Optimization can make at least two contributions to boolean logic. Its solution methods can address inference and satisfiability problems, and its style of analysis can reveal tractable classes of boolean problems that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. They key to linking optimization with logic is to provide logical formulas a numerical interpretation or semantics. While syntax concerns the...

We present a neural-competitive learning model of language evolution in which several symbol sequences compete to signify a given propositional meaning. Both symbol sequences and propositional meanings are represented by high-dimensional vectors of real numbers. A neural network learns to map between the distributed representations of the symbol sequences and the distributed representations of ...

Hospital births were introduced to India during the colonial period but became a popular option during the 1960s. Today they have replaced "traditional" home birth among the urban middle classes, and a significant proportion of hospital births are elective Caesarean sections. In this article I examine this mode of birth in the context of specific marital and residential patterns and cross-gener...

As well as identifying relevant information, a successful information management system must be able to present its findings in terms which are familiar to the user, which is especially challenging when the incoming information is in a foreign language (Levow et al., 2001). We demonstrate techniques which attempt to address this challenge by placing terms in an abstract ‘information space’ base...

Manually performed treebanking is an expensive effort compared with automatic annotation. In return, manual treebanking is generally believed to provide higherquality/value syntactic annotation than automatic methods. Unfortunately, there is little or no empirical evidence for or against this belief, though arguments have been voiced for the high degree of subjectivity in other levels of lingui...

Similarity between words is becoming a generic problem for many applications of computational linguistics, and computing word similarities is determined by word representations. Inspired by the analogies between words and lymphocytes, a lymphocyte-style word representation is proposed. The word representation is built on the basis of dependency syntax of sentences and represent word context as ...