Which Presuppositions are Subject to Contextual Felicity Constraints?

Some sentences with presupposition triggers can be felicitously uttered when their presuppositions are not entailed by the context, whereas others are infelicitous in such environments, a phenomenon known as Missing Accommodation / Informative Presupposition or varying Contextual Felicity Constraints (CFCs). Despite an abundance of recent quantitative work on presuppositions, this aspect of their behavior has received less attention via experimentation. Here, we present the results from a semantic rating study testing the relative CFC strength of thirteen presupposition triggers, making this the largest cross-trigger comparison reported in the literature to date. The results support a three-way categorical analysis of presupposition triggers, based on imposing strong, weak, or no CFCs. We observe that strong CFC triggers are all focus-associating, suggesting that (at least some of the) variation in behavior arises due to naturally-occurring semantic classes. We compare our results to three previous proposals for CFC variation and argue that none yet account for the full empirical picture.

Changes implemented in the work environment of nurses in the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Objective: to describe the changes implemented in the work environment of nurses in university hospitals considering the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: this qualitative and descriptive research was developed from an online survey with 75 nurses from three Brazilian university hospitals. Data processing occurred through textual analysis with the aid of software IRAMUTEQ. Results: five semantic classes were obtained: Organization of units for exclusive care of patients with COVID-19; Adaptations in the use of personal protective equipment; Physical structure adaptation; Care flow institution; Increased number of beds and training courses. Final considerations: the results show the effort of healthcare and nursing professionals/managers in the development of structural adaptations and reorganizations of care processes, in the hospital context, to respond with quality and efficiency to the demands arising from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Productivity of French and Dutch (semi-)copular constructions and the adverse impact of high token frequency

This paper examines the productivity of the subject complement slot in a set of French and Dutch (semi-)copular micro-constructions. The presumed counterpart of productivity, conventionalization in the form of high token frequency, will also be taken into account in the analysis of the productivity complex. On the one hand, it will be shown that prototypical copulas generally have a higher productivity than semi-copulas, although there are some semi-copulas that can rival the productivity of prototypical copulas. On the other hand, it will be demonstrated that high token frequency is in general detrimental to productivity, on the level of the entire subject complement slot and on the level of the different semantic classes. However, the shape of the frequency distribution also seems to play a role: multiple highly frequent types are in my data more detrimental to productivity than one extremely frequent type, although the semantic connectedness of the types in the distribution might also be an explanatory factor.

IMENet: Joint 3D Semantic Scene Completion and 2D Semantic Segmentation through Iterative Mutual Enhancement

3D semantic scene completion and 2D semantic segmentation are two tightly correlated tasks that are both essential for indoor scene understanding, because they predict the same semantic classes, using positively correlated high-level features. Current methods use 2D features extracted from early-fused RGB-D images for 2D segmentation to improve 3D scene completion. We argue that this sequential scheme does not ensure these two tasks fully benefit each other, and present an Iterative Mutual Enhancement Network (IMENet) to solve them jointly, which interactively refines the two tasks at the late prediction stage. Specifically, two refinement modules are developed under a unified framework for the two tasks. The first is a 2D Deformable Context Pyramid (DCP) module, which receives the projection from the current 3D predictions to refine the 2D predictions. In turn, a 3D Deformable Depth Attention (DDA) module is proposed to leverage the reprojected results from 2D predictions to update the coarse 3D predictions. This iterative fusion happens to the stable high-level features of both tasks at a late stage. Extensive experiments on NYU and NYUCAD datasets verify the effectiveness of the proposed iterative late fusion scheme, and our approach outperforms the state of the art on both 3D semantic scene completion and 2D semantic segmentation.

Discourse “Declaration of Love”: Problem of Automatic Identification (Works of A. P. Chekhov»)

The problem of revealing the “Declaration of Love” discourse in works of art is considered. The author’s development on the automatic detection of the situation of declaration of love, tested on the material of the work of A. P. Chekhov, is presented. The search was carried out on the basis of the Russian National Corpus. In total, more than 200 texts have been identified containing textual representations of the situation of declaration of love. 40 out of 200 texts are identified by the authors of the article as the most fully representative of the desired situation. The set of textual passages describing it is viewed as a cognitive-discursive set of declarations of love. The development of the algorithm was carried out based on the identification of the cognitive schemes of the writer and the statistical analysis of the lexical composition of the situation of declaration of love. Among the frequency components of the cognitive model, which A. P. Chekhov follows in describing the process of declaring love, an open space filled with plants, birds, etc. was revealed. In the general cognitive-discursive set of declarations of love, the nuclear and satellite zones were identified and analyzed, the lexical components of which belong to certain functional-semantic classes and functional-semantic groups.

Categories and Frequency: Cognition Verbs in Spanish Subject Expression

Are semantic classes of verbs genuine or do they merely mask idiosyncrasies of frequent verbs? Here, we examine the interplay between semantic classes and frequent verb-form combinations, providing new evidence from variation patterns in spontaneous speech that linguistic categories are centered on high frequency members to which other members are similar. We offer an account of the well-known favoring effect of cognition verbs on Spanish subject pronoun expression by considering the role of high-frequency verbs (e.g., creer ‘think’ and saber ‘know’) and particular expressions ((yo) creo ‘I think’, (yo) no sé ‘I don’t know’). Analysis of variation in nearly 3000 tokens of unexpressed and pronominal subjects in conversational data replicates well-established predictors, but highlights that the cognition verb effect is really one of 1sg cognition verbs. In addition, particular expressions stand out for their high frequency relative to their component parts (for (yo) creo, proportion of lexical type, and proportion of pronoun). Further analysis of 1sg verbs with frequent expressions as fixed effects reveals shared patterns with other cognition verbs, including an association with non-coreferential contexts. Thus, classes can be identified by variation constraints and contextual distributions that are shared among class members and are measurably different from those of the more general variable structure. Cognition verbs in variable Spanish subject expression form a class anchored in lexically particular constructions.

Latvian verbs in -ēt: semantics vs. conjugation

The conjugation of secondary Latvian verbs is determined with high accuracy by their suffixes. However, verbs with the suffix -ē- are different: they are more or less equally divided between the traditional second and third conjugations. The article sets out to prove or disprove the hypothesis that the assignment of Latvian verbs with the suffix -ē- to a specific conjugation correlates with their semantics. For that purpose, 705 disyllabic verbs ending in -ēt were collected and marked by their origin, transitivity, and conjugation. Verbs that are not obvious borrowings were then divided into semantic classes. As a result of the semantic classification, the working hypothesis was confirmed: second conjugation verbs ending in -ēt predominantly denote agentive actions (creation, destruction, modification, etc.), whereas third conjugation verbs usually denote phenomena, processes, states, and sound production. The results suggest that the Latvian verbal system exhibits a close interrelation between semantics and morphology.

Семантика абсолютивной конструкции В русском языке и антипассив

Данная работа рассматривает абсолютивную конструкцию переходных глаголов в русском языке в соотношении с антипассивом. Переходные глаголы определяются как глаголы, имеющие возмож-ность сочетаться с прямым объектом, т. е. обладают пациентной валентностью. Однако по разным причинам они могут не реализовывать пациентную валентность.Поскольку безобъектное употребление глагола – это результат синтаксической невыразимости пациентного аргумента, логично подходить к нему как к результату сокращения валентностных потенций. С этой точки зрения можно предположить, что безобъектная конструкция переходных глаголов имеет определенные диатетические характеристики. Мы постулируем, что невербализа-ция пациентной валентности сигнализирует о переносе пациентного аргумента на семантическую, коммуникативную периферию, и, следовательно, о его синтаксическом понижении.Выделяются три типа невербализации пациентного аргумента: контекстный эллипсис, семанти-ческая инкорпорация объекта в значение глагола и генерализованная презентация ситуации. Нас интересует прежде всего третий тип, и именно относительно этого типа традиционно применяется термин «абсолютивная конструкция». В отличие от первого и второго типов, в которых невыражен-ный объект восстанавливается через контекст или семантику глагола, в абсолютивной конструкции объект действия не может быть специфицирован, или это делается с трудом. Поэтому абсолютивная конструкция не является неполной конструкцией.Aбсолютивное употребление переходных глаголов – это результат сокращения валентности ком-муникативно нерелевантного объекта, что порождает определенные семантические сдвиги; глагол обозначает не акциональное действие, направленное на какой-то объект, а нечто более стативное, постоянное свойство субъекта, что переносит глагол в иные семантические классы и обусловливает его употребление в определенных контекстах.Абсолютивная конструкция и антипассив имеют общее функциональное сходство, а именно низ-кую дискурсивную выделенность объекта действия и генерализованную репрезентацию ситуации как постоянного свойства субъекта. В русском языке типичным показателем антипассива являет-ся возвратная частица -ся. Поэтому в случаях несущественности, очевидности, неопределенности объекта действия абсолютивная конструкция и антипассивный возвратный глагол могут функцио-нировать синонимично. Ср.: Горчичник сильно жжет Ø / сильно жжется. Следовательно, в данной статье абсолютивная конструкция сравнивается с антипассивными рефлексивными глаголами типа Собака кусается. В русском языке семантический круг антипассивных рефлексивных глаголов от-носительно узок, и это объясняется тем, что их функцию вполне могут заменить невозвратные гла-голы в абсолютивном употреблении.Кроме того, остальные типы опущения пациентной валентности также имеют соотношение с возвратными глаголами других разрядов, но детальное обсуждение этого вопроса станет темой наших дальнейших исследований.This work examines the absolute construction of transitive verbs in Russian in relation to the antipassive. Transitive verbs are defined as verbs that can be combined with a direct object, i.e. they exhibit patient valency. However, for various reasons, this patient valency is not always realized.Since the objectless use of the verb is the result of the syntactic inexpressibility of the patient argument, it is logical to approach it as the result of valency-reducing derivation. From this point of view, it can be assumed that the objectless transitive construction has certain diathetic properties. We postulate that the non-verbalization of patient valency signals the transfer of the patient argument to the semantic, communicative periphery and, consequently, to its syntactic demotion.Three types of non-verbalization of the patient argument are distinguished: context ellipsis, semantic incorporation of an object into the meaning of a verb, and generalized presentation of the situation. We are primarily interested in the third type, for which the term absolute construction is traditionally used. Unlike the first and second types, in which the unexpressed object is reconstructed through the context or semantics of the verb, in the absolute construction, the object of action cannot be specified, or it is diffi cult to do so. Therefore, an absolute construction is not an incomplete construction.The absolute use of transitive verbs is the result of reducing the valency of a communicatively irrelevant object, which generates certain semantic shift s; a verb does not denote an action directed at a concrete object but instead denotes something more stative, a constant property of the subject, which transfers the verb to other semantic classes and determines its use in certain contexts.The absolute construction and the antipassive function similarly in that both rely on the low discursive saliency of the object of action and the generalized representation of the situation as a constant property of the subject. In Russian, a typical indicator of an antipassive is the reflexive -ся. Therefore, when the object of action is insignificant, obvious or ambiguous, the absolute construction and the antipassive reflexive verb can function synonymously (e.g. Горчичник сильно жжет Ø / сильно жжется). Therefore, in this paper, the absolute construction is compared with antipassive reflexive verbs such as Собака кусается. In Russian, the semantic circle of antipassive reflexive verbs is relatively narrow, and this is due to the fact that their function may be replaced by irreflexive verbs in absolute use.In addition, the remaining types of omission of patient valency also have a correlation with reflexive verbs of other categories but a detailed discussion of this issue will be reserved for future research.

TESSERAE3D: A BENCHMARK FOR TESSERAE SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION IN 3D POINT CLOUDS

3D point cloud of mosaic tesserae is used by heritage researchers, restorers and archaeologists for digital investigations. Information extraction, pattern analysis and semantic assignment are necessary to complement the geometric information. Automated processes that can speed up the task are highly sought after, especially new supervised approaches. However, the availability of labelled data necessary for training supervised learning models is a significant constraint. This paper introduces Tesserae3D, a 3D point cloud benchmark dataset for training and evaluating machine learning models, applied to mosaic tesserae segmentation. It is a publicly available, very high density and coloured dataset, accompanied by a standard multi-class semantic segmentation baseline. It consists of about 502 million points and contains 11 semantic classes covering a wide range of tesserae types. We propose a semantic segmentation baseline building on radiometric and covariance features fed to ensemble learning methods. The results delineate an achievable 89% F1-score and are made available under https://github.com/akharroubi/Tesserae3D, providing a simple interface to improve the score based on feedback from the research community.

Semantic Evidential Grid Mapping Using Monocular and Stereo Cameras

Accurately estimating the current state of local traffic scenes is one of the key problems in the development of software components for automated vehicles. In addition to details on free space and drivability, static and dynamic traffic participants and information on the semantics may also be included in the desired representation. Multi-layer grid maps allow the inclusion of all of this information in a common representation. However, most existing grid mapping approaches only process range sensor measurements such as Lidar and Radar and solely model occupancy without semantic states. In order to add sensor redundancy and diversity, it is desired to add vision-based sensor setups in a common grid map representation. In this work, we present a semantic evidential grid mapping pipeline, including estimates for eight semantic classes, that is designed for straightforward fusion with range sensor data. Unlike other publications, our representation explicitly models uncertainties in the evidential model. We present results of our grid mapping pipeline based on a monocular vision setup and a stereo vision setup. Our mapping results are accurate and dense mapping due to the incorporation of a disparity- or depth-based ground surface estimation in the inverse perspective mapping. We conclude this paper by providing a detailed quantitative evaluation based on real traffic scenarios in the KITTI odometry benchmark dataset and demonstrating the advantages compared to other semantic grid mapping approaches.