This is to certify that I have examined this copy of a master's thesis by Salil G. Bapat and have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions required by the final examining committee have been made. Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to thank several people who have contributed towards the successful completion of this thesis. ...

Embodied/modality-specific theories of semantic memory propose that sensorimotor representations play an important role in perception and action. A large body of evidence supports the notion that concepts involving human motor action (i.e., semantic-motor representations) are processed in both language and motor regions of the brain. However, most studies have focused on perceptual tasks, leavi...

A few years ago a reading method called “word-focused extensive reading” was proposed for adults learning the fine details of word usage (Cheng 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). In this mode of reading the computer retrieved from a large corpus and displayed the word in question in a sentence. In reading similar sentences the reader would hopefully gain the knowledge of the word usage. That is the idea of ...

When participating in either an engaging or unengaging task, individuals appear to adopt consistent postures that may reflect a focused or unfocused attentional state. Posture is known to communicate certain affective states; however, it is of interest whether posture may elicit an attentional state that can influence performance on a task. To address this question, participants were first inst...

Lacking standardized extrinsic evaluation methods for vector representations of words, the NLP community has relied heavily on word similarity tasks as a proxy for intrinsic evaluation of word vectors. Word similarity evaluation, which correlates the distance between vectors and human judgments of “semantic similarity” is attractive, because it is computationally inexpensive and fast. In this p...

Information retrieval systems aim to retrieve precise and relevant information in response to a user's query. In past years entire documents which were considered to be relevant or highly correlating were returned to users. However with growth of the web and large numbers of XML documents, smaller elements or passages can be returned to the user for more precise results. This thesis explains Fl...