Aging often affects sensitivity to the higher frequencies, which results in the loss of sensitivity to phonetic detail in speech. Hearing loss may therefore interfere with the categorisation of two consonants that have most information to differentiate between them in those higher frequencies and less in the lower frequencies, e.g., /f/ and /s/. We investigate two acoustic cues, i.e., formant t...

We develop an unsupervised “dual-network” connectionist model of category learning in which rules gradually emerge from a standard Kohonen network. The architecture is based on the interaction of a statistical-learning (Kohonen) network and a competitive-learning rule network. The rules that emerge in the rule network are weightings of individual features according to their importance for categ...

Classifiers are overt linguistic categorisation devices and ‚a unique window‛ into human cognition (Lakoff, 1986). English is traditionally regarded as a non-classifier language, but a closer look shows that English also possesses classifier-like words, called ‘Quasi-Classifiers’/QCLs. This paper focuses on the cognitive categorisation process underlying English QCL usage, and takes the two-dim...

The presented work is strongly motivated by the need of modelling functional style (FS) as well as categorising unrestricted texts in terms of FS in order to attain a satisfying outcome in style processing. Towards this end, it is given a three-level description of FS that comprises: (a) the basic categories of FS, (b) the main features that characterise each one of the above categories, and (c...

Euler Diagrams are an accessible means of representing non hierarchical set-based relationships which have recently been used in resource management interfaces to facilitate user categorisation. We develop a novel, extensible Euler diagram based interface, called FunEuler, which integrates the concepts of visual classification, spatial arrangements and functional application, thereby greatly ex...

The detection of changes between OWL ontologies is an important service for ontology engineering. There are several approaches to this problem, both syntactic and semantic. A purely syntactic analysis of changes is insufficient to detect changes with logical effect, while the current state of the art in semantic diffing ignores logically ineffectual changes, which might be of great interest to ...

This paper examines the nature of graduate over-education amongst a group of applicants to a graduate conversion programme. It was found that whilst a substantial proportion of earnings differentials were associated with a mismatch between individual skill levels and job requirements, wage gaps were still likely to occur should such mismatches be eliminated. The evidence suggests that graduate ...

Multimedia content can be described in versatile ways as its essence is not limited to one view. For music data these multiple views could be a song’s audio features as well as its lyrics. Both of these modalities have their advantages as text may be easier to search in and could cover more of the ‘content semantics’ of a song, while omitting other types of semantic categorisation. (Psycho)acou...

Comparative concepts such as greener than or higher than are ways of ordering objects. They are fundamental to our grasp of gradable concepts, that is, the type of meanings expressed by gradable general terms, such as “is green” or “is high”, which are embeddable in comparative constructions in natural language. Some comparative concepts seem natural, whereas others seem gerrymandered. The aim ...