Development of Automatic Rule-based Semantic Tagger and Karaka Analyzer for Hindi

Hindi is the third most-spoken language in the world (615 million speakers) and has the fourth highest native speakers (341 million). It is an inflectionally rich and relatively free word-order language with an immense vocabulary set. Despite being such a celebrated language across the globe, very few Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications and tools have been developed to support it computationally. Moreover, most of the existing ones are not efficient enough due to the lack of semantic information (or contextual knowledge). Hindi grammar is based on Paninian grammar and derives most of its rules from it. Paninian grammar very aggressively highlights the role of karaka theory in free-word order languages. In this article, we present an application that extracts all possible karakas from simple Hindi sentences with an accuracy of 84.2% and an F1 score of 88.5%. We consider features such as Parts of Speech tags, post-position markers (vibhaktis), semantic tags for nouns and syntactic structure to grab the context in different-sized word windows within a sentence. With the help of these features, we built a rule-based inference engine to extract karakas from a sentence. The application takes in a text file with clean (without punctuation) simple Hindi sentences and gives back karaka tagged sentences in a separate text file as output.

From Thin to Thick Justice and Beyond: Access to Justice and Legal Pluralism in Indigenous Taiwan

In recent decades, the Taiwan judiciary has taken steps toward securing Indigenous people’s access to the justice system. These measures reflect a vision of access to justice framed narrowly on national courts and legal actors through the provision of free legal counsel, courtroom interpreters, and special court units dedicated to Indigenous people. These measures embrace a thin understanding of access to justice that overlooks important hurdles to both seeking and providing such access to Indigenous people. This article considers some of the key challenges of Indigenous people’s access to justice in Taiwan and the role of the judiciary in both perpetuating and addressing those challenges. It argues for a thicker understanding of access to justice that addresses the circumstances of contemporary Indigenous life and confronts the entrenchment of colonialism in the state framework. Field research in eastern Taiwan shows how aspects of normativity, spatiality, economics, order, language, and institutions, ensconced in a legal framework that reinforces an unequal power relationship between the state and Indigenous people, have shaped the character of access to the justice system and, in turn, continue to operate as obstacles to meaningful access to justice for Taiwan’s Indigenous people.

Higher-Order Language Dysfunctions in Individuals with Alcohol Use Disorder

Patients with alcohol use disorders (AUD) have difficulties with certain aspects of higher-order language functions (HOLF) but there is no data on a wide range of these functions in this group. Therefore, the aim of this study was to compare different aspects of HOLF in patients with AUD and healthy controls (HC). A total of 31 patients with AUD and 44 HC took part in the study. We assessed HOLF with the Right Hemisphere Language Battery (RHLB) and measured control variables: depression using the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) as well as the speed of processing and executive functions with the Color Trails Test (CTT). Patients with AUD had lower results on nine RHLB tests. Moreover, AUD patients had higher scores on PHQ and longer reaction times on CTT. The differences in most RHLB results remained significant after co-varying the control variables. Patients with AUD have difficulties with making inferences from the text, understanding the meaning of individual words, metaphorical content, and prosody, which may impede the comprehension and production of discourse in which linguistic elements must be integrated with non-verbal cues and contextual information. These disturbances may impact various spheres of everyday life and negatively influence social, private, and professional functioning.

Approaching probabilistic laws

In the general problem of verisimilitude, we try to define the distance of a statement from a target, which is an informative truth about some domain of investigation. For example, the target can be a state description, a structure description, or a constituent of a first-order language (Sect. 1). In the problem of legisimilitude, the target is a deterministic or universal law, which can be expressed by a nomic constituent or a quantitative function involving the operators of physical necessity and possibility (Sect. 2). The special case of legisimilitude, where the target is a probabilistic law (Sect. 3), has been discussed by Roger Rosenkrantz (Synthese, 1980) and Ilkka Niiniluoto (Truthlikeness, 1987, Ch. 11.5). Their basic proposal is to measure the distance between two probabilistic laws by the Kullback–Leibler notion of divergence, which is a semimetric on the space of probability measures. This idea can be applied to probabilistic laws of coexistence and laws of succession, and the examples may involve discrete or continuous state spaces (Sect. 3). In this paper, these earlier studies are elaborated in four directions (Sect. 4). First, even though deterministic laws are limiting cases of probabilistic laws, the target-sensitivity of truthlikeness measures implies that the legisimilitude of probabilistic laws is not easily reducible to the deterministic case. Secondly, the Jensen-Shannon divergence is applied to mixed probabilistic laws which entail some universal laws. Thirdly, a new class of distance measures between probability distributions is proposed, so that their horizontal differences are taken into account in addition to vertical ones (Sect. 5). Fourthly, a solution is given for the epistemic problem of estimating degrees of probabilistic legisimilitude on the basis of empirical evidence (Sect. 6).

Much Ado About the Many

English distinguishes between singular quantifiers like "a donkey" and plural quantifiers like "some donkeys". Pluralists hold that plural quantifiers range in an unusual, irreducibly plural, way over common objects, namely individuals from first-order domains and not over set-like objects. The favoured framework of pluralism is plural first-order logic, PFO, an interpreted first-order language that is capable of expressing plural quantification. Pluralists argue for their position by claiming that the standard formal theory based on PFO is both ontologically neutral and really logic. These properties are supposed to yield many important applications concerning second-order logic and set theory that alternative theories supposedly cannot deliver. I will show that there are serious reasons for rejecting at least the claim of ontological innocence. Doubt about innocence arises on account of the fact that, when properly spelled out, the PFO-semantics for plural quantifiers is committed to set-like objects. The correctness of my worries presupposes the principle that for every plurality there is a coextensive set. Pluralists might reply that this principle leads straight to paradox. However, as I will argue, the true culprit of the paradox is the assumption that every definite condition determines a plurality.

הכל הבל in Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 12:8 – Descriptive metaphysics of properties as comparative-philosophical supplement

In this article, a supplementary yet original contribution is made to the ongoing attempts at refining ways of comparative-philosophical conceptual clarification of Qohelet’s claim that הבל הכל in 1:2 (and 12:8). Adopting and adapting the latest analytic metaphysical concerns and categories for descriptive purposes only, a distinction is made between הבל as property of הכל and the properties of הבל in relation to הכל. Involving both correlation and contrast, the second-order language framework is hereby extended to a level of advanced nuance and specificity for restating the meaning of the book’s first-order language on its own terms, even if not in them.Contribution: By considering logical, ontological, mereological and typological aspects of property theory in dialogue with appearances of הכל and of הבל in Ecclesiastes 1:2 and 12:8 and in-between, a new way is presented in the quest to explain why things in the world of the text are the way they are, or why they are at all.

A Finitely Axiomatized Non-Classical First-Order Theory Incorporating Category Theory and Axiomatic Set Theory

It is well known that Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory (ZF), despite its usefulness as a foundational theory for mathematics, has two unwanted features: it cannot be written down explicitly due to its infinitely many axioms, and it has a countable model due to the Löwenheim–Skolem theorem. This paper presents the axioms one has to accept to get rid of these two features. For that matter, some twenty axioms are formulated in a non-classical first-order language with countably many constants: to this collection of axioms is associated a universe of discourse consisting of a class of objects, each of which is a set, and a class of arrows, each of which is a function. The axioms of ZF are derived from this finite axiom schema, and it is shown that it does not have a countable model—if it has a model at all, that is. Furthermore, the axioms of category theory are proven to hold: the present universe may therefore serve as an ontological basis for category theory. However, it has not been investigated whether any of the soundness and completeness properties hold for the present theory: the inevitable conclusion is therefore that only further research can establish whether the present results indeed constitute an advancement in the foundations of mathematics.

Inversion and word order in English: A functional perspective

English is an SVO (Subject, Verb, Object) word order language. This canonical SVO pattern is the default unmarked word-order configuration typical of English, which makes this language to be classified under the typology of SVO languages. However, driven by the major purpose of language as an instrument of human communication and social interaction, and as a semantic system for making meanings, addressors sometimes depart in their discourse from this basic canonical order of constituents where a grammaticalized system like inversion takes place, resulting in inverted constructions. Through testing and developing the Degree of Focus Hypothesis, proposed by Huffman (1993), this study, which employed a mixed methods research design, sought to explore the communicative and semantic values of inversion; and the pragmalinguistc functions of preposing, i.e., clause-initial adjuncts, to the pragmatic process of communication. The study confirmed the Degree of Focus Hypothesis where the hypothesized notion of concentration of attention stemming from inversion was found to be applicable. The paper stressed that what triggers inversion or non-inversion is a certain communicative effect such as focus rather than a relation of formal determination where one element determines mechanically the form or appearance of another. A contribution to linguistic and educational research, the paper, therefore, highlighted the importance of a human factor in the functioning of language and emphasized the need to break away from grammar-based teaching (traditional grammar) to discourse-based language teaching (communicative grammar) where languaging rather than language should be the focus of language teaching and learning.

Higher Order Language: Risk, Promotive, and Risk-Based Protective Associations with Youth Offending

Research has implicated oral language deficits as risk factors for antisocial behavior. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between higher order language skills and youth offending through a risk, promotive and risk-based protective factor paradigm. In a sample of adolescent males ( n = 130; 13 to 20 years; 62% youth offenders) skills in understanding ambiguity, making inferences, and understanding figurative language were demonstrated to have risk and promotive effects in association with youth offending. Figurative language also met criteria for having risk-based protective effects for youth at high offending risk due to poor nonverbal skills. Conceptualization of higher order language skills through this paradigm promotes a broader frame of reference for considering theoretical models and practical interventions.

On Equivalence Relations Between Interpreted Languages, with an Application to Modal and First-Order Language

I examine notions of equivalence between logics (understood as languages interpreted model-theoretically) and develop two new ones that invoke not only the algebraic but also the string-theoretic structure of the underlying language. As an application, I show how to construe modal operator languages as what might be called typographical notational variants of bona fide first-order languages.