A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One longstanding puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender, which assigns nouns to distinct classes and marks neighboring words for agreement. While historically noun classification has been viewed as a useless ...

In the realm of multi-axial ratcheting, a step by step mathematical approach is developed for the parameter determination of decomposed kinematic hardening rules. For this purpose, key characteristics are mathematically derived for these hardening rules under multi-axial loading. These characteristics are then utilized to develop expressions which relate the loading history to the accumulated p...

It is natural to expect phrase structure to be important in predicting prosodic phrasing. Yet there appears to be a concensus that syntactic phrases do not correspond well to prosodic phrasing, and independent structures have been proposed to account for prosody. I propose that the problem with phrase structure lies with the particular measures of boundary strength applied to syntactic structur...

We present the K.U.Leuven CHR system: what started out as a validation of a new attributed variables implementation, has become a part of three different Prolog systems with an increasing userbase. In this paper we highlight the particular implementation aspects of the K.U.Leuven CHR system, and a few CHR applications that we have built with our system.

We consider the problem of learning general-purpose, paraphrastic sentence embeddings, revisiting the setting of Wieting et al. (2016b). While they found LSTM recurrent networks to underperform word averaging, we present several developments that together produce the opposite conclusion. These include training on sentence pairs rather than phrase pairs, averaging states to represent sequences, ...

Radically different approaches have been proved to be effective for phrase-structure and dependency parsers in the last decade. Here, we aim to exploit the divergence in these approaches and show the utility of features extracted from the automatic dependency parses of sentences for a discriminative phrase-structure parser. Our experiments show a significant improvement over the state-of-the-ar...

The notion of catena was introduced originally to represent the syntactic structure of multiword expressions with idiosyncratic semantics and non-constituent structure. Later on, several other phenomena (such as ellipsis, verbal complexes, etc.) were formalized as catenae. This naturally led to the suggestion that a catena can be considered a basic unit of syntax. In this paper we present a for...

It has been the practice of the majority of airlines to reschedule passengers and flights so as to minimize flight delay. Some airlines are now starting to look at the problem of rescheduling from the perspective of the passenger and are trying to minimize the impact of missed and cancelled connecting flights on the consumer. In this paper we propose the algorithm Schedule Minimization foR Gene...