Bernhard Schröder

University of Duisburg-Essen | uni-due · Institut für Germanistik

The frame concept from linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence is a theoretical tool to model how explicitly given information is combined with expectations deriving from background knowledge. In this paper, we show how the frame concept can be fruitfully applied to analyze the notion of mathematical understanding. Our analysis a...

We investigate the occurrence of disfluencies (lengthening, filled pauses, silent pauses, abandoned utterances, and repairs) in German infant-directed speech (IDS), as compared to German adult-directed speech (ADS). The corpus consists of speech of nine mothers talking to their toddler (IDS condition), or to an adult experimenter (once in a task wi...

Frames are a concept in knowledge representation that explains how the receiver, using background information, completes the information conveyed by the sender. This concept is used in different disciplines, most notably in cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence. This paper argues that frames can serve as the basis for describing mathema...

In this paper we present a perception study on the role of disfluent speech in forms of prosodic cues of uncertainty in question-answering situations. In our scenario the answer to each question was modeled by varying three prosodic cues: pause, intonation, and hesitation. The utterances were generated by means of an articulatory speech synthesizer...

Several studies have shown a correlation between the language-typological feature of grammatical gender and gender equality in a society. This study looks at a more fine-grained classification of typological realizations of grammatical gender among EU languages and relates it to data on gender-quality.

The aim of this contribution is to investigate the influence of logical tools on the development of semantic theories and vice versa. Pre-19th-century logic was limited to a few sentence forms and their logical interrelations. Modern predicate logic and later type logic, both inspired by investigating the meaning of mathematical sentences, widened...

The goal of this work is to give an overview of research conducted in the field of audiovisual prosody and uncertainty. We refer to previous studies investigating the relevance of prosodic cues for both the production and perception of uncertainty in natural conversation. Afterwards, we present our own experiments dealing with the role of prosodic...

In this paper, we present work on the modelling of uncertainty by means of prosodic cues in an articulatory speech synthesizer. Our stimuli are embedded into short dialogues in question-answering situations in a human-machine scenario. The answers of the robot vary with respect to the intended level of (un)certainty, the independent variables are i...

This paper deals with the modelling and perception of disfluencies in articulatory speech synthesis. The stimuli are embedded into short dialogues in question-answering situations in a human–machine scenario. The system is supposed to express uncertainty in the answer. We test the influence of delay, intonation, and filler as prosodic indicators of...

Die Anthropologie ist die Wissenschaft vom Menschen. Sie fächert sich in geistes- und naturwissenschaftlich orientierte Disziplinen auf, wobei für die Kognitionswissenschaft hauptsächlich die Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie (in Deutschland meist als ›Ethnologie‹ bezeichnet) — und deren Unterdisziplin Kognitionsethnologie (s. Kap. II. A.2) — sowie v...

We describe an interpretation study on the effect of accentua-tion, eyebrow movement and context on the exhaustive inter-pretation of answers. Our material consists of video record-ings of nine German speakers who read dialogues with embed-ded question-answer pairs in which the answer constituted the pragmatic focus of the utterance. For the dialog...

We present an experimental study on the effect of context and of audiovisual prosody on pragmatic focus interpretation. The audiovisual material was elicited from our previous production study on the exhaustivity of answers. Here we recorded nine German speakers who were instructed to read dialogues with embedded question-answer pairs in which the...

We present an empirical study on the variation of accent type and of context on pragmatic focus interpretation. The material was based on audio-recordings of nine German speakers, who were instructed to read dialogues with embedded questionanswer pairs in which the answers constituted the pragmatic focus utterance. Different accent types occurred f...

The Naproche system is a system for linguistically analysing and proof-checking mathematical texts written in a controlled natural language. The aim is to have an input language that is as close as possible to the language that mathematicians actually use when writing textbooks or papers. Mathematical texts consist of a combination of natural lang...

The Naproche CNL is a controlled natural language for mathematical texts. A recent addition to the Naproche CNL are plural statements. We discuss the collective-distributive ambiguity in the context of mathematical language, as well as pairwise interpretations of collective plurals. Additionally, we present a special scope ambiguity conjunctions gi...

This paper presents an empirical study on the interplay between audio and visual information for pragmatic focus marking. Nine German speakers were instructed to read dialogues with embedded question-answer pairs and varied context regarding certainty and exhaustivity. Results show that H* accompanied by a raising of eyebrows or head occurs signifi...

Automated theorem provers (ATPs) struggle to solve problems with large sets of possibly superfluous axiom. Several algorithms have been developed to reduce the number of axioms, optimally only selecting the necessary axioms. However, most of these algorithms consider only single problems. In this paper, we describe an axiom selection method for ser...

This paper presents a model of pragmatic focus interpretation that is assumed to be part of a complete language comprehen-sion model and that is inspired by Levelt's language processing model. The model is derived from our empirical data on the role of accentuation, prosodic indicators of uncertainty and context for pragmatic focus interpretation....

This paper discusses the semi-formal language of mathematics and presents the Naproche CNL, a controlled natural language for mathematical authoring. Proof Representation Structures, an adaptation of Discourse Representation Structures, are used to represent the semantics of texts written in the Naproche CNL. We discuss how the Naproche CNL can be...

The Naproche project (Natural language Proof Checking) was initiated by Bernhard Schröder and Peter Koepke at the Uni-versity of Bonn to focus on an interdisciplinary study of the semi-formal language of mathematics. A central goal of Naproche is to develop a controlled natural language (CNL) for mathematical texts and adapted proof checking softwa...

chulz Approaching the Logic of Conversational Implicatures 11:30--12:00 Marian Counihan Natural language in the psychology lab 12:00--14:00 LUNCH BREAK 14:00--14:30 Hans-Christian Schmitz Stop thinking! --- Discourse particles block your mind 14:30--15:00 Bernhard Fisseni Something empirical about focus 15:30--16:00 Bernhard Schroder Neuroevolution...

ILLC-Day 2 in Bonn "Language" was the third installment of a series of Amsterdam-Bonn collaborative workshops, after LiB-Day in Amsterdam (June 30, 2003) and ILLC-Day in Bonn (November 30, 2003). These workshops are jointly organized by the ILLC and the collaboration Logic in Bonn (LiB) which is a group of logicians from four different institutes i...

In this paper we claim that eigentlich is an example of a particle that has no semantic (truth- conditional) meaning, but rather signals which role a speech act plays within the given discourse by blocking contextually salient conclusions that otherwise might be drawn by the recipient.

The German word "eigentlich" is used as an adjective, a modal adverb or a dis- course particle. The adjective, the adverb and the particle are etymologically and semantically related. "Eigentlich" is frequently used. There is disagree- ment on the meaning of "eigentlich". We analyse the meaning of the modal adverb and the discourse particle. We cla...

This paper presents an experimental study on the role of uncertainty and exhaustivity for audiovisual pragmatic focus production. We investigate whether audiovisual cues of uncer-tainty appear more often for the production of non-exhaustive answers than for exhaustive answers. Results for the audio modality suggest that rising intonation occurs mor...