We present a number of experiments testing influential hypotheses about the meaning of definite descriptions (in languages with articles, represented here by German) and bare nominals (in articleless languages, represented here by Russian). Our results are in line with the commonly entertained hypothesis that definite descriptions convey uniqueness (if singular) or maximality (if plural), but fail to support two hypotheses about bare nominal interpretation, namely that singular bare nominals convey uniqueness ( Dayal 2004) and that topical bare nominals convey uniqueness/maximality ( Geist 2010, among many others). Uniqueness or maximality inferences are expected to arise via covert type-shifting under these approaches. Our results are compatible with what we take to be the null hypothesis, namely that bare nominals in articleless languages are existential and free of presuppositional semantics, even if they correspond—in their use—to definite descriptions ( Heim 2011).
{"title":"Definiteness, Uniqueness, and Maximality in Languages With and Without Articles","authors":"R. Šimík, Christoph Demian","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffaa002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We present a number of experiments testing influential hypotheses about the meaning of definite descriptions (in languages with articles, represented here by German) and bare nominals (in articleless languages, represented here by Russian). Our results are in line with the commonly entertained hypothesis that definite descriptions convey uniqueness (if singular) or maximality (if plural), but fail to support two hypotheses about bare nominal interpretation, namely that singular bare nominals convey uniqueness ( Dayal 2004) and that topical bare nominals convey uniqueness/maximality ( Geist 2010, among many others). Uniqueness or maximality inferences are expected to arise via covert type-shifting under these approaches. Our results are compatible with what we take to be the null hypothesis, namely that bare nominals in articleless languages are existential and free of presuppositional semantics, even if they correspond—in their use—to definite descriptions ( Heim 2011).","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"2008 1","pages":"311-366"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82542608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Many languages have particles that possess multiple logical functions. Take the Mandarin particle dou for example. Varying by the item it is associated with and the prosodic pattern of the environment it appears in, dou can trigger a distributivity effect, license a preverbal free choice item, or evoke an even-like inference. Considering universal grammar a simple system, we need to figure out, for a multi-functional particle, which of its functions is primary, what parametric variations are responsible for the alternations in function, and how these variations are conditioned. In this paper, I argue that the seemingly unrelated functions of dou share the same source: dou is a pre-exhaustification exhaustifier operating on sub-alternatives. Uniformly, dou affirms the truth of its propositional prejacent, negates the exhaustification of each sub-alternative, and presupposes a non-vacuity inference that there is at least one sub-alternative. Alternations in function result from minimal weakening operations on the semantics of sub-alternatives. In particular, sub-alternatives are primarily weaker alternatives, and the non-vacuity presupposition of dou yields a distributivity effect. When the semantics of sub-alternatives is weakened under particular syntactic or prosodic conditions, dou gains its other logical functions.
{"title":"Function Alternations of the Mandarin Particle Dou: Distributor, Free Choice Licensor, and 'Even'","authors":"Yimei Xiang","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz018","url":null,"abstract":"Many languages have particles that possess multiple logical functions. Take the Mandarin particle dou for example. Varying by the item it is associated with and the prosodic pattern of the environment it appears in, dou can trigger a distributivity effect, license a preverbal free choice item, or evoke an even-like inference. Considering universal grammar a simple system, we need to figure out, for a multi-functional particle, which of its functions is primary, what parametric variations are responsible for the alternations in function, and how these variations are conditioned. In this paper, I argue that the seemingly unrelated functions of dou share the same source: dou is a pre-exhaustification exhaustifier operating on sub-alternatives. Uniformly, dou affirms the truth of its propositional prejacent, negates the exhaustification of each sub-alternative, and presupposes a non-vacuity inference that there is at least one sub-alternative. Alternations in function result from minimal weakening operations on the semantics of sub-alternatives. In particular, sub-alternatives are primarily weaker alternatives, and the non-vacuity presupposition of dou yields a distributivity effect. When the semantics of sub-alternatives is weakened under particular syntactic or prosodic conditions, dou gains its other logical functions.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"430 1","pages":"171-217"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76762284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Children’s difficulty deriving scalar implicatures has been attributed to a variety of factors including processing limitations, an inability to access scalar alternatives, and pragmatic tolerance. The present research explores the nature of children’s difficulty by investigating a previously unexplored kind of inference—an exhaustivity implicature that is triggered by disjunction. We reasoned that if children are able to draw quantity implicatures but have difficulties accessing alternative lexical expressions from a scale, then they should perform better on exhaustivity implicatures than on scalar implicatures, since the former do not require spontaneously accessing relevant scalar alternatives from the lexicon. We conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 found that 4- to 5-year-olds consistently computed exhaustivity implicatures to a greater extent than scalar implicatures. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children are more likely to compute exhaustivity implicatures with disjunction compared to conjunction. We conclude that children often fail to derive scalar implicatures because (1) they struggle to access scalar alternatives and (2) disjunction (but not conjunction) makes subdomain alternatives particularly salient. Thus, the findings suggest that exhaustivity implicatures can be derived without reference to a scale of alternatives.
{"title":"Disjunction Triggers Exhaustivity Implicatures in 4- to 5-Year-Olds: Investigating the Role of Access to Alternatives","authors":"Nicole Gotzner, D. Barner, S. Crain","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz021","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Children’s difficulty deriving scalar implicatures has been attributed to a variety of factors including processing limitations, an inability to access scalar alternatives, and pragmatic tolerance. The present research explores the nature of children’s difficulty by investigating a previously unexplored kind of inference—an exhaustivity implicature that is triggered by disjunction. We reasoned that if children are able to draw quantity implicatures but have difficulties accessing alternative lexical expressions from a scale, then they should perform better on exhaustivity implicatures than on scalar implicatures, since the former do not require spontaneously accessing relevant scalar alternatives from the lexicon. We conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 found that 4- to 5-year-olds consistently computed exhaustivity implicatures to a greater extent than scalar implicatures. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children are more likely to compute exhaustivity implicatures with disjunction compared to conjunction. We conclude that children often fail to derive scalar implicatures because (1) they struggle to access scalar alternatives and (2) disjunction (but not conjunction) makes subdomain alternatives particularly salient. Thus, the findings suggest that exhaustivity implicatures can be derived without reference to a scale of alternatives.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"92 1","pages":"219-245"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85880991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dimitrios Skordos, Roman Feiman, Alan C. Bale, D. Barner
Preschoolers often struggle to compute scalar implicatures (SI) involving disjunction (or), in which they are required to strengthen an utterance by negating stronger alternatives, e.g., to infer that, “The girl has an apple or an orange” likely means she doesn’t have both. However, recent reports surprisingly find that a substantial subset of children interpret disjunction as conjunction, concluding instead that the girl must have both fruits. According to these studies, children arrive at conjunctive readings not because they have a non-adult-like semantics, but because they lack access to the stronger scalar alternative and, and employ doubly exhaustified disjuncts when computing implicatures. Using stimuli modeled on previous studies, we test English-speaking preschoolers and replicate the finding that many children interpret or conjunctively. However, we speculate that conditions which replicate this finding may be pragmatically infelicitous, such that results do not offer a valid test of children’s semantic competence. We show that when disjunctive statements are uttered in contexts that render the speaker’s intended question more transparent, conjunctive readings disappear almost entirely. INTERPRETATION OF DISJUNCTION 4 Older preschoolers and kindergarteners often struggle to compute scalar implicatures (SIs) involving quantifiers like some (Smith, 1980; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003) and logical operators like disjunction (Braine & Rumain, 1981; Chierchia et al., 2001). For example, when presented with an utterance containing some like the one in (1a), many children fail to derive the implicature in (1c). Similarly, when presented with a sentence like the one in (2a) many children fail to derive an exclusive interpretation of or characterized by (2c): (1) a. The boy took some of the bananas. b. The boy took all of the bananas. c. The boy took some, but not all of the bananas. (2) a. The girl has an apple or an orange. b. The girl has an apple and an orange. c. The girl has an apple or an orange, but not both. On most accounts, deriving a scalar implicature involves accessing a stronger alternative statement that is generated by replacing one scalar term (e.g., some, or) with another, stronger, one (e.g., all, and). For example, to derive an implicature for the sentence containing some in (1a), children must access and negate the stronger alternative in (1b). Likewise, to derive the implicature for the sentence containing or in (2a), children must access and negate the stronger alternative in (2b). On standard accounts of disjunction, a failure to do so should result in an inclusive interpretation, wherein the listener concludes that the utterance in (2a) is acceptable even when the girl has both an apple and an orange (Crain & Khlentzos, 2010; Gazdar, 1979; McCawly, 1993; Pelletier, 1977). INTERPRETATION OF DISJUNCTION 5 Children’s difficulties with SI have been variously attributed to general processing limitations (Chierchi
学龄前儿童通常很难计算涉及分离(或)的标量含义(SI)，在这种情况下，他们被要求通过否定更强的替代来加强话语，例如，推断“这个女孩有一个苹果或一个橘子”可能意味着她没有两个。然而，最近的报告令人惊讶地发现，相当一部分儿童将分离解释为结合，得出结论认为女孩必须同时拥有两个水果。根据这些研究，孩子们得出连词阅读不是因为他们有非成人的语义，而是因为他们无法获得更强的标量替代和，并且在计算含义时使用双重耗尽的分离。使用先前研究的刺激模型，我们测试了说英语的学龄前儿童，并重复了许多儿童解释或连词的发现。然而，我们推测，重复这一发现的条件可能在语用上是不恰当的，因此结果不能提供对儿童语义能力的有效测试。我们表明，当在使说话人的意图问题更加清晰的上下文中说出析取语句时，连词阅读几乎完全消失。年龄较大的学龄前儿童和幼儿园儿童经常难以计算涉及量词的标量含义(si)，比如一些(Smith, 1980;诺韦克,2001;Papafragou & Musolino, 2003)以及像析取这样的逻辑运算符(Braine & Rumain, 1981;Chierchia et al.， 2001)。例如，当呈现一个包含(1a)中类似内容的话语时，许多儿童无法推导出(1c)中的含义。同样，当看到(2a)这样的句子时，许多孩子不能得出(2c)的排他性解释或特征:(1)a.男孩拿了一些香蕉。男孩把所有的香蕉都拿走了。男孩拿了一些，但不是所有的香蕉。这个女孩有一个苹果或一个橘子。这个女孩有一个苹果和一个橘子。这个女孩有一个苹果或一个橘子，但不是两个都有。在大多数情况下，推导标量蕴涵涉及访问通过用另一个更强的标量项(例如，some, or)替换一个标量项(例如，all, and)而生成的更强的替代语句。例如，为了推导出(1a)中包含some的句子的含义，儿童必须访问并否定(1b)中更强的选项。同样，为了推导出(2a)中包含或的句子的含义，儿童必须访问并否定(2b)中更强的选项。在脱节的标准解释中，不这样做应该导致包容性解释，其中听者得出结论，即使女孩既有苹果又有橙子，(2a)中的话语也是可以接受的(Crain & Khlentzos, 2010;Gazdar, 1979;McCawly, 1993;佩尔蒂埃,1977)。对分离现象的解释5儿童的SI障碍被不同地归因于一般的处理限制(Chierchia等人，2001;莱因哈特,2004;Pouscoulous et al.， 2007)，难以理解实验者的交际目标(Musolino & Papafragou, 2003;Papafragou & Tantalou, 2004)，以及对语用错误更宽容的倾向(Katsos & Bishop, 2011)。最近，越来越多的证据开始支持这样一种说法，即关注儿童获得相关语言替代品的机会，这些替代品是推导SI所必需的(Barner et al.， 2011;Barner & Bachrach, 2010;Chierchia et al.， 2001;Foppolo et al.， 2012;Hochstein et al.， 2014;Tieu et al.， 2016;sk鄂尔多斯& Papafragou, 2016)。这些说法认为，获取必要的语言选择的困难可能解释了为什么儿童无法推导出含义，无论这种困难是由于缺乏尺度伴侣之间的联系，未能检测到哪些选择是上下文相关的，还是缺乏在考虑句子基本含义的同时计算选择的贡献的工作记忆能力。虽然大多数支持“获得替代”观点的研究都集中在儿童对话语的弱和强解释的条件上，这两种情况对成年人来说都是可行的，但最近的两项研究通过指出一种完全不同的证据形式来支持这一说法，即将分离解释为连接。具体来说，这些研究报告说，给出像上面(2a)这样的话语，一些孩子得出结论，女孩肯定吃了两种水果。在一项记录这一现象的研究中，Singh等人(2016)使用修改的真值判断任务(crainþton, 1998)测试了4岁和5岁的英语儿童(N=31)。令人惊讶的是，他们发现孩子们接受了析取语句(例如:
{"title":"Do Children Interpret 'or' Conjunctively?","authors":"Dimitrios Skordos, Roman Feiman, Alan C. Bale, D. Barner","doi":"10.1093/JOS/FFZ022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOS/FFZ022","url":null,"abstract":"Preschoolers often struggle to compute scalar implicatures (SI) involving disjunction (or), in which they are required to strengthen an utterance by negating stronger alternatives, e.g., to infer that, “The girl has an apple or an orange” likely means she doesn’t have both. However, recent reports surprisingly find that a substantial subset of children interpret disjunction as conjunction, concluding instead that the girl must have both fruits. According to these studies, children arrive at conjunctive readings not because they have a non-adult-like semantics, but because they lack access to the stronger scalar alternative and, and employ doubly exhaustified disjuncts when computing implicatures. Using stimuli modeled on previous studies, we test English-speaking preschoolers and replicate the finding that many children interpret or conjunctively. However, we speculate that conditions which replicate this finding may be pragmatically infelicitous, such that results do not offer a valid test of children’s semantic competence. We show that when disjunctive statements are uttered in contexts that render the speaker’s intended question more transparent, conjunctive readings disappear almost entirely. INTERPRETATION OF DISJUNCTION 4 Older preschoolers and kindergarteners often struggle to compute scalar implicatures (SIs) involving quantifiers like some (Smith, 1980; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003) and logical operators like disjunction (Braine & Rumain, 1981; Chierchia et al., 2001). For example, when presented with an utterance containing some like the one in (1a), many children fail to derive the implicature in (1c). Similarly, when presented with a sentence like the one in (2a) many children fail to derive an exclusive interpretation of or characterized by (2c): (1) a. The boy took some of the bananas. b. The boy took all of the bananas. c. The boy took some, but not all of the bananas. (2) a. The girl has an apple or an orange. b. The girl has an apple and an orange. c. The girl has an apple or an orange, but not both. On most accounts, deriving a scalar implicature involves accessing a stronger alternative statement that is generated by replacing one scalar term (e.g., some, or) with another, stronger, one (e.g., all, and). For example, to derive an implicature for the sentence containing some in (1a), children must access and negate the stronger alternative in (1b). Likewise, to derive the implicature for the sentence containing or in (2a), children must access and negate the stronger alternative in (2b). On standard accounts of disjunction, a failure to do so should result in an inclusive interpretation, wherein the listener concludes that the utterance in (2a) is acceptable even when the girl has both an apple and an orange (Crain & Khlentzos, 2010; Gazdar, 1979; McCawly, 1993; Pelletier, 1977). INTERPRETATION OF DISJUNCTION 5 Children’s difficulties with SI have been variously attributed to general processing limitations (Chierchi","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"35 1","pages":"247-267"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90220516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper revisits a study by Machery et al. (2004), suggesting that, in experimental versions of Kripke’s (1980) fictional cases on the use of proper names, Westerners are more likely than East Asian participants to show intuitions compatible with Kripke’s causal-historical (CH) theory of reference. We conducted two experiments, recruting participants from Norway and Bangladesh, either in English (experiment 1; N = 75) or in the participants’ native languages (experiment 2; N = 60), using modified cases and a new approach to data analysis. We replicated the results of Machery et al. (2004), but we show that the residual finding—i.e., that participants who are not aligned with CH produce responses consistent with a definite descriptions (DD) theory of reference—does not hold. Most participants in our experiments, and nearly all those who do not provide CH answers, respond as predicted by a theory that accommodates speaker’s reference in reasoning about uses of proper names, not according to DD. We suggest that cross-cultural variation in this task is real. However, explanations of variation within or across cultures need not invoke competing theories of reference (CH vs DD), and can be unified within a single, broadly Kripkean analysis that honors the basic distinction between semantic reference and speaker’s reference.
本文回顾了Machery等人(2004)的一项研究，该研究表明，在Kripke(1980)关于专有名称使用的虚构案例的实验版本中，西方人比东亚参与者更有可能表现出与Kripke的因果历史(CH)参考理论相一致的直觉。我们进行了两个实验，招募来自挪威和孟加拉国的参与者，一个是用英语(实验1;N = 75)或参与者的母语(实验2;N = 60)，使用修改的案例和新的数据分析方法。我们复制了Machery et al.(2004)的结果，但我们表明残差发现-即。不与CH一致的参与者产生与明确描述(DD)参考理论一致的反应，这一观点并不成立。在我们的实验中，大多数参与者，以及几乎所有没有提供CH答案的人，都按照一个理论的预测做出了反应，该理论考虑了说话者在推理专有名称使用时的参考，而不是根据DD。我们认为，这个任务中的跨文化差异是真实存在的。然而，对文化内部或跨文化差异的解释不需要引用相互竞争的指称理论(CH vs DD)，而是可以统一在一个单一的、宽泛的Kripkean分析中，该分析尊重语义指称和说话人指称之间的基本区别。
{"title":"Kripkeans of the world, unite!","authors":"F. Islam, Giosuè Baggio","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffaa001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper revisits a study by Machery et al. (2004), suggesting that, in experimental versions of Kripke’s (1980) fictional cases on the use of proper names, Westerners are more likely than East Asian participants to show intuitions compatible with Kripke’s causal-historical (CH) theory of reference. We conducted two experiments, recruting participants from Norway and Bangladesh, either in English (experiment 1; N = 75) or in the participants’ native languages (experiment 2; N = 60), using modified cases and a new approach to data analysis. We replicated the results of Machery et al. (2004), but we show that the residual finding—i.e., that participants who are not aligned with CH produce responses consistent with a definite descriptions (DD) theory of reference—does not hold. Most participants in our experiments, and nearly all those who do not provide CH answers, respond as predicted by a theory that accommodates speaker’s reference in reasoning about uses of proper names, not according to DD. We suggest that cross-cultural variation in this task is real. However, explanations of variation within or across cultures need not invoke competing theories of reference (CH vs DD), and can be unified within a single, broadly Kripkean analysis that honors the basic distinction between semantic reference and speaker’s reference.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"5 1","pages":"297-309"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75630294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-03-10DOI: 10.1186/s13326-020-00220-2
Natalia Viani, Joyce Kam, Lucia Yin, André Bittar, Rina Dutta, Rashmi Patel, Robert Stewart, Sumithra Velupillai
Background: Duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) is an important clinical construct in the field of mental health, as longer DUP can be associated with worse intervention outcomes. DUP estimation requires knowledge about when psychosis symptoms first started (symptom onset), and when psychosis treatment was initiated. Electronic health records (EHRs) represent a useful resource for retrospective clinical studies on DUP, but the core information underlying this construct is most likely to lie in free text, meaning it is not readily available for clinical research. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a means to addressing this problem by automatically extracting relevant information in a structured form. As a first step, it is important to identify appropriate documents, i.e., those that are likely to include the information of interest. Next, temporal information extraction methods are needed to identify time references for early psychosis symptoms. This NLP challenge requires solving three different tasks: time expression extraction, symptom extraction, and temporal "linking". In this study, we focus on the first step, using two relevant EHR datasets.
Results: We applied a rule-based NLP system for time expression extraction that we had previously adapted to a corpus of mental health EHRs from patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (first referrals). We extended this work by applying this NLP system to a larger set of documents and patients, to identify additional texts that would be relevant for our long-term goal, and developed a new corpus from a subset of these new texts (early intervention services). Furthermore, we added normalized value annotations ("2011-05") to the annotated time expressions ("May 2011") in both corpora. The finalized corpora were used for further NLP development and evaluation, with promising results (normalization accuracy 71-86%). To highlight the specificities of our annotation task, we also applied the final adapted NLP system to a different temporally annotated clinical corpus.
Conclusions: Developing domain-specific methods is crucial to address complex NLP tasks such as symptom onset extraction and retrospective calculation of duration of a preclinical syndrome. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first clinical text resource annotated for temporal entities in the mental health domain.
{"title":"Temporal information extraction from mental health records to identify duration of untreated psychosis.","authors":"Natalia Viani, Joyce Kam, Lucia Yin, André Bittar, Rina Dutta, Rashmi Patel, Robert Stewart, Sumithra Velupillai","doi":"10.1186/s13326-020-00220-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s13326-020-00220-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) is an important clinical construct in the field of mental health, as longer DUP can be associated with worse intervention outcomes. DUP estimation requires knowledge about when psychosis symptoms first started (symptom onset), and when psychosis treatment was initiated. Electronic health records (EHRs) represent a useful resource for retrospective clinical studies on DUP, but the core information underlying this construct is most likely to lie in free text, meaning it is not readily available for clinical research. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a means to addressing this problem by automatically extracting relevant information in a structured form. As a first step, it is important to identify appropriate documents, i.e., those that are likely to include the information of interest. Next, temporal information extraction methods are needed to identify time references for early psychosis symptoms. This NLP challenge requires solving three different tasks: time expression extraction, symptom extraction, and temporal \"linking\". In this study, we focus on the first step, using two relevant EHR datasets.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>We applied a rule-based NLP system for time expression extraction that we had previously adapted to a corpus of mental health EHRs from patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (first referrals). We extended this work by applying this NLP system to a larger set of documents and patients, to identify additional texts that would be relevant for our long-term goal, and developed a new corpus from a subset of these new texts (early intervention services). Furthermore, we added normalized value annotations (\"2011-05\") to the annotated time expressions (\"May 2011\") in both corpora. The finalized corpora were used for further NLP development and evaluation, with promising results (normalization accuracy 71-86%). To highlight the specificities of our annotation task, we also applied the final adapted NLP system to a different temporally annotated clinical corpus.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Developing domain-specific methods is crucial to address complex NLP tasks such as symptom onset extraction and retrospective calculation of duration of a preclinical syndrome. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first clinical text resource annotated for temporal entities in the mental health domain.</p>","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"11 1","pages":"2"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1186/s13326-020-00220-2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10217154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks, mirroring a recent proposal for explaining semantic universals of quantifiers. This preliminary study opens up many avenues for future work on explaining semantic universals more generally, which are discussed in the conclusion.
{"title":"An Explanation of the Veridical Uniformity Universal","authors":"Shane Steinert-Threlkeld","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz019","url":null,"abstract":"A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks, mirroring a recent proposal for explaining semantic universals of quantifiers. This preliminary study opens up many avenues for future work on explaining semantic universals more generally, which are discussed in the conclusion.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"4 1","pages":"129-144"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87035733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We offer a solution to a puzzle in the number interpretation of nominals in Buriat. Buriat has a two-way number opposition in morphology (unmarked vs. plural), but semantically, both forms may be number neutral. We show that even though the number neutrality of unmarked nominals is heavily restricted, it does not boil down to (pseudo-)incorporation. Our proposal is that unmarked nominals can be either singular (projecting a NumP) or numberless (lacking a NumP). In case they are singular, they are semantically strictly atomic, but when there are numberless they are truly number neutral, just like the plurals. The plurality inferences of plurals and the consistent number neutrality of numberless nouns are accounted for in a Katzirian system with structurally defined alternatives.
{"title":"Plurality in Buriat and Structurally Constrained Alternatives","authors":"Lisa Bylinina, Alexander Podobryaev","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz017","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We offer a solution to a puzzle in the number interpretation of nominals in Buriat. Buriat has a two-way number opposition in morphology (unmarked vs. plural), but semantically, both forms may be number neutral. We show that even though the number neutrality of unmarked nominals is heavily restricted, it does not boil down to (pseudo-)incorporation. Our proposal is that unmarked nominals can be either singular (projecting a NumP) or numberless (lacking a NumP). In case they are singular, they are semantically strictly atomic, but when there are numberless they are truly number neutral, just like the plurals. The plurality inferences of plurals and the consistent number neutrality of numberless nouns are accounted for in a Katzirian system with structurally defined alternatives.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"120 1","pages":"117-128"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77965972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this work, I propose a new semantic analysis of the Japanese progressive/resultative morpheme -te iru, which also leads to an improved account of the English progressive and contributes to cross-linguistic theory of aspect. The proposal is based on the modal analysis of the English progressive proposed by Portner (1998) and Ferreira (2016), but it is modified to accommodate the Japanese data. Crucially, the target state (resultative) reading of -te iru is available when the subject entity is a theme/undergoer; this is not controlled by the length of the event being described. To implement this idea, this work develops a formal system in which each thematic role predicate has its own temporal argument, and this time does not necessarily equal the temporal trace of the event in question. Specifically, a theme bears the target state role associated with an event e at a time that immediately follows the temporal trace of e. In addition, to describe and explain the behavior of -te iru, the traditional idea of “inertia worlds” according to which the relevant possible worlds are identical up to the utterance time is modified to allow them to differ in the past as well as in the future. It is noted that this modification is justified for the English progressive as well as for the Japanese -te iru form. This proposal allows us to predict that the behavior of achievements in English and Japanese is alike in simple past sentences and nominalized cases, but differs from each other in sentences containing the aspectual morphemes in question.
在这项工作中，我提出了一种新的日语进行/结果语素- iru的语义分析，这也导致了对英语进行时的改进，并有助于跨语言的体理论。该建议是基于Portner(1998)和Ferreira(2016)提出的英语进行式的模态分析，但对其进行了修改以适应日本的数据。至关重要的是，当主体实体是主题/接受者时，- iru的目标状态(结果)阅读是可用的;这不是由所描述事件的长度所控制的。为了实现这个想法，这项工作开发了一个正式的系统，其中每个主题角色谓词都有自己的时间参数，这个时间不一定等于所讨论的事件的时间轨迹。具体来说，主题承担着与事件e相关的目标状态角色，该事件e紧跟时间轨迹e。此外，为了描述和解释- iru的行为，“惯性世界”的传统观念被修改，根据该观念，相关的可能世界在话语时间之前是相同的，允许它们在过去和未来有所不同。值得注意的是，这种修改对于英语的进行式和日语的- the iru形式都是合理的。这一建议使我们能够预测英语和日语中成就的行为在一般过去句和名词化情况下是相似的，但在包含所讨论的方面语素的句子中却不同。
{"title":"Aspect and Thematic Roles","authors":"Toshiyuki Ogihara","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz020","url":null,"abstract":"In this work, I propose a new semantic analysis of the Japanese progressive/resultative morpheme -te iru, which also leads to an improved account of the English progressive and contributes to cross-linguistic theory of aspect. The proposal is based on the modal analysis of the English progressive proposed by Portner (1998) and Ferreira (2016), but it is modified to accommodate the Japanese data. Crucially, the target state (resultative) reading of -te iru is available when the subject entity is a theme/undergoer; this is not controlled by the length of the event being described. To implement this idea, this work develops a formal system in which each thematic role predicate has its own temporal argument, and this time does not necessarily equal the temporal trace of the event in question. Specifically, a theme bears the target state role associated with an event e at a time that immediately follows the temporal trace of e. In addition, to describe and explain the behavior of -te iru, the traditional idea of “inertia worlds” according to which the relevant possible worlds are identical up to the utterance time is modified to allow them to differ in the past as well as in the future. It is noted that this modification is justified for the English progressive as well as for the Japanese -te iru form. This proposal allows us to predict that the behavior of achievements in English and Japanese is alike in simple past sentences and nominalized cases, but differs from each other in sentences containing the aspectual morphemes in question.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"3 1","pages":"83-115"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74248270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What is the semantic import of number morphology? This question has been traditionally addressed by focusing on singular and plural noun phrases. The present work brings interrogative phrases into the picture. We analyse Spanish bare interrogative ‘quién’ and its plural counterpart ‘quiénes’. Unlike which-questions in both English and Spanish, the behaviour of quién- and quiénes-interrogatives cannot be easily explained by most accounts of semantic number. In contrast, we argue that the distribution of these interrogatives in Spanish can be well accounted for by assuming that the plural ‘quiénes’ triggers a strong plurality presupposition, and can only be used in d-linking contexts, whereas ‘quién’ carries no specific requirement, as far as its semantics is concerned. As a result, our proposal shows that current approaches to number marking need to be refined in order to account for cross-linguistic and within-language variation.
{"title":"Plural Marking and d-Linking in Spanish Interrogatives","authors":"Mora Maldonado","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What is the semantic import of number morphology? This question has been traditionally addressed by focusing on singular and plural noun phrases. The present work brings interrogative phrases into the picture. We analyse Spanish bare interrogative ‘quién’ and its plural counterpart ‘quiénes’. Unlike which-questions in both English and Spanish, the behaviour of quién- and quiénes-interrogatives cannot be easily explained by most accounts of semantic number. In contrast, we argue that the distribution of these interrogatives in Spanish can be well accounted for by assuming that the plural ‘quiénes’ triggers a strong plurality presupposition, and can only be used in d-linking contexts, whereas ‘quién’ carries no specific requirement, as far as its semantics is concerned. As a result, our proposal shows that current approaches to number marking need to be refined in order to account for cross-linguistic and within-language variation.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"15 1","pages":"145-170"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91083854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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