The basic concepts in Centering Theory, such as utterance, ranking and R1-pronouns, are purposely left unspecified to concrete tasks. The proper setting of these parameters in Chinese anaphoric resolution is examined in this study. Six resolution algorithms are designed to examine the effectiveness of the instantiations of different parametric settings. The results reveal that utterances, when ...

Centering, positioning an object within specified bounds, is a common computer task, for example making selections using a touch screen or positioning icons relative to each other. The experiments measured times for participants (n = 155) to position a circular cursor with diameter, p = 40 pixel or approximately 10 mm, completely within circular targets with a variety of diameters, w. The analy...

One of the necessary extensions to the centering model is a mechanism to handle pronouns with intrasentential antecedents. Existing centering models deal only with discourses consisting of simple sentences. It leaves unclear how to delimit center-updating utterance units and how to process complex utterances consisting of multiple clauses. In this paper, I will explore the extent to which a str...

The centering inference p & q, therefore if p then q is important in reasoning research because it is logically valid for some accounts of conditionals (e. g. the material and the probability conditionals), but not for others (e. g. the inferential conditional, according to which a conditional is true if and only if there is an inferential connection between p and q). We tested participants' ac...

A new application of the mean centering of ratio spectra method is proposed for estimation of the rate constants of second order reactions, using kinetic-spectrophotometric data. The method is based on the mean centering of the ratio spectra to obtain a kinetic profile of the product. Using computational fitting, the rate constant can be obtained without any ambiguity. An interesting feature of...

Accessibility of candidate referents is a crucial factor in successful reference assignment and this intuition has been adequately accommodated and developed in centering theory. By contrast, another equally important factor involved in reference assignment, namely, accessibili ty of contextual assumptions, seems to have not been addressed fully as a part of a computational theory of reference....

Shortcut connections are a popular architectural feature of multi-layer perceptrons. It is generally assumed that by implementing a linear submapping, shortcuts assist the learning process in the remainder of the network. Here we find that this is not always the case: shortcut weights may also act as distractors that slow down convergence and can lead to inferior solutions. This problem can be ...

A wide variety of otherwise unrelated neuroteratogens elicit a common set of behavioral defects centering around cholinergic contributions to cognitive function. We utilized the developing chick to overcome confounds related to maternal effects and compared the actions of nicotine, chlorpyrifos, and heroin on cholinergic signaling in the intermedial part of the hyperstriatum ventrale (IMHV), wh...