The idea that the conceptual system draws on sensory and motor systems has received considerable experimental support in recent years. Whether the tight coupling between sensory-motor and conceptual systems is modulated by factors such as context or task demands is a matter of controversy. Here, we tested the context sensitivity of this coupling by using action verbs in three different types of...

Non-compositional multiword expressions (MWEs) still pose serious issues for a variety of natural language processing tasks and their ubiquity makes it impossible to get around methods which automatically identify these kind of MWEs. The method presented in this paper was inspired by Sporleder and Li (2009) and is able to discriminate between the literal and non-literal use of an MWE in an unsu...

Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a cognitive process with Event-Related Potentials. Participants read literal, conventional metaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous target sentences preceded...

This paper describes on-going work in the analysis of motion dynamics in pen-based interaction. The overall goal is the creation of a model of user motion in pen gestures where constraint and curvature vary over the length of the path. In particular, speed/curvature models of motion are used to analyze pen trajectories and infer target constraints obeyed by a user performing selection gestures....

Studies in developmental literature claim that for young children context plays a more important role than literal meaning in comprehending a speaker's communicative intention. The present study evaluates this claim for different categories of context in children aged 3 to 7 years. In particular, we analyze contexts pertaining to the categories we define as follows: Access, Space, Time, Discour...

Language can describe our visual world at many levels, including not only what is literally there but also the sentiment that it invokes. In this paper, we study visual language, both literal and sentimental, that describes the overall appearance and style of virtual characters. Sentimental properties, including labels such as “youthful” or “country western,” must be inferred from descriptions ...

The neural mechanisms underlying the processing of conventional and novel conceptual metaphorical sentences were examined with event-related potentials (ERPs). Conventional metaphors were created based on the Contemporary Theory of Metaphor and were operationally defined as familiar and readily interpretable. Novel metaphors were unfamiliar and harder to interpret. Using a sensicality judgment ...

In the last few years, we have seen a tremendous boost in the efficiency of SAT solvers, this boost being mostly due to Chaff. Chaff owes some of its efficiency to its “two-literal watching” data structure. In this paper we present watched data structures for Quantified Boolean Formula (QBF) satisfiability solvers. In particular, we propose (i) two Chaff-like literal watching schemes for unit c...

Some expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretations depending on the context they occur in, e.g., sales hit the roof vs. hit the roof of the car. We present a novel method of classifying whether a given instance is literal or idiomatic, focusing on verb-noun constructions. We report state-of-the-art results on this task using an approach based on the hypothesis that ...

We propose a technique for improving language modeling for automated speech recognition of medical dictations by interpolating finished text (25M words) with small humangenerated literal or/and machine-generated semiliteral corpora. By building and testing interpolated (ILM) with literal (LILM), semiliteral (SILM) and partial (PILM) corpora, we show that both perplexity and recognition results ...