Strudel: A corpus-based semantic model based on properties and types

Computational models of meaning trained on naturally occurring text successfully model human performance on tasks involving simple similarity measures, but they characterize meaning in terms of undifferentiated bags of words or topical dimensions. This has led some to question their psychological plausibility (Murphy, 2002; Schunn, 1999). We present here a fully automatic method for extracting a structured and comprehensive set of concept descriptions directly from an English part-of-speech-tagged corpus. Concepts are characterized by weighted properties, enriched with concept-property types that approximate classical relations such as hypernymy and function. Our model outperforms comparable algorithms in cognitive tasks pertaining not only to concept-internal structures (discovering properties of concepts, grouping properties by property type) but also to inter-concept relations (clustering into superordinates), suggesting the empirical validity of the property-based approach. Copyright © 2009 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.

Dignity and the Challenge to Liberty :Reading Andras Sajo's Constitutional Sentiments

This paper considers debates about the anti-liberal tendencies of the concept of “human dignity”, in particular those conceptions that are “expressivist”. My aim is to examine how far conceptions of dignity are expressivist, and if so what problems the concept of dignity understood in this way poses for liberty. I consider concerns about dignity’s potential illiberality, in particular the potential illiberality of respect-based conceptions of dignity, in the context of Professor András Sajó’s recent writing, illustrating the discussion with examples drawn from recent judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights regarding freedom of speech.