By one account of early word learning, children become proficient word learners as a result of environmental regularities: Learning words tunes the child to the regularities offered by the language being learned, orienting attention to those regularities. We test one core claim of this account, that count nouns should cue attention to the shape of the objects. Using a visual search task we pres...

Metaphors are widespread in natural language. Most natural language processing systems have failed to adequately deal with this issue. A two part approach to this problem involving a Metaphoric Lexicon and a dynamic extension system is described. The extension mechanism operates by analogically mapping previously understood mappings to account for new uses based on known regularities in the Eng...

Children are sensitive to statistical regularities in speech and likely use these regularities when learning their native language. A central goal of current research is to understand which statistical regularities support different aspects of language acquisition and processing. In the current work we explore phonological and semantic similarity effects on early lexical acquisition. Using a co...

Implicitly, Wynn’s (2002) target article starts from the transformational definition of symmetry. Unlike his suggestion, this traditional definition and the recent holographic definition are relevant to the discussion on the cognitive evolution of visual symmetries. These definitions reveal underlying properties and, thereby, they support the natural selection hypothesis. The holographic defini...

Scenario is a description technique which has attracted much attention not only from practitioners but also from researchers. Literature on this topic shows the possibilities that this description technique provides to enhance the understanding of task-related descriptions and the communication among stakeholders. On the other hand, the idea of pattern, as a description of a problem which occur...

Collecting large consistent data sets for real world software projects is problematic. Therefore, we explore how little data are required before the predictor performance plateaus; i.e. further data do not improve the performance score. In this case study, we explore three embedded controller software, two versions of an open source anti-virus software (Clam AV) and a subset of bugs in two vers...

The essence of this paper is that (a) e ective coordination between the members of an open group of agents relies on the existence of certain regularities in the group, which usually depend on the application at hand, and, (b) that such a regularities must be imposed on the individual members of the group, by some kind of higher authority. We have described here a mechanism that provides a exib...

The content of the labels in ontologies is usually considered hidden semantics, because the domain knowledge of such labels is not available as logical axioms in the ontology. The use of systematic naming conventions as best practice for the design of the content of the labels generates labels with structural regularities, namely, lexical regularities. The structure and content of such regulari...

We introduce the notion of λ-regularities in strings that consist of λ-covers and λ-seeds, and study three λ-regularities problems— the λ-cover problem, the general λ-cover problem and the λ-seed problem in this paper. λ-regularities can be viewed as generalized string regularities in the sense that a set of λ repetitive strings rather than a single repeated string are considered. We first pres...

Syntactic regularities are repetitive structures in the asserted axioms of an ontology represented as generalisations, which are axioms with variables. The Regularity Inspector for Ontologies (RIO) is a framework for detecting such regularities in ontologies. Established clustering techniques are applied to the signature of the ontology to detect clusters of similar entities. Clustering depends...