On Formalizing Logical Modalities

This paper is in the scope of the philosophy of modal logic; more precisely, it concerns the semantics of modal logic, when the modal elements are interpreted as logical modalities. Most authors have thought that the logic for logical modality—that is, the one to be used to formalize the notion of logical truth (and other related notions)—is to be found among logical systems in which modalities are allowed to be iterated. This has raised the problem of the adequacy, to that formalization purpose, of some modal schemes, such as S4 and S5 . It has been argued that the acceptance of S5 leads to non-normal modal systems, in which the uniform substitution rule fails. The thesis supported in this paper is that such a failure is rather to be attributed to what will be called “Condition of internalization.” If this is correct, there seems to be no normal modal logic system capable of formalizing logical modality, even when S5 is rejected in favor of a weaker system such as S4, as recently proposed by McKeon.

Քրւստափոր Քուշնարյան-արևելագետը

The renowned scholar, composer and pedagogue Qristofor Qushnaryan paid particular attention to the genres of traditional classical music of the peoples of the Middle East – namely, mughams and dastgahs, the art of ashughs and sazandars. The proposed in his monograph “Issues of the History and Theory of Armenian Monodic Music” ideas and principal starting concepts regarding the mutual cultural influence, genetic foundations of the phenomena, generally accepted in the East and deeply rooted and highly widespread among the Armenian populace, the commonality in the modal systems, the historical mission of Armenian musicians in this field, as well as the analytical outlines of a large number of other problems are indicative of the scholar’s undeniable merits in musical Oriental Studies, and serve as a worthwhile guidance for musicians-orientalists in their research work.

Detecting Deception from Gaze and Speech Using a Multimodal Attention LSTM-Based Framework

The automatic detection of deceptive behaviors has recently attracted the attention of the research community due to the variety of areas where it can play a crucial role, such as security or criminology. This work is focused on the development of an automatic deception detection system based on gaze and speech features. The first contribution of our research on this topic is the use of attention Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for single-modal systems with frame-level features as input. In the second contribution, we propose a multimodal system that combines the gaze and speech modalities into the LSTM architecture using two different combination strategies: Late Fusion and Attention-Pooling Fusion. The proposed models are evaluated over the Bag-of-Lies dataset, a multimodal database recorded in real conditions. On the one hand, results show that attentional LSTM networks are able to adequately model the gaze and speech feature sequences, outperforming a reference Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based system with compact features. On the other hand, both combination strategies produce better results than the single-modal systems and the multimodal reference system, suggesting that gaze and speech modalities carry complementary information for the task of deception detection that can be effectively exploited by using LSTMs.

Assessing Mental Health in Emerging Adulthood through a Mental Health Navigator: A Study Protocol (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Even the same psychological disorders present themselves differently among individuals, underscoring the need for a personalized model approach to the study of psychopathology. Emerging adulthood is a developmental phase wherein individuals experience unique vulnerability to the development of psychopathology given their exposure to repeated stressors and their disruptions in routine, making them a population worthy of investigation. OBJECTIVE This prospective study aims to leverage multi-modal assessments to examine the feasibility of an individualized approach to understanding contextual factors relevant to changes in daily affect, sleep, physiology, and activities in the service of predicting changes in mental health. METHODS Recruited participants will be monitored for a period of time (between 3 and 12 months). Participants will download the Personicle application on their smartphone to track activities (e.g. home events, cycling) and be given wearable sensor devices to wear continuously (monitors sleep, physiology, and physical activity). They will be asked to report daily mood and complete weekly open-ended text responses as well as a battery of questionnaires every 3 months. RESULTS Our study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board and is currently undergoing data collection. Adjustments were made due to the COVID-19 pandemic to enable remote data collection and assess for COVID-19-related stress. CONCLUSIONS This study will help advance the research of individualized approaches to understanding health and well-being through multi-modal systems and will demonstrate the benefit of using such approaches to study interrelations between stress, social relationships, technology and mental health.

The expression of modality in Logoori

This study presents a theoretically informed description of the expression of modality in Logoori (Luyia; Bantu). We document verbal and non-verbal modal expressions in Logoori, and show how these expressions fit into proposed typologies of modal systems (Kratzer, Angelika. 1981. The notional category of modality. In Hans-Jurgen Eikmeyer & Hannes Rieser (eds.), Words, worlds, and contexts: New approaches in word semantics, 38–74. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, Kratzer, Angelika. 1991. Modality. In Armin von Stechow & Dieter Wunderlich (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of contemporary research, 639–650. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; van der Auwera, Johan & Vladimir Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2. 79–124. https://doi.org/10.1515/lity.1998.2.1.79; Nauze, Fabrice. 2008. Modality in typological perspective. Amsterdam: Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation PhD thesis). We show that Logoori’s modal system raises some interesting questions regarding the typology and theoretical analysis of modality and its relationship to other kinds of meaning. Our study contributes to the nascent but growing research on modal systems cross linguistically by adding data from an understudied Bantu language.