Publications

Displaying 201 - 204 of 204
  • Zhang, Y., Amatuni, A., Crain, E., & Yu, C. (2020). Seeking meaning: Examining a cross-situational solution to learn action verbs using human simulation paradigm. In S. Denison, M. Mack, Y. Xu, & B. C. Armstrong (Eds.), Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2020) (pp. 2854-2860). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    To acquire the meaning of a verb, language learners not only need to find the correct mapping between a specific verb and an action or event in the world, but also infer the underlying relational meaning that the verb encodes. Most verb naming instances in naturalistic contexts are highly ambiguous as many possible actions can be embedded in the same scenario and many possible verbs can be used to describe those actions. To understand whether learners can find the correct verb meaning from referentially ambiguous learning situations, we conducted three experiments using the Human Simulation Paradigm with adult learners. Our results suggest that although finding the right verb meaning from one learning instance is hard, there is a statistical solution to this problem. When provided with multiple verb learning instances all referring to the same verb, learners are able to aggregate information across situations and gradually converge to the correct semantic space. Even in cases where they may not guess the exact target verb, they can still discover the right meaning by guessing a similar verb that is semantically close to the ground truth.
  • Zinn, C., Cablitz, G., Ringersma, J., Kemps-Snijders, M., & Wittenburg, P. (2008). Constructing knowledge spaces from linguistic resources. In Proceedings of the CIL 18 Workshop on Linguistic Studies of Ontology: From lexical semantics to formal ontologies and back.
  • Zinn, C. (2008). Conceptual spaces in ViCoS. In S. Bechhofer, M. Hauswirth, J. Hoffmann, & M. Koubarakis (Eds.), The semantic web: Research and applications (pp. 890-894). Berlin: Springer.

    Abstract

    We describe ViCoS, a tool for constructing and visualising conceptual spaces in the area of language documentation. ViCoS allows users to enrich existing lexical information about the words of a language with conceptual knowledge. Their work towards language-based, informal ontology building must be supported by easy-to-use workflows and supporting software, which we will demonstrate.
  • Zwitserlood, I., Ozyurek, A., & Perniss, P. M. (2008). Annotation of sign and gesture cross-linguistically. In O. Crasborn, E. Efthimiou, T. Hanke, E. D. Thoutenhoofd, & I. Zwitserlood (Eds.), Construction and Exploitation of Sign Language Corpora. 3rd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign Languages (pp. 185-190). Paris: ELDA.

    Abstract

    This paper discusses the construction of a cross-linguistic, bimodal corpus containing three modes of expression: expressions from two sign languages, speech and gestural expressions in two spoken languages and pantomimic expressions by users of two spoken languages who are requested to convey information without speaking. We discuss some problems and tentative solutions for the annotation of utterances expressing spatial information about referents in these three modes, suggesting a set of comparable codes for the description of both sign and gesture. Furthermore, we discuss the processing of entered annotations in ELAN, e.g. relating descriptive annotations to analytic annotations in all three modes and performing relational searches across annotations on different tiers.

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