Linguistic inferences without words

Understanding Without Words

To understand a sentence, the meanings of the words in the sentence must be retrieved and combined. Are these meanings represented within the language system (the lexical hypothesis) or are they represented in a general conceptual system that is not restricted to language (the conceptual hypothesis)? To erraluate these hypotheses, sentences were presented in which a pictued object replaced a wo...

Infinite words without palindrome

We show that there exists an uniformly recurrent infinite word whose set of factors is closed under reversal and which has only finitely many palindromic factors. 1 Notations For a finite word w = w1 · · ·wn, the reversal of w is the word w̃ = wn · · ·w1. This notation is extended to sets by setting F = {w̃ | w ∈ F} for any set F of finite words. A word w is a palindrome if w̃ = w. A set F of fini...

Words without Objects

Worlds Without Words

This paper points out a deficiency in virtual worlds as they are envisioned today. Several of the more important aspects of human communicative behavior are missing, since there is no way to accommodate natural linguistic interaction with and through the interface. We point out some explicit cases where natural language interaction would be useful in a VR framework, and identify some areas wher...

On Proofs Without Words

Most mathematicians will be familiar with the above picture. This diagram, credited to the Ancient Chinese mathematical text Zhou Bi Suan Jing, is a charmingly simple visual proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, one of mathematics’ most fundamental results. It would be hard to argue that this proof is not convincing. In fact, most standard proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem still use this picture, o...