Though most documented sign languages make use of space to denote relationships between predicate arguments, studies of emerging sign languages suggest that spatial reference does not emerge fully-formed but takes time to develop. We present an artificial sign language learning experiment that expands the cultural evolutionary framework to investigate complex linguistic constructions. Our resul...

Animations of American Sign Language (ASL) can make more information, websites, and services accessible for the significant number of deaf people in the United States with lower levels of written language literacy – ultimately leading to fuller social inclusion for these users. We are collecting and analyzing an ASL motion-capture corpus of multi-sentential discourse to seek computational model...

A word formation pattern in which use is made of a particular affix can thus be conceived of as a morphological construction in which it is only the affix that is specified whereas the slot for the stem is variable. That is, each affixation pattern is a constructional idiom (in the sense of Jackendoff, 2002). Such affixation templates give direct expression to the fact that affixes are not lexi...

Similes are figures of speech in which the similarities as well as the differences between two or more semantically unrelated entities are expressed by means of a linguistic unit. This unit, also called marker, can either be a morpheme, a word or a phrase. Since similes rely on comparison, they occur in several languages of the world. Depending on the marker used and of the semantic or structur...

We present an interactive graphical environment for the manipulation of context-free languages. The graphical environment allows the editing of a context-free grammar, the conversion to Chomsky normal form, word parsing and the (interactive) construction of parse trees. It is possible to store positive and negative datasets of words to be tested by a given grammar. The main goal of this system ...

Flattening is a method to make a de nite clause function-free. For a de nite clause C, attening replaces every occurrence of a term f(t 1 ; ; t n ) in C with a new variable v and adds an atom p f (t 1 ; ; t n ; v) with the associated predicate symbol p f with f to the body of C. Here, we denote the resulting function-free de nite clause from C by at(C). In this paper, we discuss the relationshi...

We present a system for generating and understanding of dynamic and static spatial relations in robotic interaction setups. Robots describe an environment of moving blocks using English phrases that include spatial relations such as “across” and “in front of”. We evaluate the system in robot-robot interactions and show that the system can robustly deal with visual perception errors, language om...

It is well known that patents drive the modern economies. But they do even more: patents also serve as a valuable and unique source of up-to-date scientific and technological information. It is assumed that only 10% to 15% of the content presented in patents are described in other publications as well. The worldwide stock of patents thus comprises about 85% to 90% of scientific knowledge. Given...

This paper provides a construction grammar perspective to identifying the ambiguity of prepositional phrase (PP) attachments (i.e., whether a PP is attached to the closest VP or NP1). Despite the wide discussion of these two structures (VP-attached and NP1-attached), we raise the possibility for a third parsing structure (about 11.3% from all 1845 instances analyzed), a co-attachment to both ve...

Some years ago, the notion of attribute coupled grammars was introduced by Ganzinger and Giegerich 4], together with descrip-tional composition. The latter works essentially at the speciication level, i.e., it produces an attribute grammar which speciies the composition of two attribute coupled grammars. We introduce a new approach to this composition of attribute coupled grammars. This composi...