Lexical Semantics - Science topic

The organization of the representational space underlying the neural coding of word meaning has long been a central question in cognitive science. Although there is general agreement that lexical semantic representations must make contact with sensory-motor and affective experiences in a non-arbitrary fashion, the nature of this relationship remain...

Medical natural language processing (NLP) systems are a key enabling technology for transforming Big Data from clinical report repositories to information used to support disease models and validate intervention methods. However, current medical NLP systems fall considerably short when faced with the task of logically interpreting clinical text. In...

The present study investigated acute cognitive effects of mindfulness meditation (MM) compared to an active control intervention in meditators (n = 22) and novices (n = 20) using a within-subject design. We analyzed reaction times in a digitized Stroop task at baseline, after a 10-minute MM session with a fundamental breathing exercise, and after a...

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a hot topic research in natural language processing, contradiction detection between sentences is a special case of NLI. This is considered a difficult NLP task which has a big influence when added as a component in many NLP applications, such as Question Answering Systems, text Summarization. Arabic Language is...

In today’s multilingual lexical databases, the majority of the world’s languages are under-represented. Beyond a mere issue of resource incompleteness, we show that existing lexical databases have structural limitations that result in a reduced expressivity on culturally-specific words and in mapping them across languages. In particular, the lexica...

Emotion categories configure the basic semantic knowledge of the human cognitive structure. Previous studies with people with Williams syndrome (WS) investigated their ability to process basic emotions and the dimensions of emotional valences. However, little is known about the categorization of emotions from the subordinate perspective of lexical...

We show that a single operation can account for three seemingly distinct properties of the semantics of cause and because. The properties are, firstly, their comparative nature: interpreting cause and because involves comparing what would happen in the presence of the cause (a positive condition) with what would happen in the absence of the cause (...

Introduction: Advances in natural language processing (NLP), speech recognition, and machine learning (ML) allow the exploration of linguistic and acoustic changes previously difficult to measure. We developed processes for deriving lexical-semantic and acoustic measures as Alzheimer's disease (AD) digital voice biomarkers. Methods: We collected...

Current lexica and machine learning based sentiment analysis approaches still suffer from a two-fold limitation. First, manual lexicon construction and machine training is time consuming and error-prone. Second, the prediction’s accuracy entails sentences and their corresponding training text should fall under the same domain. In this article, we e...

Currently, the detection of polarities in written texts is oriented to the lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels of the linguistic levels. This doctoral thesis seeks to contribute to the understanding of information from any context to automatically interpret its polarity, detecting characteristics at the lexical, syntactic, semantic, and phonolo...

The article implements an integrated approach to examining the mobilization potential of Twitter, which incorporates an analysis of intentions stated by the authors of hashtags and messages. The study cited in the article proceeds from J. Austin and J. Searle’s approach who argued that any utterance is essentially preparedness to perform an action,...

A major challenge for event structural theories that decompose verbs into event templates and roots relates to the syntactic distribution of roots and what types of event structures roots can be integrated into. ONTOLOGICAL APPROACHES propose roots fall into semantic classes, such as manner versus result, which determine root distribution (Rappapor...

Cross-linguistically, verbs have combinatorial patterns. When the semantics of a verb combines with the semantics of its internal arguments, different interpretations are derived. These interpretations can be literal or non-literal (Ameka 2019; Spalek 2015; Rappaport Hovav 2014; Bobuafor 2013, 2018; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2013; Ameka and Essegbe...

The idea that discourse relations are interpreted both by explicit content and by shared knowledge between producer and interpreter is pervasive in discourse and linguistic studies. How much weight should be ascribed in this process to the lexical semantics of the arguments is, however, uncertain. We propose a computational approach to analyze cont...

Low-resource, especially endangered languages are often overlooked in a majority of NLP tasks. For instance, in neural machine translation (NMT), the aim is to map text from one language into another. Although many advances have been made in developing NMT systems for natural language, little research has been done on understanding how the word ord...

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) with emphatic prosody such as ANY or EVER, and minimizers such as lift a finger or sleep a wink are known to generate particular contextual inferences that are absent in the case of non-emphatic NPIs such as unstressed any or ever. It remains an open question, however, what the exact status of these inferences is and...

Recent work on predicting category structure with distributional models, using either static word embeddings (Heyman and Heyman, 2019) or contextualized language models (CLMs) (Misra et al., 2021), report low correlations with human ratings, thus calling into question their plausibility as models of human semantic memory. In this work, we revisit t...

On closer inspection, the terms that distinguish this title appear less pertinent to a literary category than to doctrinal concepts or religious history. However, as semantic and conceptual fields of inquiry, their presence has important repercussions for Michelangelo’s poetic development (and his development as an artist). It is possible to invest...

This article addresses the verb morphology of Komnzo, a language of Southern New Guinea. It provides a description of verb indexing in Section 1, which is followed by a corpus analysis of a small class of verbs. Komnzo verb morphology encodes transitivity by distinct alignment patterns in the verb morphology, which I call ‘verb templates.’ Template...

This article focuses on the confluence of translation praxis and gender discourse in the teaching/ learning of This article focuses on the confluence of translation praxis and gender discourse in the teaching/ learning of translation in Moroccan higher education. Owing to a tremendous lack of literature on the subject of gender bias, particularly i...

The book pays attention to the issue of prefixal verbs, which are a frequent solution in Slovak for translating verbs of perception from French as a source language. Applying a linguistic lexico-grammatical approach, the aim of the publication is to identify verbs of perception, which in the process of translation have arisen through the word-forma...

This article explores the role of semantics in argument realization by providing a lexical semantic account of the contribution of applicative morphology in the Bantu language Kinyarwanda (Rwanda). I propose that applicativization is best analyzed through a constraint on the paradigmatic relationship between applied and non-applied variants of a ve...

Nonnative processing has been argued to reflect either reduced processing capacity or delayed timing of structural analysis compared to the extraction of lexical/semantic information. The current study simultaneously investigates timing and resource allocation through a time-frequency analysis of the intrinsic neural activity during syntactic proce...

This paper builds on a novel methodology of lexical semantics exemplified on lexical field theory by using several translations of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The present study, a large-scale collaboration, presents and compares the results for laugh, smile, grin, giggle, and other words for laughter behaviors across 14 languages a...

This chapter investigates how language contact with the Austronesian lingua franca, Alor Malay, leads to lexical semantic changes in the lexicon of the Papuan language, Abui. Using a variationist approach, it examines the use of a subset of verbs of visual perception, falling, change of state, across four age-groups of Abui-Alor Malay bilinguals. F...

Reseña del libro: Casado Velarde, Manuel (2021). Curso de semántica léxica del español. Pamplona: EUNSA (261 páginas, ISBN: 978-84-313-3572-4).

There have been new facets of multilateralism, which have motivated the realignment of traditional power relations established globally, especially regarding the United States and China. This new strategic environment can be observed in changes made to the Brazilian National Defense White Paper (LBDN) of 2020, as well as in the dialectic between wh...

Semantic domain refers to words that share common semantic properties and are positioned in a specific area based on the semantic relations between them. This study aims to classify the semantic domain of Aqidah through the structure of semantic relations to overcome the vagueness that occurs in Kamus Dewan Perdana (KDP) and al-Muʿjam al-Wasit (MW)...

Coercion is an inferential strategy used to resolve conflict between an operator and its argument. Such conflicts are resolved in favor of the semantic requirements of the operator (Talmy 2000). Jackendoff (1997) and De Swart (1998), among others, represent coercion through type-shifting operators that intervene between an aspectual operator and it...

The goal of this study was to evaluate if the lexical-semantic organization of Group I (high-proficient bilinguals) was comparable to that of Group II (low-proficient bilinguals), as measured by reaction time and name accuracy scores. We can determine if there is a difference in lexical semantic structure between the two groups by evaluating the sp...

Cognitive ageing is often associated with slower lexical processing, which might influence both language production and comprehension. Words are typically used in context, which can further influence word processing and potential age differences. However, it remains unclear how older adults are affected by context during reading. Older adults are r...

Word Formation Guide (WFG) – one of the services of the Information System of Resources of the Lithuanian Language E. kalba (E -Language). It is intended to quickly and concisely introduce the means of word formation of Lithuanian nouns and the essential regularities of their formation. This guide is intended for the general public, but may also be...

O estudo tem como objetivo analisar as unidades léxicas no vocabulário do romance d’A Pedra do Reino de Ariano Suassuna. Os pressupostos teóricos da Semântica Lexical e da Fraseologia orientam a análise das lexias. Para entender as relações e significados estabelecidos pelos elementos que fazem parte do trabalho, foi privilegiada uma metodologia qu...

This article presents the first steps in the investigation of the potential for digital storytelling and digital museums to be used as instruments for access, as enablers of epistemic and poietic agency. Digital storytelling and migration museums are used as a case study to explore in what ways digital storytelling impacts meaning-making processes...

Word representation paradigms situate lexical meaning at different levels of abstraction. Distributional and static embedding models generate a single vector per word type which is an aggregate across the instances of the word in a corpus. Contextual language models, on the contrary, directly capture the meaning of individual word instances. The go...

Extensive research has shown that children’s early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. Abstract word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with age-o...

This paper introduces and discusses the notion of Serial Verb Reduplication (SVR) in two Mabia languages of West Africa, Dagaare and Kusaal. The authors show that the phenomenon of SVRs, though under-represented in the literature, has a wide scope occurrence in natural language usage within serializing languages. Theoretically, two lexical semantic...

We discuss two kinds of semantics relevant to Computer Vision (CV) systems - Visual Semantics and Lexical Semantics. While visual semantics focus on how humans build concepts when using vision to perceive a target reality, lexical semantics focus on how humans build concepts of the same target reality through the use of language. The lack of coinci...

Paper 8: "Gegen den Angeklagten wurde daher auf die Todesstrafe als die allein angemessene Sühne seiner Schuld erkannt": Adjectival indeterminacy and the discursive legitimation of capital punishment in National Socialism Daniel Green, Paul Schwarzenbacher, Barbara Justen, Lara Badrel-Din, Laura Levstock, René Foidl Austrian Association for Legal L...

El idioma quechua sur peruano no solo varía según la ubicación geográfica, sino también en función de los registros socialmente determinados que se asocian a los hablantes de diferentes posiciones sociales; los cuales se distinguen en la fonología, la sintaxis, la semántica léxica y la pragmática. Es especialmente notable la estructura fonética art...

Two recent publications on compositional aspect (CA) and the article-aspect interplay (AAI) in English argue that these cross-language phenomena are so fundamental that they must be taught to learners of English at higher levels and incorporated into the contents of comprehensive English grammars (CEGs). This paper fully endorses the idea that Engl...

Thematic roles attempt to capture similarities and differences in verb meaning that are reflected in argument expression, with emergent generalizations that will contribute to the mapping from semantics to syntax. They belong to the semantics or syntax interface. If there is a verb present, it is usually most directly responsible for the thematic r...

Well-established cognitive models coming from anthropology have shown that, due to the cognitive constraints that limit our “bandwidth” for social interactions, humans organize their social relations according to a regular structure. In this work, we postulate that similar regularities can be found in other cognitive processes, such as those involv...

The study explores the military lexicon used in the modern war movies, such as “1917”, “Fury”, “Dunkirk”, “Hacksaw Ridge”, “Unbroken”, “Journey’s End” and “Midway”. The article examines military terms of modern-day war films as well as specialized methods of the interpretation of military lexicon into the translated language. The study discusses mi...

Annotation: The article introduces the study of conversion process in English and Karakalpak languages. The investigation considers some widely-spread transition of Word-formation in modern English and Karakalpak languages by means of conversional patterns. The ways of their secondary nomination are also being discussed, as well as acquiring additi...

Petra is one of the ritual dolls used by the Tenggerese people. Petra is generally used in funeral ceremonies as a symbol of ancestral spirits or people who have died, so petra is a doll that is respected by the local community. This study focuses on examining the plant lexicon that composes Petra dolls. This research was conducted to increase the...

Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual‐route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory handli...

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of irony detection in Dutch social media. To this end, we investigate both transformer models with embedding representations, as well as traditional machine learning classifiers with extensive feature sets. Our feature-based methodology implements a variety of information sources including lexical, semantic...

In this paper we investigate the Danish sense inventory from a paradigmatic and a syntagmatic perspective, respectively, and we present a collection of related lexical semantic resources that we have developed in collaboration between The Society for Danish Language and Literature and The University of Copenhagen. The resources comprise a Danish wo...

We propose rTopicVec, a supervised topic embedding model that predicts response variables associated with documents by analyzing the text data. Topic modeling leverages document-level word co-occurrence patterns to learn latent topics of each document. While word embedding is a promising text analysis technique in which words are mapped into a low-...

The purpose of this study was to reveal the lexical meanings of the words baligha, sadida, karima, ma'rufa, layyina, and maisura, which are contained in polite language phrases in the Quran: qaulan baligha, qaulan sadida, qaulan karima, qaulan ma'rufa, qaulan layyina, and qaulan maisura. The importance of revealing the lexical semantics is in order...

Recent research has revealed that neural language models at scale suffer from poor temporal generalization capability, i.e., the language model pre-trained on static data from past years performs worse over time on emerging data. Existing methods mainly perform continual training to mitigate such a misalignment. While effective to some extent but i...

In language teaching and learning, the correct use of vocabulary in the target language is as important as the language's grammar. This study investigates lexical semantic errors in the academic writing of 4th-year undergraduate students at the National University of Lesotho. Using the random sampling method, ten Action Research reports were select...

While relational nouns ( cousin ) are traditionally delineated in a binary and theory-dependent manner, this article approximates relationality as a continuous, objective corpus metric (Percent Possessive) – allowing for lexicon-wide exploration of which nouns are more or less relational and why. Comparing across nouns and accounting for the ontolo...

That words express a conceptual content is uncontroversial. This does not entail that their content should break down neatly into a grammatical part, relevant for language and to be analyzed in linguistic terms, and a conceptual part, relevant for cognition and to be analyzed in psychological terms. Various types of empirical evidence are reviewed,...

Objectives: This study presents the Korean version of the Right Hemisphere Language Battery (K-RHLB), reports the preliminary results in healthy subjects, and evaluates inter-and intra-rater reliability. Methods: Fifty-two healthy patients underwent the RHLB, which was adapted to the Korean language. The rater reliability of the Emphatic Stress Tes...

Current breakthroughs in natural language processing have benefited dramatically from neural language models, through which distributional semantics can leverage neural data representations to facilitate downstream applications. Since neural embeddings use context prediction on word co-occurrences to yield dense vectors, they are inevitably prone t...

Automatic Audio Captioning (AAC) refers to the task of translating an audio sample into a natural language (NL) text that describes the audio events, source of the events and their relationships. Unlike NL text generation tasks, which rely on metrics like BLEU, ROUGE, METEOR based on lexical semantics for evaluation, the AAC evaluation metric requi...

The topic of this article concerns the names of intimate body parts that appear in the performances of Polish female stand-up comedians. The aim of the considerations is to show the dominant semantic forms of naming intimate parts of the body and to indicate their functions in speech and genre discourse. The article begins with theoretical findings...

With the change in socio-political and educational contexts in global academia, the trend of writing academic papers has arisen among Nepali students and educators in higher education. However, many of them are still unfamiliar with the basic standard to be incorporated in an academic paper. In this context, this study examined the post-graduate st...

Background Headache medicine is largely based on detailed history taking by physicians analysing patients’ descriptions of headache. Natural language processing (NLP) structures and processes linguistic data into quantifiable units. In this study, we apply these digital techniques on self-reported narratives by patients with headache disorders to r...

Recent advances on the Vector Space Model have significantly improved some NLP applications such as neural machine translation and natural language generation. Although word co-occurrences in context have been widely used in counting-/predicting-based distributional models, the role of syntactic dependencies in deriving distributional semantics has...

Modelling semantic similarity plays a fundamental role in lexical semantic applications. A natural way of calculating semantic similarity is to access handcrafted semantic networks, but similarity prediction can also be anticipated in a distributional vector space. Similarity calculation continues to be a challenging task, even with the latest brea...

Recent advances on the Vector Space Model have significantly improved some NLP applications such as neural machine translation and natural language generation. Although word co-occurrences in context have been widely used in counting-/predicting-based distributional models, the role of syntactic dependencies in deriving distributional semantics has...

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a hot topic research in natural language processing, contradiction detection between sentences is a special case of NLI. This is considered a difficult NLP task which has a big influence when added as a component in many NLP applications, such as Question Answering Systems, text Summarization. Arabic Language is...

In this paper, we present the project An exploration of the semantic knowledge in vector models: polysemy, synonymy and idiomaticity, funded by the Xunta de Galicia within the program "Consolidación e estruturación de unidades de investigación competitivas e outras accións de fomento: Proxectos de Excelencia", with a duration of 5 years (2021-2026)...

This study addresses the relationship between the structural semantic properties of scalar change specified by change of state verbs denoting events of change of state and the aspectual interpretations these events depict. It considers Rappaport Hovav's argument that lexical semantic properties of event-denoting verbs determine their aspectual inte...

The contribution of action-perception systems of the brain to lexical semantics remains controversial. Here, we used high-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) in healthy adults to examine the role of primary (left hand motor area; HMA) and higher-order (left anterior inferior parietal lobe; aIPL) action areas in action-relat...

Abstract Aims and objectives: This study examines the licensing pattern and resulting syntactic distribution of the middle voice across object experiencer psych verbs in intermediate and advanced heritage Spanish bilinguals and Spanish-dominant sequential bilinguals. Design: Participants completed a judgment task with aural stimuli containing sent...

The focus of this thesis is broadly on the alignment of lexicographical data, particularly dictionaries. In order to tackle some of the challenges in this field, two main tasks of word sense alignment and translation inference are addressed. The first task aims to find an optimal alignment given the sense definitions of a headword in two different...

Argument mining tasks require an informed range of low to high complexity linguistic phenomena and commonsense knowledge. Previous work has shown that pre-trained language models are highly effective at encoding syntactic and semantic linguistic phenomena when applied with transfer learning techniques and built on different pre-training objectives....

In a bag‐of‐words model, the senses of a word with multiple meanings, for example ‘bank’ (used either in a river‐bank or an institution sense), are represented as probability distributions over context words, and sense prevalence is represented as a probability distribution over senses. Both of these may change with time. Modelling and measuring th...

Natural, conversational speech signals contain sources of symbolic and iconic information, both of which are necessary for the full understanding of speech. But speech intelligibility tests, which are generally derived from written language, present only symbolic information sources, including lexical semantics and syntactic structures. Speech inte...

This article explores the phenomenon of form-meaning mapping in Old English alliterative verse and presents a new account of its conceptual systematicity. It aims to find instances of regular correlation between the alliterative onsets and the lexical semantics of the words. The data include the alliterative /w/- and /s/-datasets, extracted from Be...

In today’s era, the English level of college students is very important. Different English classes can cultivate different English abilities. Smarter classroom is a concept put forward in the new century. This paper proposes the construction of a smarter classroom for college English with artificial intelligence and big data and proposes a deep neu...

The idea that ambiguity can be productive in data science remains controversial. Efforts to make scientific publications and data intelligible to computers generally assume that accommodating multiple meanings for words, known as polysemy, undermines reasoning and communication. This assumption has nonetheless been contested by historians, philosop...

Xià ‘down’ is a hot topic in the study of directional verbs in modern Chinese. Previous studies mainly focus on its syntactic property, syntax-semantics, and diachronic evolution. Few studies explore the lexical-semantic meanings of xià ‘down’, let alone taking a cross-dialectal or cross-linguistic perspective. This paper discusses the lexical sema...

Understanding how the brain makes meaning from language, a system of symbolic communication, is foundational to the field of neurosemiotics. Most studies investigating this process have used carefully selected word-, phrase-, or sentence-level stimuli, allowing for control of psycholinguistic variables. However, the majority of natural language (‘l...

Languages vary systematically in how semantic information is “packaged” in verbs and verb-related constructions. Mandarin Chinese contrasts typologically with English in its lexicalization of state change. Most Mandarin monomorphemic verbs are moot about or imply a state change, whereas many English monomorphemic verbs (e.g., kill, break) entail th...