Connectionist psycholinguistics is an emerging approach to modeling empirical data on human language processing using connectionist computational architectures. For almost 20 years, connectionist models have increasingly been used to model empirical data across many areas of language processing. We critically review four key areas: speech processing, sentence processing, language production, an...

BACKGROUND Empirical-ethical research constitutes a relatively new field which integrates socio-empirical research and normative analysis. As direct inferences from descriptive data to normative conclusions are problematic, an ethical framework is needed to determine the relevance of the empirical data for normative argument. While issues of normative-empirical collaboration and questions of em...

The self-organizing map (SOM) algorithm for finite data is derived as an approximate MAP estimation algorithm for a Gaussian mixture model with a Gaussian smoothing prior, which is equivalent to a generalized deformable model (GDM). For this model, objective criteria for selecting hyperparameters are obtained on the basis of empirical Bayesian estimation and crossvalidation, which are represent...

Although it’s been more than a year since the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5) has been published, articles regarding the new criteria have been appearing since 2011. This is because, any revisions of the DSM-IV criteria for PTSD (whether removal, addition or modification of specific symptoms) had to be supported by strong e...

We propose an independence criterion based on the eigenspectrum of covariance operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), consisting of an empirical estimate of the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the cross-covariance operator (we term this a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, or HSIC). This approach has several advantages, compared with previous kernel-based independence criteria. Fir...

A blog quality model has been proposed for bloggers to promote readers satisfaction. However, the model does not determine whether readers consider some quality criteria important, particularly with respect to different blog categories. In this paper, we employed a Rasch analysis to rank the importance of blog quality criteria for the Personal Diary, Socio-political Commentary, Humor/Entertainm...