and their phrases can license a clear division of labour between functional and lexical spatial senses. However, intermediate solutions blurring categories and semantic boundaries are shown to be possible. We formalize this proposal via a fragment of Lexical Syntax, and show that degrees of distinction between ‘functional’ and ‘lexical’ sense types and categories can be modelled via a unified account.

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