Search results for "semantic"

Design, development and validation of a system for automatic help to medical text understanding

2020

Abstract Objective The paper presents a web-based application, SIMPLE, that facilitates medical text comprehension by identifying the health-related terms of a medical text and providing the corresponding consumer terms and explanations. Background The comprehension of a medical text is often a difficult task for laypeople because it requires semantic abilities that can differ from a person to another, depending on his/her health-literacy level. Some systems have been developed for facilitating the comprehension of medical texts through text simplification, either syntactical or lexical. The ones dealing with lexical simplification usually replace the original text and do not provide additi…

'Tell Us Only What You Know': Evidentiality in the Discourse of Participants in Spanish Trials

2019

El objetivo de esta propuesta es explorar el uso de la evidencialidad en los juicios españoles y su relación con las convenciones del género y los roles de los participantes en estos eventos discursivos. Para ello, basamos nuestro estudio en un análisis cuantitativo-cualitativo de un corpus transcrito de ensayos orales en español. La evidencialidad es una categoría semántico-funcional que incluye dispositivos lingüísticos que marcan la fuente de información detrás de las declaraciones del hablante. El marcado explícito de la fuente no es obligatorio en español; sin embargo, en géneros específicos (legal, parlamentario y académico), se convierte en una poderosa herramienta argumentativa para…

Belief reports and pragmatic intrusion: the case of null appositives

2008

2016

The neural systems supporting speech and sign processing are very similar, although not identical. In a previous fTCD study of hearing native signers (Gutierrez-Sigut, Daws, et al., 2015) we found stronger left lateralization for sign than speech. Given that this increased lateralization could not be explained by hand movement alone, the contribution of motor movement versus ‘linguistic’ processes to the strength of hemispheric lateralization during sign production remains unclear. Here we directly contrast lateralization strength of covert versus overt signing during phonological and semantic fluency tasks. To address the possibility that hearing native signers’ elevated lateralization ind…

Assessing natural metalinguistic skills in people with Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia

2019

Abstract Objective The aim of this paper is to assess whether the use of natural metalinguistic skills can be used to differentiate linguistic-communicative profiles of people with dementia (Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia in the behavioural and primary progressive aphasia variants) in the earliest stages of the disease. Method A sample of 180 people was selected. Sixty had Alzheimer’s disease, 20 had frontotemporal dementia of the behavioural variant, and 40 had frontotemporal dementia of the primary progressive aphasia variant (20 had non-fluent primary progressive aphasia and 20 had semantic dementia). The control group was composed of 60 healthy people with ages, gender,…

Mapping wordnets from the perspective of inter-lingual equivalence

2017

Mapping wordnets from the perspective of inter-lingual equivalence This paper explores inter-lingual equivalence from the perspective of linking two large lexico-semantic databases, namely the Princeton WordNet of English and the plWordnet ( pl. Slowosiec ) of Polish. Wordnets are built as networks of lexico-semantic relations between words and their meanings, and constitute a type of monolingual dictionary cum thesaurus. The development of wordnets for different languages has given rise to many wordnet linking projects (e.g. EuroWordNet, Vossen, 2002). Regardless of a linking method used, these projects require defining rules for establishing equivalence links between wordnet building bloc…

Word-Formation and Contextualism

2014

While there is, under the heading of “morphopragmatics”, some research on the relation of pragmatics and word-formation, especially with a focus on diminutives, the major theoretical models of word-formation do not account for the word-formation/pragmatics interface in any systematic fashion. Moreover, in recent contextualist approaches to the semantics/pragmatics interface, the typical grammatical unit referred to is the sentence (including words that constitute a sentence), but not word structure or the morpheme. Drawing on morphological data from German, I will show the influence of pragmatic processes and principles on word-formation, arguing that word structures are also units that may…

The Attributive/Referential Distinction, Pragmatics, Modularity of Mind and Modularization

2011

In this paper I deal with the attributive/referential distinction. After reviewing the literature on the issue, I adopt Jaszczolt's view based on default semantics. I relate her view to Sperber and Wilson's Principle of Relevance. I argue in favour of the modularity hypothesis in connection with pragmatic interpretations. I also discuss the issue of modularization a la Karmiloff-Smith in connection with default inferences and, in particular, referential readings of NPs. I reply to some considerations by Cummings and use data from referential/attributive uses of NPs to show that the modularity hypothesis is defensible.

Predicting Word Maturity from Frequency and Semantic Diversity: A Computational Study

2016

Semantic word representation changes over different ages of childhood until it reaches its adult form. One method to formally model this change is the word maturity paradigm. This method uses a text sample for each age, including adult age, and transforms the samples into a semantic space by means of Latent Semantic Analysis. The representation of a word at every age is then compared with its adult representation via computational maturity indices. The present study used this paradigm to explore to the impact of word frequency and semantic diversity on maturation indices. To do this, word maturity indices were extracted from a Spanish incremental corpus and validated, using correlation scor…

Les Expressions Figées des Verbes Ser et Estar Suivies de Prép X

1996

The present work is based on the methodological setting of the LADL studies. In order to establish the body subject to analysis, we selected only the fixed phrases N0 ser/estar Prep X. In this way, we have collected 1138 expressions involving estar Prep X, and 534 with ser Prep X. In order to classify these expressions, we have grouped them according to the number and form of their complements. As to the part pertaining to semantics, the alphabetical indices have allowed us to establish that, concerning ser and estar, all the formal schemes exists for both Spanish and french, at least under the form of fixed expressions. As to the part concerning translation, we have attempted to mesure the…