The kings of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty (1516-1700) frequently married close relatives in such a way that uncle-niece, first cousins and other consanguineous unions were prevalent in that dynasty. In the historical literature, it has been suggested that inbreeding was a major cause responsible for the extinction of the dynasty when the king Charles II, physically and mentally disabled, died i...

In this paper, we address the issue of syntagmatic expressions from a computational lexical semantic perspective. From a representational viewpoint, we argue for a hybrid approach combining linguistic and conceptual paradigms, in order to account for the continuum we find in natural languages from free combining words to frozen expressions. In particular, we focus on the place of lexical and se...

A two-tier model for the description of morphological, syntactic and semantic variations of multi-word terms is presented. It is applied to term normalization of French and English corpora in the medical and agricultural domains. Five different sources of morphological and semantic knowledge are exploited (MULTEXT, CELEX, AGROVOC, WordNetl.6, and Microsoft Word97 thesaurus). 1 I n t r o d u c t...

This article examines the effects of synonymy (i.e., learning words with and without high-frequency synonyms that were known to the learners) on word knowledge in a study of 84 Japanese students learning English. It employed 10 tests measuring 5 aspects of word knowledge (orthography, paradigmatic association, syntagmatic association, meaning and form, and grammatical functions) to assess learn...

This study examines the relationship between two kinds of semantic spaces — i.e., spaces based on term frequency (tf) and word cooccurrence frequency (co) — and four semantic relations — i.e., synonymy, coordination, superordination, and collocation — by comparing, for each semantic relation, the performance of two semantic spaces in predicting word association. The simulation experiment demons...

Segmentation is a core strategy in modern marketing, and age-specific segmentation based on the age of the consumers is very common in practice. Age-specific segmentation enables the change of the segments composition during time and can be studied only by means of dynamic advertising models. Here we assume that a firm wants to optimally promote and sell a single product in an age-segmented mar...