Language understanding

Özet: Birden fazla anlama sahip herhangi bir sözcüğün tümce içerisindeki yeri önemli olmaksizin, hangi anlamda olduğu ile ilgili genellikle bir belirsizlik mevcuttur. Kişi, anlam belirsizliği olan bir tümceyi anladiği zaman belirsizliğe neden olan sözcüğün diğer anlamlarini elemiş, sadece bir anlamini göz önüne almiştir. İnsanoğlu anlama işlemini gerçekleştiren bilişsel bir sisteme sahip olduğu için, belirsizlik içeren bir tümcenin anlaşilmasi insan dil

Working memory (WM) plays a crucial role in learning a second language (L2). The ability to repeat words in an unknown language has been observed to predict success in learning that language. Conversely, decreased digit span and inability to repeat pseudowords have been related with failure in L2 acquisition. Not only digit span, but also ''word span'' and ''semantic span'' should be considered in WM analysis. In addition to the phonological system, a semantic system is proposed in the WM model for language. In bilinguals, brain activation patterns during WM tasks have been observed to be more complex when using a L2. Processing information in L2 is more demanding, and WM may be less efficient. It can be conjectured that language understanding defects in L2 are at least partially due to this decreased efficiency of WM in its phonological as well as in its semantic subsystem. Learning outcomes: The reader will be introduced to the basic assumptions of WM. It will be emphasized that WM is significantly involved in the ability to learn a L2. Cross-linguistic differences in digit span will be analyzed. It will be concluded that despite digit span and word span are affected by different variables, ''semantic span'' may be similar across languages. Words in a L2 function as low frequency words, and hence, semantic search takes longer and WM is less efficient. It will be concluded that in addition to the ''phonological system,'' the WM model should include a ''semantic system,'' involving a ''semantic store'' and a ''semantic search'' process. #

The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a childÕs text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a simple word-by-word comprehension strategy and to integrate figurative meaning into contextual information. In a preliminary phase, we used a standardized battery of tests to assess the ability of second graders and fourth graders to comprehend written texts. Three groups were identified at each age level: good, medium, and poor comprehenders. Children were then presented with familiar idiomatic expressions which also have a literal meaning (e.g., ''break the ice''). Idioms were embedded in short stories: in Experiment 1 only the idiomatic interpretation was contextually appropriate, in Experiment 2 a literal reading of the string was also plausible in the context. A multiple-choice task was used in both experiments: children were asked to choose one answer among three corresponding to: (a) the idiomatic meaning; (b) the literal meaning; and (c) an interpretation contextually appropriate but not connected with the idiomatic or literal meaning of the idiom string. The results of both experiments showed that the ability to understand a text indeed predicted childrenÕs understanding of idioms in context. To verify whether possible improvements in childrenÕs comprehension skills might produce an increase in figurative language understanding, Experiment 3 was carried out. A group of poor comprehenders who participated in Experiments 1 and 2 was tested eight months later. The results of Experiment 3 showed that children whose general comprehension skills improved their performance on an idiom comprehension test.

Embodied theories of conceptual knowledge suggest that sensory-motor representations of actions similar to those involved in the performance of the action described are recruited during language comprehension. The extent of this recruitment, however, and the brain mechanisms supporting this process remain unknown. Using fMRI, we investigated these issues by examining how people understand sentences that convey three different degrees of physical effort and by comparing this process to action execution. To understand the effort implied by the stimulus sentences, object and action properties associated with nouns and verbs respectively needed to be integrated: pushing the piano implies more physical effort than pushing the chair. Results indicated that a pre-motor region, which was also active in action execution, was sensitive to the degree of effort implied by the language. Interestingly, the anterior inferior frontal gyrus, a region typically associated with semantic processing, was not active in action execution but was nevertheless modulated by the effort implied. Inter-region correlations also suggested that this region was strongly correlated with premotor and posterior temporal regions. Overall, results suggest that (a) language understanding elicits action representations retaining a degree of specificity that was previously unsuspected, including unique properties of interactions with objects, and (b) these representations, which result from integrating the words' semantic information, may be computed within a collaborative neural network that includes the anterior inferior frontal gyrus.

Embodied approaches to language understanding hold that comprehension of linguistic material entails a situated simulation of the situation described. Some recent studies have shown that implicit, explicit, and relational properties of objects implied in a sentence are part of this simulation. However, the issue concerning the extent to which language sensorimotor specificity expressed by linguistic constituents of a sentence, contributes to situating the simulation process has not yet been adequately addressed. To fill this gap, we combined a concrete action verb with a noun denoting a graspable or non-graspable object, to form a sensible or non-sensible sentence. Verbs could express a specific action with low degrees of freedom (DoF) or an action with high DoF. Participants were asked to respond indicating whether the sentences were sensible or not. We found that simulation was active in understanding both sensible and non-sensible sentences. Moreover, the simulation was more situated with sentences containing a verb referring to an action with low DoF. Language sensorimotor specificity expressed by the noun, played a role in situating the simulation, only when the noun was preceded by a verb denoting an action with high DoF in sensible sentences. The simulation process in understanding non-sensible sentences evoked both the representations related to the verb and to the noun, these remaining separated rather than being integrated as in sensible sentences. Overall our findings are in keeping with embodied approaches to language understanding and suggest that the language sensorimotor specificity of sentence constituents affects the extent to which the simulation is situated. ª

The paper presents a new method for extracting and positioning contours of moving objects. The method is applicable in the surveillance of elderly individuals and facilitates the detection of critical situations when the elderly individuals find themselves in need of immediate help. For this, single frames from the video sequence are extracted in regular time intervals and the position of the human body is analyzed. The position is traced using the body contours. For the surveillance, a static video camera is used. The body contours extraction is performed using two consecutive filters: the first -for the adaptive texture suppression, and the second -for the contours extraction. The main presumption is that the environment is known and this makes the influence of multiple variable parameters (illumination, shadows, etc.) lower. A Fourier descriptor is used for the body position analysis.

ate character recognition results are used to improve the segmentation. The overall recognition results are good enough for use in news indexing. Performing Video OCR on news video and combining its results with other video understanding techniques will improve the overall understanding of the news video content.

The study of processes underlying the interpretation of language often produces evidence that they are complete and occur incrementally. However, computational linguistics has shown that interpretations are often effective even if they are underspecified. We present evidence that similar underspecified representations are used by humans during comprehension, drawing on a scattered and varied literature. We also show how linguistic properties of focus, subordination and focalization can control depth of processing, leading to underspecified representations. Modulation of degrees of specification might provide a way forward in the development of models of the processing underlying language understanding.

C.W. Woo et al. and to probe for possible misconceptions. The natural language understanding component uses a cascade of finite-state machines. The generation is based on lexical functional grammar. Results: Results of experiments with pretests and posttests have shown that using the system for an hour produces significant learning gains and also that even this brief use improves the student's ability to solve problems more then reading textual material on the topic. Student surveys tell us that students like the system and feel that they learn from it. The system is now in regular use in the first-year physiology course at Rush Medical College. Conclusion: We conclude that the CIRCSIM-Tutor system demonstrates that intelligent tutoring systems can implement effective natural language dialogue with current language technology. #

Simulating human language understanding on the computer is a great challenge. A way to approach it is to represent natural language meanings in logic, and to use logical provers to determine what does and does not follow from a text. What logic is best to use and how natural language meanings are best represented in it are far from trivial questions. This thesis focuses on semantic representation in deep parsing. It describes the Delilah parser and generator for Dutch, which computes semantic representations for sentences, discussing several issues and proposing some further improvements to the system. A style of logical form is developed that is optimized for inference in mainly two ways. One is the implementation of event semantics for verbs and nominalizations and with underlying states for intersective adjectives and their corresponding abstract nouns. This makes many entailments follow straightforwardly. The second is the introduction of Flat Logical Form, as an alternative to ...

A substantial part of language understanding depends on our previous experiences, but part of it consists of the creation of new meanings. Such new meanings cannot be retrieved from memory but still have to be constructed. The goals of this article were: first, to explore the nature of new meaning creation, and second, to test abstract symbol theories against embodied theories of meaning. We presented context-setting sentences followed by a test sentence to which ERPs were recorded that described a novel sensible or novel senseless situation (e.g., "The boys searched for branches/bushes [sensible/senseless] with which they went drumming..."). Novel sensible contexts that were not associatively nor semantically related were matched to novel senseless contexts in terms of familiarity and semantic similarity by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Abstract symbol theories like LSA cannot explain facilitation for novel sensible situations, whereas the embodied theory of Glenberg and Robertson [Glenberg, A.M., Robertson, D.A., 2000. Symbol grounding and meaning: A comparison of high-dimensional and embodied theories of meaning. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 379-401.] in which meaning is grounded in perception and action can account for facilitation. Experiment 1 revealed an N400 effect in a sensibility judgment task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this effect generalizes to a situation in which participants read for comprehension. Our findings support the following conclusions: First, participants can establish new meanings not stored in memory.

Intelligent tasks, such as visual perception, auditory perception, and language understanding require the construction of good internal representations of the world (or "features"), which must be invariant to irrelevant variations of the input while, preserving relevant information. A major question for Machine Learning is how to learn such good features automatically. Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) are a biologicallyinspired trainable architecture that can learn invariant features. Each stage in a ConvNets is composed of a filter bank, some non-linearities, and feature pooling layers. With multiple stages, a ConvNet can learn multi-level hierarchies of features. While ConvNets have been successfully deployed in many commercial applications from OCR to video surveillance, they require large amounts of labeled training samples. We describe new unsupervised learning algorithms, and new non-linear stages that allow ConvNets to be trained with very few labeled samples. Applications to visual object recognition and vision navigation for off-road mobile robots are described.

A substantial part of language understanding depends on our previous experiences, but part of it consists of the creation of new meanings. Such new meanings cannot be retrieved from memory but still have to be constructed. The goals of this article were: first, to explore the nature of new meaning creation, and second, to test abstract symbol theories against embodied theories of meaning. We presented context-setting sentences followed by a test sentence to which ERPs were recorded that described a novel sensible or novel senseless situation (e.g., "The boys searched for branches/bushes [sensible/senseless] with which they went drumming..."). Novel sensible contexts that were not associatively nor semantically related were matched to novel senseless contexts in terms of familiarity and semantic similarity by Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Abstract symbol theories like LSA cannot explain facilitation for novel sensible situations, whereas the embodied theory of Glenberg and Robertson [Glenberg, A.M., Robertson, D.A., 2000. Symbol grounding and meaning: A comparison of high-dimensional and embodied theories of meaning. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 379-401.] in which meaning is grounded in perception and action can account for facilitation. Experiment 1 revealed an N400 effect in a sensibility judgment task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this effect generalizes to a situation in which participants read for comprehension. Our findings support the following conclusions: First, participants can establish new meanings not stored in memory.

Digital video is rapidly becoming an important source for information, entertainment and a host of multimedia applications. With the size of these collections growing to thousands of hours, technology is needed to effectively browse segments in a short time without losing the content of the video. We propose a method to extract the significant audio and video information and create a "skim" video which represents a short synopsis of the original. The extraction of significant information, such as specific objects, audio keywords and relevant video structure, is made possible through the integration of techniques in image and language understanding. The resulting skim is much smaller, and retains the essential content of the original segment. 0

Extracting temporal information from raw text is fundamental for deep language understanding, and key to many applications like question answering, information extraction, and document summarization. Our long-term goal is to build complete temporal structure of documents and apply the temporal structure in other applications like textual entailment, question answering, dialog systems or others. In this paper, we present a first step, a system for extracting event, event features, temporal expression and its normalized values from raw text.

The present study investigates the dynamics of changes in interpretation of ambiguous sentences. The sentences used had alternative interpretations with different surface structures (bracketing). Continua were created by systematic manipulation of prosodic cues (relative foot duration), resulting in stimulus sentences that spanned the range between the two interpretations. Continua were presented to subjects who were requested to indicate as quickly as possible which meaning they perceived. The pattern of responses and response times revealed the presence of hysteresis. That is, when the values of prosodic parameters are congruent with both interpretations, the individual's recent history decides which meaning will be perceived. Thus, we can treat this categorization process as a transition from an initially stable meaning that loses stability with variations in prosody (our control parameter). The same underlying dynamics have been observed in studies of perception of syllables and aspects of visual perception. Apart from demonstrating the same characteristics of pattern formation at various levels of cognition, the study points to the usefulness of the dynamical approach in the investigation of language understanding.

Doherty and Perner (Metalinguistic awareness and theory of mind: just two words for the same thing? Cognitive Development, 13 (1998), 279±305) report that children's understanding of synonyms and false belief is dependent on an understanding of the representational mind. Experiment 1 extends this finding by examining children's understanding of homonyms. Children aged 3 and 4 years were asked to judge whether a puppet correctly selected the second member of a homonym pair. Performance on this task was strongly associated with performance on the false belief task even after chronological and verbal mental age had been accounted for. Experiment 2 incorporated two new tasks: a synonyms task and an adjectives task. Understanding of synonyms and homonyms significantly predicted performance on the false belief task. However, once chronological age was accounted for, only performance on the homonyms task did so. The difficulty experienced on the homonyms task was not due to a reluctance to acknowledge that the puppet can point to a different picture when the the same word label is used twice. Children had no difficulty on the adjectives task when the puppet had to point to a different picture described using the same adjective. The suggestion that the understanding of synonyms, homonyms and false belief are related by a common insight into the representational mind is therefore not supported.

Although people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) often have severe problems with pragmatic aspects of language, little is known about their pragmatic reasoning. We carried out a behavioral study on highfunctioning adults with autistic disorder (n = 11) and Asperger syndrome (n = 17) and matched controls (n = 28) to investigate whether they are capable of deriving scalar implicatures, which are generally considered to be pragmatic inferences. Participants were presented with underinformative sentences like ''Some sparrows are birds''. This sentence is logically true, but pragmatically inappropriate if the scalar implicature ''Not all sparrows are birds'' is derived. The present findings indicate that the combined ASD group was just as likely as controls to derive scalar implicatures, yet there was a difference between participants with autistic disorder and Asperger syndrome, suggesting a potential differentiation between these disorders in pragmatic reasoning. Moreover, our results suggest that verbal intelligence is a constraint for task performance in autistic disorder but not in Asperger syndrome.

Özet: Birden fazla anlama sahip herhangi bir sözcüğün tümce içerisindeki yeri önemli olmaksızın, hangi anlamda olduğu ile ilgili genellikle bir belirsizlik mevcuttur. Kişi, anlam belirsizliği olan bir tümceyi anladığı zaman belirsizliğe neden olan sözcüğün diğer anlamlarını elemiş, sadece bir anlamını göz önüne almıştır. İnsanoğlu anlama işlemini gerçekleştiren bilişsel bir sisteme sahip olduğu için, belirsizlik içeren bir tümcenin anlaşılması insan dil anlama sisteminde olası anlam kümesi içinden uygun anlamın seçilmesidir. Bu belirsizlik durumunun sözcüğün uygulanma şekline göre uygun algoritmaların kullanılması ile çözümlenmesi doğal dil işlemleme alanındaki çalışmalarla başlamış, hesaplamalı dilbilim çalışmalarının yaygınlaşması ile daha da önem kazanmıştır. Sözcük anlamlarının belirginleştirilmesi çalışmaları, dilin doğasını inceleyen dilbilim çalışmaları, metin veya konuşmaların çevirisinin yapıldığı bilgisayarlı çeviri sistemleri, bilgi yönetimi teknolojisi olarak kullanılan bilgi geri getirimi ve çıkarımı, İnternet üzerinde arama motorlarının tasarımı gibi çok geniş uygulama alanına sahiptir.

This paper raises the question of the aim and scope of formal research on dialogue. Two possible answers are distinguished -the "engineering" and the "simulation" viewand an argument against the soundness of the "simulation" position is reviewed. This argument centres on the (im)possibility of formalising the context (or "background") needed for human-level language understanding. This argument is then applied to formal dialogue research and some consequences are discussed.

This study investigates the relationship of theory of mind and inhibitory control in three samples from Europe, Africa and Latin America differing in relevant socioeconomic and psychological background. The relationship between false belief understanding and inhibitory control was tested using samples of 3-to 5-year-old preschoolers from Germany (N = 116), Costa Rica (N = 82) and Cameroon (N = 116). Inhibitory control and theory of mind were examined using test batteries. Age, gender, siblings, language understanding and mother's education were controlled. Results of regression analyses controlling for moderating effects of culture show a culture-independent relation between conflict inhibition and false belief understanding while delay inhibition is not a significant predictor for false belief understanding across cultures. Conflict inhibition is discussed as a universal developmental prerequisite for the development of theory of mind in the preschool years.

We present a natural-language customer service application for a telephone banking call center, developed as part of the AMITIÉS dialogue project (Automated Multilingual Interaction with Information and Services). Our dialogue system, based on empirical data gathered from real call-center conversations, features data-driven techniques that allow for spoken language understanding despite speech recognition errors, as well as mixed system/customer initiative and spontaneous conversation.

Embodied approaches to language understanding hold that comprehension of linguistic material entails a situated simulation of the situation described. Some recent studies have shown that implicit, explicit, and relational properties of objects implied in a sentence are part of this simulation. However, the issue concerning the extent to which language sensorimotor specificity expressed by linguistic constituents of a sentence, contributes to situating the simulation process has not yet been adequately addressed. To fill this gap, we combined a concrete action verb with a noun denoting a graspable or non-graspable object, to form a sensible or non-sensible sentence. Verbs could express a specific action with low degrees of freedom (DoF) or an action with high DoF. Participants were asked to respond indicating whether the sentences were sensible or not. We found that simulation was active in understanding both sensible and non-sensible sentences. Moreover, the simulation was more situated with sentences containing a verb referring to an action with low DoF. Language sensorimotor specificity expressed by the noun, played a role in situating the simulation, only when the noun was preceded by a verb denoting an action with high DoF in sensible sentences. The simulation process in understanding non-sensible sentences evoked both the representations related to the verb and to the noun, these remaining separated rather than being integrated as in sensible sentences. Overall our findings are in keeping with embodied approaches to language understanding and suggest that the language sensorimotor specificity of sentence constituents affects the extent to which the simulation is situated. ª

We introduce the second of 2 special issues of Ecological Psychology that present papers from a conference, “Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter)action,” held at Gordon College in June 2009. The articles in this issue situate the study of language use in two kinds of context that are central to an understanding of “languaging” activities in the social settings in which they occur. The first is the context of dynamical systems theory. Wallot and Van Orden show how a dynamical systems approach can illuminate language use as the intentional and creative activity that it is. Cowley and Thibault illustrate the distributed language approach. Cowley follows Gibson (1979/1986) in comparing language understanding to picture perception. Thibault illustrates the wholly embedded nature of language use in an evocative example of 2 boys offering a description of aliens they have learned about in a story. All of the contributors emphasize language as embodied social action deeply embedded in the social contexts of talking. The articles in this issue and its predecessor, Ecological Psychology 22(4), offer valuable insights for development of an ecological theory of language use.

Abbreviations are common in biomedical documents and many are ambiguous in the sense that they have several potential expansions. Identifying the correct expansion is necessary for language understanding and important for applications such as document retrieval. Identifying the correct expansion can be viewed as a Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) problem. A WSD system that uses a variety of knowledge sources, including two types of information specific to the biomedical domain, is also described. This system was tested on a corpus of ambiguous abbreviations, created by automatically identifying the correct expansion in Medline abstracts, and found to identify the correct expansion with up to 99% accuracy.

We report on a fuzzy logic-based language understanding system applied to speech recognition. This system acquires conceptual knowledge from corpus data and organizes such knowledge into fuzzy logic inference rules. The system parses speech recognition results into conceptual structures in a robust manner, and thus is able to tolerate noise caused by speech recognition errors. We discuss the fuzzy inference rule learning method and explain its organization. Experimental results that demonstrate the ability of the system to deal with complex speech input instances are reported

This paper addresses the problem of Computer-Aided Speech and Language Therapy (CASLT). The goal of the work described in the paper is to develop and evaluate a semi-automated system for providing interactive speech therapy to the increasing population of impaired individuals and help professional speech therapists. A discussion on the development and evaluation of a set of interactive therapy tools, along with the underlying speech technologies that support these tools is provided. The interactive tools are designed to facilitate the acquisition of language skills in the areas of basic phonatory skills, phonetic articulation and language understanding primarily for children with neuromuscular disorders like dysarthria. Human-machine interaction for all of these areas requires the existence of speech analysis, speech recognition, and speech verification algorithms that are robust with respect to the sources of speech variability that are characteristic of this population of speakers. The paper will present an experimental study that demonstrates the effectiveness of an interactive system for eliciting speech from a population of impaired children and young speakers ranging in age from 11 to 21 years. The performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and subword-based pronunciation verification (PV) on this domain are also presented. The results indicate that ASR and PV systems configured from speech utterances taken from the impaired speech domain can provide adequate performance, similar to the experts' agreement rate, for supporting the presented CASLT applications.

We describe a comprehensive framework for narrative understanding based on Episodic Logic (EL). This situational logic was developed and implemented as a semantic representation and commonsense knowledge representation that would serve the full range of interpretive and inferential needs of general NLU. The most distinctive feature of EL is its natural language-like expressiveness. It allows for generalized quantifiers, lambda abstraction,

Language Understanding can be considered as the realization of a mapping from sentences of a natural language into a description of their meaning in an appropriate formal language. Under this viewpoint, the application of the Onward Subsequential Transducer Inference Algorithm (OSTIA) to Language Understanding is considered. The basic version of OSTIA is reviewed and a new version is presented in which syntactic restrictions of the domain and/or range of the target transduction can e ectively be taken into account. For experimentation purposes, a task proposed by Feldman, Lako , Stolcke and Weber (1990) for assessing the capabilities of language learning and understanding systems has been adopted and three semantic coding schemes have been de ned for this task with di erent sources of di culty. In all cases the basic version of OSTIA has consistently proved able to learn very compact and accurate transducers from relatively small training sets of input-output examples of the task. Moreover, if the input sentences are corrupted with syntactic incorrectness or errors, the new version of OSTIA still provides understanding results that only degrade in a gradual and natural way.

This paper addresses the problem of Computer-Aided Speech and Language Therapy (CASLT). The goal of the work described in the paper is to develop and evaluate a semi-automated system for providing interactive speech therapy to the increasing population of impaired individuals and help professional speech therapists. A discussion on the development and evaluation of a set of interactive therapy tools, along with the underlying speech technologies that support these tools is provided. The interactive tools are designed to facilitate the acquisition of language skills in the areas of basic phonatory skills, phonetic articulation and language understanding primarily for children with neuromuscular disorders like dysarthria. Human-machine interaction for all of these areas requires the existence of speech analysis, speech recognition, and speech verification algorithms that are robust with respect to the sources of speech variability that are characteristic of this population of speakers. The paper will present an experimental study that demonstrates the effectiveness of an interactive system for eliciting speech from a population of impaired children and young speakers ranging in age from 11 to 21 years. The performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and subword-based pronunciation verification (PV) on this domain are also presented. The results indicate that ASR and PV systems configured from speech utterances taken from the impaired speech domain can provide adequate performance, similar to the experts' agreement rate, for supporting the presented CASLT applications.

This study investigates the relationship of theory of mind and inhibitory control in three samples from Europe, Africa and Latin America differing in relevant socioeconomic and psychological background. The relationship between false belief understanding and inhibitory control was tested using samples of 3-to 5-year-old preschoolers from Germany (N = 116), Costa Rica (N = 82) and Cameroon (N = 116). Inhibitory control and theory of mind were examined using test batteries. Age, gender, siblings, language understanding and mother's education were controlled. Results of regression analyses controlling for moderating effects of culture show a culture-independent relation between conflict inhibition and false belief understanding while delay inhibition is not a significant predictor for false belief understanding across cultures. Conflict inhibition is discussed as a universal developmental prerequisite for the development of theory of mind in the preschool years.

We consider lexical operations and their representation in a unification based lexicon and the role of lexical semantic information. We describe a unified treatment of the linguistic aspects of sense extension and derivational morphological processes which delimit the range of possible coercions between lexemes and give a preliminary account of how default interpretations may arise.

A recently emerging view sees language understanding as closely linked to sensory and motor processes. The present study investigates this issue by examining the influence of processing action verbs and concrete nouns on the execution of a reaching movement. Fine-grained analyses of movement kinematics revealed that relative to nouns, processing action verbs significantly affect overt motor performance. Within 200 ms following onset, processing action verbs interferes with a concurrent reaching movement. By contrast, the same words assist reaching movement when processed prior to movement onset. The cross-talk between language processes and overt motor behavior provides unambiguous evidence that action words and motor action share common cortical representations and could thus suggest that cortical motor regions are indeed involved in action word retrieval.

Although the linguistic structure of speech provides valuable communicative information, nonverbal behaviors can offer additional, often disambiguating cues. In particular, being able to see the face and hand movements of a speaker facilitates language comprehension [1]. But how does the brain derive meaningful information from these movements? Mouth movements provide information about phonological aspects of speech . In contrast, cospeech gestures display semantic information relevant to the intended message . We show that when language comprehension is accompanied by observable face movements, there is strong functional connectivity between areas of cortex involved in motor planning and production and posterior areas thought to mediate phonological aspects of speech perception. In contrast, language comprehension accompanied by cospeech gestures is associated with tuning of and strong functional connectivity between motor planning and production areas and anterior areas thought to mediate semantic aspects of language comprehension. These areas are not tuned to hand and arm movements that are not meaningful. Results suggest that when gestures accompany speech, the motor system works with language comprehension areas to determine the meaning of those gestures. Results also suggest that the cortical networks underlying language comprehension, rather than being fixed, are dynamically organized by the type of contextual information available to listeners during face-to-face communication.

Probably the hardest test for a theory of brain function is the explanation of language processing in the human brain, in particular the interplay of syntax and semantics. Clearly such an explanation can only be very speculative, because there are essentially no animal models and it is hard to study detailed neural processing in humans. The approach presented in this paper uses well established basic neural mechanisms in a plausible global network architecture that is formulated essentially in terms of cortical areas and their intracortical and corticocortical interconnections. The neural implementation of this system shows that the comparatively intricate logical task of understanding semantico-syntactical structures can be mastered by a neural network architecture. The system presented also shows additional context awareness, in particular the model is able to correct ambiguous input to a certain degree, e.g. the input "bot show/lift green wall" with an artificial ambiguity between "show" and "lift" is correctly interpreted as "bot show green wall" since a wall is not liftable. Furthermore, the system is able to learn new object words during runtime.

The Scandinavian languages are so alike that their speakers often communicate, each using their own language, which Haugen (1966) dubbed SEMICOMMUNICATION. The success of semi-communication depends on the languages involved, and, moreover, can be asymmetric: for example, Swedish is more easily understandable for a Dane, than Danish for a Swede. It has been argued that non-linguistic factors could explain intelligibility, including its asymmetry. , however, found a high correlation between linguistic distance and intelligibility. This suggests that we need to seek linguistic factors that influence intelligibility, and that potentially asymmetric factors would be particularly interesting. Gooskens' distance techniques cannot capture asymmetry. The present paper attempts to develop a model of the success of semi-communication based on conditional entropy, in particular using the conditional entropy of the phoneme mapping in corresponding (cognate) words. Semantically corresponding words were taken from frequency lists and aligned, and the conditional entropy of the phoneme mapping in aligned word pairs was calculated. This gives us information about the difficulty of predicting a phoneme in a native language given a corresponding phoneme in the foreign language. We also examine the conditional entropy of selected word classes, such as native/loan and function/content words.

We explore the implications of an event-based expectancy generation approach to language understanding, suggesting that one useful strategy employed by comprehenders is to generate expectations about upcoming words. We focus on two questions: (1) What role is played by elements other than verbs in generating expectancies? (2) What connection exists between expectancy generation and event-based knowledge? Because verbs follow their arguments in many constructions (particularly in verb-final languages), deferring expectations until the verb seems inefficient. Both human data and computational modeling suggest that other sentential elements may also play a role in predictive processing and that these constraints often reflect knowledge regarding typical events. We investigated these predictions, using both short and long stimulus onset asynchrony priming. Robust priming obtained when verbs were named aloud following typical agents, patients, instruments, and locations, suggesting that event memory is organized so that nouns denoting entities and objects activate the classes of events in which they typically play a role. These computations are assumed to be an important component of expectancy generation in sentence processing.

Many intelligent agents need knowledge and information to support their reasoning and problem solving. The World Wide Web is a vast, open, accessible and free source of knowledge, but virtually all of it is encoded as natural language text–a form difficult for most agents to directly understand. We describe initial work on adapting a mature language understanding agent to process Web text and publish its output in the Semantic Web language OWL. This approach adds knowledge on the Web in a form designed for agents ...