Conflict and cognitive control during sentence comprehension: recruitment of a frontal network during the processing of Spanish object-first sentences.

During sentence processing there is a preference to treat the first noun phrase found as the subject and agent, unless marked the other way. This preference would lead to a conflict in thematic role assignment when the syntactic structure conforms to a non-canonical object-before-subject pattern. Left perisylvian and fronto-parietal brain networks have been found to be engaged by increased computational demands during sentence comprehension, while event-reated brain potentials have been used to study the on-line manifestation of these demands. However, evidence regarding the spatiotemporal organization of brain networks in this domain is scarce. In the current study we used Magnetoencephalography to track spatio-temporally brain activity while Spanish speakers were reading subject- and object-first cleft sentences. Both kinds of sentences remained ambiguous between a subject-first or an object-first interpretation up to the appearance of the second argument. Results show the time-modulation of a frontal network at the disambiguation point of object-first sentences. Moreover, the time windows where these effects took place have been previously related to thematic role integration (300–500 ms) and to sentence reanalysis and resolution of conflicts during processing (beyond 500 ms post-stimulus). These results point to frontal cognitive control as a putative key mechanism which may operate when a revision of the sentence structure and meaning is necessary

Sentence selection for improving the tuning process of a statistical machine translation system

Este artículo describe una estrategia de selección de frases para hacer el ajuste de un sistema de traducción estadístico basado en el decodificador Moses que traduce del español al inglés. En este trabajo proponemos dos posibilidades para realizar esta selección de las frases del corpus de validación que más se parecen a las frases que queremos traducir (frases de test en lengua origen). Con esta selección podemos obtener unos mejores pesos de los modelos para emplearlos después en el proceso de traducción y, por tanto, mejorar los resultados. Concretamente, con el método de selección basado en la medida de similitud propuesta en este artículo, mejoramos la medida BLEU del 27,17% con el corpus de validación completo al 27,27% seleccionando las frases para el ajuste. Estos resultados se acercan a los del experimento ORACLE: se utilizan las mismas frases de test para hacer el ajuste de los pesos. En este caso, el BLEU obtenido es de 27,51%.

Contradictio in terminis: dialéctica de la ambigüedad en la arquitectura contemporánea

The twentieth century brought a new sensibility characterized by the discredit of cartesian rationality and the weakening of universal truths, related with aesthetic values as order, proportion and harmony. In the middle of the century, theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Rudolf Arnheim and Anton Ehrenzweig warned about the transformation developed by the artistic field. Contemporary aesthetics seemed to have a new goal: to deny the idea of art as an organized, finished and coherent structure. The order had lost its privileged position. Disorder, probability, arbitrariness, accidentality, randomness, chaos, fragmentation, indeterminacy... Gradually new terms were coined by aesthetic criticism to explain what had been happening since the beginning of the century. The first essays on the matter sought to provide new interpretative models based on, among other arguments, the phenomenology of perception, the recent discoveries of quantum mechanics, the deeper layers of the psyche or the information theories. Overall, were worthy attempts to give theoretical content to a situation as obvious as devoid of founding charter. Finally, in 1962, Umberto Eco brought together all this efforts by proposing a single theoretical frame in his book Opera Aperta. According to his point of view, all of the aesthetic production of twentieth century had a characteristic in common: its capacity to express multiplicity. For this reason, he considered that the nature of contemporary art was, above all, ambiguous. The aim of this research is to clarify the consequences of the incorporation of ambiguity in architectural theoretical discourse. We should start making an accurate analysis of this concept. However, this task is quite difficult because ambiguity does not allow itself to be clearly defined. This concept has the disadvantage that its signifier is as imprecise as its signified. In addition, the negative connotations that ambiguity still has outside the aesthetic field, stigmatizes this term and makes its use problematic. Another problem of ambiguity is that the contemporary subject is able to locate it in all situations. This means that in addition to distinguish ambiguity in contemporary productions, so does in works belonging to remote ages and styles. For that reason, it could be said that everything is ambiguous. And that’s correct, because somehow ambiguity is present in any creation of the imperfect human being. However, as Eco, Arnheim and Ehrenzweig pointed out, there are two major differences between current and past contexts. One affects the subject and the other the object. First, it’s the contemporary subject, and no other, who has acquired the ability to value and assimilate ambiguity. Secondly, ambiguity was an unexpected aesthetic result in former periods, while in contemporary object it has been codified and is deliberately present. In any case, as Eco did, we consider appropriate the use of the term ambiguity to refer to the contemporary aesthetic field. Any other term with more specific meaning would only show partial and limited aspects of a situation quite complex and difficult to diagnose. Opposed to what normally might be expected, in this case ambiguity is the term that fits better due to its particular lack of specificity. In fact, this lack of specificity is what allows to assign a dynamic condition to the idea of ambiguity that in other terms would hardly be operative. Thus, instead of trying to define the idea of ambiguity, we will analyze how it has evolved and its consequences in architectural discipline. Instead of trying to define what it is, we will examine what its presence has supposed in each moment. We will deal with ambiguity as a constant presence that has always been latent in architectural production but whose nature has been modified over time. Eco, in the mid-twentieth century, discerned between classical ambiguity and contemporary ambiguity. Currently, half a century later, the challenge is to discern whether the idea of ambiguity has remained unchanged or have suffered a new transformation. What this research will demonstrate is that it’s possible to detect a new transformation that has much to do with the cultural and aesthetic context of last decades: the transition from modernism to postmodernism. This assumption leads us to establish two different levels of contemporary ambiguity: each one related to one these periods. The first level of ambiguity is widely well-known since many years. Its main characteristics are a codified multiplicity, an interpretative freedom and an active subject who gives conclusion to an object that is incomplete or indefinite. This level of ambiguity is related to the idea of indeterminacy, concept successfully introduced into contemporary aesthetic language. The second level of ambiguity has been almost unnoticed for architectural criticism, although it has been identified and studied in other theoretical disciplines. Much of the work of Fredric Jameson and François Lyotard shows reasonable evidences that the aesthetic production of postmodernism has transcended modern ambiguity to reach a new level in which, despite of the existence of multiplicity, the interpretative freedom and the active subject have been questioned, and at last denied. In this period ambiguity seems to have reached a new level in which it’s no longer possible to obtain a conclusive and complete interpretation of the object because it has became an unreadable device. The postmodern production offers a kind of inaccessible multiplicity and its nature is deeply contradictory. This hypothetical transformation of the idea of ambiguity has an outstanding analogy with that shown in the poetic analysis made by William Empson, published in 1936 in his Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson established different levels of ambiguity and classified them according to their poetic effect. This layout had an ascendant logic towards incoherence. In seventh level, where ambiguity is higher, he located the contradiction between irreconcilable opposites. It could be said that contradiction, once it undermines the coherence of the object, was the better way that contemporary aesthetics found to confirm the Hegelian judgment, according to which art would ultimately reject its capacity to express truth. Much of the transformation of architecture throughout last century is related to the active involvement of ambiguity in its theoretical discourse. In modern architecture ambiguity is present afterwards, in its critical review made by theoreticians like Colin Rowe, Manfredo Tafuri and Bruno Zevi. The publication of several studies about Mannerism in the forties and fifties rescued certain virtues of an historical style that had been undervalued due to its deviation from Renacentist canon. Rowe, Tafuri and Zevi, among others, pointed out the similarities between Mannerism and certain qualities of modern architecture, both devoted to break previous dogmas. The recovery of Mannerism allowed joining ambiguity and modernity for first time in the same sentence. In postmodernism, on the other hand, ambiguity is present ex-professo, developing a prominent role in the theoretical discourse of this period. The distance between its analytical identification and its operational use quickly disappeared because of structuralism, an analytical methodology with the aspiration of becoming a modus operandi. Under its influence, architecture began to be identified and studied as a language. Thus, postmodern theoretical project discerned between the components of architectural language and developed them separately. Consequently, there is not only one, but three projects related to postmodern contradiction: semantic project, syntactic project and pragmatic project. Leading these projects are those prominent architects whose work manifested an especial interest in exploring and developing the potential of the use of contradiction in architecture. Thus, Robert Venturi, Peter Eisenman and Rem Koolhaas were who established the main features through which architecture developed the dialectics of ambiguity, in its last and extreme level, as a theoretical project in each component of architectural language. Robert Venturi developed a new interpretation of architecture based on its semantic component, Peter Eisenman did the same with its syntactic component, and also did Rem Koolhaas with its pragmatic component. With this approach this research aims to establish a new reflection on the architectural transformation from modernity to postmodernity. Also, it can serve to light certain aspects still unaware that have shaped the architectural heritage of past decades, consequence of a fruitful relationship between architecture and ambiguity and its provocative consummation in a contradictio in terminis. Esta investigación centra su atención fundamentalmente sobre las repercusiones de la incorporación de la ambigüedad en forma de contradicción en el discurso arquitectónico postmoderno, a través de cada uno de sus tres proyectos teóricos. Está estructurada, por tanto, en torno a un capítulo principal titulado Dialéctica de la ambigüedad como proyecto teórico postmoderno, que se desglosa en tres, de títulos: Proyecto semántico. Robert Venturi; Proyecto sintáctico. Peter Eisenman; y Proyecto pragmático. Rem Koolhaas. El capítulo central se complementa con otros dos situados al inicio. El primero, titulado Dialéctica de la ambigüedad contemporánea. Una aproximación realiza un análisis cronológico de la evolución que ha experimentado la idea de la ambigüedad en la teoría estética del siglo XX, sin entrar aún en cuestiones arquitectónicas. El segundo, titulado Dialéctica de la ambigüedad como crítica del proyecto moderno se ocupa de examinar la paulatina incorporación de la ambigüedad en la revisión crítica de la modernidad, que sería de vital importancia para posibilitar su posterior introducción operativa en la postmodernidad. Un último capítulo, situado al final del texto, propone una serie de Proyecciones que, a tenor de lo analizado en los capítulos anteriores, tratan de establecer una relectura del contexto arquitectónico actual y su evolución posible, considerando, en todo momento, que la reflexión en torno a la ambigüedad todavía hoy permite vislumbrar nuevos horizontes discursivos. Cada doble página de la Tesis sintetiza la estructura tripartita del capítulo central y, a grandes rasgos, la principal herramienta metodológica utilizada en la investigación. De este modo, la triple vertiente semántica, sintáctica y pragmática con que se ha identificado al proyecto teórico postmoderno se reproduce aquí en una distribución específica de imágenes, notas a pie de página y cuerpo principal del texto. En la columna de la izquierda están colocadas las imágenes que acompañan al texto principal. Su distribución atiende a criterios estéticos y compositivos, cualificando, en la medida de lo posible, su condición semántica. A continuación, a su derecha, están colocadas las notas a pie de página. Su disposición es en columna y cada nota está colocada a la misma altura que su correspondiente llamada en el texto principal. Su distribución reglada, su valor como notación y su posible equiparación con una estructura profunda aluden a su condición sintáctica. Finalmente, el cuerpo principal del texto ocupa por completo la mitad derecha de cada doble página. Concebido como un relato continuo, sin apenas interrupciones, su papel como responsable de satisfacer las demandas discursivas que plantea una investigación doctoral está en correspondencia con su condición pragmática.

Language identification based on a discriminative text categorization technique

In this paper, we describe new results and improvements to a lan-guage identification (LID) system based on PPRLM previously introduced in [1] and [2]. In this case, we use as parallel phone recognizers the ones provided by the Brno University of Technology for Czech, Hungarian, and Russian lan-guages, and instead of using traditional n-gram language models we use a lan-guage model that is created using a ranking with the most frequent and discrim-inative n-grams. In this language model approach, the distance between the ranking for the input sentence and the ranking for each language is computed, based on the difference in relative positions for each n-gram. This approach is able to model reliably longer span information than in traditional language models obtaining more reliable estimations. We also describe the modifications that we have being introducing along the time to the original ranking technique, e.g., different discriminative formulas to establish the ranking, variations of the template size, the suppression of repeated consecutive phones, and a new clus-tering technique for the ranking scores. Results show that this technique pro-vides a 12.9% relative improvement over PPRLM. Finally, we also describe re-sults where the traditional PPRLM and our ranking technique are combined.

Developing an information system for deaf

This paper presents the SAILSE Project (Sistema Avanzado de Información en Lengua de Signos Española ? Spanish Sign Language Advanced Information System). This project aims to develop an interactive system for facilitating the communication between a hearing and a deaf person. The first step has been the linguistic study, including a sentence collection, its translation into LSE (Lengua de Signos Española - Spanish Sign Language), and sign generation. After this analysis, the paper describes the interactive system that integrates an avatar to represent the signs, a text to speech converter and several translation technologies. Finally, this paper presents the set up carried out with deaf people and the main conclusions extracted from it.

The Spanish Travel Subjective Lexicon (STSL).

This paper presents a proposal for a recognition model for the appraisal value of sentences. It is based on splitting the text into independent sentences (full stops) and then analysing the appraisal elements contained in each sentence according to the previous value in the appraisal lexicon. In this lexicon, positive words are assigned a positive coefficient (+1) and negative words a negative coefficient (-1). We take into account word such as ?too?, ?little? (when it is not ?a bit?), ?less?, and ?nothing? than can modify the polarity degree of lexical unit when appear in the nearby environment. If any of these elements are present, then the previous coefficient will be multiplied by (-1), that is, they will change their sign. Our results show a nearly theoretical effectiveness of 90%, despite not achieving the recognition (or misrecognition) of implicit elements. These elements represent approximately 4% of the total of sentences analysed for appraisal and include the errors in the recognition of coordinated sentences. On the one hand, we found that 3.6 % of the sentences could not be recognized because they use different connectors than those included in the model; on the other hand, we found that in 8.6% of the sentences despite using some of the described connectors could not be applied the rules we have developed. The percentage relative to the whole group of appraisal sentences in the corpus was approximately of 5%.

Derivación deductiva de programas funcionales con patrones

Una de las dificultades principales en el desarrollo de software es la ausencia de un marco conceptual adecuado para su estudio. Una propuesta la constituye el modelo transformativo, que entiende el desarrollo de software como un proceso iterativo de transformación de especificaciones: se parte de una especificación inicial que va transformándose sucesivamente hasta obtener una especificación final que se toma como programa. Este modelo básico puede llevarse a la práctica de varias maneras. En concreto, la aproximación deductiva toma una sentencia lógica como especificación inicial y su proceso transformador consiste en la demostración de la sentencia; como producto secundario de la demostración se deriva un programa que satisface la especificación inicial. La tesis desarrolla un método deductivo para la derivación de programas funcionales con patrones, escritos en un lenguaje similar a Hope. El método utiliza una lógica multigénero, cuya relación con el lenguaje de programación es estudiada. También se identifican los esquemas de demostración necesarios para la derivación de funciones con patrones, basados en la demostración independiente de varias subsentencias. Cada subsentencia proporciona una subespecificación de una ecuación del futuro programa a derivar. Nuestro método deductivo está inspirado en uno previo de Zohar Manna y Richard Waldinger, conocido como el cuadro deductivo, que deriva programas en un lenguaje similar a Lisp. El nuevo método es una modificación del cuadro de estos autores, que incorpora géneros y permite demostrar una especificación mediante varios cuadros. Cada cuadro demuestra una subespecificación y por tanto deriva una ecuación del programa. Se prevén mecanismos para que los programas derivados puedan contener definiciones locales con patrones y variables anónimas y sinónimas y para que las funciones auxiliares derivadas no usen variables de las funciones principales. La tesis se completa con varios ejemplos de aplicación, un mecanismo que independentiza el método del lenguaje de programación y un prototipo de entorno interactivo de derivación deductiva. Categorías y descriptores de materia CR D.l.l [Técnicas de programación]: Programación funcional; D.2.10 [Ingeniería de software]: Diseño - métodos; F.3.1 [Lógica y significado de los programas]: Especificación, verificación y razonamiento sobre programas - lógica de programas; F.3.3 [Lógica y significado de los programas]: Estudios de construcciones de programas - construcciones funcionales; esquemas de programa y de recursion; 1.2.2 [Inteligencia artificial]: Programación automática - síntesis de programas; 1.2.3 [Inteligencia artificial]: Deducción y demostración de teoremas]: extracción de respuesta/razón; inducción matemática. Términos generales Programación funcional, síntesis de programas, demostración de teoremas. Otras palabras claves y expresiones Funciones con patrones, cuadro deductivo, especificación parcial, inducción estructural, teorema de descomposición.---ABSTRACT---One of the main difficulties in software development is the lack of an adequate conceptual framework of study. The transformational model is one such proposal that conceives software development as an iterative process of specifications transformation: an initial specification is developed and successively transformed until a final specification is obtained and taken as a program. This basic model can be implemented in several ways. The deductive approach takes a logical sentence as the initial specification and its proof constitutes the transformational process; as a byproduct of the proof, a program which satisfies the initial specification is derived. In the thesis, a deductive method for the derivation of Hope-like functional programs with patterns is developed. The method uses a many-sorted logic, whose relation to the programming language is studied. Also the proof schemes necessary for the derivation of functional programs with patterns, based on the independent proof of several subsentences, are identified. Each subsentence provides a subspecification of one equation of the future program to be derived. Our deductive method is inspired on a previous one by Zohar Manna and Richard Waldinger, known as the deductive tableau, which derives Lisp-like programs. The new method incorporates sorts in the tableau and allows to prove a sentence with several tableaux. Each tableau proves a subspecification and therefore derives an equation of the program. Mechanisms are included to allow the derived programs to contain local definitions with patterns and anonymous and synonymous variables; also, the derived auxiliary functions cannot reference parameters of their main functions. The thesis is completed with several application examples, i mechanism to make the method independent from the programming language and an interactive environment prototype for deductive derivation. CR categories and subject descriptors D.l.l [Programming techniques]: Functional programming; D.2.10 [Software engineering]: Design - methodologies; F.3.1 [Logics and meanings of programa]: Specifying and verifying and reasoning about programs - logics of programs; F.3.3 [Logics and meanings of programs]: Studies of program constructs - functional constructs; program and recursion schemes; 1.2.2 [Artificial intelligence]: Automatic programming - program synthesis; 1.2.3 [Artificial intelligence]: Deduction and theorem proving - answer/reason extraction; mathematical induction. General tenas Functional programming, program synthesis, theorem proving. Additional key words and phrases Functions with patterns, deductive tableau, structural induction, partial specification, descomposition theorem.

Translating bus information into sign language for deaf people

This paper describes the application of language translation technologies for generating bus information in Spanish Sign Language (LSE: Lengua de Signos Española). In this work, two main systems have been developed: the first for translating text messages from information panels and the second for translating spoken Spanish into natural conversations at the information point of the bus company. Both systems are made up of a natural language translator (for converting a word sentence into a sequence of LSE signs), and a 3D avatar animation module (for playing back the signs). For the natural language translator, two technological approaches have been analyzed and integrated: an example-based strategy and a statistical translator. When translating spoken utterances, it is also necessary to incorporate a speech recognizer for decoding the spoken utterance into a word sequence, prior to the language translation module. This paper includes a detailed description of the field evaluation carried out in this domain. This evaluation has been carried out at the customer information office in Madrid involving both real bus company employees and deaf people. The evaluation includes objective measurements from the system and information from questionnaires. In the field evaluation, the whole translation presents an SER (Sign Error Rate) of less than 10% and a BLEU greater than 90%.

Autonomous Acquisition of Natural Situated Communication

An important part of human intelligence, both historically and operationally, is our ability to communicate. We learn how to communicate, and maintain our communicative skills, in a society of communicators – a highly effective way to reach and maintain proficiency in this complex skill. Principles that might allow artificial agents to learn language this way are in completely known at present – the multi-dimensional nature of socio-communicative skills are beyond every machine learning framework so far proposed. Our work begins to address the challenge of proposing a way for observation-based machine learning of natural language and communication. Our framework can learn complex communicative skills with minimal up-front knowledge. The system learns by incrementally producing predictive models of causal relationships in observed data, guided by goal-inference and reasoning using forward-inverse models. We present results from two experiments where our S1 agent learns human communication by observing two humans interacting in a realtime TV-style interview, using multimodal communicative gesture and situated language to talk about recycling of various materials and objects. S1 can learn multimodal complex language and multimodal communicative acts, a vocabulary of 100 words forming natural sentences with relatively complex sentence structure, including manual deictic reference and anaphora. S1 is seeded only with high-level information about goals of the interviewer and interviewee, and a small ontology; no grammar or other information is provided to S1 a priori. The agent learns the pragmatics, semantics, and syntax of complex utterances spoken and gestures from scratch, by observing the humans compare and contrast the cost and pollution related to recycling aluminum cans, glass bottles, newspaper, plastic, and wood. After 20 hours of observation S1 can perform an unscripted TV interview with a human, in the same style, without making mistakes.

Autonomous Acquisition of Natural Language

An important part of human intelligence is the ability to use language. Humans learn how to use language in a society of language users, which is probably the most effective way to learn a language from the ground up. Principles that might allow an artificial agents to learn language this way are not known at present. Here we present a framework which begins to address this challenge. Our auto-catalytic, endogenous, reflective architecture (AERA) supports the creation of agents that can learn natural language by observation. We present results from two experiments where our S1 agent learns human communication by observing two humans interacting in a realtime mock television interview, using gesture and situated language. Results show that S1 can learn multimodal complex language and multimodal communicative acts, using a vocabulary of 100 words with numerous sentence formats, by observing unscripted interaction between the humans, with no grammar being provided to it a priori, and only high-level information about the format of the human interaction in the form of high-level goals of the interviewer and interviewee and a small ontology. The agent learns both the pragmatics, semantics, and syntax of complex sentences spoken by the human subjects on the topic of recycling of objects such as aluminum cans, glass bottles, plastic, and wood, as well as use of manual deictic reference and anaphora.

FATS: a framework for annotation of travel blogs based on subjectivity

This paper describes a framework for annotation on travel blogs based on subjectivity (FATS). The framework has the capability to auto-annotate -sentence by sentence- sections from blogs (posts) about travelling in the Spanish language. FATS is used in this experiment to annotate com- ponents from travel blogs in order to create a corpus of 300 annotated posts. Each subjective element in a sentence is annotated as positive or negative as appropriate. Currently correct annotations add up to about 95 per cent in our subset of the travel domain. By means of an iterative process of annotation we can create a subjectively annotated domain specific corpus.

Development of a genre-dependent TTS system with cross-speaker speaking-style transplantation

One of the biggest challenges in speech synthesis is the production of contextually-appropriate naturally sounding synthetic voices. This means that a Text-To-Speech system must be able to analyze a text beyond the sentence limits in order to select, or even modulate, the speaking style according to a broader context. Our current architecture is based on a two-step approach: text genre identification and speaking style synthesis according to the detected discourse genre. For the final implementation, a set of four genres and their corresponding speaking styles were considered: broadcast news, live sport commentaries, interviews and political speeches. In the final TTS evaluation, the four speaking styles were transplanted to the neutral voices of other speakers not included in the training database. When the transplanted styles were compared to the neutral voices, transplantation was significantly preferred and the similarity to the target speaker was as high as 78%.