A Multi-User Terminology Mapping Toolbox

Semantic interoperability is a major challenge in multi-center data sharing projects, a challenge that the German Initiative for Medical Informatics is taking up. With respect to laboratory data, enriching site-specific tests and measurements with LOINC codes appears to be a crucial step in supporting cross-institutional research. However, this effort is very time-consuming, as it requires expert knowledge of local site specifics. To ease this process, we developed a generic manual collaborative terminology mapping tool, the MIRACUM Mapper. It allows the creation of arbitrary mapping workflows involving different user roles. A mapping workflow with two user roles has been implemented at University Hospital Erlangen to support the local LOINC mapping. Additionally, the MIRACUM LabVisualizeR provides summary statistics and visualizations of analyte data. We developed a toolbox that facilitates the collaborative creation of mappings and streamlines the review as well as the validation process. The two tools are available under an open source license.

The Revelation Principle for Mechanism Design with Signaling Costs

The revelation principle is a key tool in mechanism design. It allows the designer to restrict attention to truthful mechanisms, greatly facilitating analysis. This is also borne out algorithmically, allowing certain computational problems in mechanism design to be solved in polynomial time. Unfortunately, when not every type can misreport every other type (the partial verification model) or—more generally—misreporting can be costly, the revelation principle can fail to hold. This also leads to NP-hardness results. The primary contribution of this article consists of characterizations of conditions under which the revelation principle still holds when reporting can be costly. (These are generalizations of conditions given earlier for the partial verification case [11, 21].) Furthermore, our results extend to cases where, instead of reporting types directly, agents send signals that do not directly correspond to types. In this case, we obtain conditions for when the mechanism designer can restrict attention to a given (but arbitrary) mapping from types to signals without loss of generality.

Pre-Conscious Automaticity of Sound-­‐Shape Mapping

The bouba–kiki effect depicts a non-arbitrary mapping between specific shapes and non-words: an angular shape is more often named with a sharp sound like ‘kiki’, while a curved shape is more often matched to a blunter sound like ‘bouba’. This effect shows a natural tendency of sound-shape pairing and has been shown to take place among adults who have different mother tongues (Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001), pre-schoolers (Maurer, Pathman, & Mondloch, 2006), and even four-month-olds (Ozturk, Krehm, & Vouloumanos, 2013). These studies therefore establish that similar sound-to-shape mappings could happen among different cultures and early in development, suggesting the mappings may be innate and possibly universal. However, it remains unclear what level of mental processing gives rise to these perceptions: the mappings could rely on introspective processes about ‘goodness-of-fit,’ or they could rely on automatic sensory processes which are active prior to conscious awareness. Here we designed several experiments to directly examine the automaticity of the bouba-kiki effect. Specifically, we examined whether the congruency of a sound-shape pair can be processed before access to awareness?

The hunt for the Age of Acquisition effect: It’s in the links!

The Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect is such that words acquired early in life are processed more quickly than later-acquired words. One explanation for the AoA effects is the arbitrary mapping hypothesis (Ellis & Lambon-Ralph, 2000), stating that the AoA effects are more likely to occur in items that have an arbitrary, rather than a systematic, nature between input and output. Previous behavioural findings have shown that the AoA effects are larger in pictorial than word items. However, no behavioural studies have attempted to directly assess the AoA effects in relation to the connections between representations. In the first two experiments, 48 participants completed a word-picture verification task (Experiments 1A and 2A), together with a spoken (Experiment 1B) or written (Experiment 2B) picture naming task. In the third and fourth experiments, 48 participants complete a picture-word verification task (Experiments 3A and 4A), together with a spoken (Experiment 3B) or written (Experiment 4B) word naming task. For each pair of experiments the subtraction of the naming latencies from the verification tasks for each item per participant was calculated (Experiments 1-4C; e.g. Santiago, Mackay, Palma & Rho, 2000). Results showed that early-acquired items were responded to more quickly than late-acquired ones for all experiments, except for Experiment 3B (spoken word naming) where the AoA effect was shown for only low-frequency words. In addition, the subtraction results for pictorial stimuli demonstrated strong AoA effects. This strengthens the case for the AM hypothesis, also suggesting the AoA effect resides in the connections between representations.

Acoustic and Visual Stimulus Parameters Underlying Sound Symbolic Crossmodal Correspondences

ABSTRACTIt is often assumed that a fundamental property of language is the arbitrariness of the relationship between sound and meaning. Sound symbolism, which refers to non-arbitrary mapping between the sound of a word and its meaning, contradicts this assumption. Sensitivity to sound symbolism has been studied through crossmodal correspondences (CCs) between auditory pseudowords (e.g. ‘loh-moh’) and visual shapes (e.g. a blob). We used representational similarity analysis to examine the relationships between physical stimulus parameters and perceptual ratings that varied on dimensions of roundedness and pointedness, for a range of auditory pseudowords and visual shapes. We found that perceptual ratings of these stimuli relate to certain physical features of both the visual and auditory domains. Representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of parameters that capture the spatial profile of the visual shapes, such as the simple matching coefficient and Jaccard distance, were significantly correlated with those of the visual ratings. RDMs of certain acoustic parameters of the pseudowords, such as the temporal fast Fourier transform (FFT) and spectral tilt, that reflect spectral composition, as well as shimmer and speech envelope that reflect aspects of amplitude variation over time, were significantly correlated with those of the auditory perceptual ratings. RDMs of the temporal FFT (acoustic) and the simple matching coefficient (visual) were significantly correlated. These findings suggest that sound-symbolic CCs are related to basic properties of auditory and visual stimuli, and thus provide insights into the fundamental nature of sound symbolism and how this might evoke specific impressions of physical meaning in natural language.

Thinking in action

When thought overwhelms the mind, the mind uses the body and the world. Several studies reveal ways that people alone or together use gesture and marks on paper to structure and augment their thought for comprehension, inference, and discovery. The studies show that the mapping of thought to gesture or the page is more direct than the arbitrary mapping to language and suggest that these forms of visual/spatial/action representation are used to “translate” language into mental representations. It is argued that actions in space create patterns in the world that reflect abstractions, that the actions are incorporated into gestures and the patterns into diagrams, a network that integrates gesture, action, the designed world, and abstraction dubbed spraction.

Computation with No Memory, and Rearrangeable Multicast Networks

International audience We investigate the computation of mappings from a set S^n to itself with "in situ programs", that is using no extra variables than the input, and performing modifications of one component at a time, hence using no extra memory. In this paper, we survey this problem introduced in previous papers by the authors, we detail its close relation with rearrangeable multicast networks, and we provide new results for both viewpoints. A bijective mapping can be computed by 2n-1 component modifications, that is by a program of length 2n-1, a result equivalent to the rearrangeability of the concatenation of two reversed butterfly networks. For a general arbitrary mapping, we give two methods to build a program with maximal length 4n-3. Equivalently, this yields rearrangeable multicast routing methods for the network formed by four successive butterflies with alternating reversions. The first method is available for any set S and practically equivalent to a known method in network theory. The second method, a refinment of the first, described when |S| is a power of 2, is new and allows more flexibility than the known method. For a linear mapping, when S is any field, or a quotient of an Euclidean domain (e.g Z/sZ for any integer s), we build a program with maximal length 2n-1. In this case the assignments are also linear, thereby particularly efficient from the algorithmic viewpoint, and giving moreover directly a program for the inverse when it exists. This yields also a new result on matrix decompositions, and a new result on the multicast properties of two successive reversed butterflies. Results of this flavour were known only for the boolean field Z/2Z.

Effects of age of acquisition and semantic transparency on reading characters in Chinese dyslexia

ABSTRACTThis study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and semantic errors from other errors. A post hoc analysis of subsets of items orthogonally varied in the AOA and semantic transparency revealed an interaction between the two variables. These findings converge on reports of AOA and semantic effects on deep dyslexic individuals reading alphabetic scripts. The case of TWT, together with recent results of another Chinese dyslexic individual who reads via the nonsemantic route and exhibits the effects of AOA and phonological consistency, supports the arbitrary mapping hypothesis, which states that the AOA effect resides in the connection between two levels of representation.