Affixation in semantic space: Modeling morpheme meanings with compositional distributional semantics.

PubMed

Marelli, Marco; Baroni, Marco

2015-07-01

The present work proposes a computational model of morpheme combination at the meaning level. The model moves from the tenets of distributional semantics, and assumes that word meanings can be effectively represented by vectors recording their co-occurrence with other words in a large text corpus. Given this assumption, affixes are modeled as functions (matrices) mapping stems onto derived forms. Derived-form meanings can be thought of as the result of a combinatorial procedure that transforms the stem vector on the basis of the affix matrix (e.g., the meaning of nameless is obtained by multiplying the vector of name with the matrix of -less). We show that this architecture accounts for the remarkable human capacity of generating new words that denote novel meanings, correctly predicting semantic intuitions about novel derived forms. Moreover, the proposed compositional approach, once paired with a whole-word route, provides a new interpretative framework for semantic transparency, which is here partially explained in terms of ease of the combinatorial procedure and strength of the transformation brought about by the affix. Model-based predictions are in line with the modulation of semantic transparency on explicit intuitions about existing words, response times in lexical decision, and morphological priming. In conclusion, we introduce a computational model to account for morpheme combination at the meaning level. The model is data-driven, theoretically sound, and empirically supported, and it makes predictions that open new research avenues in the domain of semantic processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Structured Natural-Language Descriptions for Semantic Content Retrieval of Visual Materials.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Tam, A. M.; Leung, C. H. C.

2001-01-01

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

Adapting Semantic Natural Language Processing Technology to Address Information Overload in Influenza Epidemic Management

PubMed Central

Keselman, Alla; Rosemblat, Graciela; Kilicoglu, Halil; Fiszman, Marcelo; Jin, Honglan; Shin, Dongwook; Rindflesch, Thomas C.

2013-01-01

Explosion of disaster health information results in information overload among response professionals. The objective of this project was to determine the feasibility of applying semantic natural language processing (NLP) technology to addressing this overload. The project characterizes concepts and relationships commonly used in disaster health-related documents on influenza pandemics, as the basis for adapting an existing semantic summarizer to the domain. Methods include human review and semantic NLP analysis of a set of relevant documents. This is followed by a pilot-test in which two information specialists use the adapted application for a realistic information seeking task. According to the results, the ontology of influenza epidemics management can be described via a manageable number of semantic relationships that involve concepts from a limited number of semantic types. Test users demonstrate several ways to engage with the application to obtain useful information. This suggests that existing semantic NLP algorithms can be adapted to support information summarization and visualization in influenza epidemics and other disaster health areas. However, additional research is needed in the areas of terminology development (as many relevant relationships and terms are not part of existing standardized vocabularies), NLP, and user interface design. PMID:24311971

Quantization, Frobenius and Bi algebras from the Categorical Framework of Quantum Mechanics to Natural Language Semantics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sadrzadeh, Mehrnoosh

2017-07-01

Compact Closed categories and Frobenius and Bi algebras have been applied to model and reason about Quantum protocols. The same constructions have also been applied to reason about natural language semantics under the name: ``categorical distributional compositional'' semantics, or in short, the ``DisCoCat'' model. This model combines the statistical vector models of word meaning with the compositional models of grammatical structure. It has been applied to natural language tasks such as disambiguation, paraphrasing and entailment of phrases and sentences. The passage from the grammatical structure to vectors is provided by a functor, similar to the Quantization functor of Quantum Field Theory. The original DisCoCat model only used compact closed categories. Later, Frobenius algebras were added to it to model long distance dependancies such as relative pronouns. Recently, bialgebras have been added to the pack to reason about quantifiers. This paper reviews these constructions and their application to natural language semantics. We go over the theory and present some of the core experimental results.

The role of the left anterior temporal lobe in semantic composition vs. semantic memory.

PubMed

Westerlund, Masha; Pylkkänen, Liina

2014-05-01

The left anterior temporal lobe (LATL) is robustly implicated in semantic processing by a growing body of literature. However, these results have emerged from two distinct bodies of work, addressing two different processing levels. On the one hand, the LATL has been characterized as a 'semantic hub׳ that binds features of concepts across a distributed network, based on results from semantic dementia and hemodynamic findings on the categorization of specific compared to basic exemplars. On the other, the LATL has been implicated in combinatorial operations in language, as shown by increased activity in this region associated with the processing of sentences and of basic phrases. The present work aimed to reconcile these two literatures by independently manipulating combination and concept specificity within a minimal MEG paradigm. Participants viewed simple nouns that denoted either low specificity (fish) or high specificity categories (trout) presented in either combinatorial (spotted fish/trout) or non-combinatorial contexts (xhsl fish/trout). By combining these paradigms from the two literatures, we directly compared the engagement of the LATL in semantic memory vs. semantic composition. Our results indicate that although noun specificity subtly modulates the LATL activity elicited by single nouns, it most robustly affects the size of the composition effect when these nouns are adjectivally modified, with low specificity nouns eliciting a much larger effect. We conclude that these findings are compatible with an account in which the specificity and composition effects arise from a shared mechanism of meaning specification. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Recent Advances in Clinical Natural Language Processing in Support of Semantic Analysis.

PubMed

Velupillai, S; Mowery, D; South, B R; Kvist, M; Dalianis, H

2015-08-13

We present a review of recent advances in clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on semantic analysis and key subtasks that support such analysis. We conducted a literature review of clinical NLP research from 2008 to 2014, emphasizing recent publications (2012-2014), based on PubMed and ACL proceedings as well as relevant referenced publications from the included papers. Significant articles published within this time-span were included and are discussed from the perspective of semantic analysis. Three key clinical NLP subtasks that enable such analysis were identified: 1) developing more efficient methods for corpus creation (annotation and de-identification), 2) generating building blocks for extracting meaning (morphological, syntactic, and semantic subtasks), and 3) leveraging NLP for clinical utility (NLP applications and infrastructure for clinical use cases). Finally, we provide a reflection upon most recent developments and potential areas of future NLP development and applications. There has been an increase of advances within key NLP subtasks that support semantic analysis. Performance of NLP semantic analysis is, in many cases, close to that of agreement between humans. The creation and release of corpora annotated with complex semantic information models has greatly supported the development of new tools and approaches. Research on non-English languages is continuously growing. NLP methods have sometimes been successfully employed in real-world clinical tasks. However, there is still a gap between the development of advanced resources and their utilization in clinical settings. A plethora of new clinical use cases are emerging due to established health care initiatives and additional patient-generated sources through the extensive use of social media and other devices.

Recent Advances in Clinical Natural Language Processing in Support of Semantic Analysis

PubMed Central

Mowery, D.; South, B. R.; Kvist, M.; Dalianis, H.

2015-01-01

Summary Objectives We present a review of recent advances in clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a focus on semantic analysis and key subtasks that support such analysis. Methods We conducted a literature review of clinical NLP research from 2008 to 2014, emphasizing recent publications (2012-2014), based on PubMed and ACL proceedings as well as relevant referenced publications from the included papers. Results Significant articles published within this time-span were included and are discussed from the perspective of semantic analysis. Three key clinical NLP subtasks that enable such analysis were identified: 1) developing more efficient methods for corpus creation (annotation and de-identification), 2) generating building blocks for extracting meaning (morphological, syntactic, and semantic subtasks), and 3) leveraging NLP for clinical utility (NLP applications and infrastructure for clinical use cases). Finally, we provide a reflection upon most recent developments and potential areas of future NLP development and applications. Conclusions There has been an increase of advances within key NLP subtasks that support semantic analysis. Performance of NLP semantic analysis is, in many cases, close to that of agreement between humans. The creation and release of corpora annotated with complex semantic information models has greatly supported the development of new tools and approaches. Research on non-English languages is continuously growing. NLP methods have sometimes been successfully employed in real-world clinical tasks. However, there is still a gap between the development of advanced resources and their utilization in clinical settings. A plethora of new clinical use cases are emerging due to established health care initiatives and additional patient-generated sources through the extensive use of social media and other devices. PMID:26293867

Electrophysiological Correlates of Semantic Dissimilarity Reflect the Comprehension of Natural, Narrative Speech.

PubMed

Broderick, Michael P; Anderson, Andrew J; Di Liberto, Giovanni M; Crosse, Michael J; Lalor, Edmund C

2018-03-05

People routinely hear and understand speech at rates of 120-200 words per minute [1, 2]. Thus, speech comprehension must involve rapid, online neural mechanisms that process words' meanings in an approximately time-locked fashion. However, electrophysiological evidence for such time-locked processing has been lacking for continuous speech. Although valuable insights into semantic processing have been provided by the "N400 component" of the event-related potential [3-6], this literature has been dominated by paradigms using incongruous words within specially constructed sentences, with less emphasis on natural, narrative speech comprehension. Building on the discovery that cortical activity "tracks" the dynamics of running speech [7-9] and psycholinguistic work demonstrating [10-12] and modeling [13-15] how context impacts on word processing, we describe a new approach for deriving an electrophysiological correlate of natural speech comprehension. We used a computational model [16] to quantify the meaning carried by words based on how semantically dissimilar they were to their preceding context and then regressed this measure against electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded from subjects as they listened to narrative speech. This produced a prominent negativity at a time lag of 200-600 ms on centro-parietal EEG channels, characteristics common to the N400. Applying this approach to EEG datasets involving time-reversed speech, cocktail party attention, and audiovisual speech-in-noise demonstrated that this response was very sensitive to whether or not subjects understood the speech they heard. These findings demonstrate that, when successfully comprehending natural speech, the human brain responds to the contextual semantic content of each word in a relatively time-locked fashion. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A grammar-based semantic similarity algorithm for natural language sentences.

PubMed

Lee, Ming Che; Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng

2014-01-01

This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to "artificial language", such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure.

A Grammar-Based Semantic Similarity Algorithm for Natural Language Sentences

PubMed Central

Chang, Jia Wei; Hsieh, Tung Cheng

2014-01-01

This paper presents a grammar and semantic corpus based similarity algorithm for natural language sentences. Natural language, in opposition to “artificial language”, such as computer programming languages, is the language used by the general public for daily communication. Traditional information retrieval approaches, such as vector models, LSA, HAL, or even the ontology-based approaches that extend to include concept similarity comparison instead of cooccurrence terms/words, may not always determine the perfect matching while there is no obvious relation or concept overlap between two natural language sentences. This paper proposes a sentence similarity algorithm that takes advantage of corpus-based ontology and grammatical rules to overcome the addressed problems. Experiments on two famous benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has a significant performance improvement in sentences/short-texts with arbitrary syntax and structure. PMID:24982952

Semantic size of abstract concepts: it gets emotional when you can't see it.

PubMed

Yao, Bo; Vasiljevic, Milica; Weick, Mario; Sereno, Margaret E; O'Donnell, Patrick J; Sereno, Sara C

2013-01-01

Size is an important visuo-spatial characteristic of the physical world. In language processing, previous research has demonstrated a processing advantage for words denoting semantically "big" (e.g., jungle) versus "small" (e.g., needle) concrete objects. We investigated whether semantic size plays a role in the recognition of words expressing abstract concepts (e.g., truth). Semantically "big" and "small" concrete and abstract words were presented in a lexical decision task. Responses to "big" words, regardless of their concreteness, were faster than those to "small" words. Critically, we explored the relationship between semantic size and affective characteristics of words as well as their influence on lexical access. Although a word's semantic size was correlated with its emotional arousal, the temporal locus of arousal effects may depend on the level of concreteness. That is, arousal seemed to have an earlier (lexical) effect on abstract words, but a later (post-lexical) effect on concrete words. Our findings provide novel insights into the semantic representations of size in abstract concepts and highlight that affective attributes of words may not always index lexical access.

Semantator: semantic annotator for converting biomedical text to linked data.

PubMed

Tao, Cui; Song, Dezhao; Sharma, Deepak; Chute, Christopher G

2013-10-01

More than 80% of biomedical data is embedded in plain text. The unstructured nature of these text-based documents makes it challenging to easily browse and query the data of interest in them. One approach to facilitate browsing and querying biomedical text is to convert the plain text to a linked web of data, i.e., converting data originally in free text to structured formats with defined meta-level semantics. In this paper, we introduce Semantator (Semantic Annotator), a semantic-web-based environment for annotating data of interest in biomedical documents, browsing and querying the annotated data, and interactively refining annotation results if needed. Through Semantator, information of interest can be either annotated manually or semi-automatically using plug-in information extraction tools. The annotated results will be stored in RDF and can be queried using the SPARQL query language. In addition, semantic reasoners can be directly applied to the annotated data for consistency checking and knowledge inference. Semantator has been released online and was used by the biomedical ontology community who provided positive feedbacks. Our evaluation results indicated that (1) Semantator can perform the annotation functionalities as designed; (2) Semantator can be adopted in real applications in clinical and transactional research; and (3) the annotated results using Semantator can be easily used in Semantic-web-based reasoning tools for further inference. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Is Passive Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence from Adult Grammaticality Judgment and Comprehension Studies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Ambridge, Ben; Bidgood, Amy; Pine, Julian M.; Rowland, Caroline F.; Freudenthal, Daniel

2016-01-01

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., "*£5 was cost by the book"), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is…

Some Semantic Structures for Representing English Meanings.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Simmons, R. F.

This paper defines the structure of a semantic network for use in representing discourse and lexical meanings. The structure is designed to represent underlying semantic meanings that, with a lexicon and a grammar, can generate natural-language sentences in a linguistically justifiable manner. The semantics of natural English can be defined as a…

Natural speech reveals the semantic maps that tile human cerebral cortex

PubMed Central

Huth, Alexander G.; de Heer, Wendy A.; Griffiths, Thomas L.; Theunissen, Frédéric E.; Gallant, Jack L.

2016-01-01

The meaning of language is represented in regions of the cerebral cortex collectively known as the “semantic system”. However, little of the semantic system has been mapped comprehensively, and the semantic selectivity of most regions is unknown. Here we systematically map semantic selectivity across the cortex using voxel-wise modeling of fMRI data collected while subjects listened to hours of narrative stories. We show that the semantic system is organized into intricate patterns that appear consistent across individuals. We then use a novel generative model to create a detailed semantic atlas. Our results suggest that most areas within the semantic system represent information about specific semantic domains, or groups of related concepts, and our atlas shows which domains are represented in each area. This study demonstrates that data-driven methods—commonplace in studies of human neuroanatomy and functional connectivity—provide a powerful and efficient means for mapping functional representations in the brain. PMID:27121839

Decoding the Semantic Content of Natural Movies from Human Brain Activity

PubMed Central

Huth, Alexander G.; Lee, Tyler; Nishimoto, Shinji; Bilenko, Natalia Y.; Vu, An T.; Gallant, Jack L.

2016-01-01

One crucial test for any quantitative model of the brain is to show that the model can be used to accurately decode information from evoked brain activity. Several recent neuroimaging studies have decoded the structure or semantic content of static visual images from human brain activity. Here we present a decoding algorithm that makes it possible to decode detailed information about the object and action categories present in natural movies from human brain activity signals measured by functional MRI. Decoding is accomplished using a hierarchical logistic regression (HLR) model that is based on labels that were manually assigned from the WordNet semantic taxonomy. This model makes it possible to simultaneously decode information about both specific and general categories, while respecting the relationships between them. Our results show that we can decode the presence of many object and action categories from averaged blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses with a high degree of accuracy (area under the ROC curve > 0.9). Furthermore, we used this framework to test whether semantic relationships defined in the WordNet taxonomy are represented the same way in the human brain. This analysis showed that hierarchical relationships between general categories and atypical examples, such as organism and plant, did not seem to be reflected in representations measured by BOLD fMRI. PMID:27781035

Divergent Human Cortical Regions for Processing Distinct Acoustic-Semantic Categories of Natural Sounds: Animal Action Sounds vs. Vocalizations

PubMed Central

Webster, Paula J.; Skipper-Kallal, Laura M.; Frum, Chris A.; Still, Hayley N.; Ward, B. Douglas; Lewis, James W.

2017-01-01

A major gap in our understanding of natural sound processing is knowledge of where or how in a cortical hierarchy differential processing leads to categorical perception at a semantic level. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we sought to determine if and where cortical pathways in humans might diverge for processing action sounds vs. vocalizations as distinct acoustic-semantic categories of real-world sound when matched for duration and intensity. This was tested by using relatively less semantically complex natural sounds produced by non-conspecific animals rather than humans. Our results revealed a striking double-dissociation of activated networks bilaterally. This included a previously well described pathway preferential for processing vocalization signals directed laterally from functionally defined primary auditory cortices to the anterior superior temporal gyri, and a less well-described pathway preferential for processing animal action sounds directed medially to the posterior insulae. We additionally found that some of these regions and associated cortical networks showed parametric sensitivity to high-order quantifiable acoustic signal attributes and/or to perceptual features of the natural stimuli, such as the degree of perceived recognition or intentional understanding. Overall, these results supported a neurobiological theoretical framework for how the mammalian brain may be fundamentally organized to process acoustically and acoustic-semantically distinct categories of ethologically valid, real-world sounds. PMID:28111538

Trust estimation of the semantic web using semantic web clustering

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shirgahi, Hossein; Mohsenzadeh, Mehran; Haj Seyyed Javadi, Hamid

2017-05-01

Development of semantic web and social network is undeniable in the Internet world these days. Widespread nature of semantic web has been very challenging to assess the trust in this field. In recent years, extensive researches have been done to estimate the trust of semantic web. Since trust of semantic web is a multidimensional problem, in this paper, we used parameters of social network authority, the value of pages links authority and semantic authority to assess the trust. Due to the large space of semantic network, we considered the problem scope to the clusters of semantic subnetworks and obtained the trust of each cluster elements as local and calculated the trust of outside resources according to their local trusts and trust of clusters to each other. According to the experimental result, the proposed method shows more than 79% Fscore that is about 11.9% in average more than Eigen, Tidal and centralised trust methods. Mean of error in this proposed method is 12.936, that is 9.75% in average less than Eigen and Tidal trust methods.

Pulmonary disorder and present nuclear denotation: A brief summary

PubMed Central

Wiwanitkit, Viroj

2011-01-01

There are many health effects caused by leaked radiation from damaged reactors of a nuclear power plant. However, the effect on pulmonary system is not reported much. Focusing on the present nuclear denotation crisis in Japan, it is wise to review on the specific issue of pulmonary disorder and nuclear denotation. Several disorders of interest, including malignancy and non-malignancy disorders, are mentioned in the literature. PMID:21760839

Semantic Search of Web Services

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hao, Ke

2013-01-01

This dissertation addresses semantic search of Web services using natural language processing. We first survey various existing approaches, focusing on the fact that the expensive costs of current semantic annotation frameworks result in limited use of semantic search for large scale applications. We then propose a vector space model based service…

Semantic Size of Abstract Concepts: It Gets Emotional When You Can’t See It

PubMed Central

Yao, Bo; Vasiljevic, Milica; Weick, Mario; Sereno, Margaret E.; O’Donnell, Patrick J.; Sereno, Sara C.

2013-01-01

Size is an important visuo-spatial characteristic of the physical world. In language processing, previous research has demonstrated a processing advantage for words denoting semantically “big” (e.g., jungle) versus “small” (e.g., needle) concrete objects. We investigated whether semantic size plays a role in the recognition of words expressing abstract concepts (e.g., truth). Semantically “big” and “small” concrete and abstract words were presented in a lexical decision task. Responses to “big” words, regardless of their concreteness, were faster than those to “small” words. Critically, we explored the relationship between semantic size and affective characteristics of words as well as their influence on lexical access. Although a word’s semantic size was correlated with its emotional arousal, the temporal locus of arousal effects may depend on the level of concreteness. That is, arousal seemed to have an earlier (lexical) effect on abstract words, but a later (post-lexical) effect on concrete words. Our findings provide novel insights into the semantic representations of size in abstract concepts and highlight that affective attributes of words may not always index lexical access. PMID:24086421

Individual Variability in the Semantic Processing of English Compound Words

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schmidtke, Daniel; Van Dyke, Julie A.; Kuperman, Victor

2018-01-01

Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In…

Semantic biomedical resource discovery: a Natural Language Processing framework.

PubMed

Sfakianaki, Pepi; Koumakis, Lefteris; Sfakianakis, Stelios; Iatraki, Galatia; Zacharioudakis, Giorgos; Graf, Norbert; Marias, Kostas; Tsiknakis, Manolis

2015-09-30

A plethora of publicly available biomedical resources do currently exist and are constantly increasing at a fast rate. In parallel, specialized repositories are been developed, indexing numerous clinical and biomedical tools. The main drawback of such repositories is the difficulty in locating appropriate resources for a clinical or biomedical decision task, especially for non-Information Technology expert users. In parallel, although NLP research in the clinical domain has been active since the 1960s, progress in the development of NLP applications has been slow and lags behind progress in the general NLP domain. The aim of the present study is to investigate the use of semantics for biomedical resources annotation with domain specific ontologies and exploit Natural Language Processing methods in empowering the non-Information Technology expert users to efficiently search for biomedical resources using natural language. A Natural Language Processing engine which can "translate" free text into targeted queries, automatically transforming a clinical research question into a request description that contains only terms of ontologies, has been implemented. The implementation is based on information extraction techniques for text in natural language, guided by integrated ontologies. Furthermore, knowledge from robust text mining methods has been incorporated to map descriptions into suitable domain ontologies in order to ensure that the biomedical resources descriptions are domain oriented and enhance the accuracy of services discovery. The framework is freely available as a web application at ( http://calchas.ics.forth.gr/ ). For our experiments, a range of clinical questions were established based on descriptions of clinical trials from the ClinicalTrials.gov registry as well as recommendations from clinicians. Domain experts manually identified the available tools in a tools repository which are suitable for addressing the clinical questions at hand, either

How to switch on and switch off semantic priming effects for natural and artifactual categories: activation processes in category memory depend on focusing specific feature dimensions.

PubMed

Bermeitinger, Christina; Wentura, Dirk; Frings, Christian

2011-06-01

"Semantic priming" refers to the phenomenon that people react faster to target words preceded by semantically related rather than semantically unrelated words. We wondered whether momentary mind sets modulate semantic priming for natural versus artifactual categories. We interspersed a category priming task with a second task that required participants to react to either the perceptual or action features of simple geometric shapes. Focusing on perceptual features enhanced semantic priming effects for natural categories, whereas focusing on action features enhanced semantic priming effects for artifactual categories. In fact, significant priming effects emerged only for those categories thought to rely on the features activated by the second task. This result suggests that (a) priming effects depend on momentary mind set and (b) features can be weighted flexibly in concept representations; it is also further evidence for sensory-functional accounts of concept and category representation.

What's in a Name? Denotation, Connotation, and "A Boy Named Sue"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lawton, Bessie

2011-01-01

Language choice--specifically word choice--is an important topic on a basic communication or public speaking course. One sub-topic under "Language" involves understanding the difference between denotation and connotation. Denotation refers to a word's definition, while connotation refers to the emotions associated with the word. Speakers need to…

10 CFR 1703.102 - Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-01-01

... 10 Energy 4 2012-01-01 2012-01-01 false Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. 1703... § 1703.102 Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. Agency record is a record in the... singular; the present tense includes the future tense; and words of one gender include the other gender. ...

10 CFR 1703.102 - Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-01-01

... 10 Energy 4 2011-01-01 2011-01-01 false Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. 1703... § 1703.102 Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. Agency record is a record in the... singular; the present tense includes the future tense; and words of one gender include the other gender. ...

10 CFR 1703.102 - Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-01-01

... 10 Energy 4 2014-01-01 2014-01-01 false Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. 1703... § 1703.102 Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. Agency record is a record in the... singular; the present tense includes the future tense; and words of one gender include the other gender. ...

10 CFR 1703.102 - Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-01-01

... 10 Energy 4 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. 1703... § 1703.102 Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. Agency record is a record in the... singular; the present tense includes the future tense; and words of one gender include the other gender. ...

10 CFR 1703.102 - Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-01-01

... 10 Energy 4 2013-01-01 2013-01-01 false Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. 1703... § 1703.102 Definitions; words denoting number, gender and tense. Agency record is a record in the... singular; the present tense includes the future tense; and words of one gender include the other gender. ...

Ambiguity and Relatedness Effects in Semantic Tasks: Are They Due to Semantic Coding?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hino, Yasushi; Pexman, Penny M.; Lupker, Stephen J.

2006-01-01

According to parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of visual word recognition, the speed of semantic coding is modulated by the nature of the orthographic-to-semantic mappings. Consistent with this idea, an ambiguity disadvantage and a relatedness-of-meaning (ROM) advantage have been reported in some word recognition tasks in which semantic…

The Function of Semantics in Automated Language Processing.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pacak, Milos; Pratt, Arnold W.

This paper is a survey of some of the major semantic models that have been developed for automated semantic analysis of natural language. Current approaches to semantic analysis and logical interference are based mainly on models of human cognitive processes such as Quillian's semantic memory, Simmon's Protosynthex III and others. All existing…

The influence of semantic and morphological complexity of verbs on sentence recall: Implications for the nature of conceptual representation and category-specific deficits.

PubMed

Mobayyen, Forouzan; de Almeida, Roberto G

2005-03-01

One hundred and forty normal undergraduate students participated in a Proactive Interference (PI) experiment with sentences containing verbs from four different semantic and morphological classes (lexical causatives, morphological causatives, and morphologically complex and simplex perception verbs). Past research has shown significant PI build-up effects for semantically and morphologically complex verbs in isolation (de Almeida & Mobayyen, 2004). The results of the present study show that, when embedded into sentence contexts, semantically and morphologically complex verbs do not produce significant PI build-up effects. Different verb classes, however, yield different recall patterns: sentences with semantically complex verbs (e.g., causatives) were recalled significantly better than sentences with semantically simplex verbs (e.g., perception verbs). The implications for the nature of both verb-conceptual representations and category-specific semantic deficits are discussed.

A Developmental Study of Conceptual, Semantic Differential, and Acoustical Dimensions as Encoding Categories in Short-Term Memory. Final Report.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Pender, Nola J.

The purpose of this research was to investigate developmental changes in encoding processes. It attempted to determine the extent to which children of varying ages utilize semantic (denotative or connotative) and acoustical encoding categories in a short-term memory task. It appears to be a reasonable assumption that as associational hierarchies…

Semantic framework for mapping object-oriented model to semantic web languages

PubMed Central

Ježek, Petr; Mouček, Roman

2015-01-01

The article deals with and discusses two main approaches in building semantic structures for electrophysiological metadata. It is the use of conventional data structures, repositories, and programming languages on one hand and the use of formal representations of ontologies, known from knowledge representation, such as description logics or semantic web languages on the other hand. Although knowledge engineering offers languages supporting richer semantic means of expression and technological advanced approaches, conventional data structures and repositories are still popular among developers, administrators and users because of their simplicity, overall intelligibility, and lower demands on technical equipment. The choice of conventional data resources and repositories, however, raises the question of how and where to add semantics that cannot be naturally expressed using them. As one of the possible solutions, this semantics can be added into the structures of the programming language that accesses and processes the underlying data. To support this idea we introduced a software prototype that enables its users to add semantically richer expressions into a Java object-oriented code. This approach does not burden users with additional demands on programming environment since reflective Java annotations were used as an entry for these expressions. Moreover, additional semantics need not to be written by the programmer directly to the code, but it can be collected from non-programmers using a graphic user interface. The mapping that allows the transformation of the semantically enriched Java code into the Semantic Web language OWL was proposed and implemented in a library named the Semantic Framework. This approach was validated by the integration of the Semantic Framework in the EEG/ERP Portal and by the subsequent registration of the EEG/ERP Portal in the Neuroscience Information Framework. PMID:25762923

Semantic framework for mapping object-oriented model to semantic web languages.

PubMed

Ježek, Petr; Mouček, Roman

2015-01-01

The article deals with and discusses two main approaches in building semantic structures for electrophysiological metadata. It is the use of conventional data structures, repositories, and programming languages on one hand and the use of formal representations of ontologies, known from knowledge representation, such as description logics or semantic web languages on the other hand. Although knowledge engineering offers languages supporting richer semantic means of expression and technological advanced approaches, conventional data structures and repositories are still popular among developers, administrators and users because of their simplicity, overall intelligibility, and lower demands on technical equipment. The choice of conventional data resources and repositories, however, raises the question of how and where to add semantics that cannot be naturally expressed using them. As one of the possible solutions, this semantics can be added into the structures of the programming language that accesses and processes the underlying data. To support this idea we introduced a software prototype that enables its users to add semantically richer expressions into a Java object-oriented code. This approach does not burden users with additional demands on programming environment since reflective Java annotations were used as an entry for these expressions. Moreover, additional semantics need not to be written by the programmer directly to the code, but it can be collected from non-programmers using a graphic user interface. The mapping that allows the transformation of the semantically enriched Java code into the Semantic Web language OWL was proposed and implemented in a library named the Semantic Framework. This approach was validated by the integration of the Semantic Framework in the EEG/ERP Portal and by the subsequent registration of the EEG/ERP Portal in the Neuroscience Information Framework.

FN400 potentials are functionally identical to N400 potentials and reflect semantic processing during recognition testing

PubMed Central

Voss, Joel L.; Federmeier, Kara D.

2010-01-01

The “F” in FN400 denotes a more frontal scalp distribution relative to the morphologically similar N400 component—a distinction consistent with the hypothesized distinct roles of FN400 in familiarity memory versus N400 in language. However, no direct comparisons have substantiated these assumed dissimilarities. To this end, we manipulated short-term semantic priming during a recognition test. Semantic priming effects on N400 were indistinguishable from memory effects at the same latency, and semantic priming strongly modulated the “FN400,” despite having no influence on familiarity memory. Thus, no evidence suggested either electrophysiological or functional differences between the N400 and FN400, and findings were contrary to the linking of the “FN400” to familiarity. Instead, it appears that semantic/conceptual priming (reflected in the N400) occurs during recognition tests, and is frequently (mis)labeled as FN400 and attributed to familiarity. PMID:20701709

Wernicke's aphasia reflects a combination of acoustic-phonological and semantic control deficits: a case-series comparison of Wernicke's aphasia, semantic dementia and semantic aphasia.

PubMed

Robson, Holly; Sage, Karen; Ralph, Matthew A Lambon

2012-01-01

Wernicke's aphasia (WA) is the classical neurological model of comprehension impairment and, as a result, the posterior temporal lobe is assumed to be critical to semantic cognition. This conclusion is potentially confused by (a) the existence of patient groups with semantic impairment following damage to other brain regions (semantic dementia and semantic aphasia) and (b) an ongoing debate about the underlying causes of comprehension impairment in WA. By directly comparing these three patient groups for the first time, we demonstrate that the comprehension impairment in Wernicke's aphasia is best accounted for by dual deficits in acoustic-phonological analysis (associated with pSTG) and semantic cognition (associated with pMTG and angular gyrus). The WA group were impaired on both nonverbal and verbal comprehension assessments consistent with a generalised semantic impairment. This semantic deficit was most similar in nature to that of the semantic aphasia group suggestive of a disruption to semantic control processes. In addition, only the WA group showed a strong effect of input modality on comprehension, with accuracy decreasing considerably as acoustic-phonological requirements increased. These results deviate from traditional accounts which emphasise a single impairment and, instead, implicate two deficits underlying the comprehension disorder in WA. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

COTARD SYNDROME IN SEMANTIC DEMENTIA

PubMed Central

Mendez, Mario F.; Ramírez-Bermúdez, Jesús

2011-01-01

Background Semantic dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the loss of meaning of words or concepts. semantic dementia can offer potential insights into the mechanisms of content-specific delusions. Objective The authors present a rare case of semantic dementia with Cotard syndrome, a delusion characterized by nihilism or self-negation. Method The semantic deficits and other features of semantic dementia were evaluated in relation to the patient's Cotard syndrome. Results Mrs. A developed the delusional belief that she was wasting and dying. This occurred after she lost knowledge for her somatic discomforts and sensations and for the organs that were the source of these sensations. Her nihilistic beliefs appeared to emerge from her misunderstanding of her somatic sensations. Conclusion This unique patient suggests that a mechanism for Cotard syndrome is difficulty interpreting the nature and source of internal pains and sensations. We propose that loss of semantic knowledge about one's own body may lead to the delusion of nihilism or death. PMID:22054629

The Nature and Neural Correlates of Semantic Association versus Conceptual Similarity

PubMed Central

Jackson, Rebecca L.; Hoffman, Paul; Pobric, Gorana; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.

2015-01-01

The ability to represent concepts and the relationships between them is critical to human cognition. How does the brain code relationships between items that share basic conceptual properties (e.g., dog and wolf) while simultaneously representing associative links between dissimilar items that co-occur in particular contexts (e.g., dog and bone)? To clarify the neural bases of these semantic components in neurologically intact participants, both types of semantic relationship were investigated in an fMRI study optimized for anterior temporal lobe (ATL) coverage. The clear principal finding was that the same core semantic network (ATL, superior temporal sulcus, ventral prefrontal cortex) was equivalently engaged when participants made semantic judgments on the basis of association or conceptual similarity. Direct comparisons revealed small, weaker differences for conceptual similarity > associative decisions (e.g., inferior prefrontal cortex) and associative > conceptual similarity (e.g., ventral parietal cortex) which appear to reflect graded differences in task difficulty. Indeed, once reaction time was entered as a covariate into the analysis, no associative versus category differences remained. The paper concludes with a discussion of how categorical/feature-based and associative relationships might be represented within a single, unified semantic system. PMID:25636912

The general/specific breakdown of semantic memory and the nature of superordinate knowledge: insights from superordinate and basic-level feature norms.

PubMed

Marques, J Frederico

2007-12-01

The deterioration of semantic memory usually proceeds from more specific to more general superordinate categories, although rarer cases of superordinate knowledge impairment have also been reported. The nature of superordinate knowledge and the explanation of these two semantic impairments were evaluated from the analysis of superordinate and basic-level feature norms. The results show that, in comparison to basic-level concepts, superordinate concepts are not generally less informative and have similar feature distinctiveness and proportion of individual sensory features, but their features are less shared by their members. Results are in accord with explanations based on feature connection weights and/or concept confusability for the superordinate advantage cases. Results especially support an explanation for superordinate impairments in terms of higher semantic control requirements as related to features being less shared between concept members. Implications for patients with semantic impairments are also discussed.

Testing the attentional boundary conditions of subliminal semantic priming: the influence of semantic and phonological task sets

PubMed Central

Adams, Sarah C.; Kiefer, Markus

2012-01-01

Recent studies challenged the classical notion of automaticity and indicated that even unconscious automatic semantic processing is under attentional control to some extent. In line with our attentional sensitization model, these data suggest that a sensitization of semantic pathways by a semantic task set is necessary for subliminal semantic priming to occur while non-semantic task sets attenuate priming. In the present study, we tested whether masked semantic priming is also reduced by phonological task sets using the previously developed induction task paradigm. This would substantiate the notion that attention to semantics is necessary for eliciting unconscious semantic priming. Participants first performed semantic and phonological induction tasks that should either activate a semantic or a phonological task set. Subsequent to the induction task, a masked prime word, either associated or non-associated with the following lexical decision target word, was presented. Across two experiments, we varied the nature of the phonological induction task (word phonology vs. letter phonology) to assess whether the attentional focus on the entire word vs. single letters modulates subsequent masked semantic priming. In both experiments, subliminal semantic priming was only found subsequent to the semantic induction task, but was attenuated following either phonological induction task. These results indicate that attention to phonology attenuates subsequent semantic processing of unconsciously presented primes whether or not attention is directed to the entire word or to single letters. The present findings therefore substantiate earlier evidence that an attentional orientation toward semantics is necessary for subliminal semantic priming to be elicited. PMID:22952461

Controlled semantic cognition relies upon dynamic and flexible interactions between the executive 'semantic control' and hub-and-spoke 'semantic representation' systems.

PubMed

Chiou, Rocco; Humphreys, Gina F; Jung, JeYoung; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A

2018-06-01

Built upon a wealth of neuroimaging, neurostimulation, and neuropsychology data, a recent proposal set forth a framework termed controlled semantic cognition (CSC) to account for how the brain underpins the ability to flexibly use semantic knowledge (Lambon Ralph et al., 2017; Nature Reviews Neuroscience). In CSC, the 'semantic control' system, underpinned predominantly by the prefrontal cortex, dynamically monitors and modulates the 'semantic representation' system that consists of a 'hub' (anterior temporal lobe, ATL) and multiple 'spokes' (modality-specific areas). CSC predicts that unfamiliar and exacting semantic tasks should intensify communication between the 'control' and 'representation' systems, relative to familiar and less taxing tasks. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test this hypothesis. Participants paired unrelated concepts by canonical colours (a less accustomed task - e.g., pairing ketchup with fire-extinguishers due to both being red) or paired well-related concepts by semantic relationship (a typical task - e.g., ketchup is related to mustard). We found the 'control' system was more engaged by atypical than typical pairing. While both tasks activated the ATL 'hub', colour pairing additionally involved occipitotemporal 'spoke' regions abutting areas of hue perception. Furthermore, we uncovered a gradient along the ventral temporal cortex, transitioning from the caudal 'spoke' zones preferring canonical colour processing to the rostral 'hub' zones preferring semantic relationship. Functional connectivity also differed between the tasks: Compared with semantic pairing, colour pairing relied more upon the inferior frontal gyrus, a key node of the control system, driving enhanced connectivity with occipitotemporal 'spoke'. Together, our findings characterise the interaction within the neural architecture of semantic cognition - the control system dynamically heightens its connectivity with relevant

How many kinds of reasoning? Inference, probability, and natural language semantics.

PubMed

Lassiter, Daniel; Goodman, Noah D

2015-03-01

The "new paradigm" unifying deductive and inductive reasoning in a Bayesian framework (Oaksford & Chater, 2007; Over, 2009) has been claimed to be falsified by results which show sharp differences between reasoning about necessity vs. plausibility (Heit & Rotello, 2010; Rips, 2001; Rotello & Heit, 2009). We provide a probabilistic model of reasoning with modal expressions such as "necessary" and "plausible" informed by recent work in formal semantics of natural language, and show that it predicts the possibility of non-linear response patterns which have been claimed to be problematic. Our model also makes a strong monotonicity prediction, while two-dimensional theories predict the possibility of reversals in argument strength depending on the modal word chosen. Predictions were tested using a novel experimental paradigm that replicates the previously-reported response patterns with a minimal manipulation, changing only one word of the stimulus between conditions. We found a spectrum of reasoning "modes" corresponding to different modal words, and strong support for our model's monotonicity prediction. This indicates that probabilistic approaches to reasoning can account in a clear and parsimonious way for data previously argued to falsify them, as well as new, more fine-grained, data. It also illustrates the importance of careful attention to the semantics of language employed in reasoning experiments. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The Semantic Distance Task: Quantifying Semantic Distance with Semantic Network Path Length

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kenett, Yoed N.; Levi, Effi; Anaki, David; Faust, Miriam

2017-01-01

Semantic distance is a determining factor in cognitive processes, such as semantic priming, operating upon semantic memory. The main computational approach to compute semantic distance is through latent semantic analysis (LSA). However, objections have been raised against this approach, mainly in its failure at predicting semantic priming. We…

SATware: A Semantic Approach for Building Sentient Spaces

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Massaguer, Daniel; Mehrotra, Sharad; Vaisenberg, Ronen; Venkatasubramanian, Nalini

This chapter describes the architecture of a semantic-based middleware environment for building sensor-driven sentient spaces. The proposed middleware explicitly models sentient space semantics (i.e., entities, spaces, activities) and supports mechanisms to map sensor observations to the state of the sentient space. We argue how such a semantic approach provides a powerful programming environment for building sensor spaces. In addition, the approach provides natural ways to exploit semantics for variety of purposes including scheduling under resource constraints and sensor recalibration.

Language production is facilitated by semantic richness but inhibited by semantic density: Evidence from picture naming.

PubMed

Rabovsky, Milena; Schad, Daniel J; Abdel Rahman, Rasha

2016-01-01

Communicating meaningful messages is the ultimate goal of language production. Yet, verbal messages can differ widely in the complexity and richness of their semantic content, and such differences should strongly modulate conceptual and lexical encoding processes during speech planning. However, despite the crucial role of semantic content in language production, the influence of this variability is currently unclear. Here, we investigate influences of the number of associated semantic features and intercorrelational feature density on language production during picture naming. While the number of semantic features facilitated naming, intercorrelational feature density inhibited naming. Both effects follow naturally from the assumption of conceptual facilitation and simultaneous lexical competition. They are difficult to accommodate with language production theories dismissing lexical competition. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Semantics and Syntax of Non-Standard Coordination

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Paperno, Denis

2012-01-01

This dissertation explores the diversity and unity of coordination constructions in natural language. Following the goal of bridging syntactic typology with formal semantics, it takes the typological variation in NP coordination patterns as a challenge for semantic theory. Hybrid Coordination in Russian and Comitative Coordination in…

The semantic distance task: Quantifying semantic distance with semantic network path length.

PubMed

Kenett, Yoed N; Levi, Effi; Anaki, David; Faust, Miriam

2017-09-01

Semantic distance is a determining factor in cognitive processes, such as semantic priming, operating upon semantic memory. The main computational approach to compute semantic distance is through latent semantic analysis (LSA). However, objections have been raised against this approach, mainly in its failure at predicting semantic priming. We propose a novel approach to computing semantic distance, based on network science methodology. Path length in a semantic network represents the amount of steps needed to traverse from 1 word in the network to the other. We examine whether path length can be used as a measure of semantic distance, by investigating how path length affect performance in a semantic relatedness judgment task and recall from memory. Our results show a differential effect on performance: Up to 4 steps separating between word-pairs, participants exhibit an increase in reaction time (RT) and decrease in the percentage of word-pairs judged as related. From 4 steps onward, participants exhibit a significant decrease in RT and the word-pairs are dominantly judged as unrelated. Furthermore, we show that as path length between word-pairs increases, success in free- and cued-recall decreases. Finally, we demonstrate how our measure outperforms computational methods measuring semantic distance (LSA and positive pointwise mutual information) in predicting participants RT and subjective judgments of semantic strength. Thus, we provide a computational alternative to computing semantic distance. Furthermore, this approach addresses key issues in cognitive theory, namely the breadth of the spreading activation process and the effect of semantic distance on memory retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Electrocortical N400 Effects of Semantic Satiation

PubMed Central

Ströberg, Kim; Andersen, Lau M.; Wiens, Stefan

2017-01-01

Semantic satiation is characterised by the subjective and temporary loss of meaning after high repetition of a prime word. To study the nature of this effect, previous electroencephalography (EEG) research recorded the N400, an ERP component that is sensitive to violations of semantic context. The N400 is characterised by a relative negativity to words that are unrelated vs. related to the semantic context. The semantic satiation hypothesis predicts that the N400 should decrease with high repetition. However, previous findings have been inconsistent. Because of these inconsistent findings and the shortcomings of previous research, we used a modified design that minimises confounding effects from non-semantic processes. We recorded 64-channel EEG and analysed the N400 in a semantic priming task in which the primes were repeated 3 or 30 times. Critically, we separated low and high repetition trials and excluded response trials. Further, we varied the physical features (letter case and format) of consecutive primes to minimise confounding effects from perceptual habituation. For centrofrontal electrodes, the N400 was reduced after 30 repetitions (vs. 3 repetitions). Explorative source reconstructions suggested that activity decreased after 30 repetitions in bilateral inferior temporal gyrus, the right posterior section of the superior and middle temporal gyrus, right supramarginal gyrus, bilateral lateral occipital cortex, and bilateral lateral orbitofrontal cortex. These areas overlap broadly with those typically involved in the N400, namely middle temporal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus. The results support the semantic rather than the perceptual nature of the satiation effect. PMID:29375411

Generative Semantics

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bagha, Karim Nazari

2011-01-01

Generative semantics is (or perhaps was) a research program within linguistics, initiated by the work of George Lakoff, John R. Ross, Paul Postal and later McCawley. The approach developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid 1960s, but stood largely in opposition to work by Noam Chomsky and his students. The nature and genesis of…

Semantic memory in developmental amnesia.

PubMed

Elward, Rachael L; Vargha-Khadem, Faraneh

2018-04-30

Patients with developmental amnesia resulting from bilateral hippocampal atrophy associated with neonatal hypoxia-ischaemia typically show relatively preserved semantic memory and factual knowledge about the natural world despite severe impairments in episodic memory. Understanding the neural and mnemonic processes that enable this context-free semantic knowledge to be acquired throughout development without the support of the contextualised episodic memory system is a serious challenge. This review describes the clinical presentation of patients with developmental amnesia, contrasts its features with those reported for adult-onset hippocampal amnesia, and analyses the effects of variables that influence the learning of new semantic information. Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

"Truth be told" - Semantic memory as the scaffold for veridical communication.

PubMed

Hayes, Brett K; Ramanan, Siddharth; Irish, Muireann

2018-01-01

Theoretical accounts placing episodic memory as central to constructive and communicative functions neglect the role of semantic memory. We argue that the decontextualized nature of semantic schemas largely supersedes the computational bottleneck and error-prone nature of episodic memory. Rather, neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence of episodic-semantic interactions suggest that an integrative framework more accurately captures the mechanisms underpinning social communication.

Electrophysiological evidence of automatic early semantic processing.

PubMed

Hinojosa, José A; Martín-Loeches, Manuel; Muñoz, Francisco; Casado, Pilar; Pozo, Miguel A

2004-01-01

This study investigates the automatic-controlled nature of early semantic processing by means of the Recognition Potential (RP), an event-related potential response that reflects lexical selection processes. For this purpose tasks differing in their processing requirements were used. Half of the participants performed a physical task involving a lower-upper case discrimination judgement (shallow processing requirements), whereas the other half carried out a semantic task, consisting in detecting animal names (deep processing requirements). Stimuli were identical in the two tasks. Reaction time measures revealed that the physical task was easier to perform than the semantic task. However, RP effects elicited by the physical and semantic tasks did not differ in either latency, amplitude, or topographic distribution. Thus, the results from the present study suggest that early semantic processing is automatically triggered whenever a linguistic stimulus enters the language processor.

Semantic representations in the temporal pole predict false memories

PubMed Central

Chadwick, Martin J.; Anjum, Raeesa S.; Kumaran, Dharshan; Schacter, Daniel L.; Spiers, Hugo J.; Hassabis, Demis

2016-01-01

Recent advances in neuroscience have given us unprecedented insight into the neural mechanisms of false memory, showing that artificial memories can be inserted into the memory cells of the hippocampus in a way that is indistinguishable from true memories. However, this alone is not enough to explain how false memories can arise naturally in the course of our daily lives. Cognitive psychology has demonstrated that many instances of false memory, both in the laboratory and the real world, can be attributed to semantic interference. Whereas previous studies have found that a diverse set of regions show some involvement in semantic false memory, none have revealed the nature of the semantic representations underpinning the phenomenon. Here we use fMRI with representational similarity analysis to search for a neural code consistent with semantic false memory. We find clear evidence that false memories emerge from a similarity-based neural code in the temporal pole, a region that has been called the “semantic hub” of the brain. We further show that each individual has a partially unique semantic code within the temporal pole, and this unique code can predict idiosyncratic patterns of memory errors. Finally, we show that the same neural code can also predict variation in true-memory performance, consistent with an adaptive perspective on false memory. Taken together, our findings reveal the underlying structure of neural representations of semantic knowledge, and how this semantic structure can both enhance and distort our memories. PMID:27551087

Semantic representations in the temporal pole predict false memories.

PubMed

Chadwick, Martin J; Anjum, Raeesa S; Kumaran, Dharshan; Schacter, Daniel L; Spiers, Hugo J; Hassabis, Demis

2016-09-06

Recent advances in neuroscience have given us unprecedented insight into the neural mechanisms of false memory, showing that artificial memories can be inserted into the memory cells of the hippocampus in a way that is indistinguishable from true memories. However, this alone is not enough to explain how false memories can arise naturally in the course of our daily lives. Cognitive psychology has demonstrated that many instances of false memory, both in the laboratory and the real world, can be attributed to semantic interference. Whereas previous studies have found that a diverse set of regions show some involvement in semantic false memory, none have revealed the nature of the semantic representations underpinning the phenomenon. Here we use fMRI with representational similarity analysis to search for a neural code consistent with semantic false memory. We find clear evidence that false memories emerge from a similarity-based neural code in the temporal pole, a region that has been called the "semantic hub" of the brain. We further show that each individual has a partially unique semantic code within the temporal pole, and this unique code can predict idiosyncratic patterns of memory errors. Finally, we show that the same neural code can also predict variation in true-memory performance, consistent with an adaptive perspective on false memory. Taken together, our findings reveal the underlying structure of neural representations of semantic knowledge, and how this semantic structure can both enhance and distort our memories.

Double dissociation of semantic categories in Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Gonnerman, L M; Andersen, E S; Devlin, J T; Kempler, D; Seidenberg, M S

1997-04-01

Data that demonstrate distinct patterns of semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are presented. Findings suggest that while groups of mild-moderate patients may not display category specific impairments, some individual patients do show selective impairment of either natural kinds or artifacts. We present a model of semantic organization in which category specific impairments arise from damage to distributed features underlying different types of categories. We incorporate the crucial notions of intercorrelations and distinguishing features, allowing us to demonstrate (1) how category specific impairments can result from widespread damage and (2) how selective deficits in AD reflect different points in the progression of impairment. The different patterns of impairment arise from an interaction between the nature of the semantic categories and the progression of damage.

Biomedical semantics in the Semantic Web

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

The Semantic Web offers an ideal platform for representing and linking biomedical information, which is a prerequisite for the development and application of analytical tools to address problems in data-intensive areas such as systems biology and translational medicine. As for any new paradigm, the adoption of the Semantic Web offers opportunities and poses questions and challenges to the life sciences scientific community: which technologies in the Semantic Web stack will be more beneficial for the life sciences? Is biomedical information too complex to benefit from simple interlinked representations? What are the implications of adopting a new paradigm for knowledge representation? What are the incentives for the adoption of the Semantic Web, and who are the facilitators? Is there going to be a Semantic Web revolution in the life sciences? We report here a few reflections on these questions, following discussions at the SWAT4LS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences) workshop series, of which this Journal of Biomedical Semantics special issue presents selected papers from the 2009 edition, held in Amsterdam on November 20th. PMID:21388570

Biomedical semantics in the Semantic Web.

PubMed

Splendiani, Andrea; Burger, Albert; Paschke, Adrian; Romano, Paolo; Marshall, M Scott

2011-03-07

The Semantic Web offers an ideal platform for representing and linking biomedical information, which is a prerequisite for the development and application of analytical tools to address problems in data-intensive areas such as systems biology and translational medicine. As for any new paradigm, the adoption of the Semantic Web offers opportunities and poses questions and challenges to the life sciences scientific community: which technologies in the Semantic Web stack will be more beneficial for the life sciences? Is biomedical information too complex to benefit from simple interlinked representations? What are the implications of adopting a new paradigm for knowledge representation? What are the incentives for the adoption of the Semantic Web, and who are the facilitators? Is there going to be a Semantic Web revolution in the life sciences?We report here a few reflections on these questions, following discussions at the SWAT4LS (Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences) workshop series, of which this Journal of Biomedical Semantics special issue presents selected papers from the 2009 edition, held in Amsterdam on November 20th.

The Syntax and Semantics of ERICA. Technical Report No. 185, Psychology and Education Series.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Smith, Robert Lawrence, Jr.

This report is a detailed empirical examination of Suppes' ideas about the syntax and semantics of natural language, and an attempt at supporting the proposal that model-theoretic semantics of the type first proposed by Tarski is a useful tool for understanding the semantics of natural language. Child speech was selected as the best place to find…

KaBOB: ontology-based semantic integration of biomedical databases.

PubMed

Livingston, Kevin M; Bada, Michael; Baumgartner, William A; Hunter, Lawrence E

2015-04-23

The ability to query many independent biological databases using a common ontology-based semantic model would facilitate deeper integration and more effective utilization of these diverse and rapidly growing resources. Despite ongoing work moving toward shared data formats and linked identifiers, significant problems persist in semantic data integration in order to establish shared identity and shared meaning across heterogeneous biomedical data sources. We present five processes for semantic data integration that, when applied collectively, solve seven key problems. These processes include making explicit the differences between biomedical concepts and database records, aggregating sets of identifiers denoting the same biomedical concepts across data sources, and using declaratively represented forward-chaining rules to take information that is variably represented in source databases and integrating it into a consistent biomedical representation. We demonstrate these processes and solutions by presenting KaBOB (the Knowledge Base Of Biomedicine), a knowledge base of semantically integrated data from 18 prominent biomedical databases using common representations grounded in Open Biomedical Ontologies. An instance of KaBOB with data about humans and seven major model organisms can be built using on the order of 500 million RDF triples. All source code for building KaBOB is available under an open-source license. KaBOB is an integrated knowledge base of biomedical data representationally based in prominent, actively maintained Open Biomedical Ontologies, thus enabling queries of the underlying data in terms of biomedical concepts (e.g., genes and gene products, interactions and processes) rather than features of source-specific data schemas or file formats. KaBOB resolves many of the issues that routinely plague biomedical researchers intending to work with data from multiple data sources and provides a platform for ongoing data integration and development and for

Semantic Borders and Incomplete Understanding.

PubMed

Silva-Filho, Waldomiro J; Dazzani, Maria Virgínia

2016-03-01

In this article, we explore a fundamental issue of Cultural Psychology, that is our "capacity to make meaning", by investigating a thesis from contemporary philosophical semantics, namely, that there is a decisive relationship between language and rationality. Many philosophers think that for a person to be described as a rational agent he must understand the semantic content and meaning of the words he uses to express his intentional mental states, e.g., his beliefs and thoughts. Our argument seeks to investigate the thesis developed by Tyler Burge, according to which our mastery or understanding of the semantic content of the terms which form our beliefs and thoughts is an "incomplete understanding". To do this, we discuss, on the one hand, the general lines of anti-individualism or semantic externalism and, on the other, criticisms of the Burgean notion of incomplete understanding - one radical and the other moderate. We defend our understanding that the content of our beliefs must be described in the light of the limits and natural contingencies of our cognitive capacities and the normative nature of our rationality. At heart, anti-individualism leads us to think about the fact that we are social creatures, living in contingent situations, with important, but limited, cognitive capacities, and that we receive the main, and most important, portion of our knowledge simply from what others tell us. Finally, we conclude that this discussion may contribute to the current debate about the notion of borders.

Dissociation of lexical syntax and semantics: evidence from focal cortical degeneration.

PubMed

Garrard, P; Carroll, E; Vinson, D; Vigliocco, G

2004-10-01

The question of whether information relevant to meaning (semantics) and structure (syntax) relies on a common language processor or on separate subsystems has proved difficult to address definitively because of the confounds involved in comparing the two types of information. At the sentence level syntactic and semantic judgments make different cognitive demands, while at the single word level, the most commonly used syntactic distinction (between nouns and verbs) is confounded with a fundamental semantic difference (between objects and actions). The present study employs a different syntactic contrast (between count nouns and mass nouns), which is crossed with a semantic difference (between naturally occurring and man-made substances) applying to words within a circumscribed semantic field (foodstuffs). We show, first, that grammaticality judgments of a patient with semantic dementia are indistinguishable from those of a group of age-matched controls, and are similar regardless of the status of his semantic knowledge about the item. In a second experiment we use the triadic task in a group of age-matched controls to show that similarity judgments are influenced not only by meaning (natural vs. manmade), but also implicitly by syntactic information (count vs. mass). Using the same task in a patient with semantic dementia we show that the semantic influences on the syntactic dimension are unlikely to account for this pattern in normals. These data are discussed in relation to modular vs. nonmodular models of language processing, and in particular to the semantic-syntactic distinction.

Semantic annotation in biomedicine: the current landscape.

PubMed

Jovanović, Jelena; Bagheri, Ebrahim

2017-09-22

The abundance and unstructured nature of biomedical texts, be it clinical or research content, impose significant challenges for the effective and efficient use of information and knowledge stored in such texts. Annotation of biomedical documents with machine intelligible semantics facilitates advanced, semantics-based text management, curation, indexing, and search. This paper focuses on annotation of biomedical entity mentions with concepts from relevant biomedical knowledge bases such as UMLS. As a result, the meaning of those mentions is unambiguously and explicitly defined, and thus made readily available for automated processing. This process is widely known as semantic annotation, and the tools that perform it are known as semantic annotators.Over the last dozen years, the biomedical research community has invested significant efforts in the development of biomedical semantic annotation technology. Aiming to establish grounds for further developments in this area, we review a selected set of state of the art biomedical semantic annotators, focusing particularly on general purpose annotators, that is, semantic annotation tools that can be customized to work with texts from any area of biomedicine. We also examine potential directions for further improvements of today's annotators which could make them even more capable of meeting the needs of real-world applications. To motivate and encourage further developments in this area, along the suggested and/or related directions, we review existing and potential practical applications and benefits of semantic annotators.

Coupling ontology driven semantic representation with multilingual natural language generation for tuning international terminologies.

PubMed

Rassinoux, Anne-Marie; Baud, Robert H; Rodrigues, Jean-Marie; Lovis, Christian; Geissbühler, Antoine

2007-01-01

The importance of clinical communication between providers, consumers and others, as well as the requisite for computer interoperability, strengthens the need for sharing common accepted terminologies. Under the directives of the World Health Organization (WHO), an approach is currently being conducted in Australia to adopt a standardized terminology for medical procedures that is intended to become an international reference. In order to achieve such a standard, a collaborative approach is adopted, in line with the successful experiment conducted for the development of the new French coding system CCAM. Different coding centres are involved in setting up a semantic representation of each term using a formal ontological structure expressed through a logic-based representation language. From this language-independent representation, multilingual natural language generation (NLG) is performed to produce noun phrases in various languages that are further compared for consistency with the original terms. Outcomes are presented for the assessment of the International Classification of Health Interventions (ICHI) and its translation into Portuguese. The initial results clearly emphasize the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the proposed method for handling both a different classification and an additional language. NLG tools, based on ontology driven semantic representation, facilitate the discovery of ambiguous and inconsistent terms, and, as such, should be promoted for establishing coherent international terminologies.

Intrusive effects of semantic information on visual selective attention.

PubMed

Malcolm, George L; Rattinger, Michelle; Shomstein, Sarah

2016-10-01

Every object is represented by semantic information in extension to its low-level properties. It is well documented that such information biases attention when it is necessary for an ongoing task. However, whether semantic relationships influence attentional selection when they are irrelevant to the ongoing task remains an open question. The ubiquitous nature of semantic information suggests that it could bias attention even when these properties are irrelevant. In the present study, three objects appeared on screen, two of which were semantically related. After a varying time interval, a target or distractor appeared on top of each object. The objects' semantic relationships never predicted the target location. Despite this, a semantic bias on attentional allocation was observed, with an initial, transient bias to semantically related objects. Further experiments demonstrated that this effect was contingent on the objects being attended: if an object never contained the target, it no longer exerted a semantic influence. In a final set of experiments, we demonstrated that the semantic bias is robust and appears even in the presence of more predictive cues (spatial probability). These results suggest that as long as an object is attended, its semantic properties bias attention, even if it is irrelevant to an ongoing task and if more predictive factors are available.

Model-based semantic dictionaries for medical language understanding.

PubMed Central

Rassinoux, A. M.; Baud, R. H.; Ruch, P.; Trombert-Paviot, B.; Rodrigues, J. M.

1999-01-01

Semantic dictionaries are emerging as a major cornerstone towards achieving sound natural language understanding. Indeed, they constitute the main bridge between words and conceptual entities that reflect their meanings. Nowadays, more and more wide-coverage lexical dictionaries are electronically available in the public domain. However, associating a semantic content with lexical entries is not a straightforward task as it is subordinate to the existence of a fine-grained concept model of the treated domain. This paper presents the benefits and pitfalls in building and maintaining multilingual dictionaries, the semantics of which is directly established on an existing concept model. Concrete cases, handled through the GALEN-IN-USE project, illustrate the use of such semantic dictionaries for the analysis and generation of multilingual surgical procedures. PMID:10566333

New Embedded Denotes Fuzzy C-Mean Application for Breast Cancer Density Segmentation in Digital Mammograms

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Othman, Khairulnizam; Ahmad, Afandi

2016-11-01

In this research we explore the application of normalize denoted new techniques in advance fast c-mean in to the problem of finding the segment of different breast tissue regions in mammograms. The goal of the segmentation algorithm is to see if new denotes fuzzy c- mean algorithm could separate different densities for the different breast patterns. The new density segmentation is applied with multi-selection of seeds label to provide the hard constraint, whereas the seeds labels are selected based on user defined. New denotes fuzzy c- mean have been explored on images of various imaging modalities but not on huge format digital mammograms just yet. Therefore, this project is mainly focused on using normalize denoted new techniques employed in fuzzy c-mean to perform segmentation to increase visibility of different breast densities in mammography images. Segmentation of the mammogram into different mammographic densities is useful for risk assessment and quantitative evaluation of density changes. Our proposed methodology for the segmentation of mammograms on the basis of their region into different densities based categories has been tested on MIAS database and Trueta Database.

Rewriting Logic Semantics of a Plan Execution Language

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Dowek, Gilles; Munoz, Cesar A.; Rocha, Camilo

2009-01-01

The Plan Execution Interchange Language (PLEXIL) is a synchronous language developed by NASA to support autonomous spacecraft operations. In this paper, we propose a rewriting logic semantics of PLEXIL in Maude, a high-performance logical engine. The rewriting logic semantics is by itself a formal interpreter of the language and can be used as a semantic benchmark for the implementation of PLEXIL executives. The implementation in Maude has the additional benefit of making available to PLEXIL designers and developers all the formal analysis and verification tools provided by Maude. The formalization of the PLEXIL semantics in rewriting logic poses an interesting challenge due to the synchronous nature of the language and the prioritized rules defining its semantics. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a general procedure for simulating synchronous set relations in rewriting logic that is sound and, for deterministic relations, complete. We also report on the finding of two issues at the design level of the original PLEXIL semantics that were identified with the help of the executable specification in Maude.

Semantic graphs and associative memories

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Pomi, Andrés; Mizraji, Eduardo

2004-12-01

Graphs have been increasingly utilized in the characterization of complex networks from diverse origins, including different kinds of semantic networks. Human memories are associative and are known to support complex semantic nets; these nets are represented by graphs. However, it is not known how the brain can sustain these semantic graphs. The vision of cognitive brain activities, shown by modern functional imaging techniques, assigns renewed value to classical distributed associative memory models. Here we show that these neural network models, also known as correlation matrix memories, naturally support a graph representation of the stored semantic structure. We demonstrate that the adjacency matrix of this graph of associations is just the memory coded with the standard basis of the concept vector space, and that the spectrum of the graph is a code invariant of the memory. As long as the assumptions of the model remain valid this result provides a practical method to predict and modify the evolution of the cognitive dynamics. Also, it could provide us with a way to comprehend how individual brains that map the external reality, almost surely with different particular vector representations, are nevertheless able to communicate and share a common knowledge of the world. We finish presenting adaptive association graphs, an extension of the model that makes use of the tensor product, which provides a solution to the known problem of branching in semantic nets.

Building a biomedical semantic network in Wikipedia with Semantic Wiki Links

PubMed Central

Good, Benjamin M.; Clarke, Erik L.; Loguercio, Salvatore; Su, Andrew I.

2012-01-01

Wikipedia is increasingly used as a platform for collaborative data curation, but its current technical implementation has significant limitations that hinder its use in biocuration applications. Specifically, while editors can easily link between two articles in Wikipedia to indicate a relationship, there is no way to indicate the nature of that relationship in a way that is computationally accessible to the system or to external developers. For example, in addition to noting a relationship between a gene and a disease, it would be useful to differentiate the cases where genetic mutation or altered expression causes the disease. Here, we introduce a straightforward method that allows Wikipedia editors to embed computable semantic relations directly in the context of current Wikipedia articles. In addition, we demonstrate two novel applications enabled by the presence of these new relationships. The first is a dynamically generated information box that can be rendered on all semantically enhanced Wikipedia articles. The second is a prototype gene annotation system that draws its content from the gene-centric articles on Wikipedia and exposes the new semantic relationships to enable previously impossible, user-defined queries. Database URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Gene_Wiki PMID:22434829

Building a biomedical semantic network in Wikipedia with Semantic Wiki Links.

PubMed

Good, Benjamin M; Clarke, Erik L; Loguercio, Salvatore; Su, Andrew I

2012-01-01

Wikipedia is increasingly used as a platform for collaborative data curation, but its current technical implementation has significant limitations that hinder its use in biocuration applications. Specifically, while editors can easily link between two articles in Wikipedia to indicate a relationship, there is no way to indicate the nature of that relationship in a way that is computationally accessible to the system or to external developers. For example, in addition to noting a relationship between a gene and a disease, it would be useful to differentiate the cases where genetic mutation or altered expression causes the disease. Here, we introduce a straightforward method that allows Wikipedia editors to embed computable semantic relations directly in the context of current Wikipedia articles. In addition, we demonstrate two novel applications enabled by the presence of these new relationships. The first is a dynamically generated information box that can be rendered on all semantically enhanced Wikipedia articles. The second is a prototype gene annotation system that draws its content from the gene-centric articles on Wikipedia and exposes the new semantic relationships to enable previously impossible, user-defined queries. DATABASE URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Gene_Wiki.

Context-Aware Adaptive Hybrid Semantic Relatedness in Biomedical Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Emadzadeh, Ehsan

Text mining of biomedical literature and clinical notes is a very active field of research in biomedical science. Semantic analysis is one of the core modules for different Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions. Methods for calculating semantic relatedness of two concepts can be very useful in solutions solving different problems such as relationship extraction, ontology creation and question / answering [1--6]. Several techniques exist in calculating semantic relatedness of two concepts. These techniques utilize different knowledge sources and corpora. So far, researchers attempted to find the best hybrid method for each domain by combining semantic relatedness techniques and data sources manually. In this work, attempts were made to eliminate the needs for manually combining semantic relatedness methods targeting any new contexts or resources through proposing an automated method, which attempted to find the best combination of semantic relatedness techniques and resources to achieve the best semantic relatedness score in every context. This may help the research community find the best hybrid method for each context considering the available algorithms and resources.

Predication-based semantic indexing: permutations as a means to encode predications in semantic space.

PubMed

Cohen, Trevor; Schvaneveldt, Roger W; Rindflesch, Thomas C

2009-11-14

Corpus-derived distributional models of semantic distance between terms have proved useful in a number of applications. For both theoretical and practical reasons, it is desirable to extend these models to encode discrete concepts and the ways in which they are related to one another. In this paper, we present a novel vector space model that encodes semantic predications derived from MEDLINE by the SemRep system into a compact spatial representation. The associations captured by this method are of a different and complementary nature to those derived by traditional vector space models, and the encoding of predication types presents new possibilities for knowledge discovery and information retrieval.

Lack of semantic priming effects in famous person recognition in Mild Cognitive Impairment.

PubMed

Brambati, Simona M; Peters, Frédéric; Belleville, Sylvie; Joubert, Sven

2012-04-01

Growing evidence indicates that individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) manifest semantic deficits that are often more severe for items that are characterized by a unique semantic and lexical association, such as famous people and famous buildings, than common concepts, such as objects. However, it is still controversial whether the semantic deficits observed in MCI are determined by a degradation of semantic information or by a deficit in intentional access to semantic knowledge. Here we used a semantic priming task in order to assess the integrity of the semantic system without requiring explicit access to this system. This paradigm may provide new insights in clarifying the nature of the semantic deficits in MCI. We assessed the semantic and repetition priming effect in 13 individuals with MCI and 13 age-matched controls who engaged in a familiarity judgment task of famous names. In the semantic priming condition, the prime was the name of a member of the same occupation category as the target (Tom Cruise-Brad Pitt), while in the repetition priming condition the prime was the same name as the target (Charlie Chaplin-Charlie Chaplin). The results showed a defective priming effect in MCI in the semantic but not in the repetition priming condition. Specifically, when compared to controls, MCI patients did not show a facilitation effect in responding to the same occupation prime-target pairs, but they showed an equivalent facilitation effect when the target was the same name as the prime. The present results provide support to the hypothesis that the semantic impairments observed in MCI cannot be uniquely ascribed to a deficit in intentional access to semantic information. Instead, these findings point to the semantic nature of these deficits and, in particular, to a degraded representation of semantic information concerning famous people. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Srl. All rights reserved.

Semantic error patterns on the Boston Naming Test in normal aging, amnestic mild cognitive impairment, and mild Alzheimer's disease: is there semantic disruption?

PubMed

Balthazar, Marcio Luiz Figueredo; Cendes, Fernando; Damasceno, Benito Pereira

2008-11-01

Naming difficulty is common in Alzheimer's disease (AD), but the nature of this problem is not well established. The authors investigated the presence of semantic breakdown and the pattern of general and semantic errors in patients with mild AD, patients with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), and normal controls by examining their spontaneous answers on the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and verifying whether they needed or were benefited by semantic and phonemic cues. The errors in spontaneous answers were classified in four mutually exclusive categories (semantic errors, visual paragnosia, phonological errors, and omission errors), and the semantic errors were further subclassified as coordinate, superordinate, and circumlocutory. Patients with aMCI performed normally on the BNT and needed fewer semantic and phonemic cues than patients with mild AD. After semantic cues, subjects with aMCI and control subjects gave more correct answers than patients with mild AD, but after phonemic cues, there was no difference between the three groups, suggesting that the low performance of patients with AD cannot be completely explained by semantic breakdown. Patterns of spontaneous naming errors and subtypes of semantic errors were similar in the three groups, with decreasing error frequency from coordinate to superordinate to circumlocutory subtypes.

Learning for Semantic Parsing with Kernels under Various Forms of Supervision

DTIC Science & Technology

2007-08-01

natural language sentences to their formal executable meaning representations. This is a challenging problem and is critical for developing computing...sentences are semantically tractable. This indi- cates that Geoquery is more challenging domain for semantic parsing than ATIS. In the past, there have been a...Combining parsers. In Proceedings of the Conference on Em- pirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Very Large Corpora (EMNLP/ VLC -99), pp. 187–194

Integrating a Hypernymic Proposition Interpreter into a Semantic Processor for Biomedical Texts

PubMed Central

Fiszman, Marcelo; Rindflesch, Thomas C.; Kilicoglu, Halil

2003-01-01

Semantic processing provides the potential for producing high quality results in natural language processing (NLP) applications in the biomedical domain. In this paper, we address a specific semantic phenomenon, the hypernymic proposition, and concentrate on integrating the interpretation of such predications into a more general semantic processor in order to improve overall accuracy. A preliminary evaluation assesses the contribution of hypernymic propositions in providing more specific semantic predications and thus improving effectiveness in retrieving treatment propositions in MEDLINE abstracts. Finally, we discuss the generalization of this methodology to additional semantic propositions as well as other types of biomedical texts. PMID:14728170

Semantic memory: a feature-based analysis and new norms for Italian.

PubMed

Montefinese, Maria; Ambrosini, Ettore; Fairfield, Beth; Mammarella, Nicola

2013-06-01

Semantic norms for properties produced by native speakers are valuable tools for researchers interested in the structure of semantic memory and in category-specific semantic deficits in individuals following brain damage. The aims of this study were threefold. First, we sought to extend existing semantic norms by adopting an empirical approach to category (Exp. 1) and concept (Exp. 2) selection, in order to obtain a more representative set of semantic memory features. Second, we extensively outlined a new set of semantic production norms collected from Italian native speakers for 120 artifactual and natural basic-level concepts, using numerous measures and statistics following a feature-listing task (Exp. 3b). Finally, we aimed to create a new publicly accessible database, since only a few existing databases are publicly available online.

18 CFR 1.102 - Words denoting number, gender and so forth.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-04-01

... 18 Conservation of Power and Water Resources 1 2013-04-01 2013-04-01 false Words denoting number, gender and so forth. 1.102 Section 1.102 Conservation of Power and Water Resources FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY GENERAL RULES RULES OF GENERAL APPLICABILITY Definitions and...

18 CFR 1.102 - Words denoting number, gender and so forth.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2010 CFR

2010-04-01

... 18 Conservation of Power and Water Resources 1 2010-04-01 2010-04-01 false Words denoting number, gender and so forth. 1.102 Section 1.102 Conservation of Power and Water Resources FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY GENERAL RULES RULES OF GENERAL APPLICABILITY Definitions and...

18 CFR 1.102 - Words denoting number, gender and so forth.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-04-01

... 18 Conservation of Power and Water Resources 1 2012-04-01 2012-04-01 false Words denoting number, gender and so forth. 1.102 Section 1.102 Conservation of Power and Water Resources FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY GENERAL RULES RULES OF GENERAL APPLICABILITY Definitions and...

18 CFR 1.102 - Words denoting number, gender and so forth.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-04-01

... 18 Conservation of Power and Water Resources 1 2014-04-01 2014-04-01 false Words denoting number, gender and so forth. 1.102 Section 1.102 Conservation of Power and Water Resources FEDERAL ENERGY REGULATORY COMMISSION, DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY GENERAL RULES RULES OF GENERAL APPLICABILITY Definitions and...

Semantic Similarity of Labels and Inductive Generalization: Taking a Second Look

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Fisher, Anna V.; Matlen, Bryan J.; Godwin, Karrie E.

2011-01-01

Prior research suggests that preschoolers can generalize object properties based on category information conveyed by semantically-similar labels. However, previous research did not control for co-occurrence probability of labels in natural speech. The current studies re-assessed children's generalization with semantically-similar labels.…

Audiovisual semantic congruency during encoding enhances memory performance.

PubMed

Heikkilä, Jenni; Alho, Kimmo; Hyvönen, Heidi; Tiippana, Kaisa

2015-01-01

Studies of memory and learning have usually focused on a single sensory modality, although human perception is multisensory in nature. In the present study, we investigated the effects of audiovisual encoding on later unisensory recognition memory performance. The participants were to memorize auditory or visual stimuli (sounds, pictures, spoken words, or written words), each of which co-occurred with either a semantically congruent stimulus, incongruent stimulus, or a neutral (non-semantic noise) stimulus in the other modality during encoding. Subsequent memory performance was overall better when the stimulus to be memorized was initially accompanied by a semantically congruent stimulus in the other modality than when it was accompanied by a neutral stimulus. These results suggest that semantically congruent multisensory experiences enhance encoding of both nonverbal and verbal materials, resulting in an improvement in their later recognition memory.

Frontotemporal neural systems supporting semantic processing in Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Peelle, Jonathan E; Powers, John; Cook, Philip A; Smith, Edward E; Grossman, Murray

2014-03-01

We hypothesized that semantic memory for object concepts involves both representations of visual feature knowledge in modality-specific association cortex and heteromodal regions that are important for integrating and organizing this semantic knowledge so that it can be used in a flexible, contextually appropriate manner. We examined this hypothesis in an fMRI study of mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). Participants were presented with pairs of printed words and asked whether the words matched on a given visual-perceptual feature (e.g., guitar, violin: SHAPE). The stimuli probed natural kinds and manufactured objects, and the judgments involved shape or color. We found activation of bilateral ventral temporal cortex and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during semantic judgments, with AD patients showing less activation of these regions than healthy seniors. Moreover, AD patients showed less ventral temporal activation than did healthy seniors for manufactured objects, but not for natural kinds. We also used diffusion-weighted MRI of white matter to examine fractional anisotropy (FA). Patients with AD showed significantly reduced FA in the superior longitudinal fasciculus and inferior frontal-occipital fasciculus, which carry projections linking temporal and frontal regions of this semantic network. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that semantic memory is supported in part by a large-scale neural network involving modality-specific association cortex, heteromodal association cortex, and projections between these regions. The semantic deficit in AD thus arises from gray matter disease that affects the representation of feature knowledge and processing its content, as well as white matter disease that interrupts the integrated functioning of this large-scale network.

18 CFR 1.102 - Words denoting number, gender and so forth.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2011 CFR

2011-04-01

..., gender and so forth. 1.102 Section 1.102 Conservation of Power and Water Resources FEDERAL ENERGY... Rules of Construction § 1.102 Words denoting number, gender and so forth. In determining the meaning of...) Words of one gender include the other gender. [Order 225, 47 FR 19022, May 3, 1982] ...

Semantic similarity measure in biomedical domain leverage web search engine.

PubMed

Chen, Chi-Huang; Hsieh, Sheau-Ling; Weng, Yung-Ching; Chang, Wen-Yung; Lai, Feipei

2010-01-01

Semantic similarity measure plays an essential role in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. In this paper we propose a page-count-based semantic similarity measure and apply it in biomedical domains. Previous researches in semantic web related applications have deployed various semantic similarity measures. Despite the usefulness of the measurements in those applications, measuring semantic similarity between two terms remains a challenge task. The proposed method exploits page counts returned by the Web Search Engine. We define various similarity scores for two given terms P and Q, using the page counts for querying P, Q and P AND Q. Moreover, we propose a novel approach to compute semantic similarity using lexico-syntactic patterns with page counts. These different similarity scores are integrated adapting support vector machines, to leverage the robustness of semantic similarity measures. Experimental results on two datasets achieve correlation coefficients of 0.798 on the dataset provided by A. Hliaoutakis, 0.705 on the dataset provide by T. Pedersen with physician scores and 0.496 on the dataset provided by T. Pedersen et al. with expert scores.

The N400 reveals how personal semantics is processed: Insights into the nature and organization of self-knowledge

PubMed Central

Federmeier, Kara D.

2017-01-01

There is growing recognition that some important forms of long-term memory are difficult to classify into one of the well-studied memory subtypes. One example is personal semantics. Like the episodes that are stored as part of one’s autobiography, personal semantics is linked to an individual, yet, like general semantic memory, it is detached from a specific encoding context. Access to general semantics elicits an electrophysiological response known as the N400, which has been characterized across three decades of research; surprisingly, this response has not been fully examined in the context of personal semantics. In this study, we assessed responses to congruent and incongruent statements about people’s own, personal preferences. We found that access to personal preferences elicited N400 responses, with congruency effects that were similar in latency and distribution to those for general semantic statements elicited from the same participants. These results suggest that the processing of personal and general semantics share important functional and neurobiological features. PMID:26825011

Recognition during recall failure: Semantic feature matching as a mechanism for recognition of semantic cues when recall fails.

PubMed

Cleary, Anne M; Ryals, Anthony J; Wagner, Samantha R

2016-01-01

Research suggests that a feature-matching process underlies cue familiarity-detection when cued recall with graphemic cues fails. When a test cue (e.g., potchbork) overlaps in graphemic features with multiple unrecalled studied items (e.g., patchwork, pitchfork, pocketbook, pullcork), higher cue familiarity ratings are given during recall failure of all of the targets than when the cue overlaps in graphemic features with only one studied target and that target fails to be recalled (e.g., patchwork). The present study used semantic feature production norms (McRae et al., Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 37, 547-559, 2005) to examine whether the same holds true when the cues are semantic in nature (e.g., jaguar is used to cue cheetah). Indeed, test cues (e.g., cedar) that overlapped in semantic features (e.g., a_tree, has_bark, etc.) with four unretrieved studied items (e.g., birch, oak, pine, willow) received higher cue familiarity ratings during recall failure than test cues that overlapped in semantic features with only two (also unretrieved) studied items (e.g., birch, oak), which in turn received higher familiarity ratings during recall failure than cues that did not overlap in semantic features with any studied items. These findings suggest that the feature-matching theory of recognition during recall failure can accommodate recognition of semantic cues during recall failure, providing a potential mechanism for conceptually-based forms of cue recognition during target retrieval failure. They also provide converging evidence for the existence of the semantic features envisaged in feature-based models of semantic knowledge representation and for those more concretely specified by the production norms of McRae et al. (Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 37, 547-559, 2005).

Lexical-semantic processing in the semantic priming paradigm in aphasic patients.

PubMed

Salles, Jerusa Fumagalli de; Holderbaum, Candice Steffen; Parente, Maria Alice Mattos Pimenta; Mansur, Letícia Lessa; Ansaldo, Ana Inès

2012-09-01

There is evidence that the explicit lexical-semantic processing deficits which characterize aphasia may be observed in the absence of implicit semantic impairment. The aim of this article was to critically review the international literature on lexical-semantic processing in aphasia, as tested through the semantic priming paradigm. Specifically, this review focused on aphasia and lexical-semantic processing, the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the semantic paradigms used, and recent evidence from neuroimaging studies on lexical-semantic processing. Furthermore, evidence on dissociations between implicit and explicit lexical-semantic processing reported in the literature will be discussed and interpreted by referring to functional neuroimaging evidence from healthy populations. There is evidence that semantic priming effects can be found both in fluent and in non-fluent aphasias, and that these effects are related to an extensive network which includes the temporal lobe, the pre-frontal cortex, the left frontal gyrus, the left temporal gyrus and the cingulated cortex.

The N400 reveals how personal semantics is processed: Insights into the nature and organization of self-knowledge.

PubMed

Coronel, Jason C; Federmeier, Kara D

2016-04-01

There is growing recognition that some important forms of long-term memory are difficult to classify into one of the well-studied memory subtypes. One example is personal semantics. Like the episodes that are stored as part of one's autobiography, personal semantics is linked to an individual, yet, like general semantic memory, it is detached from a specific encoding context. Access to general semantics elicits an electrophysiological response known as the N400, which has been characterized across three decades of research; surprisingly, this response has not been fully examined in the context of personal semantics. In this study, we assessed responses to congruent and incongruent statements about people's own, personal preferences. We found that access to personal preferences elicited N400 responses, with congruency effects that were similar in latency and distribution to those for general semantic statements elicited from the same participants. These results suggest that the processing of personal and general semantics share important functional and neurobiological features. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Tools for Testing Denotational Semantic Definitions of Programming Languages.

DTIC Science & Technology

1983-05-01

16. DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT (of this Report) This document is approved for public release and sale : distribution is unlimited. 17. DISTRIBUTION...decl Itun ...type_deci prodjtype_decl sumjype..decl Iseq .. type..deci I pkgspec I pkg...body I use..clause type...decl: (TDECL typejid type..def

EXACT2: the semantics of biomedical protocols

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

Background The reliability and reproducibility of experimental procedures is a cornerstone of scientific practice. There is a pressing technological need for the better representation of biomedical protocols to enable other agents (human or machine) to better reproduce results. A framework that ensures that all information required for the replication of experimental protocols is essential to achieve reproducibility. Methods We have developed the ontology EXACT2 (EXperimental ACTions) that is designed to capture the full semantics of biomedical protocols required for their reproducibility. To construct EXACT2 we manually inspected hundreds of published and commercial biomedical protocols from several areas of biomedicine. After establishing a clear pattern for extracting the required information we utilized text-mining tools to translate the protocols into a machine amenable format. We have verified the utility of EXACT2 through the successful processing of previously 'unseen' (not used for the construction of EXACT2) protocols. Results The paper reports on a fundamentally new version EXACT2 that supports the semantically-defined representation of biomedical protocols. The ability of EXACT2 to capture the semantics of biomedical procedures was verified through a text mining use case. In this EXACT2 is used as a reference model for text mining tools to identify terms pertinent to experimental actions, and their properties, in biomedical protocols expressed in natural language. An EXACT2-based framework for the translation of biomedical protocols to a machine amenable format is proposed. Conclusions The EXACT2 ontology is sufficient to record, in a machine processable form, the essential information about biomedical protocols. EXACT2 defines explicit semantics of experimental actions, and can be used by various computer applications. It can serve as a reference model for for the translation of biomedical protocols in natural language into a semantically

Varieties of semantic 'access' deficit in Wernicke's aphasia and semantic aphasia.

PubMed

Thompson, Hannah E; Robson, Holly; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2015-12-01

Comprehension deficits are common in stroke aphasia, including in cases with (i) semantic aphasia, characterized by poor executive control of semantic processing across verbal and non-verbal modalities; and (ii) Wernicke's aphasia, associated with poor auditory-verbal comprehension and repetition, plus fluent speech with jargon. However, the varieties of these comprehension problems, and their underlying causes, are not well understood. Both patient groups exhibit some type of semantic 'access' deficit, as opposed to the 'storage' deficits observed in semantic dementia. Nevertheless, existing descriptions suggest that these patients might have different varieties of 'access' impairment-related to difficulty resolving competition (in semantic aphasia) versus initial activation of concepts from sensory inputs (in Wernicke's aphasia). We used a case series design to compare patients with Wernicke's aphasia and those with semantic aphasia on Warrington's paradigmatic assessment of semantic 'access' deficits. In these verbal and non-verbal matching tasks, a small set of semantically-related items are repeatedly presented over several cycles so that the target on one trial becomes a distractor on another (building up interference and eliciting semantic 'blocking' effects). Patients with Wernicke's aphasia and semantic aphasia were distinguished according to lesion location in the temporal cortex, but in each group, some individuals had additional prefrontal damage. Both of these aspects of lesion variability-one that mapped onto classical 'syndromes' and one that did not-predicted aspects of the semantic 'access' deficit. Both semantic aphasia and Wernicke's aphasia cases showed multimodal semantic impairment, although as expected, the Wernicke's aphasia group showed greater deficits on auditory-verbal than picture judgements. Distribution of damage in the temporal lobe was crucial for predicting the initially 'beneficial' effects of stimulus repetition: cases with

[Electrophysiological bases of semantic processing of objects].

PubMed

Kahlaoui, Karima; Baccino, Thierry; Joanette, Yves; Magnié, Marie-Noële

2007-02-01

How pictures and words are stored and processed in the human brain constitute a long-standing question in cognitive psychology. Behavioral studies have yielded a large amount of data addressing this issue. Generally speaking, these data show that there are some interactions between the semantic processing of pictures and words. However, behavioral methods can provide only limited insight into certain findings. Fortunately, Event-Related Potential (ERP) provides on-line cues about the temporal nature of cognitive processes and contributes to the exploration of their neural substrates. ERPs have been used in order to better understand semantic processing of words and pictures. The main objective of this article is to offer an overview of the electrophysiologic bases of semantic processing of words and pictures. Studies presented in this article showed that the processing of words is associated with an N 400 component, whereas pictures elicited both N 300 and N 400 components. Topographical analysis of the N 400 distribution over the scalp is compatible with the idea that both image-mediated concrete words and pictures access an amodal semantic system. However, given the distinctive N 300 patterns, observed only during picture processing, it appears that picture and word processing rely upon distinct neuronal networks, even if they end up activating more or less similar semantic representations.

Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), and Semantics in Polar Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Duerr, R.; Ramdeen, S.

2017-12-01

One of the interesting features of Polar Science is that it historically has been extremely interdisciplinary, encompassing all of the physical and social sciences. Given the ubiquity of specialized terminology in each field, enabling researchers to find, understand, and use all of the heterogeneous data needed for polar research continues to be a bottleneck. Within the informatics community, semantics has broadly accepted as a solution to these problems, yet progress in developing reusable semantic resources has been slow. The NSF-funded ClearEarth project has been adapting the methods and tools from other communities such as Biomedicine to the Earth sciences with the goal of enhancing progress and the rate at which the needed semantic resources can be created. One of the outcomes of the project has been a better understanding of the differences in the way linguists and physical scientists understand disciplinary text. One example of these differences is the tendency for each discipline and often disciplinary subfields to expend effort in creating discipline specific glossaries where individual terms often are comprised of more than one word (e.g., first-year sea ice). Often each term in a glossary is imbued with substantial contextual or physical meaning - meanings which are rarely explicitly called out within disciplinary texts; meaning which are therefore not immediately accessible to those outside that discipline or subfield; meanings which can often be represented semantically. Here we show how recognition of these difference and the use of glossaries can be used to speed up the annotation processes endemic to NLP, enable inter-community recognition and possible reconciliation of terminology differences. A number of processes and tools will be described, as will progress towards semi-automated generation of ontology structures.

A Joint Investigation of Semantic Facilitation and Semantic Interference in Continuous Naming

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scaltritti, Michele; Peressotti, Francesca; Navarrete, Eduardo

2017-01-01

When speakers name multiple semantically related items, opposing effects can be found. Semantic facilitation is found when naming 2 semantically related items in a row. In contrast, semantic interference is found when speakers name semantically related items separated by 1 or more intervening unrelated items. This latter form of interference is…

Generative Semantics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

King, Margaret

The first section of this paper deals with the attempts within the framework of transformational grammar to make semantics a systematic part of linguistic description, and outlines the characteristics of the generative semantics position. The second section takes a critical look at generative semantics in its later manifestations, and makes a case…

Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Complex Semantic Networks of Geophysical Systems

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fox, P.

2012-04-01

The vast majority of explorations of the Earth's systems are limited in their ability to effectively explore the most important (often most difficult) problems because they are forced to interconnect at the data-element, or syntactic, level rather than at a higher scientific, or semantic, level. Recent successes in the application of complex network theory and algorithms to climate data, raise expectations that more general graph-based approaches offer the opportunity for new discoveries. In the past ~ 5 years in the natural sciences there has substantial progress in providing both specialists and non-specialists the ability to describe in machine readable form, geophysical quantities and relations among them in meaningful and natural ways, effectively breaking the prior syntax barrier. The corresponding open-world semantics and reasoning provide higher-level interconnections. That is, semantics provided around the data structures, using semantically-equipped tools, and semantically aware interfaces between science application components allowing for discovery at the knowledge level. More recently, formal semantic approaches to continuous and aggregate physical processes are beginning to show promise and are soon likely to be ready to apply to geoscientific systems. To illustrate these opportunities, this presentation presents two application examples featuring domain vocabulary (ontology) and property relations (named and typed edges in the graphs). First, a climate knowledge discovery pilot encoding and exploration of CMIP5 catalog information with the eventual goal to encode and explore CMIP5 data. Second, a multi-stakeholder knowledge network for integrated assessments in marine ecosystems, where the data is highly inter-disciplinary.

Autobiographically significant concepts: more episodic than semantic in nature? An electrophysiological investigation of overlapping types of memory.

PubMed

Renoult, Louis; Davidson, Patrick S R; Schmitz, Erika; Park, Lillian; Campbell, Kenneth; Moscovitch, Morris; Levine, Brian

2015-01-01

A common assertion is that semantic memory emerges from episodic memory, shedding the distinctive contexts associated with episodes over time and/or repeated instances. Some semantic concepts, however, may retain their episodic origins or acquire episodic information during life experiences. The current study examined this hypothesis by investigating the ERP correlates of autobiographically significant (AS) concepts, that is, semantic concepts that are associated with vivid episodic memories. We inferred the contribution of semantic and episodic memory to AS concepts using the amplitudes of the N400 and late positive component, respectively. We compared famous names that easily brought to mind episodic memories (high AS names) against equally famous names that did not bring such recollections to mind (low AS names) on a semantic task (fame judgment) and an episodic task (recognition memory). Compared with low AS names, high AS names were associated with increased amplitude of the late positive component in both tasks. Moreover, in the recognition task, this effect of AS was highly correlated with recognition confidence. In contrast, the N400 component did not differentiate the high versus low AS names but, instead, was related to the amount of general knowledge participants had regarding each name. These results suggest that semantic concepts high in AS, such as famous names, have an episodic component and are associated with similar brain processes to those that are engaged by episodic memory. Studying AS concepts may provide unique insights into how episodic and semantic memory interact.

On the semantic content of grammatical gender and its impact on the representation of human referents.

PubMed

Irmen, Lisa; Kurovskaja, Julia

2010-01-01

Grammatical gender has been shown to provide natural gender information about human referents. However, due to formal and conceptual differences between masculine and feminine forms, it remains an open question whether these gender categories influence the processing of person information to the same degree. Experiment 1 compared the semantic content of masculine and feminine grammatical gender by combining masculine and feminine role names with either gender congruent or incongruent referents (e.g., Dieser Lehrer [masc.]/Diese Lehrerin [fem.] ist mein Mann/meine Frau; This teacher is my husband/my wife). Participants rated sentences in terms of correctness and customariness. In Experiment 2, in addition to ratings reading times were recorded to assess processing more directly. Both experiments were run in German. Sentences with grammatically feminine role names and gender incongruent referents were rated as less correct and less customary than those with masculine forms and incongruent referents. Combining a masculine role name with an incongruent referent slowed down reading to a greater extent than combining a feminine role name with an incongruent referent. Results thus specify the differential effects of masculine and feminine grammatical gender in denoting human referents.

How Semantic Radicals in Chinese characters Facilitate Hierarchical Category-Based Induction.

PubMed

Wang, Xiaoxi; Ma, Xie; Tao, Yun; Tao, Yachen; Li, Hong

2018-04-03

Prior studies indicate that the semantic radical in Chinese characters contains category information that can support the independent retrieval of category information through the lexical network to the conceptual network. Inductive reasoning relies on category information; thus, semantic radicals may influence inductive reasoning. As most natural concepts are hierarchically structured in the human brain, this study examined how semantic radicals impact inductive reasoning for hierarchical concepts. The study used animal and plant nouns, organized in basic, superordinate, and subordinate levels; half had a semantic radical and half did not. Eighteen participants completed an inductive reasoning task. Behavioural and event-related potential (ERP) data were collected. The behavioural results showed that participants reacted faster and more accurately in the with-semantic-radical condition than in the without-semantic-radical condition. For the ERPs, differences between the conditions were found, and these differences lasted from the very early cognitive processing stage (i.e., the N1 time window) to the relatively late processing stages (i.e., the N400 and LPC time windows). Semantic radicals can help to distinguish the hierarchies earlier (in the N400 period) than characters without a semantic radical (in the LPC period). These results provide electrophysiological evidence that semantic radicals may improve sensitivity to distinguish between hierarchical concepts.

Face (and Nose) Priming for Book: The Malleability of Semantic Memory

PubMed Central

Coane, Jennifer H.; Balota, David A.

2010-01-01

There are two general classes of models of semantic structure that support semantic priming effects. Feature-overlap models of semantic priming assume that shared features between primes and targets are critical (e.g., cat-DOG). Associative accounts assume that contextual co-occurrence is critical and that the system is organized along associations independent of featural overlap (e.g., leash-DOG). If unrelated concepts can become related as a result of contextual co-occurrence, this would be more supportive of associative accounts and provide insight into the nature of the network underlying “semantic” priming effects. Naturally co-occurring recent associations (e.g., face-BOOK) were tested under conditions that minimize strategic influences (i.e., short stimulus onset asynchrony, low relatedness proportion) in a semantic priming paradigm. Priming for new associations did not differ from the priming found for pre-existing relations (e.g., library-BOOK). Mediated priming (e.g., nose-BOOK) was also found. These results suggest that contextual associations can result in the reorganization of the network that subserves “semantic” priming effects. PMID:20494866

Principal semantic components of language and the measurement of meaning.

PubMed

Samsonovich, Alexei V; Samsonovic, Alexei V; Ascoli, Giorgio A

2010-06-11

Metric systems for semantics, or semantic cognitive maps, are allocations of words or other representations in a metric space based on their meaning. Existing methods for semantic mapping, such as Latent Semantic Analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, are based on paradigms involving dissimilarity metrics. They typically do not take into account relations of antonymy and yield a large number of domain-specific semantic dimensions. Here, using a novel self-organization approach, we construct a low-dimensional, context-independent semantic map of natural language that represents simultaneously synonymy and antonymy. Emergent semantics of the map principal components are clearly identifiable: the first three correspond to the meanings of "good/bad" (valence), "calm/excited" (arousal), and "open/closed" (freedom), respectively. The semantic map is sufficiently robust to allow the automated extraction of synonyms and antonyms not originally in the dictionaries used to construct the map and to predict connotation from their coordinates. The map geometric characteristics include a limited number ( approximately 4) of statistically significant dimensions, a bimodal distribution of the first component, increasing kurtosis of subsequent (unimodal) components, and a U-shaped maximum-spread planar projection. Both the semantic content and the main geometric features of the map are consistent between dictionaries (Microsoft Word and Princeton's WordNet), among Western languages (English, French, German, and Spanish), and with previously established psychometric measures. By defining the semantics of its dimensions, the constructed map provides a foundational metric system for the quantitative analysis of word meaning. Language can be viewed as a cumulative product of human experiences. Therefore, the extracted principal semantic dimensions may be useful to characterize the general semantic dimensions of the content of mental states. This is a fundamental step toward a

Semantic deficits in Spanish-English bilingual children with language impairment.

PubMed

Sheng, Li; Peña, Elizabeth D; Bedore, Lisa M; Fiestas, Christine E

2012-02-01

To examine the nature and extent of semantic deficits in bilingual children with language impairment (LI). Thirty-seven Spanish-English bilingual children with LI (ranging from age 7;0 [years;months] to 9;10) and 37 typically developing (TD) age-matched peers generated 3 associations to 12 pairs of translation equivalents in English and Spanish. Responses were coded as paradigmatic (e.g., dinner-lunch, cena-desayuno [dinner-breakfast]), syntagmatic (e.g., delicious-pizza, delicioso-frijoles [delicious-beans]), and errors (e.g., wearing-where, vestirse-mal [to get dressed-bad]). A semantic depth score was derived in each language and conceptually by combining children's performance in both languages. The LI group achieved significantly lower semantic depth scores than the TD group after controlling for group differences in vocabulary size. Children showed higher conceptual scores than single-language scores. Both groups showed decreases in semantic depth scores across multiple elicitations. Analyses of individual performances indicated that semantic deficits (1 SD below the TD mean semantic depth score) were manifested in 65% of the children with LI and in 14% of the TD children. School-age bilingual children with and without LI demonstrated spreading activation of semantic networks. Consistent with the literature on monolingual children with LI, sparsely linked semantic networks characterize a considerable proportion of bilingual children with LI.

"Pre-Semantic" Cognition Revisited: Critical Differences between Semantic Aphasia and Semantic Dementia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Jefferies, Elizabeth; Rogers, Timothy T.; Hopper, Samantha; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.

2010-01-01

Patients with semantic dementia show a specific pattern of impairment on both verbal and non-verbal "pre-semantic" tasks, e.g., reading aloud, past tense generation, spelling to dictation, lexical decision, object decision, colour decision and delayed picture copying. All seven tasks are characterised by poorer performance for items that are…

Semantic Desktop

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sauermann, Leo; Kiesel, Malte; Schumacher, Kinga; Bernardi, Ansgar

In diesem Beitrag wird gezeigt, wie der Arbeitsplatz der Zukunft aussehen könnte und wo das Semantic Web neue Möglichkeiten eröffnet. Dazu werden Ansätze aus dem Bereich Semantic Web, Knowledge Representation, Desktop-Anwendungen und Visualisierung vorgestellt, die es uns ermöglichen, die bestehenden Daten eines Benutzers neu zu interpretieren und zu verwenden. Dabei bringt die Kombination von Semantic Web und Desktop Computern besondere Vorteile - ein Paradigma, das unter dem Titel Semantic Desktop bekannt ist. Die beschriebenen Möglichkeiten der Applikationsintegration sind aber nicht auf den Desktop beschränkt, sondern können genauso in Web-Anwendungen Verwendung finden.

Measuring content overlap during handoff communication using distributional semantics: An exploratory study.

PubMed

Abraham, Joanna; Kannampallil, Thomas G; Srinivasan, Vignesh; Galanter, William L; Tagney, Gail; Cohen, Trevor

2017-01-01

We develop and evaluate a methodological approach to measure the degree and nature of overlap in handoff communication content within and across clinical professions. This extensible, exploratory approach relies on combining techniques from conversational analysis and distributional semantics. We audio-recorded handoff communication of residents and nurses on the General Medicine floor of a large academic hospital (n=120 resident and n=120 nurse handoffs). We measured semantic similarity, a proxy for content overlap, between resident-resident and nurse-nurse communication using multiple steps: a qualitative conversational content analysis; an automated semantic similarity analysis using Reflective Random Indexing (RRI); and comparing semantic similarity generated by RRI analysis with human ratings of semantic similarity. There was significant association between the semantic similarity as computed by the RRI method and human rating (ρ=0.88). Based on the semantic similarity scores, content overlap was relatively higher for content related to patient active problems, assessment of active problems, patient-identifying information, past medical history, and medications/treatments. In contrast, content overlap was limited on content related to allergies, family-related information, code status, and anticipatory guidance. Our approach using RRI analysis provides new opportunities for characterizing the nature and degree of overlap in handoff communication. Although exploratory, this method provides a basis for identifying content that can be used for determining shared understanding across clinical professions. Additionally, this approach can inform the development of flexibly standardized handoff tools that reflect clinical content that are most appropriate for fostering shared understanding during transitions of care. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Mandarin-Speaking Children's Speech Recognition: Developmental Changes in the Influences of Semantic Context and F0 Contours.

PubMed

Zhou, Hong; Li, Yu; Liang, Meng; Guan, Connie Qun; Zhang, Linjun; Shu, Hua; Zhang, Yang

2017-01-01

The goal of this developmental speech perception study was to assess whether and how age group modulated the influences of high-level semantic context and low-level fundamental frequency ( F 0 ) contours on the recognition of Mandarin speech by elementary and middle-school-aged children in quiet and interference backgrounds. The results revealed different patterns for semantic and F 0 information. One the one hand, age group modulated significantly the use of F 0 contours, indicating that elementary school children relied more on natural F 0 contours than middle school children during Mandarin speech recognition. On the other hand, there was no significant modulation effect of age group on semantic context, indicating that children of both age groups used semantic context to assist speech recognition to a similar extent. Furthermore, the significant modulation effect of age group on the interaction between F 0 contours and semantic context revealed that younger children could not make better use of semantic context in recognizing speech with flat F 0 contours compared with natural F 0 contours, while older children could benefit from semantic context even when natural F 0 contours were altered, thus confirming the important role of F 0 contours in Mandarin speech recognition by elementary school children. The developmental changes in the effects of high-level semantic and low-level F 0 information on speech recognition might reflect the differences in auditory and cognitive resources associated with processing of the two types of information in speech perception.

Altered brain response for semantic knowledge in Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Wierenga, Christina E; Stricker, Nikki H; McCauley, Ashley; Simmons, Alan; Jak, Amy J; Chang, Yu-Ling; Nation, Daniel A; Bangen, Katherine J; Salmon, David P; Bondi, Mark W

2011-02-01

Word retrieval deficits are common in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and are thought to reflect a degradation of semantic memory. Yet, the nature of semantic deterioration in AD and the underlying neural correlates of these semantic memory changes remain largely unknown. We examined the semantic memory impairment in AD by investigating the neural correlates of category knowledge (e.g., living vs. nonliving) and featural processing (global vs. local visual information). During event-related fMRI, 10 adults diagnosed with mild AD and 22 cognitively normal (CN) older adults named aloud items from three categories for which processing of specific visual features has previously been dissociated from categorical features. Results showed widespread group differences in the categorical representation of semantic knowledge in several language-related brain areas. For example, the right inferior frontal gyrus showed selective brain response for nonliving items in the CN group but living items in the AD group. Additionally, the AD group showed increased brain response for word retrieval irrespective of category in Broca's homologue in the right hemisphere and rostral cingulate cortex bilaterally, which suggests greater recruitment of frontally mediated neural compensatory mechanisms in the face of semantic alteration. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Semantic based man-machine interface for real-time communication

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Ali, M.; Ai, C.-S.

1988-01-01

A flight expert system (FLES) was developed to assist pilots in monitoring, diagnosing and recovering from in-flight faults. To provide a communications interface between the flight crew and FLES, a natural language interface (NALI) was implemented. Input to NALI is processed by three processors: (1) the semantics parser; (2) the knowledge retriever; and (3) the response generator. First the semantic parser extracts meaningful words and phrases to generate an internal representation of the query. At this point, the semantic parser has the ability to map different input forms related to the same concept into the same internal representation. Then the knowledge retriever analyzes and stores the context of the query to aid in resolving ellipses and pronoun references. At the end of this process, a sequence of retrievel functions is created as a first step in generating the proper response. Finally, the response generator generates the natural language response to the query. The architecture of NALI was designed to process both temporal and nontemporal queries. The architecture and implementation of NALI are described.

Semantic Similarity between Web Documents Using Ontology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chahal, Poonam; Singh Tomer, Manjeet; Kumar, Suresh

2018-06-01

The World Wide Web is the source of information available in the structure of interlinked web pages. However, the procedure of extracting significant information with the assistance of search engine is incredibly critical. This is for the reason that web information is written mainly by using natural language, and further available to individual human. Several efforts have been made in semantic similarity computation between documents using words, concepts and concepts relationship but still the outcome available are not as per the user requirements. This paper proposes a novel technique for computation of semantic similarity between documents that not only takes concepts available in documents but also relationships that are available between the concepts. In our approach documents are being processed by making ontology of the documents using base ontology and a dictionary containing concepts records. Each such record is made up of the probable words which represents a given concept. Finally, document ontology's are compared to find their semantic similarity by taking the relationships among concepts. Relevant concepts and relations between the concepts have been explored by capturing author and user intention. The proposed semantic analysis technique provides improved results as compared to the existing techniques.

Semantic Similarity between Web Documents Using Ontology

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chahal, Poonam; Singh Tomer, Manjeet; Kumar, Suresh

2018-03-01

The World Wide Web is the source of information available in the structure of interlinked web pages. However, the procedure of extracting significant information with the assistance of search engine is incredibly critical. This is for the reason that web information is written mainly by using natural language, and further available to individual human. Several efforts have been made in semantic similarity computation between documents using words, concepts and concepts relationship but still the outcome available are not as per the user requirements. This paper proposes a novel technique for computation of semantic similarity between documents that not only takes concepts available in documents but also relationships that are available between the concepts. In our approach documents are being processed by making ontology of the documents using base ontology and a dictionary containing concepts records. Each such record is made up of the probable words which represents a given concept. Finally, document ontology's are compared to find their semantic similarity by taking the relationships among concepts. Relevant concepts and relations between the concepts have been explored by capturing author and user intention. The proposed semantic analysis technique provides improved results as compared to the existing techniques.

The nature and time-course of medial temporal lobe contributions to semantic retrieval: an fMRI study on verbal fluency.

PubMed

Sheldon, Signy; Moscovitch, Morris

2012-06-01

Recent investigations have shown that the medial temporal lobe (MTL), a region thought to be exclusive to episodic memory, can also influence performance on tests of semantic memory. The present study examined further the nature of MTL contributions to semantic memory tasks by tracking MTL activation as participants performed category fluency, a traditional test of semantic retrieval. For categories that were inherently autobiographical (e.g. names of friends), the MTLs were activated throughout the time period in which items were generated, consistent with the MTLs role in retrieving autobiographical memories. For categories that could not benefit from autobiographical or spatial/context information (e.g. governmental offices), the MTL was not implicated at any time point. For categories for which both prototypical and episodically-related information exists (e.g. kitchen utensils), there was more robust MTL activity for the open-ended, late generation periods compared with the more well-defined, early item generation time periods. We interpret these results as suggesting that early in the generation phase, responses are based on well-rehearsed prototypical knowledge whereas later performance relies more on open-ended strategies, such as deriving exemplars from personally relevant contextual information (e.g. imagining one's own kitchen). These findings and interpretation were consistent with the results of an initial, separate behavioral study (Expt 1), that used the distinctiveness of responses as a measure of open-endedness across the generation phase: Response distinctiveness corresponded to the predicted open-endedness of the various tasks at early and late phases. Overall, this is consistent with the view that as generation of semantic information becomes open-ended, it recruits processes from other domains, such as episodic memory, to support performance. Copyright © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

What does semantic tiling of the cortex tell us about semantics?

PubMed

Barsalou, Lawrence W

2017-10-01

Recent use of voxel-wise modeling in cognitive neuroscience suggests that semantic maps tile the cortex. Although this impressive research establishes distributed cortical areas active during the conceptual processing that underlies semantics, it tells us little about the nature of this processing. While mapping concepts between Marr's computational and implementation levels to support neural encoding and decoding, this approach ignores Marr's algorithmic level, central for understanding the mechanisms that implement cognition, in general, and conceptual processing, in particular. Following decades of research in cognitive science and neuroscience, what do we know so far about the representation and processing mechanisms that implement conceptual abilities? Most basically, much is known about the mechanisms associated with: (1) feature and frame representations, (2) grounded, abstract, and linguistic representations, (3) knowledge-based inference, (4) concept composition, and (5) conceptual flexibility. Rather than explaining these fundamental representation and processing mechanisms, semantic tiles simply provide a trace of their activity over a relatively short time period within a specific learning context. Establishing the mechanisms that implement conceptual processing in the brain will require more than mapping it to cortical (and sub-cortical) activity, with process models from cognitive science likely to play central roles in specifying the intervening mechanisms. More generally, neuroscience will not achieve its basic goals until it establishes algorithmic-level mechanisms that contribute essential explanations to how the brain works, going beyond simply establishing the brain areas that respond to various task conditions. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Semantic relations differentially impact associative recognition memory: electrophysiological evidence.

PubMed

Kriukova, Olga; Bridger, Emma; Mecklinger, Axel

2013-10-01

Though associative recognition memory is thought to rely primarily on recollection, recent research indicates that familiarity might also make a substantial contribution when to-be-learned items are integrated into a coherent structure by means of an existing semantic relation. It remains unclear how different types of semantic relations, such as categorical (e.g., dancer-singer) and thematic (e.g., dancer-stage) relations might affect associative recognition, however. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we addressed this question by manipulating the type of semantic link between paired words in an associative recognition memory experiment. An early midfrontal old/new effect, typically linked to familiarity, was observed across the relation types. In contrast, a robust left parietal old/new effect was found in the categorical condition only, suggesting a clear contribution of recollection to associative recognition for this kind of pairs. One interpretation of this pattern is that familiarity was sufficiently diagnostic for associative recognition of thematic relations, which could result from the integrative nature of the thematic relatedness compared to the similarity-based nature of categorical pairs. The present study suggests that the extent to which recollection and familiarity are involved in associative recognition is at least in part determined by the properties of semantic relations between the paired associates. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Investigating Correlation between Protein Sequence Similarity and Semantic Similarity Using Gene Ontology Annotations.

PubMed

Ikram, Najmul; Qadir, Muhammad Abdul; Afzal, Muhammad Tanvir

2018-01-01

Sequence similarity is a commonly used measure to compare proteins. With the increasing use of ontologies, semantic (function) similarity is getting importance. The correlation between these measures has been applied in the evaluation of new semantic similarity methods, and in protein function prediction. In this research, we investigate the relationship between the two similarity methods. The results suggest absence of a strong correlation between sequence and semantic similarities. There is a large number of proteins with low sequence similarity and high semantic similarity. We observe that Pearson's correlation coefficient is not sufficient to explain the nature of this relationship. Interestingly, the term semantic similarity values above 0 and below 1 do not seem to play a role in improving the correlation. That is, the correlation coefficient depends only on the number of common GO terms in proteins under comparison, and the semantic similarity measurement method does not influence it. Semantic similarity and sequence similarity have a distinct behavior. These findings are of significant effect for future works on protein comparison, and will help understand the semantic similarity between proteins in a better way.

Personal semantics: at the crossroads of semantic and episodic memory.

PubMed

Renoult, Louis; Davidson, Patrick S R; Palombo, Daniela J; Moscovitch, Morris; Levine, Brian

2012-11-01

Declarative memory is usually described as consisting of two systems: semantic and episodic memory. Between these two poles, however, may lie a third entity: personal semantics (PS). PS concerns knowledge of one's past. Although typically assumed to be an aspect of semantic memory, it is essentially absent from existing models of knowledge. Furthermore, like episodic memory (EM), PS is idiosyncratically personal (i.e., not culturally-shared). We show that, depending on how it is operationalized, the neural correlates of PS can look more similar to semantic memory, more similar to EM, or dissimilar to both. We consider three different perspectives to better integrate PS into existing models of declarative memory and suggest experimental strategies for disentangling PS from semantic and episodic memory. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The semantic web and computer vision: old AI meets new AI

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mundy, J. L.; Dong, Y.; Gilliam, A.; Wagner, R.

2018-04-01

There has been vast process in linking semantic information across the billions of web pages through the use of ontologies encoded in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A prime example is the Wikipedia where the knowledge contained in its more than four million pages is encoded in an ontological database called DBPedia http://wiki.dbpedia.org/. Web-based query tools can retrieve semantic information from DBPedia encoded in interlinked ontologies that can be accessed using natural language. This paper will show how this vast context can be used to automate the process of querying images and other geospatial data in support of report changes in structures and activities. Computer vision algorithms are selected and provided with context based on natural language requests for monitoring and analysis. The resulting reports provide semantically linked observations from images and 3D surface models.

Semantic layers for illustrative volume rendering.

PubMed

Rautek, Peter; Bruckner, Stefan; Gröller, Eduard

2007-01-01

Direct volume rendering techniques map volumetric attributes (e.g., density, gradient magnitude, etc.) to visual styles. Commonly this mapping is specified by a transfer function. The specification of transfer functions is a complex task and requires expert knowledge about the underlying rendering technique. In the case of multiple volumetric attributes and multiple visual styles the specification of the multi-dimensional transfer function becomes more challenging and non-intuitive. We present a novel methodology for the specification of a mapping from several volumetric attributes to multiple illustrative visual styles. We introduce semantic layers that allow a domain expert to specify the mapping in the natural language of the domain. A semantic layer defines the mapping of volumetric attributes to one visual style. Volumetric attributes and visual styles are represented as fuzzy sets. The mapping is specified by rules that are evaluated with fuzzy logic arithmetics. The user specifies the fuzzy sets and the rules without special knowledge about the underlying rendering technique. Semantic layers allow for a linguistic specification of the mapping from attributes to visual styles replacing the traditional transfer function specification.

SSWAP: A Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol for semantic web services.

PubMed

Gessler, Damian D G; Schiltz, Gary S; May, Greg D; Avraham, Shulamit; Town, Christopher D; Grant, David; Nelson, Rex T

2009-09-23

SSWAP (Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol; pronounced "swap") is an architecture, protocol, and platform for using reasoning to semantically integrate heterogeneous disparate data and services on the web. SSWAP was developed as a hybrid semantic web services technology to overcome limitations found in both pure web service technologies and pure semantic web technologies. There are currently over 2400 resources published in SSWAP. Approximately two dozen are custom-written services for QTL (Quantitative Trait Loci) and mapping data for legumes and grasses (grains). The remaining are wrappers to Nucleic Acids Research Database and Web Server entries. As an architecture, SSWAP establishes how clients (users of data, services, and ontologies), providers (suppliers of data, services, and ontologies), and discovery servers (semantic search engines) interact to allow for the description, querying, discovery, invocation, and response of semantic web services. As a protocol, SSWAP provides the vocabulary and semantics to allow clients, providers, and discovery servers to engage in semantic web services. The protocol is based on the W3C-sanctioned first-order description logic language OWL DL. As an open source platform, a discovery server running at http://sswap.info (as in to "swap info") uses the description logic reasoner Pellet to integrate semantic resources. The platform hosts an interactive guide to the protocol at http://sswap.info/protocol.jsp, developer tools at http://sswap.info/developer.jsp, and a portal to third-party ontologies at http://sswapmeet.sswap.info (a "swap meet"). SSWAP addresses the three basic requirements of a semantic web services architecture (i.e., a common syntax, shared semantic, and semantic discovery) while addressing three technology limitations common in distributed service systems: i.e., i) the fatal mutability of traditional interfaces, ii) the rigidity and fragility of static subsumption hierarchies, and iii) the

SSWAP: A Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol for semantic web services

PubMed Central

Gessler, Damian DG; Schiltz, Gary S; May, Greg D; Avraham, Shulamit; Town, Christopher D; Grant, David; Nelson, Rex T

2009-01-01

Background SSWAP (Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol; pronounced "swap") is an architecture, protocol, and platform for using reasoning to semantically integrate heterogeneous disparate data and services on the web. SSWAP was developed as a hybrid semantic web services technology to overcome limitations found in both pure web service technologies and pure semantic web technologies. Results There are currently over 2400 resources published in SSWAP. Approximately two dozen are custom-written services for QTL (Quantitative Trait Loci) and mapping data for legumes and grasses (grains). The remaining are wrappers to Nucleic Acids Research Database and Web Server entries. As an architecture, SSWAP establishes how clients (users of data, services, and ontologies), providers (suppliers of data, services, and ontologies), and discovery servers (semantic search engines) interact to allow for the description, querying, discovery, invocation, and response of semantic web services. As a protocol, SSWAP provides the vocabulary and semantics to allow clients, providers, and discovery servers to engage in semantic web services. The protocol is based on the W3C-sanctioned first-order description logic language OWL DL. As an open source platform, a discovery server running at (as in to "swap info") uses the description logic reasoner Pellet to integrate semantic resources. The platform hosts an interactive guide to the protocol at , developer tools at , and a portal to third-party ontologies at (a "swap meet"). Conclusion SSWAP addresses the three basic requirements of a semantic web services architecture (i.e., a common syntax, shared semantic, and semantic discovery) while addressing three technology limitations common in distributed service systems: i.e., i) the fatal mutability of traditional interfaces, ii) the rigidity and fragility of static subsumption hierarchies, and iii) the confounding of content, structure, and presentation. SSWAP is novel by establishing

Empirical Distributional Semantics: Methods and Biomedical Applications

PubMed Central

Cohen, Trevor; Widdows, Dominic

2009-01-01

Over the past fifteen years, a range of methods have been developed that are able to learn human-like estimates of the semantic relatedness between terms from the way in which these terms are distributed in a corpus of unannotated natural language text. These methods have also been evaluated in a number of applications in the cognitive science, computational linguistics and the information retrieval literatures. In this paper, we review the available methodologies for derivation of semantic relatedness from free text, as well as their evaluation in a variety of biomedical and other applications. Recent methodological developments, and their applicability to several existing applications are also discussed. PMID:19232399

Hybrid Semantic Analysis for Mapping Adverse Drug Reaction Mentions in Tweets to Medical Terminology.

PubMed

Emadzadeh, Ehsan; Sarker, Abeed; Nikfarjam, Azadeh; Gonzalez, Graciela

2017-01-01

Social networks, such as Twitter, have become important sources for active monitoring of user-reported adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Automatic extraction of ADR information can be crucial for healthcare providers, drug manufacturers, and consumers. However, because of the non-standard nature of social media language, automatically extracted ADR mentions need to be mapped to standard forms before they can be used by operational pharmacovigilance systems. We propose a modular natural language processing pipeline for mapping (normalizing) colloquial mentions of ADRs to their corresponding standardized identifiers. We seek to accomplish this task and enable customization of the pipeline so that distinct unlabeled free text resources can be incorporated to use the system for other normalization tasks. Our approach, which we call Hybrid Semantic Analysis (HSA), sequentially employs rule-based and semantic matching algorithms for mapping user-generated mentions to concept IDs in the Unified Medical Language System vocabulary. The semantic matching component of HSA is adaptive in nature and uses a regression model to combine various measures of semantic relatedness and resources to optimize normalization performance on the selected data source. On a publicly available corpus, our normalization method achieves 0.502 recall and 0.823 precision (F-measure: 0.624). Our proposed method outperforms a baseline based on latent semantic analysis and another that uses MetaMap.

SemanticOrganizer: A Customizable Semantic Repository for Distributed NASA Project Teams

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Keller, Richard M.; Berrios, Daniel C.; Carvalho, Robert E.; Hall, David R.; Rich, Stephen J.; Sturken, Ian B.; Swanson, Keith J.; Wolfe, Shawn R.

2004-01-01

SemanticOrganizer is a collaborative knowledge management system designed to support distributed NASA projects, including diverse teams of scientists, engineers, and accident investigators. The system provides a customizable, semantically structured information repository that stores work products relevant to multiple projects of differing types. SemanticOrganizer is one of the earliest and largest semantic web applications deployed at NASA to date, and has been used in diverse contexts ranging from the investigation of Space Shuttle Columbia's accident to the search for life on other planets. Although the underlying repository employs a single unified ontology, access control and ontology customization mechanisms make the repository contents appear different for each project team. This paper describes SemanticOrganizer, its customization facilities, and a sampling of its applications. The paper also summarizes some key lessons learned from building and fielding a successful semantic web application across a wide-ranging set of domains with diverse users.

Semantic Typicality Effects in Acquired Dyslexia: Evidence for Semantic Impairment in Deep Dyslexia.

PubMed

Riley, Ellyn A; Thompson, Cynthia K

2010-06-01

BACKGROUND: Acquired deep dyslexia is characterized by impairment in grapheme-phoneme conversion and production of semantic errors in oral reading. Several theories have attempted to explain the production of semantic errors in deep dyslexia, some proposing that they arise from impairments in both grapheme-phoneme and lexical-semantic processing, and others proposing that such errors stem from a deficit in phonological production. Whereas both views have gained some acceptance, the limited evidence available does not clearly eliminate the possibility that semantic errors arise from a lexical-semantic input processing deficit. AIMS: To investigate semantic processing in deep dyslexia, this study examined the typicality effect in deep dyslexic individuals, phonological dyslexic individuals, and controls using an online category verification paradigm. This task requires explicit semantic access without speech production, focusing observation on semantic processing from written or spoken input. METHODS #ENTITYSTARTX00026; PROCEDURES: To examine the locus of semantic impairment, the task was administered in visual and auditory modalities with reaction time as the primary dependent measure. Nine controls, six phonological dyslexic participants, and five deep dyslexic participants completed the study. OUTCOMES #ENTITYSTARTX00026; RESULTS: Controls and phonological dyslexic participants demonstrated a typicality effect in both modalities, while deep dyslexic participants did not demonstrate a typicality effect in either modality. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that deep dyslexia is associated with a semantic processing deficit. Although this does not rule out the possibility of concomitant deficits in other modules of lexical-semantic processing, this finding suggests a direction for treatment of deep dyslexia focused on semantic processing.

Varieties of semantic ‘access’ deficit in Wernicke’s aphasia and semantic aphasia

PubMed Central

Robson, Holly; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2015-01-01

Comprehension deficits are common in stroke aphasia, including in cases with (i) semantic aphasia, characterized by poor executive control of semantic processing across verbal and non-verbal modalities; and (ii) Wernicke’s aphasia, associated with poor auditory–verbal comprehension and repetition, plus fluent speech with jargon. However, the varieties of these comprehension problems, and their underlying causes, are not well understood. Both patient groups exhibit some type of semantic ‘access’ deficit, as opposed to the ‘storage’ deficits observed in semantic dementia. Nevertheless, existing descriptions suggest that these patients might have different varieties of ‘access’ impairment—related to difficulty resolving competition (in semantic aphasia) versus initial activation of concepts from sensory inputs (in Wernicke’s aphasia). We used a case series design to compare patients with Wernicke’s aphasia and those with semantic aphasia on Warrington’s paradigmatic assessment of semantic ‘access’ deficits. In these verbal and non-verbal matching tasks, a small set of semantically-related items are repeatedly presented over several cycles so that the target on one trial becomes a distractor on another (building up interference and eliciting semantic ‘blocking’ effects). Patients with Wernicke’s aphasia and semantic aphasia were distinguished according to lesion location in the temporal cortex, but in each group, some individuals had additional prefrontal damage. Both of these aspects of lesion variability—one that mapped onto classical ‘syndromes’ and one that did not—predicted aspects of the semantic ‘access’ deficit. Both semantic aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia cases showed multimodal semantic impairment, although as expected, the Wernicke’s aphasia group showed greater deficits on auditory-verbal than picture judgements. Distribution of damage in the temporal lobe was crucial for predicting the initially �

Integrating Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Natural Language Understanding Program

DTIC Science & Technology

1988-08-01

heavily on the original SPQR component, and uses the same context free grammar to analyze the ISR. The main difference is that, where before SPQR ...ISR is semantically coherent. This has been tested thoroughly on the CASREPS domain, and selects the same parses that SPQR Eid, in less time. There...were a few SPQR patterns that reflected semantic information that could only be provided by time analysis, such as the fact that [pressure during

Getting connected: Both associative and semantic links structure semantic memory for newly learned persons.

PubMed

Wiese, Holger; Schweinberger, Stefan R

2015-01-01

The present study examined whether semantic memory for newly learned people is structured by visual co-occurrence, shared semantics, or both. Participants were trained with pairs of simultaneously presented (i.e., co-occurring) preexperimentally unfamiliar faces, which either did or did not share additionally provided semantic information (occupation, place of living, etc.). Semantic information could also be shared between faces that did not co-occur. A subsequent priming experiment revealed faster responses for both co-occurrence/no shared semantics and no co-occurrence/shared semantics conditions, than for an unrelated condition. Strikingly, priming was strongest in the co-occurrence/shared semantics condition, suggesting additive effects of these factors. Additional analysis of event-related brain potentials yielded priming in the N400 component only for combined effects of visual co-occurrence and shared semantics, with more positive amplitudes in this than in the unrelated condition. Overall, these findings suggest that both semantic relatedness and visual co-occurrence are important when novel information is integrated into person-related semantic memory.

Semantic Analysis of Email Using Domain Ontologies and WordNet

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Berrios, Daniel C.; Keller, Richard M.

2005-01-01

The problem of capturing and accessing knowledge in paper form has been supplanted by a problem of providing structure to vast amounts of electronic information. Systems that can construct semantic links for natural language documents like email messages automatically will be a crucial element of semantic email tools. We have designed an information extraction process that can leverage the knowledge already contained in an existing semantic web, recognizing references in email to existing nodes in a network of ontology instances by using linguistic knowledge and knowledge of the structure of the semantic web. We developed a heuristic score that uses several forms of evidence to detect references in email to existing nodes in the Semanticorganizer repository's network. While these scores cannot directly support automated probabilistic inference, they can be used to rank nodes by relevance and link those deemed most relevant to email messages.

Semantically Interoperable XML Data

PubMed Central

Vergara-Niedermayr, Cristobal; Wang, Fusheng; Pan, Tony; Kurc, Tahsin; Saltz, Joel

2013-01-01

XML is ubiquitously used as an information exchange platform for web-based applications in healthcare, life sciences, and many other domains. Proliferating XML data are now managed through latest native XML database technologies. XML data sources conforming to common XML schemas could be shared and integrated with syntactic interoperability. Semantic interoperability can be achieved through semantic annotations of data models using common data elements linked to concepts from ontologies. In this paper, we present a framework and software system to support the development of semantic interoperable XML based data sources that can be shared through a Grid infrastructure. We also present our work on supporting semantic validated XML data through semantic annotations for XML Schema, semantic validation and semantic authoring of XML data. We demonstrate the use of the system for a biomedical database of medical image annotations and markups. PMID:25298789

Representations for Semantic Learning Webs: Semantic Web Technology in Learning Support

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Dzbor, M.; Stutt, A.; Motta, E.; Collins, T.

2007-01-01

Recent work on applying semantic technologies to learning has concentrated on providing novel means of accessing and making use of learning objects. However, this is unnecessarily limiting: semantic technologies will make it possible to develop a range of educational Semantic Web services, such as interpretation, structure-visualization, support…

Evidence for the contribution of a threshold retrieval process to semantic memory.

PubMed

Kempnich, Maria; Urquhart, Josephine A; O'Connor, Akira R; Moulin, Chris J A

2017-10-01

It is widely held that episodic retrieval can recruit two processes: a threshold context retrieval process (recollection) and a continuous signal strength process (familiarity). Conversely the processes recruited during semantic retrieval are less well specified. We developed a semantic task analogous to single-item episodic recognition to interrogate semantic recognition receiver-operating characteristics (ROCs) for a marker of a threshold retrieval process. We fitted observed ROC points to three signal detection models: two models typically used in episodic recognition (unequal variance and dual-process signal detection models) and a novel dual-process recollect-to-reject (DP-RR) signal detection model that allows a threshold recollection process to aid both target identification and lure rejection. Given the nature of most semantic questions, we anticipated the DP-RR model would best fit the semantic task data. Experiment 1 (506 participants) provided evidence for a threshold retrieval process in semantic memory, with overall best fits to the DP-RR model. Experiment 2 (316 participants) found within-subjects estimates of episodic and semantic threshold retrieval to be uncorrelated. Our findings add weight to the proposal that semantic and episodic memory are served by similar dual-process retrieval systems, though the relationship between the two threshold processes needs to be more fully elucidated.

CNTRO: A Semantic Web Ontology for Temporal Relation Inferencing in Clinical Narratives.

PubMed

Tao, Cui; Wei, Wei-Qi; Solbrig, Harold R; Savova, Guergana; Chute, Christopher G

2010-11-13

Using Semantic-Web specifications to represent temporal information in clinical narratives is an important step for temporal reasoning and answering time-oriented queries. Existing temporal models are either not compatible with the powerful reasoning tools developed for the Semantic Web, or designed only for structured clinical data and therefore are not ready to be applied on natural-language-based clinical narrative reports directly. We have developed a Semantic-Web ontology which is called Clinical Narrative Temporal Relation ontology. Using this ontology, temporal information in clinical narratives can be represented as RDF (Resource Description Framework) triples. More temporal information and relations can then be inferred by Semantic-Web based reasoning tools. Experimental results show that this ontology can represent temporal information in real clinical narratives successfully.

Robust Deep Semantics for Language Understanding

DTIC Science & Technology

focus on five areas: deep learning, textual inferential relations, relation and event extraction by distant supervision , semantic parsing and...ontology expansion, and coreference resolution. As time went by, the program focus converged towards emphasizing technologies for knowledge base...natural logic methods for text understanding, improved mention coreference algorithms, and the further development of multilingual tools in CoreNLP.

Contextual priming in semantic anomia: a case study.

PubMed

Renvall, Kati; Laine, Matti; Martin, Nadine

2005-11-01

The present case continues the series of anomia treatment studies with contextual priming (CP), being the second in-depth treatment study conducted for an individual suffering from semantically based anomia. Our aim was to acquire further evidence of the facilitation and interference effects of the CP treatment on semantic anomia. Based on the results of the study of , our hypothesis before the treatment was that our participant would show short-term interference and at most modest and short-term benefit from treatment. To acquire such evidence would not only be important for the choice of anomia treatment methods in individual patients, but would also prompt further development of the CP method. The CP technique used for our participant included cycles of repeating and naming items in three contextual conditions (semantic, phonological, and unrelated). As predicted, the overall improvement of naming was modest and short-term. Interestingly, the contextual condition that corresponded with the nature of our patient's underlying naming deficit (semantic) elicited immediate interference in the form of contextual naming errors, as well as short-term improvement of naming. Based on this and a recent study by , it appears that despite short-term positive effects, in its current form the CP treatment is not sufficient for those aphasics who have a semantic deficit underlying their anomia. The possible mechanism and directions for future research are discussed.

Semantic Networks and Social Networks

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Downes, Stephen

2005-01-01

Purpose: To illustrate the need for social network metadata within semantic metadata. Design/methodology/approach: Surveys properties of social networks and the semantic web, suggests that social network analysis applies to semantic content, argues that semantic content is more searchable if social network metadata is merged with semantic web…

Electrophysiological Evidence of Automatic Early Semantic Processing

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hinojosa, Jose A.; Martin-Loeches, Manuel; Munoz, Francisco; Casado, Pilar; Pozo, Miguel A.

2004-01-01

This study investigates the automatic-controlled nature of early semantic processing by means of the Recognition Potential (RP), an event-related potential response that reflects lexical selection processes. For this purpose tasks differing in their processing requirements were used. Half of the participants performed a physical task involving a…

Explaining semantic short-term memory deficits: Evidence for the critical role of semantic control

PubMed Central

Hoffman, Paul; Jefferies, Elizabeth; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.

2011-01-01

Patients with apparently selective short-term memory (STM) deficits for semantic information have played an important role in developing multi-store theories of STM and challenge the idea that verbal STM is supported by maintaining activation in the language system. We propose that semantic STM deficits are not as selective as previously thought and can occur as a result of mild disruption to semantic control processes, i.e., mechanisms that bias semantic processing towards task-relevant aspects of knowledge and away from irrelevant information. We tested three semantic STM patients with tasks that tapped four aspects of semantic control: (i) resolving ambiguity between word meanings, (ii) sensitivity to cues, (iii) ignoring irrelevant information and (iv) detecting weak semantic associations. All were impaired in conditions requiring more semantic control, irrespective of the STM demands of the task, suggesting a mild, but task-general, deficit in regulating semantic knowledge. This mild deficit has a disproportionate effect on STM tasks because they have high intrinsic control demands: in STM tasks, control is required to keep information active when it is no longer available in the environment and to manage competition between items held in memory simultaneously. By re-interpreting the core deficit in semantic STM patients in this way, we are able to explain their apparently selective impairment without the need for a specialised STM store. Instead, we argue that semantic STM patients occupy the mildest end of spectrum of semantic control disorders. PMID:21195105

Semantic memory in object use.

PubMed

Silveri, Maria Caterina; Ciccarelli, Nicoletta

2009-10-01

We studied five patients with semantic memory disorders, four with semantic dementia and one with herpes simplex virus encephalitis, to investigate the involvement of semantic conceptual knowledge in object use. Comparisons between patients who had semantic deficits of different severity, as well as the follow-up, showed that the ability to use objects was largely preserved when the deficit was mild but progressively decayed as the deficit became more severe. Naming was generally more impaired than object use. Production tasks (pantomime execution and actual object use) and comprehension tasks (pantomime recognition and action recognition) as well as functional knowledge about objects were impaired when the semantic deficit was severe. Semantic and unrelated errors were produced during object use, but actions were always fluent and patients performed normally on a novel tools task in which the semantic demand was minimal. Patients with severe semantic deficits scored borderline on ideational apraxia tasks. Our data indicate that functional semantic knowledge is crucial for using objects in a conventional way and suggest that non-semantic factors, mainly non-declarative components of memory, might compensate to some extent for semantic disorders and guarantee some residual ability to use very common objects independently of semantic knowledge.

The structure of semantic person memory: evidence from semantic priming in person recognition.

PubMed

Wiese, Holger

2011-11-01

This paper reviews research on the structure of semantic person memory as examined with semantic priming. In this experimental paradigm, a familiarity decision on a target face or written name is usually faster when it is preceded by a related as compared to an unrelated prime. This effect has been shown to be relatively short lived and susceptible to interfering items. Moreover, semantic priming can cross stimulus domains, such that a written name can prime a target face and vice versa. However, it remains controversial whether representations of people are stored in associative networks based on co-occurrence, or in more abstract semantic categories. In line with prominent cognitive models of face recognition, which explain semantic priming by shared semantic information between prime and target, recent research demonstrated that priming could be obtained from purely categorically related, non-associated prime/target pairs. Although strategic processes, such as expectancy and retrospective matching likely contribute, there is also evidence for a non-strategic contribution to priming, presumably related to spreading activation. Finally, a semantic priming effect has been demonstrated in the N400 event-related potential (ERP) component, which may reflect facilitated access to semantic information. It is concluded that categorical relatedness is one organizing principle of semantic person memory. ©2011 The British Psychological Society.

Semantic processes leading to true and false memory formation in schizophrenia.

PubMed

Paz-Alonso, Pedro M; Ghetti, Simona; Ramsay, Ian; Solomon, Marjorie; Yoon, Jong; Carter, Cameron S; Ragland, J Daniel

2013-07-01

Encoding semantic relationships between items on word lists (semantic processing) enhances true memories, but also increases memory distortions. Episodic memory impairments in schizophrenia (SZ) are strongly driven by failures to process semantic relations, but the exact nature of these relational semantic processing deficits is not well understood. Here, we used a false memory paradigm to investigate the impact of implicit and explicit semantic processing manipulations on episodic memory in SZ. Thirty SZ and 30 demographically matched healthy controls (HC) studied Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) lists of semantically associated words. Half of the lists had strong implicit semantic associations and the remainder had low strength associations. Similarly, half of the lists were presented under "standard" instructions and the other half under explicit "relational processing" instructions. After study, participants performed recall and old/new recognition tests composed of targets, critical lures, and unrelated lures. HC exhibited higher true memories and better discriminability between true and false memory compared to SZ. High, versus low, associative strength increased false memory rates in both groups. However, explicit "relational processing" instructions positively improved true memory rates only in HC. Finally, true and false memory rates were associated with severity of disorganized and negative symptoms in SZ. These results suggest that reduced processing of semantic relationships during encoding in SZ may stem from an inability to implement explicit relational processing strategies rather than a fundamental deficit in the implicit activation and retrieval of word meanings from patients' semantic lexicon. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

SSWAP: A Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol for Semantic Web Services

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

SSWAP (Simple Semantic Web Architecture and Protocol) is an architecture, protocol, and platform for using reasoning to semantically integrate heterogeneous disparate data and services on the web. SSWAP is the driving technology behind the Virtual Plant Information Network, an NSF-funded semantic w...

Atypical Lexical/Semantic Processing in High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders without Early Language Delay

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kamio, Yoko; Robins, Diana; Kelley, Elizabeth; Swainson, Brook; Fein, Deborah

2007-01-01

Although autism is associated with impaired language functions, the nature of semantic processing in high-functioning pervasive developmental disorders (HFPDD) without a history of early language delay has been debated. In this study, we aimed to examine whether the automatic lexical/semantic aspect of language is impaired or intact in these…

Orthographic versus semantic matching in visual search for words within lists.

PubMed

Léger, Laure; Rouet, Jean-François; Ros, Christine; Vibert, Nicolas

2012-03-01

An eye-tracking experiment was performed to assess the influence of orthographic and semantic distractor words on visual search for words within lists. The target word (e.g., "raven") was either shown to participants before the search (literal search) or defined by its semantic category (e.g., "bird", categorical search). In both cases, the type of words included in the list affected visual search times and eye movement patterns. In the literal condition, the presence of orthographic distractors sharing initial and final letters with the target word strongly increased search times. Indeed, the orthographic distractors attracted participants' gaze and were fixated for longer times than other words in the list. The presence of semantic distractors related to the target word also increased search times, which suggests that significant automatic semantic processing of nontarget words took place. In the categorical condition, semantic distractors were expected to have a greater impact on the search task. As expected, the presence in the list of semantic associates of the target word led to target selection errors. However, semantic distractors did not significantly increase search times any more, whereas orthographic distractors still did. Hence, the visual characteristics of nontarget words can be strong predictors of the efficiency of visual search even when the exact target word is unknown. The respective impacts of orthographic and semantic distractors depended more on the characteristics of lists than on the nature of the search task.

[Schizophrenia and semantic priming effects].

PubMed

Lecardeur, L; Giffard, B; Eustache, F; Dollfus, S

2006-01-01

This article is a review of studies using the semantic priming paradigm to assess the functioning of semantic memory in schizophrenic patients. Semantic priming describes the phenomenon of increasing the speed with which a string of letters (the target) is recognized as a word (lexical decision task) by presenting to the subject a semantically related word (the prime) prior to the appearance of the target word. This semantic priming is linked to both automatic and controlled processes depending on experimental conditions (stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), percentage of related words and explicit memory instructions). Automatic process observed with short SOA, low related word percentage and instructions asking only to process the target, could be linked to the "automatic spreading activation" through the semantic network. Controlled processes involve "semantic matching" (the number of related and unrelated pairs influences the subjects decision) and "expectancy" (the prime leads the subject to generate an expectancy set of potential target to the prime). These processes can be observed whatever the SOA for the former and with long SOA for the later, but both with only high related word percentage and explicit memory instructions. Studies evaluating semantic priming effects in schizophrenia show conflicting results: schizophrenic patients can present hyperpriming (semantic priming effect is larger in patients than in controls), hypopriming (semantic priming effect is lower in patients than in controls) or equal semantic priming effects compared to control subjects. These results could be associated to a global impairment of controlled processes in schizophrenia, essentially to a dysfunction of semantic matching process. On the other hand, efficiency of semantic automatic spreading activation process is controversial. These discrepancies could be linked to the different experimental conditions used (duration of SOA, proportion of related pairs and instructions), which

Verbal and non-verbal semantic impairment: From fluent primary progressive aphasia to semantic dementia

PubMed Central

Senaha, Mirna Lie Hosogi; Caramelli, Paulo; Porto, Claudia Sellitto; Nitrini, Ricardo

2007-01-01

Selective disturbances of semantic memory have attracted the interest of many investigators and the question of the existence of single or multiple semantic systems remains a very controversial theme in the literature. Objectives To discuss the question of multiple semantic systems based on a longitudinal study of a patient who presented semantic dementia from fluent primary progressive aphasia. Methods A 66 year-old woman with selective impairment of semantic memory was examined on two occasions, undergoing neuropsychological and language evaluations, the results of which were compared to those of three paired control individuals. Results In the first evaluation, physical examination was normal and the score on the Mini-Mental State Examination was 26. Language evaluation revealed fluent speech, anomia, disturbance in word comprehension, preservation of the syntactic and phonological aspects of the language, besides surface dyslexia and dysgraphia. Autobiographical and episodic memories were relatively preserved. In semantic memory tests, the following dissociation was found: disturbance of verbal semantic memory with preservation of non-verbal semantic memory. Magnetic resonance of the brain revealed marked atrophy of the left anterior temporal lobe. After 14 months, the difficulties in verbal semantic memory had become more severe and the semantic disturbance, limited initially to the linguistic sphere, had worsened to involve non-verbal domains. Conclusions Given the dissociation found in the first examination, we believe there is sufficient clinical evidence to refute the existence of a unitary semantic system. PMID:29213389

High Performance Semantic Factoring of Giga-Scale Semantic Graph Databases

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Joslyn, Cliff A.; Adolf, Robert D.; Al-Saffar, Sinan

2010-10-04

As semantic graph database technology grows to address components ranging from extant large triple stores to SPARQL endpoints over SQL-structured relational databases, it will become increasingly important to be able to bring high performance computational resources to bear on their analysis, interpretation, and visualization, especially with respect to their innate semantic structure. Our research group built a novel high performance hybrid system comprising computational capability for semantic graph database processing utilizing the large multithreaded architecture of the Cray XMT platform, conventional clusters, and large data stores. In this paper we describe that architecture, and present the results of our deployingmore » that for the analysis of the Billion Triple dataset with respect to its semantic factors.« less

From Data to Semantic Information

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Floridi, Luciano

2003-06-01

There is no consensus yet on the definition of semantic information. This paper contributes to the current debate by criticising and revising the Standard Definition of semantic Information (SDI) as meaningful data, in favour of the Dretske-Grice approach: meaningful and well-formed data constitute semantic information only if they also qualify as contingently truthful. After a brief introduction, SDI is criticised for providing necessary but insufficient conditions for the definition of semantic information. SDI is incorrect because truth-values do not supervene on semantic information, and misinformation (that is, false semantic information) is not a type of semantic information, but pseudo-information, that is not semantic information at all. This is shown by arguing that none of the reasons for interpreting misinformation as a type of semantic information is convincing, whilst there are compelling reasons to treat it as pseudo-information. As a consequence, SDI is revised to include a necessary truth-condition. The last section summarises the main results of the paper and indicates the important implications of the revised definition for the analysis of the deflationary theories of truth, the standard definition of knowledge and the classic, quantitative theory of semantic information.

JournalMap: Geo-semantic searching for relevant knowledge

USDA-ARS?s Scientific Manuscript database

Ecologists struggling to understand rapidly changing environments and evolving ecosystem threats need quick access to relevant research and documentation of natural systems. The advent of semantic and aggregation searching (e.g., Google Scholar, Web of Science) has made it easier to find useful lite...

Cognitive integration of asynchronous natural or non-natural auditory and visual information in videos of real-world events: an event-related potential study.

PubMed

Liu, B; Wang, Z; Wu, G; Meng, X

2011-04-28

In this paper, we aim to study the cognitive integration of asynchronous natural or non-natural auditory and visual information in videos of real-world events. Videos with asynchronous semantically consistent or inconsistent natural sound or speech were used as stimuli in order to compare the difference and similarity between multisensory integrations of videos with asynchronous natural sound and speech. The event-related potential (ERP) results showed that N1 and P250 components were elicited irrespective of whether natural sounds were consistent or inconsistent with critical actions in videos. Videos with inconsistent natural sound could elicit N400-P600 effects compared to videos with consistent natural sound, which was similar to the results from unisensory visual studies. Videos with semantically consistent or inconsistent speech could both elicit N1 components. Meanwhile, videos with inconsistent speech would elicit N400-LPN effects in comparison with videos with consistent speech, which showed that this semantic processing was probably related to recognition memory. Moreover, the N400 effect elicited by videos with semantically inconsistent speech was larger and later than that elicited by videos with semantically inconsistent natural sound. Overall, multisensory integration of videos with natural sound or speech could be roughly divided into two stages. For the videos with natural sound, the first stage might reflect the connection between the received information and the stored information in memory; and the second one might stand for the evaluation process of inconsistent semantic information. For the videos with speech, the first stage was similar to the first stage of videos with natural sound; while the second one might be related to recognition memory process. Copyright © 2011 IBRO. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Lexicality Effects in Word and Nonword Recall of Semantic Dementia and Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia

PubMed Central

Reilly, Jamie; Troche, Joshua; Chatel, Alison; Park, Hyejin; Kalinyak-Fliszar, Michelene; Antonucci, Sharon M.; Martin, Nadine

2012-01-01

Background Verbal working memory is an essential component of many language functions, including sentence comprehension and word learning. As such, working memory has emerged as a domain of intense research interest both in aphasiology and in the broader field of cognitive neuroscience. The integrity of verbal working memory encoding relies on a fluid interaction between semantic and phonological processes. That is, we encode verbal detail using many cues related to both the sound and meaning of words. Lesion models can provide an effective means of parsing the contributions of phonological or semantic impairment to recall performance. Methods and Procedures We employed the lesion model approach here by contrasting the nature of lexicality errors incurred during recall of word and nonword sequences by 3individuals with progressive nonfluent aphasia (a phonological dominant impairment) compared to that of 2 individuals with semantic dementia (a semantic dominant impairment). We focused on psycholinguistic attributes of correctly recalled stimuli relative to those that elicited a lexicality error (i.e., nonword → word OR word → nonword). Outcomes and results Patients with semantic dementia showed greater sensitivity to phonological attributes (e.g., phoneme length, wordlikeness) of the target items relative to semantic attributes (e.g., familiarity). Patients with PNFA showed the opposite pattern, marked by sensitivity to word frequency, age of acquisition, familiarity, and imageability. Conclusions We interpret these results in favor of a processing strategy such that in the context of a focal phonological impairment patients revert to an over-reliance on preserved semantic processing abilities. In contrast, a focal semantic impairment forces both reliance upon and hypersensitivity to phonological attributes of target words. We relate this interpretation to previous hypotheses about the nature of verbal short-term memory in progressive aphasia. PMID:23486736

Interconnected growing self-organizing maps for auditory and semantic acquisition modeling

PubMed Central

Cao, Mengxue; Li, Aijun; Fang, Qiang; Kaufmann, Emily; Kröger, Bernd J.

2014-01-01

Based on the incremental nature of knowledge acquisition, in this study we propose a growing self-organizing neural network approach for modeling the acquisition of auditory and semantic categories. We introduce an Interconnected Growing Self-Organizing Maps (I-GSOM) algorithm, which takes associations between auditory information and semantic information into consideration, in this paper. Direct phonetic–semantic association is simulated in order to model the language acquisition in early phases, such as the babbling and imitation stages, in which no phonological representations exist. Based on the I-GSOM algorithm, we conducted experiments using paired acoustic and semantic training data. We use a cyclical reinforcing and reviewing training procedure to model the teaching and learning process between children and their communication partners. A reinforcing-by-link training procedure and a link-forgetting procedure are introduced to model the acquisition of associative relations between auditory and semantic information. Experimental results indicate that (1) I-GSOM has good ability to learn auditory and semantic categories presented within the training data; (2) clear auditory and semantic boundaries can be found in the network representation; (3) cyclical reinforcing and reviewing training leads to a detailed categorization as well as to a detailed clustering, while keeping the clusters that have already been learned and the network structure that has already been developed stable; and (4) reinforcing-by-link training leads to well-perceived auditory–semantic associations. Our I-GSOM model suggests that it is important to associate auditory information with semantic information during language acquisition. Despite its high level of abstraction, our I-GSOM approach can be interpreted as a biologically-inspired neurocomputational model. PMID:24688478

Interconnected growing self-organizing maps for auditory and semantic acquisition modeling.

PubMed

Cao, Mengxue; Li, Aijun; Fang, Qiang; Kaufmann, Emily; Kröger, Bernd J

2014-01-01

Based on the incremental nature of knowledge acquisition, in this study we propose a growing self-organizing neural network approach for modeling the acquisition of auditory and semantic categories. We introduce an Interconnected Growing Self-Organizing Maps (I-GSOM) algorithm, which takes associations between auditory information and semantic information into consideration, in this paper. Direct phonetic-semantic association is simulated in order to model the language acquisition in early phases, such as the babbling and imitation stages, in which no phonological representations exist. Based on the I-GSOM algorithm, we conducted experiments using paired acoustic and semantic training data. We use a cyclical reinforcing and reviewing training procedure to model the teaching and learning process between children and their communication partners. A reinforcing-by-link training procedure and a link-forgetting procedure are introduced to model the acquisition of associative relations between auditory and semantic information. Experimental results indicate that (1) I-GSOM has good ability to learn auditory and semantic categories presented within the training data; (2) clear auditory and semantic boundaries can be found in the network representation; (3) cyclical reinforcing and reviewing training leads to a detailed categorization as well as to a detailed clustering, while keeping the clusters that have already been learned and the network structure that has already been developed stable; and (4) reinforcing-by-link training leads to well-perceived auditory-semantic associations. Our I-GSOM model suggests that it is important to associate auditory information with semantic information during language acquisition. Despite its high level of abstraction, our I-GSOM approach can be interpreted as a biologically-inspired neurocomputational model.

High performance semantic factoring of giga-scale semantic graph databases.

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

al-Saffar, Sinan; Adolf, Bob; Haglin, David

2010-10-01

As semantic graph database technology grows to address components ranging from extant large triple stores to SPARQL endpoints over SQL-structured relational databases, it will become increasingly important to be able to bring high performance computational resources to bear on their analysis, interpretation, and visualization, especially with respect to their innate semantic structure. Our research group built a novel high performance hybrid system comprising computational capability for semantic graph database processing utilizing the large multithreaded architecture of the Cray XMT platform, conventional clusters, and large data stores. In this paper we describe that architecture, and present the results of our deployingmore » that for the analysis of the Billion Triple dataset with respect to its semantic factors, including basic properties, connected components, namespace interaction, and typed paths.« less

Semantic SenseLab: implementing the vision of the Semantic Web in neuroscience

PubMed Central

Samwald, Matthias; Chen, Huajun; Ruttenberg, Alan; Lim, Ernest; Marenco, Luis; Miller, Perry; Shepherd, Gordon; Cheung, Kei-Hoi

2011-01-01

Summary Objective Integrative neuroscience research needs a scalable informatics framework that enables semantic integration of diverse types of neuroscience data. This paper describes the use of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and other Semantic Web technologies for the representation and integration of molecular-level data provided by several of SenseLab suite of neuroscience databases. Methods Based on the original database structure, we semi-automatically translated the databases into OWL ontologies with manual addition of semantic enrichment. The SenseLab ontologies are extensively linked to other biomedical Semantic Web resources, including the Subcellular Anatomy Ontology, Brain Architecture Management System, the Gene Ontology, BIRNLex and UniProt. The SenseLab ontologies have also been mapped to the Basic Formal Ontology and Relation Ontology, which helps ease interoperability with many other existing and future biomedical ontologies for the Semantic Web. In addition, approaches to representing contradictory research statements are described. The SenseLab ontologies are designed for use on the Semantic Web that enables their integration into a growing collection of biomedical information resources. Conclusion We demonstrate that our approach can yield significant potential benefits and that the Semantic Web is rapidly becoming mature enough to realize its anticipated promises. The ontologies are available online at http://neuroweb.med.yale.edu/senselab/ PMID:20006477

Semantic SenseLab: Implementing the vision of the Semantic Web in neuroscience.

PubMed

Samwald, Matthias; Chen, Huajun; Ruttenberg, Alan; Lim, Ernest; Marenco, Luis; Miller, Perry; Shepherd, Gordon; Cheung, Kei-Hoi

2010-01-01

Integrative neuroscience research needs a scalable informatics framework that enables semantic integration of diverse types of neuroscience data. This paper describes the use of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and other Semantic Web technologies for the representation and integration of molecular-level data provided by several of SenseLab suite of neuroscience databases. Based on the original database structure, we semi-automatically translated the databases into OWL ontologies with manual addition of semantic enrichment. The SenseLab ontologies are extensively linked to other biomedical Semantic Web resources, including the Subcellular Anatomy Ontology, Brain Architecture Management System, the Gene Ontology, BIRNLex and UniProt. The SenseLab ontologies have also been mapped to the Basic Formal Ontology and Relation Ontology, which helps ease interoperability with many other existing and future biomedical ontologies for the Semantic Web. In addition, approaches to representing contradictory research statements are described. The SenseLab ontologies are designed for use on the Semantic Web that enables their integration into a growing collection of biomedical information resources. We demonstrate that our approach can yield significant potential benefits and that the Semantic Web is rapidly becoming mature enough to realize its anticipated promises. The ontologies are available online at http://neuroweb.med.yale.edu/senselab/. 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Considering the role of semantic memory in episodic future thinking: evidence from semantic dementia.

PubMed

Irish, Muireann; Addis, Donna Rose; Hodges, John R; Piguet, Olivier

2012-07-01

Semantic dementia is a progressive neurodegenerative condition characterized by the profound and amodal loss of semantic memory in the context of relatively preserved episodic memory. In contrast, patients with Alzheimer's disease typically display impairments in episodic memory, but with semantic deficits of a much lesser magnitude than in semantic dementia. Our understanding of episodic memory retrieval in these cohorts has greatly increased over the last decade, however, we know relatively little regarding the ability of these patients to imagine and describe possible future events, and whether episodic future thinking is mediated by divergent neural substrates contingent on dementia subtype. Here, we explored episodic future thinking in patients with semantic dementia (n=11) and Alzheimer's disease (n=11), in comparison with healthy control participants (n=10). Participants completed a battery of tests designed to probe episodic and semantic thinking across past and future conditions, as well as standardized tests of episodic and semantic memory. Further, all participants underwent magnetic resonance imaging. Despite their relatively intact episodic retrieval for recent past events, the semantic dementia cohort showed significant impairments for episodic future thinking. In contrast, the group with Alzheimer's disease showed parallel deficits across past and future episodic conditions. Voxel-based morphometry analyses confirmed that atrophy in the left inferior temporal gyrus and bilateral temporal poles, regions strongly implicated in semantic memory, correlated significantly with deficits in episodic future thinking in semantic dementia. Conversely, episodic future thinking performance in Alzheimer's disease correlated with atrophy in regions associated with episodic memory, namely the posterior cingulate, parahippocampal gyrus and frontal pole. These distinct neuroanatomical substrates contingent on dementia group were further qualified by correlational

High Performance Descriptive Semantic Analysis of Semantic Graph Databases

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Joslyn, Cliff A.; Adolf, Robert D.; al-Saffar, Sinan

As semantic graph database technology grows to address components ranging from extant large triple stores to SPARQL endpoints over SQL-structured relational databases, it will become increasingly important to be able to understand their inherent semantic structure, whether codified in explicit ontologies or not. Our group is researching novel methods for what we call descriptive semantic analysis of RDF triplestores, to serve purposes of analysis, interpretation, visualization, and optimization. But data size and computational complexity makes it increasingly necessary to bring high performance computational resources to bear on this task. Our research group built a novel high performance hybrid system comprisingmore » computational capability for semantic graph database processing utilizing the large multi-threaded architecture of the Cray XMT platform, conventional servers, and large data stores. In this paper we describe that architecture and our methods, and present the results of our analyses of basic properties, connected components, namespace interaction, and typed paths such for the Billion Triple Challenge 2010 dataset.« less

A Semantic Parsing Method for Mapping Clinical Questions to Logical Forms

PubMed Central

Roberts, Kirk; Patra, Braja Gopal

2017-01-01

This paper presents a method for converting natural language questions about structured data in the electronic health record (EHR) into logical forms. The logical forms can then subsequently be converted to EHR-dependent structured queries. The natural language processing task, known as semantic parsing, has the potential to convert questions to logical forms with extremely high precision, resulting in a system that is usable and trusted by clinicians for real-time use in clinical settings. We propose a hybrid semantic parsing method, combining rule-based methods with a machine learning-based classifier. The overall semantic parsing precision on a set of 212 questions is 95.6%. The parser’s rules furthermore allow it to “know what it does not know”, enabling the system to indicate when unknown terms prevent it from understanding the question’s full logical structure. When combined with a module for converting a logical form into an EHR-dependent query, this high-precision approach allows for a question answering system to provide a user with a single, verifiably correct answer. PMID:29854217

Semantic Modeling of Requirements: Leveraging Ontologies in Systems Engineering

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mir, Masood Saleem

2012-01-01

The interdisciplinary nature of "Systems Engineering" (SE), having "stakeholders" from diverse domains with orthogonal facets, and need to consider all stages of "lifecycle" of system during conception, can benefit tremendously by employing "Knowledge Engineering" (KE) to achieve semantic agreement among all…

A Semantic Graph Query Language

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Kaplan, I L

2006-10-16

Semantic graphs can be used to organize large amounts of information from a number of sources into one unified structure. A semantic query language provides a foundation for extracting information from the semantic graph. The graph query language described here provides a simple, powerful method for querying semantic graphs.

The Neural Correlates of Infant and Adult Goal Prediction: Evidence for Semantic Processing Systems

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reid, Vincent M.; Hoehl, Stefanie; Grigutsch, Maren; Groendahl, Anna; Parise, Eugenio; Striano, Tricia

2009-01-01

The sequential nature of action ensures that an individual can anticipate the conclusion of an observed action via the use of semantic rules. The semantic processing of language and action has been linked to the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP). The authors developed an ERP paradigm in which infants and adults observed simple…

Research in Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Understanding.

DTIC Science & Technology

1984-09-01

TYPE OF REPORT & PERIOO COVERED RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION Annual Report FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING 9/1/83 - 8/31/84 S. PERFORMING...nhaber) Artificial intelligence, natural language understanding , knowledge representation, semantics, semantic networks, KL-TWO, NIKL, belief and...attempting to understand and react to a complex, evolving situation. This report summarizes our research in knowledge representation and natural language

EEG Theta and Alpha Responses Reveal Qualitative Differences in Processing Taxonomic versus Thematic Semantic Relationships

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Maguire, Mandy J.; Brier, Matthew R.; Ferree, Thomas C.

2010-01-01

Despite the importance of semantic relationships to our understanding of semantic knowledge, the nature of the neural processes underlying these abilities are not well understood. In order to investigate these processes, 20 healthy adults listened to thematically related (e.g., leash-dog), taxonomically related (e.g., horse-dog), or unrelated…

Semantic mechanisms may be responsible for developing synesthesia

PubMed Central

Mroczko-Wąsowicz, Aleksandra; Nikolić, Danko

2014-01-01

Currently, little is known about how synesthesia develops and which aspects of synesthesia can be acquired through a learning process. We review the increasing evidence for the role of semantic representations in the induction of synesthesia, and argue for the thesis that synesthetic abilities are developed and modified by semantic mechanisms. That is, in certain people semantic mechanisms associate concepts with perception-like experiences—and this association occurs in an extraordinary way. This phenomenon can be referred to as “higher” synesthesia or ideasthesia. The present analysis suggests that synesthesia develops during childhood and is being enriched further throughout the synesthetes’ lifetime; for example, the already existing concurrents may be adopted by novel inducers or new concurrents may be formed. For a deeper understanding of the origin and nature of synesthesia we propose to focus future research on two aspects: (i) the similarities between synesthesia and ordinary phenomenal experiences based on concepts; and (ii) the tight entanglement of perception, cognition and the conceptualization of the world. Importantly, an explanation of how biological systems get to generate experiences, synesthetic or not, may have to involve an explanation of how semantic networks are formed in general and what their role is in the ability to be aware of the surrounding world. PMID:25191239

An agent-based peer-to-peer architecture for semantic discovery of manufacturing services across virtual enterprises

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhang, Wenyu; Zhang, Shuai; Cai, Ming; Jian, Wu

2015-04-01

With the development of virtual enterprise (VE) paradigm, the usage of serviceoriented architecture (SOA) is increasingly being considered for facilitating the integration and utilisation of distributed manufacturing resources. However, due to the heterogeneous nature among VEs, the dynamic nature of a VE and the autonomous nature of each VE member, the lack of both sophisticated coordination mechanism in the popular centralised infrastructure and semantic expressivity in the existing SOA standards make the current centralised, syntactic service discovery method undesirable. This motivates the proposed agent-based peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture for semantic discovery of manufacturing services across VEs. Multi-agent technology provides autonomous and flexible problemsolving capabilities in dynamic and adaptive VE environments. Peer-to-peer overlay provides highly scalable coupling across decentralised VEs, each of which exhibiting as a peer composed of multiple agents dealing with manufacturing services. The proposed architecture utilises a novel, efficient, two-stage search strategy - semantic peer discovery and semantic service discovery - to handle the complex searches of manufacturing services across VEs through fast peer filtering. The operation and experimental evaluation of the prototype system are presented to validate the implementation of the proposed approach.

A Defense of Semantic Minimalism

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Su

2012-01-01

Semantic Minimalism is a position about the semantic content of declarative sentences, i.e., the content that is determined entirely by syntax. It is defined by the following two points: "Point 1": The semantic content is a complete/truth-conditional proposition. "Point 2": The semantic content is useful to a theory of…

Towards comprehensive syntactic and semantic annotations of the clinical narrative

PubMed Central

Albright, Daniel; Lanfranchi, Arrick; Fredriksen, Anwen; Styler, William F; Warner, Colin; Hwang, Jena D; Choi, Jinho D; Dligach, Dmitriy; Nielsen, Rodney D; Martin, James; Ward, Wayne; Palmer, Martha; Savova, Guergana K

2013-01-01

Objective To create annotated clinical narratives with layers of syntactic and semantic labels to facilitate advances in clinical natural language processing (NLP). To develop NLP algorithms and open source components. Methods Manual annotation of a clinical narrative corpus of 127 606 tokens following the Treebank schema for syntactic information, PropBank schema for predicate-argument structures, and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) schema for semantic information. NLP components were developed. Results The final corpus consists of 13 091 sentences containing 1772 distinct predicate lemmas. Of the 766 newly created PropBank frames, 74 are verbs. There are 28 539 named entity (NE) annotations spread over 15 UMLS semantic groups, one UMLS semantic type, and the Person semantic category. The most frequent annotations belong to the UMLS semantic groups of Procedures (15.71%), Disorders (14.74%), Concepts and Ideas (15.10%), Anatomy (12.80%), Chemicals and Drugs (7.49%), and the UMLS semantic type of Sign or Symptom (12.46%). Inter-annotator agreement results: Treebank (0.926), PropBank (0.891–0.931), NE (0.697–0.750). The part-of-speech tagger, constituency parser, dependency parser, and semantic role labeler are built from the corpus and released open source. A significant limitation uncovered by this project is the need for the NLP community to develop a widely agreed-upon schema for the annotation of clinical concepts and their relations. Conclusions This project takes a foundational step towards bringing the field of clinical NLP up to par with NLP in the general domain. The corpus creation and NLP components provide a resource for research and application development that would have been previously impossible. PMID:23355458

Won't get fooled again: An event-related potential study of task and repetition effects on the semantic processing of items without semantics.

PubMed

Laszlo, Sarah; Stites, Mallory; Federmeier, Kara D

2012-01-01

A growing body of evidence suggests that semantic access is obligatory. Several studies have demonstrated that brain activity associated with semantic processing, measured in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), is elicited even by meaningless, orthographically illegal strings, suggesting that semantic access is not gated by lexicality. However, the downstream consequences of that activity vary by item type, exemplified by the typical finding that N400 activity is reduced by repetition for words and pronounceable nonwords but not for illegal strings. We propose that this lack of repetition effect for illegal strings is caused not by lack of contact with semantics, but by the unrefined nature of that contact under conditions in which illegal strings can be readily categorised as task-irrelevant. To test this, we collected ERPs from participants performing a modified Lexical Decision Task, in which the presence of orthographically illegal acronyms rendered meaningless illegal strings more difficult lures than normal. Confirming our hypothesis, under these conditions illegal strings elicited robust N400 repetition effects, quantitatively and qualitatively similar to those elicited by words, pseudowords, and acronyms.

Subliminal semantic priming in speech.

PubMed

Daltrozzo, Jérôme; Signoret, Carine; Tillmann, Barbara; Perrin, Fabien

2011-01-01

Numerous studies have reported subliminal repetition and semantic priming in the visual modality. We transferred this paradigm to the auditory modality. Prime awareness was manipulated by a reduction of sound intensity level. Uncategorized prime words (according to a post-test) were followed by semantically related, unrelated, or repeated target words (presented without intensity reduction) and participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT). Participants with slower reaction times in the LDT showed semantic priming (faster reaction times for semantically related compared to unrelated targets) and negative repetition priming (slower reaction times for repeated compared to semantically related targets). This is the first report of semantic priming in the auditory modality without conscious categorization of the prime.

Subliminal Semantic Priming in Speech

PubMed Central

Tillmann, Barbara; Perrin, Fabien

2011-01-01

Numerous studies have reported subliminal repetition and semantic priming in the visual modality. We transferred this paradigm to the auditory modality. Prime awareness was manipulated by a reduction of sound intensity level. Uncategorized prime words (according to a post-test) were followed by semantically related, unrelated, or repeated target words (presented without intensity reduction) and participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT). Participants with slower reaction times in the LDT showed semantic priming (faster reaction times for semantically related compared to unrelated targets) and negative repetition priming (slower reaction times for repeated compared to semantically related targets). This is the first report of semantic priming in the auditory modality without conscious categorization of the prime. PMID:21655277

Opposing Effects of Semantic Diversity in Lexical and Semantic Relatedness Decisions

PubMed Central

2015-01-01

Semantic ambiguity has often been divided into 2 forms: homonymy, referring to words with 2 unrelated interpretations (e.g., bark), and polysemy, referring to words associated with a number of varying but semantically linked uses (e.g., twist). Typically, polysemous words are thought of as having a fixed number of discrete definitions, or “senses,” with each use of the word corresponding to one of its senses. In this study, we investigated an alternative conception of polysemy, based on the idea that polysemous variation in meaning is a continuous, graded phenomenon that occurs as a function of contextual variation in word usage. We quantified this contextual variation using semantic diversity (SemD), a corpus-based measure of the degree to which a particular word is used in a diverse set of linguistic contexts. In line with other approaches to polysemy, we found a reaction time (RT) advantage for high SemD words in lexical decision, which occurred for words of both high and low imageability. When participants made semantic relatedness decisions to word pairs, however, responses were slower to high SemD pairs, irrespective of whether these were related or unrelated. Again, this result emerged irrespective of the imageability of the word. The latter result diverges from previous findings using homonyms, in which ambiguity effects have only been found for related word pairs. We argue that participants were slower to respond to high SemD words because their high contextual variability resulted in noisy, underspecified semantic representations that were more difficult to compare with one another. We demonstrated this principle in a connectionist computational model that was trained to activate distributed semantic representations from orthographic inputs. Greater variability in the orthography-to-semantic mappings of high SemD words resulted in a lower degree of similarity for related pairs of this type. At the same time, the representations of high SemD unrelated

Life, Information, Entropy, and Time: Vehicles for Semantic Inheritance.

PubMed

Crofts, Antony R

2007-01-01

evolution. The initial interpretational steps include protein synthesis, molecular recognition, and catalytic potential that facilitate structural and functional roles. Combinatorial possibilities are extended through interactions of increasing complexity in the temporal dimension. (3) All living things show a behavior that indicates awareness of time, or chronognosis. The ∼4 billion years of biological evolution have given rise to forms with increasing sophistication in sensory adaptation. This has been linked to the development of an increasing chronognostic range, and an associated increase in combinatorial complexity. (4) Development of a modern human phenotype and the ability to communicate through language, led to the development of archival storage, and invention of the basic skills, institutions and mechanisms that allowed the evolution of modern civilizations. Combinatorial amplification at the supra-phenotypical level arose from the invention of syntax, grammar, numbers, and the subsequent developments of abstraction in writing, algorithms, etc. The translational machineries of the human mind, the "mutation" of ideas therein, and the "conversations" of our social intercourse, have allowed a limited set of symbolic descriptors to evolve into an exponentially expanding semantic heritage. (5) The three postulates above open interesting epistemological questions. An understanding of topics such dualism, the élan vital, the status of hypothesis in science, memetics, the nature of consciousness, the role of semantic processing in the survival of societies, and Popper's three worlds, require recognition of an insubstantial component. By recognizing a necessary linkage between semantic content and a physical machinery, we can bring these perennial problems into the framework of a realistic philosophy. It is suggested, following Popper, that the ∼4 billion years of evolution of the biosphere represents an exploration of the nature of reality at the physicochemical

Treatment for Anomia in Semantic Dementia

PubMed Central

Henry, Maya L.; Beeson, Pélagie M.; Rapcsak, Steven Z.

2009-01-01

Anomia is a striking and consistent clinical feature of semantic dementia (SD), a progressive aphasia syndrome associated with focal cortical atrophy of the anterior temporal lobes. Word retrieval deficits in patients with SD have been attributed to the loss of conceptual knowledge, resulting in an impairment referred to as semantic anomia. Whereas an abundance of research has been dedicated to treatment for anomia in individuals with focal brain damage due to stroke, considerably less work has been done regarding treatment for patients with progressive language decline. The purpose of this article is to review the available literature concerning the nature and treatment of anomia in individuals with SD. Several studies have shown that new lexical learning remains possible in these patients. However, newly learned information is likely to be constrained by the learning context, and increased reliance on perceptual and autobiographical contextual information may be necessary to provide critical support for new vocabulary acquisition. There is also evidence suggesting that treatment may slow the progression of anomia over time, even affording some protective benefit to lexical items that are not yet lost. However, treatment efforts are likely to be most beneficial at early stages of the disease, when residual semantic knowledge as. well as relatively spared episodic memory may support new learning. PMID:18348092

SEMANTICS AND CRITICAL READING.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

FLANIGAN, MICHAEL C.

PROFICIENCY IN CRITICAL READING CAN BE ACCELERATED BY MAKING STUDENTS AWARE OF VARIOUS SEMANTIC DEVICES THAT HELP CLARIFY MEANINGS AND PURPOSES. EXCERPTS FROM THE ARTICLE "TEEN-AGE CORRUPTION" FROM THE NINTH-GRADE SEMANTICS UNIT WRITTEN BY THE PROJECT ENGLISH DEMONSTRATION CENTER AT EUCLID, OHIO, ARE USED TO ILLUSTRATE HOW SEMANTICS RELATE TO…

Semantics and pragmatics.

PubMed

McNally, Louise

2013-05-01

The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of conventionalized and context- or use-dependent aspects of natural language meaning, respectively. The complexity of human language as a semiotic system has led to considerable debate about how the semantics/pragmatics distinction should be drawn, if at all. This debate largely reflects contrasting views of meaning as a property of linguistic expressions versus something that speakers do. The fact that both views of meaning are essential to a complete understanding of language has led to a variety of efforts over the last 40 years to develop better integrated and more comprehensive theories of language use and interpretation. The most important advances have included the adaptation of propositional analyses of declarative sentences to interrogative, imperative and exclamative forms; the emergence of dynamic, game theoretic, and multi-dimensional theories of meaning; and the development of various techniques for incorporating context-dependent aspects of content into representations of context-invariant content with the goal of handling phenomena such as vagueness resolution, metaphor, and metonymy. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:285-297. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1227 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. The authors declare no conflict of interest. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Semantic Data Access Services at NASA's Atmospheric Science Data Center

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Huffer, E.; Hertz, J.; Kusterer, J.

2012-12-01

The corpus of Earth Science data products at the Atmospheric Science Data Center at NASA's Langley Research Center comprises a widely heterogeneous set of products, even among those whose subject matter is very similar. Two distinct data products may both contain data on the same parameter, for instance, solar irradiance; but the instruments used, and the circumstances under which the data were collected and processed, may differ significantly. Understanding the differences is critical to using the data effectively. Data distribution services must be able to provide prospective users with enough information to allow them to meaningfully compare and evaluate the data products offered. Semantic technologies - ontologies, triple stores, reasoners, linked data - offer functionality for addressing this issue. Ontologies can provide robust, high-fidelity domain models that serve as common schema for discovering, evaluating, comparing and integrating data from disparate products. Reasoning engines and triple stores can leverage ontologies to support intelligent search applications that allow users to discover, query, retrieve, and easily reformat data from a broad spectrum of sources. We argue that because of the extremely complex nature of scientific data, data distribution systems should wholeheartedly embrace semantic technologies in order to make their data accessible to a broad array of prospective end users, and to ensure that the data they provide will be clearly understood and used appropriately by consumers. Toward this end, we propose a distribution system in which formal ontological models that accurately and comprehensively represent the ASDC's data domain, and fully leverage the expressivity and inferential capabilities of first order logic, are used to generate graph-based representations of the relevant relationships among data sets, observational systems, metadata files, and geospatial, temporal and scientific parameters to help prospective data consumers

Congruent and Incongruent Semantic Context Influence Vowel Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wotton, J. M.; Elvebak, R. L.; Moua, L. C.; Heggem, N. M.; Nelson, C. A.; Kirk, K. M.

2011-01-01

The influence of sentence context on the recognition of naturally spoken vowels degraded by reverberation and Gaussian noise was investigated. Target words were paired to have similar consonant sounds but different vowels (e.g., map/mop) and were embedded early in sentences which provided three types of semantic context. Fifty-eight…

Deriving a probabilistic syntacto-semantic grammar for biomedicine based on domain-specific terminologies

PubMed Central

Fan, Jung-Wei; Friedman, Carol

2011-01-01

Biomedical natural language processing (BioNLP) is a useful technique that unlocks valuable information stored in textual data for practice and/or research. Syntactic parsing is a critical component of BioNLP applications that rely on correctly determining the sentence and phrase structure of free text. In addition to dealing with the vast amount of domain-specific terms, a robust biomedical parser needs to model the semantic grammar to obtain viable syntactic structures. With either a rule-based or corpus-based approach, the grammar engineering process requires substantial time and knowledge from experts, and does not always yield a semantically transferable grammar. To reduce the human effort and to promote semantic transferability, we propose an automated method for deriving a probabilistic grammar based on a training corpus consisting of concept strings and semantic classes from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), a comprehensive terminology resource widely used by the community. The grammar is designed to specify noun phrases only due to the nominal nature of the majority of biomedical terminological concepts. Evaluated on manually parsed clinical notes, the derived grammar achieved a recall of 0.644, precision of 0.737, and average cross-bracketing of 0.61, which demonstrated better performance than a control grammar with the semantic information removed. Error analysis revealed shortcomings that could be addressed to improve performance. The results indicated the feasibility of an approach which automatically incorporates terminology semantics in the building of an operational grammar. Although the current performance of the unsupervised solution does not adequately replace manual engineering, we believe once the performance issues are addressed, it could serve as an aide in a semi-supervised solution. PMID:21549857

Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article

PubMed Central

Shotton, David; Portwin, Katie; Klyne, Graham; Miles, Alistair

2009-01-01

Scientific innovation depends on finding, integrating, and re-using the products of previous research. Here we explore how recent developments in Web technology, particularly those related to the publication of data and metadata, might assist that process by providing semantic enhancements to journal articles within the mainstream process of scholarly journal publishing. We exemplify this by describing semantic enhancements we have made to a recent biomedical research article taken from PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, providing enrichment to its content and increased access to datasets within it. These semantic enhancements include provision of live DOIs and hyperlinks; semantic markup of textual terms, with links to relevant third-party information resources; interactive figures; a re-orderable reference list; a document summary containing a study summary, a tag cloud, and a citation analysis; and two novel types of semantic enrichment: the first, a Supporting Claims Tooltip to permit “Citations in Context”, and the second, Tag Trees that bring together semantically related terms. In addition, we have published downloadable spreadsheets containing data from within tables and figures, have enriched these with provenance information, and have demonstrated various types of data fusion (mashups) with results from other research articles and with Google Maps. We have also published machine-readable RDF metadata both about the article and about the references it cites, for which we developed a Citation Typing Ontology, CiTO (http://purl.org/net/cito/). The enhanced article, which is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228.x001, presents a compelling existence proof of the possibilities of semantic publication. We hope the showcase of examples and ideas it contains, described in this paper, will excite the imaginations of researchers and publishers, stimulating them to explore the possibilities of semantic publishing for their own research

The nature-disorder paradox: A perceptual study on how nature is disorderly yet aesthetically preferred.

PubMed

Kotabe, Hiroki P; Kardan, Omid; Berman, Marc G

2017-08-01

Natural environments have powerful aesthetic appeal linked to their capacity for psychological restoration. In contrast, disorderly environments are aesthetically aversive, and have various detrimental psychological effects. But in our research, we have repeatedly found that natural environments are perceptually disorderly. What could explain this paradox? We present 3 competing hypotheses: the aesthetic preference for naturalness is more powerful than the aesthetic aversion to disorder (the nature-trumps-disorder hypothesis ); disorder is trivial to aesthetic preference in natural contexts (the harmless-disorder hypothesis ); and disorder is aesthetically preferred in natural contexts (the beneficial-disorder hypothesis ). Utilizing novel methods of perceptual study and diverse stimuli, we rule in the nature-trumps-disorder hypothesis and rule out the harmless-disorder and beneficial-disorder hypotheses. In examining perceptual mechanisms, we find evidence that high-level scene semantics are both necessary and sufficient for the nature-trumps-disorder effect. Necessity is evidenced by the effect disappearing in experiments utilizing only low-level visual stimuli (i.e., where scene semantics have been removed) and experiments utilizing a rapid-scene-presentation procedure that obscures scene semantics. Sufficiency is evidenced by the effect reappearing in experiments utilizing noun stimuli which remove low-level visual features. Furthermore, we present evidence that the interaction of scene semantics with low-level visual features amplifies the nature-trumps-disorder effect-the effect is weaker both when statistically adjusting for quantified low-level visual features and when using noun stimuli which remove low-level visual features. These results have implications for psychological theories bearing on the joint influence of low- and high-level perceptual inputs on affect and cognition, as well as for aesthetic design. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all

Not just semantics: Strong frequency and weak cognate effects on semantic association in bilinguals

PubMed Central

Antón-Méndez, Inés; Gollan, Tamar H.

2012-01-01

To investigate the possibility that knowledge of two languages influences the nature of semantic representations, bilinguals and monolinguals were compared in a word association task. In Experiment 1, bilinguals produced less typical responses relative to monolinguals when given cues with a very common associate (e.g., given bride, bilinguals said “dress” instead of “groom”). In Experiment 2, bilinguals produced responses as typical as those of monolinguals when given cues with high-frequency associates, but not when given cues with low-frequency associates. Bilinguals’ responses were also affected, to a certain extent, by the cognate status of the stimulus word pairs: They were more similar to monolinguals’ responses when the cue and its strongest associate were both cognates (e.g., minute–second is minuto–segundo in Spanish), as opposed to both being noncognates. Experiment 3 confirmed the presence of a robust frequency effect on bilingual but not on monolingual association responses. These findings imply a lexical locus for the bilingual effect on association responses and reveal the association task to be not quite as purely semantic as was previously assumed. PMID:20852236

Auditing the Assignments of Top-Level Semantic Types in the UMLS Semantic Network to UMLS Concepts

PubMed Central

He, Zhe; Perl, Yehoshua; Elhanan, Gai; Chen, Yan; Geller, James; Bian, Jiang

2018-01-01

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is an important terminological system. By the policy of its curators, each concept of the UMLS should be assigned the most specific Semantic Types (STs) in the UMLS Semantic Network (SN). Hence, the Semantic Types of most UMLS concepts are assigned at or near the bottom (leaves) of the UMLS Semantic Network. While most ST assignments are correct, some errors do occur. Therefore, Quality Assurance efforts of UMLS curators for ST assignments should concentrate on automatically detected sets of UMLS concepts with higher error rates than random sets. In this paper, we investigate the assignments of top-level semantic types in the UMLS semantic network to concepts, identify potential erroneous assignments, define four categories of errors, and thus provide assistance to curators of the UMLS to avoid these assignments errors. Human experts analyzed samples of concepts assigned 10 of the top-level semantic types and categorized the erroneous ST assignments into these four logical categories. Two thirds of the concepts assigned these 10 top-level semantic types are erroneous. Our results demonstrate that reviewing top-level semantic type assignments to concepts provides an effective way for UMLS quality assurance, comparing to reviewing a random selection of semantic type assignments. PMID:29375930

Auditing the Assignments of Top-Level Semantic Types in the UMLS Semantic Network to UMLS Concepts.

PubMed

He, Zhe; Perl, Yehoshua; Elhanan, Gai; Chen, Yan; Geller, James; Bian, Jiang

2017-11-01

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is an important terminological system. By the policy of its curators, each concept of the UMLS should be assigned the most specific Semantic Types (STs) in the UMLS Semantic Network (SN). Hence, the Semantic Types of most UMLS concepts are assigned at or near the bottom (leaves) of the UMLS Semantic Network. While most ST assignments are correct, some errors do occur. Therefore, Quality Assurance efforts of UMLS curators for ST assignments should concentrate on automatically detected sets of UMLS concepts with higher error rates than random sets. In this paper, we investigate the assignments of top-level semantic types in the UMLS semantic network to concepts, identify potential erroneous assignments, define four categories of errors, and thus provide assistance to curators of the UMLS to avoid these assignments errors. Human experts analyzed samples of concepts assigned 10 of the top-level semantic types and categorized the erroneous ST assignments into these four logical categories. Two thirds of the concepts assigned these 10 top-level semantic types are erroneous. Our results demonstrate that reviewing top-level semantic type assignments to concepts provides an effective way for UMLS quality assurance, comparing to reviewing a random selection of semantic type assignments.

Hierarchical semantic structures for medical NLP.

PubMed

Taira, Ricky K; Arnold, Corey W

2013-01-01

We present a framework for building a medical natural language processing (NLP) system capable of deep understanding of clinical text reports. The framework helps developers understand how various NLP-related efforts and knowledge sources can be integrated. The aspects considered include: 1) computational issues dealing with defining layers of intermediate semantic structures to reduce the dimensionality of the NLP problem; 2) algorithmic issues in which we survey the NLP literature and discuss state-of-the-art procedures used to map between various levels of the hierarchy; and 3) implementation issues to software developers with available resources. The objective of this poster is to educate readers to the various levels of semantic representation (e.g., word level concepts, ontological concepts, logical relations, logical frames, discourse structures, etc.). The poster presents an architecture for which diverse efforts and resources in medical NLP can be integrated in a principled way.

Grammatical markers switch roles and elicit different electrophysiological responses under shallow and deep semantic requirements.

PubMed

Soshi, Takahiro; Nakajima, Heizo; Hagiwara, Hiroko

2016-10-01

Static knowledge about the grammar of a natural language is represented in the cortico-subcortical system. However, the differences in dynamic verbal processing under different cognitive conditions are unclear. To clarify this, we conducted an electrophysiological experiment involving a semantic priming paradigm in which semantically congruent or incongruent word sequences (prime nouns-target verbs) were randomly presented. We examined the event-related brain potentials that occurred in response to congruent and incongruent target words that were preceded by primes with or without grammatical case markers. The two participant groups performed either the shallow (lexical judgment) or deep (direct semantic judgment) semantic tasks. We hypothesized that, irrespective of the case markers, the congruent targets would reduce centro-posterior N400 activities under the deep semantic condition, which induces selective attention to the semantic relatedness of content words. However, the same congruent targets with correct case markers would reduce lateralized negativity under the shallow semantic condition because grammatical case markers are related to automatic structural integration under semantically unattended conditions. We observed that congruent targets (e.g., 'open') that were preceded by primes with congruent case markers (e.g., 'shutter-object case') reduced lateralized negativity under the shallow semantic condition. In contrast, congruent targets, irrespective of case markers, consistently yielded N400 reductions under the deep semantic condition. To summarize, human neural verbal processing differed in response to the same grammatical markers in the same verbal expressions under semantically attended or unattended conditions.

Different impairments of semantic cognition in semantic dementia and semantic aphasia: evidence from the non-verbal domain

PubMed Central

Corbett, Faye; Jefferies, Elizabeth; Ehsan, Sheeba

2009-01-01

Disorders of semantic cognition in different neuropsychological conditions result from diverse areas of brain damage and may have different underlying causes. This study used a comparative case-series design to examine the hypothesis that relatively circumscribed bilateral atrophy of the anterior temporal lobe in semantic dementia (SD) produces a gradual degradation of core semantic representations, whilst a deficit of cognitive control produces multi-modal semantic impairment in a subset of patients with stroke aphasia following damage involving the left prefrontal cortex or regions in and around the temporoparietal area; this condition, which transcends traditional aphasia classifications, is referred to as ‘semantic aphasia’ (SA). There have been very few direct comparisons of these patient groups to date and these previous studies have focussed on verbal comprehension. This study used a battery of object-use tasks to extend this line of enquiry into the non-verbal domain for the first time. A group of seven SA patients were identified who failed both word and picture versions of a semantic association task. These patients were compared with eight SD cases. Both groups showed significant deficits in object use but these impairments were qualitatively different. Item familiarity correlated with performance on object-use tasks for the SD group, consistent with the view that core semantic representations are degrading in this condition. In contrast, the SA participants were insensitive to the familiarity of the objects. Further, while the SD patients performed consistently across tasks that tapped different aspects of knowledge and object use for the same items, the performance of the SA participants reflected the control requirements of the tasks. Single object use was relatively preserved in SA but performance on complex mechanical puzzles was substantially impaired. Similarly, the SA patients were able to complete straightforward item matching tasks, such as

Biomedical question answering using semantic relations.

PubMed

Hristovski, Dimitar; Dinevski, Dejan; Kastrin, Andrej; Rindflesch, Thomas C

2015-01-16

The proliferation of the scientific literature in the field of biomedicine makes it difficult to keep abreast of current knowledge, even for domain experts. While general Web search engines and specialized information retrieval (IR) systems have made important strides in recent decades, the problem of accurate knowledge extraction from the biomedical literature is far from solved. Classical IR systems usually return a list of documents that have to be read by the user to extract relevant information. This tedious and time-consuming work can be lessened with automatic Question Answering (QA) systems, which aim to provide users with direct and precise answers to their questions. In this work we propose a novel methodology for QA based on semantic relations extracted from the biomedical literature. We extracted semantic relations with the SemRep natural language processing system from 122,421,765 sentences, which came from 21,014,382 MEDLINE citations (i.e., the complete MEDLINE distribution up to the end of 2012). A total of 58,879,300 semantic relation instances were extracted and organized in a relational database. The QA process is implemented as a search in this database, which is accessed through a Web-based application, called SemBT (available at http://sembt.mf.uni-lj.si ). We conducted an extensive evaluation of the proposed methodology in order to estimate the accuracy of extracting a particular semantic relation from a particular sentence. Evaluation was performed by 80 domain experts. In total 7,510 semantic relation instances belonging to 2,675 distinct relations were evaluated 12,083 times. The instances were evaluated as correct 8,228 times (68%). In this work we propose an innovative methodology for biomedical QA. The system is implemented as a Web-based application that is able to provide precise answers to a wide range of questions. A typical question is answered within a few seconds. The tool has some extensions that make it especially useful for

Differential pattern of semantic memory organization between bipolar I and II disorders.

PubMed

Chang, Jae Seung; Choi, Sungwon; Ha, Kyooseob; Ha, Tae Hyon; Cho, Hyun Sang; Choi, Jung Eun; Cha, Boseok; Moon, Eunsoo

2011-06-01

Semantic cognition is one of the key factors in psychosocial functioning. The aim of this study was to explore the differences in pattern of semantic memory organization between euthymic patients with bipolar I and II disorders using the category fluency task. Study participants included 23 euthymic subjects with bipolar I disorder, 23 matched euthymic subjects with bipolar II disorder and 23 matched control subjects. All participants were assessed for verbal learning, recall, learning strategies, and fluency. The combined methods of hierarchical clustering and multidimensional scaling were used to compare the pattern of semantic memory organization among the three groups. Quantitative measures of verbal learning, recall, learning strategies, and fluency did not differ between the three groups. A two-cluster structure of semantic memory organization was identified for the three groups. Semantic structure was more disorganized in the bipolar I disorder group compared to the bipolar II disorder. In addition, patients with bipolar II disorder used less elaborate strategies of semantic memory organization than those of controls. Compared to healthy controls, strategies for categorization in semantic memory appear to be less knowledge-based in patients with bipolar disorders. A differential pattern of semantic memory organization between bipolar I and II disorders indicates a higher risk of cognitive abnormalities in patients with bipolar I disorder compared to patients with bipolar II disorder. Exploring qualitative nature of neuropsychological domains may provide an explanatory insight into the characteristic behaviors of patients with bipolar disorders. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The Influence of Working Memory Load on Semantic Priming

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Heyman, Tom; Van Rensbergen, Bram; Storms, Gert; Hutchison, Keith A.; De Deyne, Simon

2015-01-01

The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of "automatic target activation" and/or the use of strategies like prospective "expectancy generation" and "retrospective semantic…

Ways of making-sense: Local gamma synchronization reveals differences between semantic processing induced by music and language.

PubMed

Barraza, Paulo; Chavez, Mario; Rodríguez, Eugenio

2016-01-01

Similar to linguistic stimuli, music can also prime the meaning of a subsequent word. However, it is so far unknown what is the brain dynamics underlying the semantic priming effect induced by music, and its relation to language. To elucidate these issues, we compare the brain oscillatory response to visual words that have been semantically primed either by a musical excerpt or by an auditory sentence. We found that semantic violation between music-word pairs triggers a classical ERP N400, and induces a sustained increase of long-distance theta phase synchrony, along with a transient increase of local gamma activity. Similar results were observed after linguistic semantic violation except for gamma activity, which increased after semantic congruence between sentence-word pairs. Our findings indicate that local gamma activity is a neural marker that signals different ways of semantic processing between music and language, revealing the dynamic and self-organized nature of the semantic processing. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The contribution of executive control to semantic cognition: Convergent evidence from semantic aphasia and executive dysfunction.

PubMed

Thompson, Hannah E; Almaghyuli, Azizah; Noonan, Krist A; Barak, Ohr; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2018-01-03

Semantic cognition, as described by the controlled semantic cognition (CSC) framework (Rogers et al., , Neuropsychologia, 76, 220), involves two key components: activation of coherent, generalizable concepts within a heteromodal 'hub' in combination with modality-specific features (spokes), and a constraining mechanism that manipulates and gates this knowledge to generate time- and task-appropriate behaviour. Executive-semantic goal representations, largely supported by executive regions such as frontal and parietal cortex, are thought to allow the generation of non-dominant aspects of knowledge when these are appropriate for the task or context. Semantic aphasia (SA) patients have executive-semantic deficits, and these are correlated with general executive impairment. If the CSC proposal is correct, patients with executive impairment should not only exhibit impaired semantic cognition, but should also show characteristics that align with those observed in SA. This possibility remains largely untested, as patients selected on the basis that they show executive impairment (i.e., with 'dysexecutive syndrome') have not been extensively tested on tasks tapping semantic control and have not been previously compared with SA cases. We explored conceptual processing in 12 patients showing symptoms consistent with dysexecutive syndrome (DYS) and 24 SA patients, using a range of multimodal semantic assessments which manipulated control demands. Patients with executive impairments, despite not being selected to show semantic impairments, nevertheless showed parallel patterns to SA cases. They showed strong effects of distractor strength, cues and miscues, and probe-target distance, plus minimal effects of word frequency on comprehension (unlike semantic dementia patients with degradation of conceptual knowledge). This supports a component process account of semantic cognition in which retrieval is shaped by control processes, and confirms that deficits in SA patients reflect

Semantically Enriching the Search System of a Music Digital Library

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

de Juan, Paloma; Iglesias, Carlos

Traditional search systems are usually based on keywords, a very simple and convenient mechanism to express a need for information. This is the most popular way of searching the Web, although it is not always an easy task to accurately summarize a natural language query in a few keywords. Working with keywords means losing the context, which is the only thing that can help us deal with ambiguity. This is the biggest problem of keyword-based systems. Semantic Web technologies seem a perfect solution to this problem, since they make it possible to represent the semantics of a given domain. In this chapter, we present three projects, Harmos, Semusici and Cantiga, whose aim is to provide access to a music digital library. We will describe two search systems, a traditional one and a semantic one, developed in the context of these projects and compare them in terms of usability and effectiveness.

Putting semantics into the semantic web: how well can it capture biology?

PubMed

Kazic, Toni

2006-01-01

Could the Semantic Web work for computations of biological interest in the way it's intended to work for movie reviews and commercial transactions? It would be wonderful if it could, so it's worth looking to see if its infrastructure is adequate to the job. The technologies of the Semantic Web make several crucial assumptions. I examine those assumptions; argue that they create significant problems; and suggest some alternative ways of achieving the Semantic Web's goals for biology.

Predictions interact with missing sensory evidence in semantic processing areas.

PubMed

Scharinger, Mathias; Bendixen, Alexandra; Herrmann, Björn; Henry, Molly J; Mildner, Toralf; Obleser, Jonas

2016-02-01

Human brain function draws on predictive mechanisms that exploit higher-level context during lower-level perception. These mechanisms are particularly relevant for situations in which sensory information is compromised or incomplete, as for example in natural speech where speech segments may be omitted due to sluggish articulation. Here, we investigate which brain areas support the processing of incomplete words that were predictable from semantic context, compared with incomplete words that were unpredictable. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), participants heard sentences that orthogonally varied in predictability (semantically predictable vs. unpredictable) and completeness (complete vs. incomplete, i.e. missing their final consonant cluster). The effects of predictability and completeness interacted in heteromodal semantic processing areas, including left angular gyrus and left precuneus, where activity did not differ between complete and incomplete words when they were predictable. The same regions showed stronger activity for incomplete than for complete words when they were unpredictable. The interaction pattern suggests that for highly predictable words, the speech signal does not need to be complete for neural processing in semantic processing areas. Hum Brain Mapp 37:704-716, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Learning for Semantic Parsing Using Statistical Syntactic Parsing Techniques

DTIC Science & Technology

2010-05-01

Workshop on Supervisory Con- trol of Learning and Adaptive Systems. San Jose, CA. Roland Kuhn and Renato De Mori (1995). The application of semantic...Processing (EMNLP-09), pp. 1–10. Suntec,Singapore. Ana-Maria Popescu, Alex Armanasu, Oren Etzioni, David Ko and Alexander Yates (2004). Modern natural

Medical document anonymization with a semantic lexicon.

PubMed Central

Ruch, P.; Baud, R. H.; Rassinoux, A. M.; Bouillon, P.; Robert, G.

2000-01-01

We present an original system for locating and removing personally-identifying information in patient records. In this experiment, anonymization is seen as a particular case of knowledge extraction. We use natural language processing tools provided by the MEDTAG framework: a semantic lexicon specialized in medicine, and a toolkit for word-sense and morpho-syntactic tagging. The system finds 98-99% of all personally-identifying information. PMID:11079980

Temporal Representation in Semantic Graphs

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Levandoski, J J; Abdulla, G M

2007-08-07

A wide range of knowledge discovery and analysis applications, ranging from business to biological, make use of semantic graphs when modeling relationships and concepts. Most of the semantic graphs used in these applications are assumed to be static pieces of information, meaning temporal evolution of concepts and relationships are not taken into account. Guided by the need for more advanced semantic graph queries involving temporal concepts, this paper surveys the existing work involving temporal representations in semantic graphs.

Semantic word category processing in semantic dementia and posterior cortical atrophy.

PubMed

Shebani, Zubaida; Patterson, Karalyn; Nestor, Peter J; Diaz-de-Grenu, Lara Z; Dawson, Kate; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2017-08-01

There is general agreement that perisylvian language cortex plays a major role in lexical and semantic processing; but the contribution of additional, more widespread, brain areas in the processing of different semantic word categories remains controversial. We investigated word processing in two groups of patients whose neurodegenerative diseases preferentially affect specific parts of the brain, to determine whether their performance would vary as a function of semantic categories proposed to recruit those brain regions. Cohorts with (i) Semantic Dementia (SD), who have anterior temporal-lobe atrophy, and (ii) Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), who have predominantly parieto-occipital atrophy, performed a lexical decision test on words from five different lexico-semantic categories: colour (e.g., yellow), form (oval), number (seven), spatial prepositions (under) and function words (also). Sets of pseudo-word foils matched the target words in length and bi-/tri-gram frequency. Word-frequency was matched between the two visual word categories (colour and form) and across the three other categories (number, prepositions, and function words). Age-matched healthy individuals served as controls. Although broad word processing deficits were apparent in both patient groups, the deficit was strongest for colour words in SD and for spatial prepositions in PCA. The patterns of performance on the lexical decision task demonstrate (a) general lexicosemantic processing deficits in both groups, though more prominent in SD than in PCA, and (b) differential involvement of anterior-temporal and posterior-parietal cortex in the processing of specific semantic categories of words. Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.

OMOGENIA: A Semantically Driven Collaborative Environment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Liapis, Aggelos

Ontology creation can be thought of as a social procedure. Indeed the concepts involved in general need to be elicited from communities of domain experts and end-users by teams of knowledge engineers. Many problems in ontology creation appear to resemble certain problems in software design, particularly with respect to the setup of collaborative systems. For instance, the resolution of conceptual conflicts between formalized ontologies is a major engineering problem as ontologies move into widespread use on the semantic web. Such conflict resolution often requires human collaboration and cannot be achieved by automated methods with the exception of simple cases. In this chapter we discuss research in the field of computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) that focuses on classification and which throws light on ontology building. Furthermore, we present a semantically driven collaborative environment called OMOGENIA as a natural way to display and examine the structure of an evolving ontology in a collaborative setting.

Differential interference effects of negative emotional states on subsequent semantic and perceptual processing

PubMed Central

Gorlick, Marissa A.; Mather, Mara

2012-01-01

Past studies have revealed that encountering negative events interferes with cognitive processing of subsequent stimuli. The present study investigated whether negative events affect semantic and perceptual processing differently. Presentation of negative pictures produced slower reaction times than neutral or positive pictures in tasks that require semantic processing, such as natural/man-made judgments about drawings of objects, commonness judgments about objects, and categorical judgments about pairs of words. In contrast, negative picture presentation did not slow down judgments in subsequent perceptual processing (e.g., color judgments about words, and size judgments about objects). The subjective arousal level of negative pictures did not modulate the interference effects on semantic/perceptual processing. These findings indicate that encountering negative emotional events interferes with semantic processing of subsequent stimuli more strongly than perceptual processing, and that not all types of subsequent cognitive processing are impaired by negative events. PMID:22142207

Differential interference effects of negative emotional states on subsequent semantic and perceptual processing.

PubMed

Sakaki, Michiko; Gorlick, Marissa A; Mather, Mara

2011-12-01

Past studies have revealed that encountering negative events interferes with cognitive processing of subsequent stimuli. The present study investigates whether negative events affect semantic and perceptual processing differently. Presentation of negative pictures produced slower reaction times than neutral or positive pictures in tasks that require semantic processing, such as natural or man-made judgments about drawings of objects, commonness judgments about objects, and categorical judgments about pairs of words. In contrast, negative picture presentation did not slow down judgments in subsequent perceptual processing (e.g., color judgments about words, size judgments about objects). The subjective arousal level of negative pictures did not modulate the interference effects on semantic or perceptual processing. These findings indicate that encountering negative emotional events interferes with semantic processing of subsequent stimuli more strongly than perceptual processing, and that not all types of subsequent cognitive processing are impaired by negative events. (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved.

SemantEco: a semantically powered modular architecture for integrating distributed environmental and ecological data

USGS Publications Warehouse

Patton, Evan W.; Seyed, Patrice; Wang, Ping; Fu, Linyun; Dein, F. Joshua; Bristol, R. Sky; McGuinness, Deborah L.

2014-01-01

We aim to inform the development of decision support tools for resource managers who need to examine large complex ecosystems and make recommendations in the face of many tradeoffs and conflicting drivers. We take a semantic technology approach, leveraging background ontologies and the growing body of linked open data. In previous work, we designed and implemented a semantically enabled environmental monitoring framework called SemantEco and used it to build a water quality portal named SemantAqua. Our previous system included foundational ontologies to support environmental regulation violations and relevant human health effects. In this work, we discuss SemantEco’s new architecture that supports modular extensions and makes it easier to support additional domains. Our enhanced framework includes foundational ontologies to support modeling of wildlife observation and wildlife health impacts, thereby enabling deeper and broader support for more holistically examining the effects of environmental pollution on ecosystems. We conclude with a discussion of how, through the application of semantic technologies, modular designs will make it easier for resource managers to bring in new sources of data to support more complex use cases.

Research in Knowledge Representation for Natural Language Understanding

DTIC Science & Technology

1980-11-01

artificial intelligence, natural language understanding , parsing, syntax, semantics, speaker meaning, knowledge representation, semantic networks...TinB PAGE map M W006 1Report No. 4513 L RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE UNDERSTANDING Annual Report 1 September 1979 to 31... understanding , knowledge representation, and knowledge based inference. The work that we have been doing falls into three classes, successively motivated by

Wernicke's Aphasia Reflects a Combination of Acoustic-Phonological and Semantic Control Deficits: A Case-Series Comparison of Wernicke's Aphasia, Semantic Dementia and Semantic Aphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Robson, Holly; Sage, Karen; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.

2012-01-01

Wernicke's aphasia (WA) is the classical neurological model of comprehension impairment and, as a result, the posterior temporal lobe is assumed to be critical to semantic cognition. This conclusion is potentially confused by (a) the existence of patient groups with semantic impairment following damage to other brain regions (semantic dementia and…

Mapping the Structure of Semantic Memory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Morais, Ana Sofia; Olsson, Henrik; Schooler, Lael J.

2013-01-01

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual's semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals…

Preservation of Person-Specific Semantic Knowledge in Semantic Dementia: Does Direct Personal Experience Have a Specific Role?

PubMed Central

Péron, Julie A.; Piolino, Pascale; Moal-Boursiquot, Sandrine Le; Biseul, Isabelle; Leray, Emmanuelle; Bon, Laetitia; Desgranges, Béatrice; Eustache, Francis; Belliard, Serge

2015-01-01

Semantic dementia patients seem to have better knowledge of information linked to the self. More specifically, despite having severe semantic impairment, these patients show that they have more general information about the people they know personally by direct experience than they do about other individuals they know indirectly. However, the role of direct personal experience remains debated because of confounding factors such as frequency, recency of exposure, and affective relevance. We performed an exploratory study comparing the performance of five semantic dementia patients with that of 10 matched healthy controls on the recognition (familiarity judgment) and identification (biographic information recall) of personally familiar names vs. famous names. As expected, intergroup comparisons indicated a semantic breakdown in semantic dementia patients as compared with healthy controls. Moreover, unlike healthy controls, the semantic dementia patients recognized and identified personally familiar names better than they did famous names. This pattern of results suggests that direct personal experience indeed plays a specific role in the relative preservation of person-specific semantic meaning in semantic dementia. We discuss the role of direct personal experience on the preservation of semantic knowledge and the potential neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these processes. PMID:26635578

The Semantic eScience Framework

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fox, P. A.; McGuinness, D. L.

2009-12-01

The goal of this effort is to design and implement a configurable and extensible semantic eScience framework (SESF). Configuration requires research into accommodating different levels of semantic expressivity and user requirements from use cases. Extensibility is being achieved in a modular approach to the semantic encodings (i.e. ontologies) performed in community settings, i.e. an ontology framework into which specific applications all the way up to communities can extend the semantics for their needs.We report on how we are accommodating the rapid advances in semantic technologies and tools and the sustainable software path for the future (certain) technical advances. In addition to a generalization of the current data science interface, we will present plans for an upper-level interface suitable for use by clearinghouses, and/or educational portals, digital libraries, and other disciplines.SESF builds upon previous work in the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory. The VSTO utilizes leading edge knowledge representation, query and reasoning techniques to support knowledge-enhanced search, data access, integration, and manipulation. It encodes term meanings and their inter-relationships in ontologies anduses these ontologies and associated inference engines to semantically enable the data services. The Semantically-Enabled Science Data Integration (SESDI) project implemented data integration capabilities among three sub-disciplines; solar radiation, volcanic outgassing and atmospheric structure using extensions to existingmodular ontolgies and used the VSTO data framework, while adding smart faceted search and semantic data registrationtools. The Semantic Provenance Capture in Data Ingest Systems (SPCDIS) has added explanation provenance capabilities to an observational data ingest pipeline for images of the Sun providing a set of tools to answer diverseend user questions such as ``Why does this image look bad?.

Exploiting Recurring Structure in a Semantic Network

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wolfe, Shawn R.; Keller, Richard M.

2004-01-01

With the growing popularity of the Semantic Web, an increasing amount of information is becoming available in machine interpretable, semantically structured networks. Within these semantic networks are recurring structures that could be mined by existing or novel knowledge discovery methods. The mining of these semantic structures represents an interesting area that focuses on mining both for and from the Semantic Web, with surprising applicability to problems confronting the developers of Semantic Web applications. In this paper, we present representative examples of recurring structures and show how these structures could be used to increase the utility of a semantic repository deployed at NASA.

Cross border semantic interoperability for clinical research: the EHR4CR semantic resources and services

PubMed Central

Daniel, Christel; Ouagne, David; Sadou, Eric; Forsberg, Kerstin; Gilchrist, Mark Mc; Zapletal, Eric; Paris, Nicolas; Hussain, Sajjad; Jaulent, Marie-Christine; MD, Dipka Kalra

2016-01-01

With the development of platforms enabling the use of routinely collected clinical data in the context of international clinical research, scalable solutions for cross border semantic interoperability need to be developed. Within the context of the IMI EHR4CR project, we first defined the requirements and evaluation criteria of the EHR4CR semantic interoperability platform and then developed the semantic resources and supportive services and tooling to assist hospital sites in standardizing their data for allowing the execution of the project use cases. The experience gained from the evaluation of the EHR4CR platform accessing to semantically equivalent data elements across 11 European participating EHR systems from 5 countries demonstrated how far the mediation model and mapping efforts met the expected requirements of the project. Developers of semantic interoperability platforms are beginning to address a core set of requirements in order to reach the goal of developing cross border semantic integration of data. PMID:27570649

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

PubMed Central

Sutton, Logan; Smith, Eric; Moore, Cristopher; Wilkins, Jon F.; Maddieson, Ian; Croft, William

2016-01-01

How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here, we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries to translate words to and from languages carefully selected to be representative of worldwide diversity. These translations reveal cases where a particular language uses a single “polysemous” word to express multiple concepts that another language represents using distinct words. We use the frequency of such polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity and represent the pattern of these linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly structured: Certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and naturally interpretable clusters of closely related concepts emerge. Statistical analysis of the polysemies observed in a subset of the basic vocabulary shows that these structural properties are consistent across different language groups, and largely independent of geography, environment, and the presence or absence of a literary tradition. The methods developed here can be applied to any semantic domain to reveal the extent to which its conceptual structure is, similarly, a universal attribute of human cognition and language use. PMID:26831113

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

DOE PAGES

Youn, Hyejin; Sutton, Logan; Smith, Eric; ...

2016-02-01

How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here, we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries to translate words to and from languages carefully selected to be representative of worldwide diversity. These translations reveal cases where a particular language uses a single “polysemous” word tomore » express multiple concepts that another language represents using distinct words. We use the frequency of such polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity and represent the pattern of these linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly structured: Certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and naturally interpretable clusters of closely related concepts emerge. Statistical analysis of the polysemies observed in a subset of the basic vocabulary shows that these structural properties are consistent across different language groups, and largely independent of geography, environment, and the presence or absence of a literary tradition. As a result, the methods developed here can be applied to any semantic domain to reveal the extent to which its conceptual structure is, similarly, a universal attribute of human cognition and language use.« less

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Youn, Hyejin; Sutton, Logan; Smith, Eric

How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides indirect access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here, we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries to translate words to and from languages carefully selected to be representative of worldwide diversity. These translations reveal cases where a particular language uses a single “polysemous” word tomore » express multiple concepts that another language represents using distinct words. We use the frequency of such polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity and represent the pattern of these linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly structured: Certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and naturally interpretable clusters of closely related concepts emerge. Statistical analysis of the polysemies observed in a subset of the basic vocabulary shows that these structural properties are consistent across different language groups, and largely independent of geography, environment, and the presence or absence of a literary tradition. As a result, the methods developed here can be applied to any semantic domain to reveal the extent to which its conceptual structure is, similarly, a universal attribute of human cognition and language use.« less

Context-rich semantic framework for effective data-to-decisions in coalition networks

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Grueneberg, Keith; de Mel, Geeth; Braines, Dave; Wang, Xiping; Calo, Seraphin; Pham, Tien

2013-05-01

In a coalition context, data fusion involves combining of soft (e.g., field reports, intelligence reports) and hard (e.g., acoustic, imagery) sensory data such that the resulting output is better than what it would have been if the data are taken individually. However, due to the lack of explicit semantics attached with such data, it is difficult to automatically disseminate and put the right contextual data in the hands of the decision makers. In order to understand the data, explicit meaning needs to be added by means of categorizing and/or classifying the data in relationship to each other from base reference sources. In this paper, we present a semantic framework that provides automated mechanisms to expose real-time raw data effectively by presenting appropriate information needed for a given situation so that an informed decision could be made effectively. The system utilizes controlled natural language capabilities provided by the ITA (International Technology Alliance) Controlled English (CE) toolkit to provide a human-friendly semantic representation of messages so that the messages can be directly processed in human/machine hybrid environments. The Real-time Semantic Enrichment (RTSE) service adds relevant contextual information to raw data streams from domain knowledge bases using declarative rules. The rules define how the added semantics and context information are derived and stored in a semantic knowledge base. The software framework exposes contextual information from a variety of hard and soft data sources in a fast, reliable manner so that an informed decision can be made using semantic queries in intelligent software systems.

An Analysis of Frame Semantics of Continuous Processes

DTIC Science & Technology

2016-08-10

in natural text involving a variety of continuous processes. Keywords: Frame Semantics; Qualitative Reasoning Introduction & Background Daily...We evaluate our mapping on science texts , but expect our approach to be domain general. Qualitative Process Theory In QP theory, changes within a...fragments from text could reason about real-world scenarios, predicting, for example, that our tub of water may overflow. However, the incremental

Recipes for Semantic Web Dog Food — The ESWC and ISWC Metadata Projects

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Möller, Knud; Heath, Tom; Handschuh, Siegfried; Domingue, John

Semantic Web conferences such as ESWC and ISWC offer prime opportunities to test and showcase semantic technologies. Conference metadata about people, papers and talks is diverse in nature and neither too small to be uninteresting or too big to be unmanageable. Many metadata-related challenges that may arise in the Semantic Web at large are also present here. Metadata must be generated from sources which are often unstructured and hard to process, and may originate from many different players, therefore suitable workflows must be established. Moreover, the generated metadata must use appropriate formats and vocabularies, and be served in a way that is consistent with the principles of linked data. This paper reports on the metadata efforts from ESWC and ISWC, identifies specific issues and barriers encountered during the projects, and discusses how these were approached. Recommendations are made as to how these may be addressed in the future, and we discuss how these solutions may generalize to metadata production for the Semantic Web at large.

Spreading Activation in an Attractor Network with Latching Dynamics: Automatic Semantic Priming Revisited

PubMed Central

Lerner, Itamar; Bentin, Shlomo; Shriki, Oren

2012-01-01

Localist models of spreading activation (SA) and models assuming distributed-representations offer very different takes on semantic priming, a widely investigated paradigm in word recognition and semantic memory research. In the present study we implemented SA in an attractor neural network model with distributed representations and created a unified framework for the two approaches. Our models assumes a synaptic depression mechanism leading to autonomous transitions between encoded memory patterns (latching dynamics), which account for the major characteristics of automatic semantic priming in humans. Using computer simulations we demonstrated how findings that challenged attractor-based networks in the past, such as mediated and asymmetric priming, are a natural consequence of our present model’s dynamics. Puzzling results regarding backward priming were also given a straightforward explanation. In addition, the current model addresses some of the differences between semantic and associative relatedness and explains how these differences interact with stimulus onset asynchrony in priming experiments. PMID:23094718

Semantic control and modality: an input processing deficit in aphasia leading to deregulated semantic cognition in a single modality.

PubMed

Thompson, Hannah E; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2013-08-01

Research suggests that semantic memory deficits can occur in at least three ways. Patients can (1) show amodal degradation of concepts within the semantic store itself, such as in semantic dementia (SD), (2) have difficulty in controlling activation within the semantic system and accessing appropriate knowledge in line with current goals or context, as in semantic aphasia (SA) and (3) experience a semantic deficit in only one modality following degraded input from sensory cortex. Patients with SA show deficits of semantic control and access across word and picture tasks, consistent with the view that their problems arise from impaired modality-general control processes. However, there are a few reports in the literature of patients with semantic access problems restricted to auditory-verbal materials, who show decreasing ability to retrieve concepts from words when they are presented repeatedly with closely related distractors. These patients challenge the notion that semantic control processes are modality-general and suggest instead a separation of 'access' to auditory-verbal and non-verbal semantic systems. We had the rare opportunity to study such a case in detail. Our aims were to examine the effect of manipulations of control demands in auditory-verbal semantic, non-verbal semantic and non-semantic tasks, allowing us to assess whether such cases always show semantic control/access impairments that follow a modality-specific pattern, or whether there are alternative explanations. Our findings revealed: (1) deficits on executive tasks, unrelated to semantic demands, which were more evident in the auditory modality than the visual modality; (2) deficits in executively-demanding semantic tasks which were accentuated in the auditory-verbal domain compared with the visual modality, but still present on non-verbal tasks, and (3) a coupling between comprehension and executive control requirements, in that mild impairment on single word comprehension was greatly

Shifting Interests: Changes in the Lexical Semantics of ED-MEDIA

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wild, Fridolin; Valentine, Chris; Scott, Peter

2010-01-01

Large research networks naturally form complex communities with overlapping but not identical expertise. To map the distribution of professional competence in field of "technology-enhanced learning", the lexical semantics expressed in research articles published in a representative, large-scale conference (ED-MEDIA) can be investigated and changes…

The Semantic eScience Framework

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McGuinness, Deborah; Fox, Peter; Hendler, James

2010-05-01

The goal of this effort is to design and implement a configurable and extensible semantic eScience framework (SESF). Configuration requires research into accommodating different levels of semantic expressivity and user requirements from use cases. Extensibility is being achieved in a modular approach to the semantic encodings (i.e. ontologies) performed in community settings, i.e. an ontology framework into which specific applications all the way up to communities can extend the semantics for their needs.We report on how we are accommodating the rapid advances in semantic technologies and tools and the sustainable software path for the future (certain) technical advances. In addition to a generalization of the current data science interface, we will present plans for an upper-level interface suitable for use by clearinghouses, and/or educational portals, digital libraries, and other disciplines.SESF builds upon previous work in the Virtual Solar-Terrestrial Observatory. The VSTO utilizes leading edge knowledge representation, query and reasoning techniques to support knowledge-enhanced search, data access, integration, and manipulation. It encodes term meanings and their inter-relationships in ontologies anduses these ontologies and associated inference engines to semantically enable the data services. The Semantically-Enabled Science Data Integration (SESDI) project implemented data integration capabilities among three sub-disciplines; solar radiation, volcanic outgassing and atmospheric structure using extensions to existingmodular ontolgies and used the VSTO data framework, while adding smart faceted search and semantic data registrationtools. The Semantic Provenance Capture in Data Ingest Systems (SPCDIS) has added explanation provenance capabilities to an observational data ingest pipeline for images of the Sun providing a set of tools to answer diverseend user questions such as ``Why does this image look bad?. http://tw.rpi.edu/portal/SESF

Semantic and episodic memory in children with temporal lobe epilepsy: do they relate to literacy skills?

PubMed

Lah, Suncica; Smith, Mary Lou

2014-01-01

Children with temporal lobe epilepsy are at risk for deficits in new learning (episodic memory) and literacy skills. Semantic memory deficits and double dissociations between episodic and semantic memory have recently been found in this patient population. In the current study we investigate whether impairments of these 2 distinct memory systems relate to literacy skills. 57 children with unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy completed tests of verbal memory (episodic and semantic) and literacy skills (reading and spelling accuracy, and reading comprehension). For the entire group, semantic memory explained over 30% of variance in each of the literacy domains. Episodic memory explained a significant, but rather small proportion (< 10%) of variance in reading and spelling accuracy, but not in reading comprehension. Moreover, when children with opposite patterns of specific memory impairments (intact semantic/impaired episodic, intact episodic/impaired semantic) were compared, significant reductions in literacy skills were evident only in children with semantic memory impairments, but not in children with episodic memory impairments relative to the norms and to children with temporal lobe epilepsy who had intact memory. Our study provides the first evidence for differential relations between episodic and semantic memory impairments and literacy skills in children with temporal lobe epilepsy. As such, it highlights the urgent need to consider semantic memory deficits in management of children with temporal lobe epilepsy and undertake further research into the nature of reading difficulties of children with semantic memory impairments.

A Graph-Based Recovery and Decomposition of Swanson’s Hypothesis using Semantic Predications

PubMed Central

Cameron, Delroy; Bodenreider, Olivier; Yalamanchili, Hima; Danh, Tu; Vallabhaneni, Sreeram; Thirunarayan, Krishnaprasad; Sheth, Amit P.; Rindflesch, Thomas C.

2014-01-01

Objectives This paper presents a methodology for recovering and decomposing Swanson’s Raynaud Syndrome–Fish Oil Hypothesis semi-automatically. The methodology leverages the semantics of assertions extracted from biomedical literature (called semantic predications) along with structured background knowledge and graph-based algorithms to semi-automatically capture the informative associations originally discovered manually by Swanson. Demonstrating that Swanson’s manually intensive techniques can be undertaken semi-automatically, paves the way for fully automatic semantics-based hypothesis generation from scientific literature. Methods Semantic predications obtained from biomedical literature allow the construction of labeled directed graphs which contain various associations among concepts from the literature. By aggregating such associations into informative subgraphs, some of the relevant details originally articulated by Swanson has been uncovered. However, by leveraging background knowledge to bridge important knowledge gaps in the literature, a methodology for semi-automatically capturing the detailed associations originally explicated in natural language by Swanson has been developed. Results Our methodology not only recovered the 3 associations commonly recognized as Swanson’s Hypothesis, but also decomposed them into an additional 16 detailed associations, formulated as chains of semantic predications. Altogether, 14 out of the 19 associations that can be attributed to Swanson were retrieved using our approach. To the best of our knowledge, such an in-depth recovery and decomposition of Swanson’s Hypothesis has never been attempted. Conclusion In this work therefore, we presented a methodology for semi- automatically recovering and decomposing Swanson’s RS-DFO Hypothesis using semantic representations and graph algorithms. Our methodology provides new insights into potential prerequisites for semantics-driven Literature-Based Discovery (LBD

Semantic dementia Brazilian study of nineteen cases

PubMed Central

Senaha, Mirna Lie Hosogi; Caramelli, Paulo; Porto, Claudia Sellitto; Nitrini, Ricardo

2007-01-01

The term semantic dementia was devised by Snowden et al. in 1989 and nowadays, the semantic dementia syndrome is recognized as one of the clinical forms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and is characterized by a language semantic disturbance associated to non-verbal semantic memory impairment. Objectives The aim of this study was to describe a Brazilian sample of 19 semantic dementia cases, emphasizing the clinical characteristics important for differential diagnosis of this syndrome. Methods Nineteen cases with semantic dementia were evaluated between 1999 and 2007. All patients were submitted to neurological evaluation, neuroimaging exams and cognitive, language and semantic memory evaluation. Results All patients presented fluent spontaneous speech, preservation of syntactic and phonological aspects of the language, word-finding difficulty, semantic paraphasias, word comprehension impairment, low performance in visual confrontation naming tasks, impairment on tests of non-verbal semantic memory and preservation of autobiographical memory and visuospatial skills. Regarding radiological investigations, temporal lobe atrophy and/or hypoperfusion were found in all patients. Conclusions The cognitive, linguistic and of neuroimaging data in our case series corroborate other studies showing that semantic dementia constitutes a syndrome with well defined clinical characteristics associated to temporal lobe atrophy. PMID:29213413

Semantic Likelihood Models for Bayesian Inference in Human-Robot Interaction

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sweet, Nicholas

Autonomous systems, particularly unmanned aerial systems (UAS), remain limited in au- tonomous capabilities largely due to a poor understanding of their environment. Current sensors simply do not match human perceptive capabilities, impeding progress towards full autonomy. Recent work has shown the value of humans as sources of information within a human-robot team; in target applications, communicating human-generated 'soft data' to autonomous systems enables higher levels of autonomy through large, efficient information gains. This requires development of a 'human sensor model' that allows soft data fusion through Bayesian inference to update the probabilistic belief representations maintained by autonomous systems. Current human sensor models that capture linguistic inputs as semantic information are limited in their ability to generalize likelihood functions for semantic statements: they may be learned from dense data; they do not exploit the contextual information embedded within groundings; and they often limit human input to restrictive and simplistic interfaces. This work provides mechanisms to synthesize human sensor models from constraints based on easily attainable a priori knowledge, develops compression techniques to capture information-dense semantics, and investigates the problem of capturing and fusing semantic information contained within unstructured natural language. A robotic experimental testbed is also developed to validate the above contributions.

Semantic modeling and structural synthesis of onboard electronics protection means as open information system

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Zhevnerchuk, D. V.; Surkova, A. S.; Lomakina, L. S.; Golubev, A. S.

2018-05-01

The article describes the component representation approach and semantic models of on-board electronics protection from ionizing radiation of various nature. Semantic models are constructed, the feature of which is the representation of electronic elements, protection modules, sources of impact in the form of blocks with interfaces. The rules of logical inference and algorithms for synthesizing the object properties of the semantic network, imitating the interface between the components of the protection system and the sources of radiation, are developed. The results of the algorithm are considered using the example of radiation-resistant microcircuits 1645RU5U, 1645RT2U and the calculation and experimental method for estimating the durability of on-board electronics.

SemanticSCo: A platform to support the semantic composition of services for gene expression analysis.

PubMed

Guardia, Gabriela D A; Ferreira Pires, Luís; da Silva, Eduardo G; de Farias, Cléver R G

2017-02-01

Gene expression studies often require the combined use of a number of analysis tools. However, manual integration of analysis tools can be cumbersome and error prone. To support a higher level of automation in the integration process, efforts have been made in the biomedical domain towards the development of semantic web services and supporting composition environments. Yet, most environments consider only the execution of simple service behaviours and requires users to focus on technical details of the composition process. We propose a novel approach to the semantic composition of gene expression analysis services that addresses the shortcomings of the existing solutions. Our approach includes an architecture designed to support the service composition process for gene expression analysis, and a flexible strategy for the (semi) automatic composition of semantic web services. Finally, we implement a supporting platform called SemanticSCo to realize the proposed composition approach and demonstrate its functionality by successfully reproducing a microarray study documented in the literature. The SemanticSCo platform provides support for the composition of RESTful web services semantically annotated using SAWSDL. Our platform also supports the definition of constraints/conditions regarding the order in which service operations should be invoked, thus enabling the definition of complex service behaviours. Our proposed solution for semantic web service composition takes into account the requirements of different stakeholders and addresses all phases of the service composition process. It also provides support for the definition of analysis workflows at a high-level of abstraction, thus enabling users to focus on biological research issues rather than on the technical details of the composition process. The SemanticSCo source code is available at https://github.com/usplssb/SemanticSCo. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Semantic Technologies for Re-Use of Clinical Routine Data.

PubMed

Kreuzthaler, Markus; Martínez-Costa, Catalina; Kaiser, Peter; Schulz, Stefan

2017-01-01

Routine patient data in electronic patient records are only partly structured, and an even smaller segment is coded, mainly for administrative purposes. Large parts are only available as free text. Transforming this content into a structured and semantically explicit form is a prerequisite for querying and information extraction. The core of the system architecture presented in this paper is based on SAP HANA in-memory database technology using the SAP Connected Health platform for data integration as well as for clinical data warehousing. A natural language processing pipeline analyses unstructured content and maps it to a standardized vocabulary within a well-defined information model. The resulting semantically standardized patient profiles are used for a broad range of clinical and research application scenarios.

Establishing semantic interoperability of biomedical metadata registries using extended semantic relationships.

PubMed

Park, Yu Rang; Yoon, Young Jo; Kim, Hye Hyeon; Kim, Ju Han

2013-01-01

Achieving semantic interoperability is critical for biomedical data sharing between individuals, organizations and systems. The ISO/IEC 11179 MetaData Registry (MDR) standard has been recognized as one of the solutions for this purpose. The standard model, however, is limited. Representing concepts consist of two or more values, for instance, are not allowed including blood pressure with systolic and diastolic values. We addressed the structural limitations of ISO/IEC 11179 by an integrated metadata object model in our previous research. In the present study, we introduce semantic extensions for the model by defining three new types of semantic relationships; dependency, composite and variable relationships. To evaluate our extensions in a real world setting, we measured the efficiency of metadata reduction by means of mapping to existing others. We extracted metadata from the College of American Pathologist Cancer Protocols and then evaluated our extensions. With no semantic loss, one third of the extracted metadata could be successfully eliminated, suggesting better strategy for implementing clinical MDRs with improved efficiency and utility.

Semantic Web and Contextual Information: Semantic Network Analysis of Online Journalistic Texts

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Lim, Yon Soo

This study examines why contextual information is important to actualize the idea of semantic web, based on a case study of a socio-political issue in South Korea. For this study, semantic network analyses were conducted regarding English-language based 62 blog posts and 101 news stories on the web. The results indicated the differences of the meaning structures between blog posts and professional journalism as well as between conservative journalism and progressive journalism. From the results, this study ascertains empirical validity of current concerns about the practical application of the new web technology, and discusses how the semantic web should be developed.

Conditional discriminations, symmetry, and semantic priming.

PubMed

Vaidya, Manish; Hudgins, Caleb D; Ortu, Daniele

2015-09-01

Psychologists interested in the study of symbolic behavior have found that people are faster at reporting that two words are related to one another than they are in reporting that two words are not related - an effect called semantic priming. This phenomenon has largely been documented in the context of natural languages using real words as stimuli. The current study asked whether laboratory-generated stimulus-stimulus relations established between arbitrary geometrical shapes would also show the semantic priming effect. Participants learned six conditional relations using a one-to-many training structure (A1-B1, A1-C1, A1-D1, A2-B2, A2-C2, A2-D2) and demonstrated, via accurate performance on tests of derived symmetry, that the trained stimulus functions had become reversible. In a lexical decision task, subjects also demonstrated a priming effect as they displayed faster reaction times to target stimuli when the prime and target came from the same trained or derived conditional relations, compared to the condition in which the prime and target came from different trained or derived conditional relations. These data suggest that laboratory-generated equivalence relations may serve as useful analogues of symbolic behavior. However, the fact that conditional relations training and symmetry alone were sufficient to produce the effect suggests that semantic priming like effects may be the byproduct of simpler stimulus-stimulus relations. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Interpreting semantic clustering effects in free recall.

PubMed

Manning, Jeremy R; Kahana, Michael J

2012-07-01

The order in which participants choose to recall words from a studied list of randomly selected words provides insights into how memories of the words are represented, organised, and retrieved. One pervasive finding is that when a pair of semantically related words (e.g., "cat" and "dog") is embedded in the studied list, the related words are often recalled successively. This tendency to successively recall semantically related words is termed semantic clustering (Bousfield, 1953; Bousfield & Sedgewick, 1944; Cofer, Bruce, & Reicher, 1966). Measuring semantic clustering effects requires making assumptions about which words participants consider to be similar in meaning. However, it is often difficult to gain insights into individual participants' internal semantic models, and for this reason researchers typically rely on standardised semantic similarity metrics. Here we use simulations to gain insights into the expected magnitudes of semantic clustering effects given systematic differences between participants' internal similarity models and the similarity metric used to quantify the degree of semantic clustering. Our results provide a number of useful insights into the interpretation of semantic clustering effects in free recall.

Linked data scientometrics in semantic e-Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Narock, Tom; Wimmer, Hayden

2017-03-01

The Semantic Web is inherently multi-disciplinary and many domains have taken advantage of semantic technologies. Yet, the geosciences are one of the fields leading the way in Semantic Web adoption and validation. Astronomy, Earth science, hydrology, and solar-terrestrial physics have seen a noteworthy amount of semantic integration. The geoscience community has been willing early adopters of semantic technologies and have provided essential feedback to the broader semantic web community. Yet, there has been no systematic study of the community as a whole and there exists no quantitative data on the impact and status of semantic technologies in the geosciences. We explore the applicability of Linked Data to scientometrics in the geosciences. In doing so, we gain an initial understanding of the breadth and depth of the Semantic Web in the geosciences. We identify what appears to be a transitionary period in the applicability of these technologies.

An Intelligent Semantic E-Learning Framework Using Context-Aware Semantic Web Technologies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Huang, Weihong; Webster, David; Wood, Dawn; Ishaya, Tanko

2006-01-01

Recent developments of e-learning specifications such as Learning Object Metadata (LOM), Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), Learning Design and other pedagogy research in semantic e-learning have shown a trend of applying innovative computational techniques, especially Semantic Web technologies, to promote existing content-focused…

Comparing implicit and explicit semantic access of direct and indirect word pairs in schizophrenia to evaluate models of semantic memory.

PubMed

Neill, Erica; Rossell, Susan Lee

2013-02-28

Semantic memory deficits in schizophrenia (SZ) are profound, yet there is no research comparing implicit and explicit semantic processing in the same participant sample. In the current study, both implicit and explicit priming are investigated using direct (LION-TIGER) and indirect (LION-STRIPES; where tiger is not displayed) stimuli comparing SZ to healthy controls. Based on a substantive review (Rossell and Stefanovic, 2007) and meta-analysis (Pomarol-Clotet et al., 2008), it was predicted that SZ would be associated with increased indirect priming implicitly. Further, it was predicted that SZ would be associated with abnormal indirect priming explicitly, replicating earlier work (Assaf et al., 2006). No specific hypotheses were made for implicit direct priming due to the heterogeneity of the literature. It was hypothesised that explicit direct priming would be intact based on the structured nature of this task. The pattern of results suggests (1) intact reaction time (RT) and error performance implicitly in the face of abnormal direct priming and (2) impaired RT and error performance explicitly. This pattern confirms general findings regarding implicit/explicit memory impairments in SZ whilst highlighting the unique pattern of performance specific to semantic priming. Finally, priming performance is discussed in relation to thought disorder and length of illness. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

An Experiment in Scientific Code Semantic Analysis

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Stewart, Mark E. M.

1998-01-01

This paper concerns a procedure that analyzes aspects of the meaning or semantics of scientific and engineering code. This procedure involves taking a user's existing code, adding semantic declarations for some primitive variables, and parsing this annotated code using multiple, distributed expert parsers. These semantic parser are designed to recognize formulae in different disciplines including physical and mathematical formulae and geometrical position in a numerical scheme. The parsers will automatically recognize and document some static, semantic concepts and locate some program semantic errors. Results are shown for a subroutine test case and a collection of combustion code routines. This ability to locate some semantic errors and document semantic concepts in scientific and engineering code should reduce the time, risk, and effort of developing and using these codes.

Individual differences in automatic semantic priming.

PubMed

Andrews, Sally; Lo, Steson; Xia, Violet

2017-05-01

This research investigated whether masked semantic priming in a semantic categorization task that required classification of words as animals or nonanimals was modulated by individual differences in lexical proficiency. A sample of 89 skilled readers, assessed on reading comprehension, vocabulary and spelling ability, classified target words preceded by brief (50 ms) masked primes that were either congruent or incongruent with the category of the target. Congruent primes were also selected to be either high (e.g., hawk EAGLE, pistol RIFLE) or low (e.g., mole EAGLE, boots RIFLE) in semantic feature overlap with the target. "Overall proficiency," indexed by high performance on both a "semantic composite" measure of reading comprehension and vocabulary and a "spelling composite," was associated with stronger congruence priming from both high and low feature overlap primes for animal exemplars, but only predicted priming from low overlap primes for nonexemplars. Classification of high frequency nonexemplars was also significantly modulated by an independent "spelling-meaning" factor, indexed by the discrepancy between the semantic and spelling composites, because relatively higher scores on the semantic than the spelling composite were associated with stronger semantic priming. These findings show that higher lexical proficiency is associated with stronger evidence of automatic semantic priming and suggest that individual differences in lexical quality modulate the division of labor between orthographic and semantic processing in early lexical retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic annotation of consumer health questions.

PubMed

Kilicoglu, Halil; Ben Abacha, Asma; Mrabet, Yassine; Shooshan, Sonya E; Rodriguez, Laritza; Masterton, Kate; Demner-Fushman, Dina

2018-02-06

Consumers increasingly use online resources for their health information needs. While current search engines can address these needs to some extent, they generally do not take into account that most health information needs are complex and can only fully be expressed in natural language. Consumer health question answering (QA) systems aim to fill this gap. A major challenge in developing consumer health QA systems is extracting relevant semantic content from the natural language questions (question understanding). To develop effective question understanding tools, question corpora semantically annotated for relevant question elements are needed. In this paper, we present a two-part consumer health question corpus annotated with several semantic categories: named entities, question triggers/types, question frames, and question topic. The first part (CHQA-email) consists of relatively long email requests received by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) customer service, while the second part (CHQA-web) consists of shorter questions posed to MedlinePlus search engine as queries. Each question has been annotated by two annotators. The annotation methodology is largely the same between the two parts of the corpus; however, we also explain and justify the differences between them. Additionally, we provide information about corpus characteristics, inter-annotator agreement, and our attempts to measure annotation confidence in the absence of adjudication of annotations. The resulting corpus consists of 2614 questions (CHQA-email: 1740, CHQA-web: 874). Problems are the most frequent named entities, while treatment and general information questions are the most common question types. Inter-annotator agreement was generally modest: question types and topics yielded highest agreement, while the agreement for more complex frame annotations was lower. Agreement in CHQA-web was consistently higher than that in CHQA-email. Pairwise inter-annotator agreement proved most

Examining lateralized semantic access using pictures.

PubMed

Lovseth, Kyle; Atchley, Ruth Ann

2010-03-01

A divided visual field (DVF) experiment examined the semantic processing strategies employed by the cerebral hemispheres to determine if strategies observed with written word stimuli generalize to other media for communicating semantic information. We employed picture stimuli and vary the degree of semantic relatedness between the picture pairs. Participants made an on-line semantic relatedness judgment in response to sequentially presented pictures. We found that when pictures are presented to the right hemisphere responses are generally more accurate than the left hemisphere for semantic relatedness judgments for picture pairs. Furthermore, consistent with earlier DVF studies employing words, we conclude that the RH is better at accessing or maintaining access to information that has a weak or more remote semantic relationship. We also found evidence of faster access for pictures presented to the LH in the strongly-related condition. Overall, these results are consistent with earlier DVF word studies that argue that the cerebral hemispheres each play an important and separable role during semantic retrieval. Copyright 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Semantic enrichment of clinical models towards semantic interoperability. The heart failure summary use case.

PubMed

Martínez-Costa, Catalina; Cornet, Ronald; Karlsson, Daniel; Schulz, Stefan; Kalra, Dipak

2015-05-01

To improve semantic interoperability of electronic health records (EHRs) by ontology-based mediation across syntactically heterogeneous representations of the same or similar clinical information. Our approach is based on a semantic layer that consists of: (1) a set of ontologies supported by (2) a set of semantic patterns. The first aspect of the semantic layer helps standardize the clinical information modeling task and the second shields modelers from the complexity of ontology modeling. We applied this approach to heterogeneous representations of an excerpt of a heart failure summary. Using a set of finite top-level patterns to derive semantic patterns, we demonstrate that those patterns, or compositions thereof, can be used to represent information from clinical models. Homogeneous querying of the same or similar information, when represented according to heterogeneous clinical models, is feasible. Our approach focuses on the meaning embedded in EHRs, regardless of their structure. This complex task requires a clear ontological commitment (ie, agreement to consistently use the shared vocabulary within some context), together with formalization rules. These requirements are supported by semantic patterns. Other potential uses of this approach, such as clinical models validation, require further investigation. We show how an ontology-based representation of a clinical summary, guided by semantic patterns, allows homogeneous querying of heterogeneous information structures. Whether there are a finite number of top-level patterns is an open question. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Semantic Memory in the Clinical Progression of Alzheimer Disease.

PubMed

Tchakoute, Christophe T; Sainani, Kristin L; Henderson, Victor W

2017-09-01

Semantic memory measures may be useful in tracking and predicting progression of Alzheimer disease. We investigated relationships among semantic memory tasks and their 1-year predictive value in women with Alzheimer disease. We conducted secondary analyses of a randomized clinical trial of raloxifene in 42 women with late-onset mild-to-moderate Alzheimer disease. We assessed semantic memory with tests of oral confrontation naming, category fluency, semantic recognition and semantic naming, and semantic density in written narrative discourse. We measured global cognition (Alzheimer Disease Assessment Scale, cognitive subscale), dementia severity (Clinical Dementia Rating sum of boxes), and daily function (Activities of Daily Living Inventory) at baseline and 1 year. At baseline and 1 year, most semantic memory scores correlated highly or moderately with each other and with global cognition, dementia severity, and daily function. Semantic memory task performance at 1 year had worsened one-third to one-half standard deviation. Factor analysis of baseline test scores distinguished processes in semantic and lexical retrieval (semantic recognition, semantic naming, confrontation naming) from processes in lexical search (semantic density, category fluency). The semantic-lexical retrieval factor predicted global cognition at 1 year. Considered separately, baseline confrontation naming and category fluency predicted dementia severity, while semantic recognition and a composite of semantic recognition and semantic naming predicted global cognition. No individual semantic memory test predicted daily function. Semantic-lexical retrieval and lexical search may represent distinct aspects of semantic memory. Semantic memory processes are sensitive to cognitive decline and dementia severity in Alzheimer disease.

Exploiting salient semantic analysis for information retrieval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Luo, Jing; Meng, Bo; Quan, Changqin; Tu, Xinhui

2016-11-01

Recently, many Wikipedia-based methods have been proposed to improve the performance of different natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as semantic relatedness computation, text classification and information retrieval. Among these methods, salient semantic analysis (SSA) has been proven to be an effective way to generate conceptual representation for words or documents. However, its feasibility and effectiveness in information retrieval is mostly unknown. In this paper, we study how to efficiently use SSA to improve the information retrieval performance, and propose a SSA-based retrieval method under the language model framework. First, SSA model is adopted to build conceptual representations for documents and queries. Then, these conceptual representations and the bag-of-words (BOW) representations can be used in combination to estimate the language models of queries and documents. The proposed method is evaluated on several standard text retrieval conference (TREC) collections. Experiment results on standard TREC collections show the proposed models consistently outperform the existing Wikipedia-based retrieval methods.

Multimodal Feature Integration in the Angular Gyrus during Episodic and Semantic Retrieval

PubMed Central

Bonnici, Heidi M.; Richter, Franziska R.; Yazar, Yasemin

2016-01-01

G) contribute to the retrieval of episodic and semantic memories. Our multivariate pattern classifier could distinguish episodic memory representations in AnG according to whether they were multimodal (audio-visual) or unimodal (auditory or visual) in nature, whereas statistically equivalent AnG activity was observed during retrieval of unimodal and multimodal semantic memories. Classification accuracy during episodic retrieval scaled with the trial-by-trial vividness with which participants experienced their recollections. Therefore, the findings offer new insights into the integrative processes subserved by AnG and how its function may contribute to our subjective experience of remembering. PMID:27194327

Multimodal Feature Integration in the Angular Gyrus during Episodic and Semantic Retrieval.

PubMed

Bonnici, Heidi M; Richter, Franziska R; Yazar, Yasemin; Simons, Jon S

2016-05-18

episodic and semantic memories. Our multivariate pattern classifier could distinguish episodic memory representations in AnG according to whether they were multimodal (audio-visual) or unimodal (auditory or visual) in nature, whereas statistically equivalent AnG activity was observed during retrieval of unimodal and multimodal semantic memories. Classification accuracy during episodic retrieval scaled with the trial-by-trial vividness with which participants experienced their recollections. Therefore, the findings offer new insights into the integrative processes subserved by AnG and how its function may contribute to our subjective experience of remembering. Copyright © 2016 Bonnici, Richter, et al.

Multi-talker background and semantic priming effect

PubMed Central

Dekerle, Marie; Boulenger, Véronique; Hoen, Michel; Meunier, Fanny

2014-01-01

The reported studies have aimed to investigate whether informational masking in a multi-talker background relies on semantic interference between the background and target using an adapted semantic priming paradigm. In 3 experiments, participants were required to perform a lexical decision task on a target item embedded in backgrounds composed of 1–4 voices. These voices were Semantically Consistent (SC) voices (i.e., pronouncing words sharing semantic features with the target) or Semantically Inconsistent (SI) voices (i.e., pronouncing words semantically unrelated to each other and to the target). In the first experiment, backgrounds consisted of 1 or 2 SC voices. One and 2 SI voices were added in Experiments 2 and 3, respectively. The results showed a semantic priming effect only in the conditions where the number of SC voices was greater than the number of SI voices, suggesting that semantic priming depended on prime intelligibility and strategic processes. However, even if backgrounds were composed of 3 or 4 voices, reducing intelligibility, participants were able to recognize words from these backgrounds, although no semantic priming effect on the targets was observed. Overall this finding suggests that informational masking can occur at a semantic level if intelligibility is sufficient. Based on the Effortfulness Hypothesis, we also suggest that when there is an increased difficulty in extracting target signals (caused by a relatively high number of voices in the background), more cognitive resources were allocated to formal processes (i.e., acoustic and phonological), leading to a decrease in available resources for deeper semantic processing of background words, therefore preventing semantic priming from occurring. PMID:25400572

Semantic attributes based texture generation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chi, Huifang; Gan, Yanhai; Qi, Lin; Dong, Junyu; Madessa, Amanuel Hirpa

2018-04-01

Semantic attributes are commonly used for texture description. They can be used to describe the information of a texture, such as patterns, textons, distributions, brightness, and so on. Generally speaking, semantic attributes are more concrete descriptors than perceptual features. Therefore, it is practical to generate texture images from semantic attributes. In this paper, we propose to generate high-quality texture images from semantic attributes. Over the last two decades, several works have been done on texture synthesis and generation. Most of them focusing on example-based texture synthesis and procedural texture generation. Semantic attributes based texture generation still deserves more devotion. Gan et al. proposed a useful joint model for perception driven texture generation. However, perceptual features are nonobjective spatial statistics used by humans to distinguish different textures in pre-attentive situations. To give more describing information about texture appearance, semantic attributes which are more in line with human description habits are desired. In this paper, we use sigmoid cross entropy loss in an auxiliary model to provide enough information for a generator. Consequently, the discriminator is released from the relatively intractable mission of figuring out the joint distribution of condition vectors and samples. To demonstrate the validity of our method, we compare our method to Gan et al.'s method on generating textures by designing experiments on PTD and DTD. All experimental results show that our model can generate textures from semantic attributes.

Language Networks Associated with Computerized Semantic Indices

PubMed Central

Pakhomov, Serguei V. S.; Jones, David T.; Knopman, David S.

2014-01-01

Tests of generative semantic verbal fluency are widely used to study organization and representation of concepts in the human brain. Previous studies demonstrated that clustering and switching behavior during verbal fluency tasks is supported by multiple brain mechanisms associated with semantic memory and executive control. Previous work relied on manual assessments of semantic relatedness between words and grouping of words into semantic clusters. We investigated a computational linguistic approach to measuring the strength of semantic relatedness between words based on latent semantic analysis of word co-occurrences in a subset of a large online encyclopedia. We computed semantic clustering indices and compared them to brain network connectivity measures obtained with task-free fMRI in a sample consisting of healthy participants and those differentially affected by cognitive impairment. We found that semantic clustering indices were associated with brain network connectivity in distinct areas including fronto-temporal, fronto-parietal and fusiform gyrus regions. This study shows that computerized semantic indices complement traditional assessments of verbal fluency to provide a more complete account of the relationship between brain and verbal behavior involved organization and retrieval of lexical information from memory. PMID:25315785

Language networks associated with computerized semantic indices.

PubMed

Pakhomov, Serguei V S; Jones, David T; Knopman, David S

2015-01-01

Tests of generative semantic verbal fluency are widely used to study organization and representation of concepts in the human brain. Previous studies demonstrated that clustering and switching behavior during verbal fluency tasks is supported by multiple brain mechanisms associated with semantic memory and executive control. Previous work relied on manual assessments of semantic relatedness between words and grouping of words into semantic clusters. We investigated a computational linguistic approach to measuring the strength of semantic relatedness between words based on latent semantic analysis of word co-occurrences in a subset of a large online encyclopedia. We computed semantic clustering indices and compared them to brain network connectivity measures obtained with task-free fMRI in a sample consisting of healthy participants and those differentially affected by cognitive impairment. We found that semantic clustering indices were associated with brain network connectivity in distinct areas including fronto-temporal, fronto-parietal and fusiform gyrus regions. This study shows that computerized semantic indices complement traditional assessments of verbal fluency to provide a more complete account of the relationship between brain and verbal behavior involved organization and retrieval of lexical information from memory. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Semantic-based crossmodal processing during visual suppression.

PubMed

Cox, Dustin; Hong, Sang Wook

2015-01-01

To reveal the mechanisms underpinning the influence of auditory input on visual awareness, we examine, (1) whether purely semantic-based multisensory integration facilitates the access to visual awareness for familiar visual events, and (2) whether crossmodal semantic priming is the mechanism responsible for the semantic auditory influence on visual awareness. Using continuous flash suppression, we rendered dynamic and familiar visual events (e.g., a video clip of an approaching train) inaccessible to visual awareness. We manipulated the semantic auditory context of the videos by concurrently pairing them with a semantically matching soundtrack (congruent audiovisual condition), a semantically non-matching soundtrack (incongruent audiovisual condition), or with no soundtrack (neutral video-only condition). We found that participants identified the suppressed visual events significantly faster (an earlier breakup of suppression) in the congruent audiovisual condition compared to the incongruent audiovisual condition and video-only condition. However, this facilitatory influence of semantic auditory input was only observed when audiovisual stimulation co-occurred. Our results suggest that the enhanced visual processing with a semantically congruent auditory input occurs due to audiovisual crossmodal processing rather than semantic priming, which may occur even when visual information is not available to visual awareness.

One size does not fit all: face emotion processing impairments in semantic dementia, behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease are mediated by distinct cognitive deficits.

PubMed

Miller, Laurie A; Hsieh, Sharpley; Lah, Suncica; Savage, Sharon; Hodges, John R; Piguet, Olivier

2012-01-01

Patients with frontotemporal dementia (both behavioural variant [bvFTD] and semantic dementia [SD]) as well as those with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show deficits on tests of face emotion processing, yet the mechanisms underlying these deficits have rarely been explored. We compared groups of patients with bvFTD (n = 17), SD (n = 12) or AD (n = 20) to an age- and education-matched group of healthy control subjects (n = 36) on three face emotion processing tasks (Ekman 60, Emotion Matching and Emotion Selection) and found that all three patient groups were similarly impaired. Analyses of covariance employed to partial out the influences of language and perceptual impairments, which frequently co-occur in these patients, provided evidence of different underlying cognitive mechanisms. These analyses revealed that language impairments explained the original poor scores obtained by the SD patients on the Ekman 60 and Emotion Selection tasks, which involve verbal labels. Perceptual deficits contributed to Emotion Matching performance in the bvFTD and AD patients. Importantly, all groups remained impaired on one task or more following these analyses, denoting a primary emotion processing disturbance in these dementia syndromes. These findings highlight the multifactorial nature of emotion processing deficits in patients with dementia.

Quantifying Semantic Linguistic Maturity in Children.

PubMed

Hansson, Kristina; Bååth, Rasmus; Löhndorf, Simone; Sahlén, Birgitta; Sikström, Sverker

2016-10-01

We propose a method to quantify semantic linguistic maturity (SELMA) based on a high dimensional semantic representation of words created from the co-occurrence of words in a large text corpus. The method was applied to oral narratives from 108 children aged 4;0-12;10. By comparing the SELMA measure with maturity ratings made by human raters we found that SELMA predicted the rating of semantic maturity made by human raters over and above the prediction made using a child's age and number of words produced. We conclude that the semantic content of narratives changes in a predictable pattern with children's age and argue that SELMA is a measure quantifying semantic linguistic maturity. The study opens up the possibility of using quantitative measures for studying the development of semantic representation in children's narratives, and emphasizes the importance of word co-occurrences for understanding the development of meaning.

On the Existence of Semantic Working Memory: Evidence for Direct Semantic Maintenance

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Shivde, Geeta; Anderson, Michael C.

2011-01-01

Despite widespread acknowledgment of the importance of online semantic maintenance, there has been astonishingly little work that clearly establishes this construct. We review the extant work relevant to short-term retention of meaning and show that, although consistent with semantic working memory, most data can be accommodated in other ways.…

Semantically-Sensitive Macroprocessing

DTIC Science & Technology

1989-12-15

constr uct for protecting critical regions. Given the synchronization primitives P and V, we might implement the following transformation, where...By this we mean that the semantic model for the base language provides a primitive set of concepts, represented by data types and operations...the gener- ation of a (dynamic-) semantically equivalent program fragment ultimately expressible in terms of built-in primitives . Note that static

Adults' acquisition of novel dimension words: creating a semantic congruity effect.

PubMed

Ryalls, B O; Smith, L B

2000-07-01

The semantic congruity effect is exhibited when adults are asked to compare pairs of items from a series, and their response is faster when the direction of the comparison coincides with the location of the stimuli in the series. For example, people are faster at picking the bigger of 2 big items than the littler of 2 big items. In the 4 experiments presented, adults were taught new dimensional adjectives (mal/ler and borg/er). Characteristics of the learning situation, such as the nature of the stimulus series and the relative frequency of labeling, were varied. Results revealed that the participants who learned the relative meaning of the artificial dimensional adjectives also formed categories and developed a semantic congruity effect regardless of the characteristics of training. These findings have important implications for our understanding of adult acquisition of novel relational words, the relationship between learning such words and categorization, and the explanations of the semantic congruity effect.

Publication and Retrieval of Computational Chemical-Physical Data Via the Semantic Web. Final Technical Report

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Ostlund, Neil

This research showed the feasibility of applying the concepts of the Semantic Web to Computation Chemistry. We have created the first web portal (www.chemsem.com) that allows data created in the calculations of quantum chemistry, and other such chemistry calculations to be placed on the web in a way that makes the data accessible to scientists in a semantic form never before possible. The semantic web nature of the portal allows data to be searched, found, and used as an advance over the usual approach of a relational database. The semantic data on our portal has the nature of a Giantmore » Global Graph (GGG) that can be easily merged with related data and searched globally via a SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) that makes global searches for data easier than with traditional methods. Our Semantic Web Portal requires that the data be understood by a computer and hence defined by an ontology (vocabulary). This ontology is used by the computer in understanding the data. We have created such an ontology for computational chemistry (purl.org/gc) that encapsulates a broad knowledge of the field of computational chemistry. We refer to this ontology as the Gainesville Core. While it is perhaps the first ontology for computational chemistry and is used by our portal, it is only a start of what must be a long multi-partner effort to define computational chemistry. In conjunction with the above efforts we have defined a new potential file standard (Common Standard for eXchange – CSX for computational chemistry data). This CSX file is the precursor of data in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) form that the semantic web requires. Our portal translates CSX files (as well as other computational chemistry data files) into RDF files that are part of the graph database that the semantic web employs. We propose a CSX file as a convenient way to encapsulate computational chemistry data.« less

Semantic Coherence Facilitates Distributional Learning.

PubMed

Ouyang, Long; Boroditsky, Lera; Frank, Michael C

2017-04-01

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of association with other words (e.g., they both tend to occur with words like "deliver," "truck," "package"). In contrast to these computational results, artificial language learning experiments suggest that distributional statistics alone do not facilitate learning of linguistic categories. However, experiments in this paradigm expose participants to entirely novel words, whereas real language learners encounter input that contains some known words that are semantically organized. In three experiments, we show that (a) the presence of familiar semantic reference points facilitates distributional learning and (b) this effect crucially depends both on the presence of known words and the adherence of these known words to some semantic organization. Copyright © 2016 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.

Semantic querying of relational data for clinical intelligence: a semantic web services-based approach

PubMed Central

2013-01-01

Background Clinical Intelligence, as a research and engineering discipline, is dedicated to the development of tools for data analysis for the purposes of clinical research, surveillance, and effective health care management. Self-service ad hoc querying of clinical data is one desirable type of functionality. Since most of the data are currently stored in relational or similar form, ad hoc querying is problematic as it requires specialised technical skills and the knowledge of particular data schemas. Results A possible solution is semantic querying where the user formulates queries in terms of domain ontologies that are much easier to navigate and comprehend than data schemas. In this article, we are exploring the possibility of using SADI Semantic Web services for semantic querying of clinical data. We have developed a prototype of a semantic querying infrastructure for the surveillance of, and research on, hospital-acquired infections. Conclusions Our results suggest that SADI can support ad-hoc, self-service, semantic queries of relational data in a Clinical Intelligence context. The use of SADI compares favourably with approaches based on declarative semantic mappings from data schemas to ontologies, such as query rewriting and RDFizing by materialisation, because it can easily cope with situations when (i) some computation is required to turn relational data into RDF or OWL, e.g., to implement temporal reasoning, or (ii) integration with external data sources is necessary. PMID:23497556

Episodic memory, semantic memory, and amnesia.

PubMed

Squire, L R; Zola, S M

1998-01-01

Episodic memory and semantic memory are two types of declarative memory. There have been two principal views about how this distinction might be reflected in the organization of memory functions in the brain. One view, that episodic memory and semantic memory are both dependent on the integrity of medial temporal lobe and midline diencephalic structures, predicts that amnesic patients with medial temporal lobe/diencephalic damage should be proportionately impaired in both episodic and semantic memory. An alternative view is that the capacity for semantic memory is spared, or partially spared, in amnesia relative to episodic memory ability. This article reviews two kinds of relevant data: 1) case studies where amnesia has occurred early in childhood, before much of an individual's semantic knowledge has been acquired, and 2) experimental studies with amnesic patients of fact and event learning, remembering and knowing, and remote memory. The data provide no compelling support for the view that episodic and semantic memory are affected differently in medial temporal lobe/diencephalic amnesia. However, episodic and semantic memory may be dissociable in those amnesic patients who additionally have severe frontal lobe damage.

Integrating Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse DARPA Natural Language Understanding Program. Volume 1. Technical Report

DTIC Science & Technology

1989-09-30

26 9.1 Overview of SPQR ............................................................................. 26 9.2...domain. The ISR is the input to the selection component SPQR , whose function is to block semantically anomalous parses before they are sent to the...frequently occurring pairs of words, which is useful for identifying fixed multi-word expressions. 9. SELECTION The SPQR module (Selectional Pattern

Distributed semantic networks and CLIPS

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Snyder, James; Rodriguez, Tony

1991-01-01

Semantic networks of frames are commonly used as a method of reasoning in many problems. In most of these applications the semantic network exists as a single entity in a single process environment. Advances in workstation hardware provide support for more sophisticated applications involving multiple processes, interacting in a distributed environment. In these applications the semantic network may well be distributed over several concurrently executing tasks. This paper describes the design and implementation of a frame based, distributed semantic network in which frames are accessed both through C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS) expert systems and procedural C++ language programs. The application area is a knowledge based, cooperative decision making model utilizing both rule based and procedural experts.

Semantic Contamination and Mathematical Proof: Can a Non-Proof Prove?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mejia-Ramos, Juan Pablo; Inglis, Matthew

2011-01-01

The way words are used in natural language can influence how the same words are understood by students in formal educational contexts. Here we argue that this so-called semantic contamination effect plays a role in determining how students engage with mathematical proof, a fundamental aspect of learning mathematics. Analyses of responses to…

Spanish semantic feature production norms for 400 concrete concepts.

PubMed

Vivas, Jorge; Vivas, Leticia; Comesaña, Ana; Coni, Ana García; Vorano, Agostina

2017-06-01

Semantic feature production norms provide many quantitative measures of different feature and concept variables that are necessary to solve some debates surrounding the nature of the organization, both normal and pathological, of semantic memory. Despite the current existence of norms for different languages, there are still no published norms in Spanish. This article presents a new set of norms collected from 810 participants for 400 living and nonliving concepts among Spanish speakers. These norms consist of empirical collections of features that participants used to describe the concepts. Four files were elaborated: a concept-feature file, a concept-concept matrix, a feature-feature matrix, and a significantly correlated features file. We expect that these norms will be useful for researchers in the fields of experimental psychology, neuropsychology, and psycholinguistics.

Introduction to geospatial semantics and technology workshop handbook

USGS Publications Warehouse

Varanka, Dalia E.

2012-01-01

The workshop is a tutorial on introductory geospatial semantics with hands-on exercises using standard Web browsers. The workshop is divided into two sections, general semantics on the Web and specific examples of geospatial semantics using data from The National Map of the U.S. Geological Survey and the Open Ontology Repository. The general semantics section includes information and access to publicly available semantic archives. The specific session includes information on geospatial semantics with access to semantically enhanced data for hydrography, transportation, boundaries, and names. The Open Ontology Repository offers open-source ontologies for public use.

Semantic Integrative Digital Pathology: Insights into Microsemiological Semantics and Image Analysis Scalability.

PubMed

Racoceanu, Daniel; Capron, Frédérique

2016-01-01

Being able to provide a traceable and dynamic second opinion has become an ethical priority for patients and health care professionals in modern computer-aided medicine. In this perspective, a semantic cognitive virtual microscopy approach has been recently initiated, the MICO project, by focusing on cognitive digital pathology. This approach supports the elaboration of pathology-compliant daily protocols dedicated to breast cancer grading, in particular mitotic counts and nuclear atypia. A proof of concept has thus been elaborated, and an extension of these approaches is now underway in a collaborative digital pathology framework, the FlexMIm project. As important milestones on the way to routine digital pathology, a series of pioneer international benchmarking initiatives have been launched for mitosis detection (MITOS), nuclear atypia grading (MITOS-ATYPIA) and glandular structure detection (GlaS), some of the fundamental grading components in diagnosis and prognosis. These initiatives allow envisaging a consolidated validation referential database for digital pathology in the very near future. This reference database will need coordinated efforts from all major teams working in this area worldwide, and it will certainly represent a critical bottleneck for the acceptance of all future imaging modules in clinical practice. In line with recent advances in molecular imaging and genetics, keeping the microscopic modality at the core of future digital systems in pathology is fundamental to insure the acceptance of these new technologies, as well as for a deeper systemic, structured comprehension of the pathologies. After all, at the scale of routine whole-slide imaging (WSI; ∼0.22 µm/pixel), the microscopic image represents a structured 'genomic cluster', enabling a naturally structured support for integrative digital pathology approaches. In order to accelerate and structure the integration of this heterogeneous information, a major effort is and will continue to

Semantic-based surveillance video retrieval.

PubMed

Hu, Weiming; Xie, Dan; Fu, Zhouyu; Zeng, Wenrong; Maybank, Steve

2007-04-01

Visual surveillance produces large amounts of video data. Effective indexing and retrieval from surveillance video databases are very important. Although there are many ways to represent the content of video clips in current video retrieval algorithms, there still exists a semantic gap between users and retrieval systems. Visual surveillance systems supply a platform for investigating semantic-based video retrieval. In this paper, a semantic-based video retrieval framework for visual surveillance is proposed. A cluster-based tracking algorithm is developed to acquire motion trajectories. The trajectories are then clustered hierarchically using the spatial and temporal information, to learn activity models. A hierarchical structure of semantic indexing and retrieval of object activities, where each individual activity automatically inherits all the semantic descriptions of the activity model to which it belongs, is proposed for accessing video clips and individual objects at the semantic level. The proposed retrieval framework supports various queries including queries by keywords, multiple object queries, and queries by sketch. For multiple object queries, succession and simultaneity restrictions, together with depth and breadth first orders, are considered. For sketch-based queries, a method for matching trajectories drawn by users to spatial trajectories is proposed. The effectiveness and efficiency of our framework are tested in a crowded traffic scene.

Predicting Survey Responses: How and Why Semantics Shape Survey Statistics on Organizational Behaviour

PubMed Central

Arnulf, Jan Ketil; Larsen, Kai Rune; Martinsen, Øyvind Lund; Bong, Chih How

2014-01-01

Some disciplines in the social sciences rely heavily on collecting survey responses to detect empirical relationships among variables. We explored whether these relationships were a priori predictable from the semantic properties of the survey items, using language processing algorithms which are now available as new research methods. Language processing algorithms were used to calculate the semantic similarity among all items in state-of-the-art surveys from Organisational Behaviour research. These surveys covered areas such as transformational leadership, work motivation and work outcomes. This information was used to explain and predict the response patterns from real subjects. Semantic algorithms explained 60–86% of the variance in the response patterns and allowed remarkably precise prediction of survey responses from humans, except in a personality test. Even the relationships between independent and their purported dependent variables were accurately predicted. This raises concern about the empirical nature of data collected through some surveys if results are already given a priori through the way subjects are being asked. Survey response patterns seem heavily determined by semantics. Language algorithms may suggest these prior to administering a survey. This study suggests that semantic algorithms are becoming new tools for the social sciences, opening perspectives on survey responses that prevalent psychometric theory cannot explain. PMID:25184672

Stuck on semantics: Processing of irrelevant object-scene inconsistencies modulates ongoing gaze behavior.

PubMed

Cornelissen, Tim H W; Võ, Melissa L-H

2017-01-01

People have an amazing ability to identify objects and scenes with only a glimpse. How automatic is this scene and object identification? Are scene and object semantics-let alone their semantic congruity-processed to a degree that modulates ongoing gaze behavior even if they are irrelevant to the task at hand? Objects that do not fit the semantics of the scene (e.g., a toothbrush in an office) are typically fixated longer and more often than objects that are congruent with the scene context. In this study, we overlaid a letter T onto photographs of indoor scenes and instructed participants to search for it. Some of these background images contained scene-incongruent objects. Despite their lack of relevance to the search, we found that participants spent more time in total looking at semantically incongruent compared to congruent objects in the same position of the scene. Subsequent tests of explicit and implicit memory showed that participants did not remember many of the inconsistent objects and no more of the consistent objects. We argue that when we view natural environments, scene and object relationships are processed obligatorily, such that irrelevant semantic mismatches between scene and object identity can modulate ongoing eye-movement behavior.

Predicting survey responses: how and why semantics shape survey statistics on organizational behaviour.

PubMed

Arnulf, Jan Ketil; Larsen, Kai Rune; Martinsen, Øyvind Lund; Bong, Chih How

2014-01-01

Some disciplines in the social sciences rely heavily on collecting survey responses to detect empirical relationships among variables. We explored whether these relationships were a priori predictable from the semantic properties of the survey items, using language processing algorithms which are now available as new research methods. Language processing algorithms were used to calculate the semantic similarity among all items in state-of-the-art surveys from Organisational Behaviour research. These surveys covered areas such as transformational leadership, work motivation and work outcomes. This information was used to explain and predict the response patterns from real subjects. Semantic algorithms explained 60-86% of the variance in the response patterns and allowed remarkably precise prediction of survey responses from humans, except in a personality test. Even the relationships between independent and their purported dependent variables were accurately predicted. This raises concern about the empirical nature of data collected through some surveys if results are already given a priori through the way subjects are being asked. Survey response patterns seem heavily determined by semantics. Language algorithms may suggest these prior to administering a survey. This study suggests that semantic algorithms are becoming new tools for the social sciences, opening perspectives on survey responses that prevalent psychometric theory cannot explain.

Semantic Priming Revisited: In Search of Structural Age Change in Semantic Knowledge.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Mergler, Nancy L.; And Others

Contradictory previous research results showing that (1) language knowledge does not decrease with age; and (2) age differences exist in semantic strategies for memory recall provide the impetus for a study of semantic priming in young adults (mean age = 20) and older adults (mean age = 70) by providing target and prime words with six different…

Examining Lateralized Semantic Access Using Pictures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lovseth, Kyle; Atchley, Ruth Ann

2010-01-01

A divided visual field (DVF) experiment examined the semantic processing strategies employed by the cerebral hemispheres to determine if strategies observed with written word stimuli generalize to other media for communicating semantic information. We employed picture stimuli and vary the degree of semantic relatedness between the picture pairs.…

Spatio-Temporal Change Modeling of Lulc: a Semantic Kriging Approach

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bhattacharjee, S.; Ghosh, S. K.

2015-07-01

Spatio-temporal land-use/ land-cover (LULC) change modeling is important to forecast the future LULC distribution, which may facilitate natural resource management, urban planning, etc. The spatio-temporal change in LULC trend often exhibits non-linear behavior, due to various dynamic factors, such as, human intervention (e.g., urbanization), environmental factors, etc. Hence, proper forecasting of LULC distribution should involve the study and trend modeling of historical data. Existing literatures have reported that the meteorological attributes (e.g., NDVI, LST, MSI), are semantically related to the terrain. Being influenced by the terrestrial dynamics, the temporal changes of these attributes depend on the LULC properties. Hence, incorporating meteorological knowledge into the temporal prediction process may help in developing an accurate forecasting model. This work attempts to study the change in inter-annual LULC pattern and the distribution of different meteorological attributes of a region in Kolkata (a metropolitan city in India) during the years 2000-2010 and forecast the future spread of LULC using semantic kriging (SemK) approach. A new variant of time-series SemK is proposed, namely Rev-SemKts to capture the multivariate semantic associations between different attributes. From empirical analysis, it may be observed that the augmentation of semantic knowledge in spatio-temporal modeling of meteorological attributes facilitate more precise forecasting of LULC pattern.

The semantic organisation of proper nouns: the case of people and brand names.

PubMed

Crutch, Sebastian J; Warrington, Elizabeth K

2004-01-01

We describe the performance of a patient (AZ) with a semantic refractory access disorder on a series of experiments probing comprehension of two broad proper noun categories, namely person names and brand names. By inducing and manipulating the semantic relatedness effects which are commonly observed in semantic refractory access patients, we demonstrate that famous person knowledge is primarily organised by occupation, whilst knowledge of brands is organised by product type. For instance, we show that AZ has significantly greater difficulty identifying a famous person from among distractor personalities who have the same occupation (e.g. composers: Beethoven, Mozart, Handel, and Bach) than those who have different occupations (e.g. Beethoven, Picasso, Shakespeare, and Jefferson). We also show that such semantic relatedness effects do not occur when stimuli are grouped by another variable such as nationality. We argue that these semantic distance effects reflect the greater build-up of refractoriness among concepts which are supported by shared neural circuitry. In psychological space, it seems natural that these individuals should be classified in this way. The strength of our findings lie in the fact that this organisation of psychological space is mirrored by neural organisation. Thus, we report a previously undocumented degree of fine-grain organisation within conceptual knowledge of these classes of proper nouns. We also interpret our data as providing the strongest empirical support to date for the semantic module of cognitive models of person recognition.

The semantic measures library and toolkit: fast computation of semantic similarity and relatedness using biomedical ontologies.

PubMed

Harispe, Sébastien; Ranwez, Sylvie; Janaqi, Stefan; Montmain, Jacky

2014-03-01

The semantic measures library and toolkit are robust open-source and easy to use software solutions dedicated to semantic measures. They can be used for large-scale computations and analyses of semantic similarities between terms/concepts defined in terminologies and ontologies. The comparison of entities (e.g. genes) annotated by concepts is also supported. A large collection of measures is available. Not limited to a specific application context, the library and the toolkit can be used with various controlled vocabularies and ontology specifications (e.g. Open Biomedical Ontology, Resource Description Framework). The project targets both designers and practitioners of semantic measures providing a JAVA library, as well as a command-line tool that can be used on personal computers or computer clusters. Downloads, documentation, tutorials, evaluation and support are available at http://www.semantic-measures-library.org.

The Semantic Learning Organization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sicilia, Miguel-Angel; Lytras, Miltiadis D.

2005-01-01

Purpose: The aim of this paper is introducing the concept of a "semantic learning organization" (SLO) as an extension of the concept of "learning organization" in the technological domain. Design/methodology/approach: The paper takes existing definitions and conceptualizations of both learning organizations and Semantic Web technology to develop…

Qualitative dynamics semantics for SBGN process description.

PubMed

Rougny, Adrien; Froidevaux, Christine; Calzone, Laurence; Paulevé, Loïc

2016-06-16

Qualitative dynamics semantics provide a coarse-grain modeling of networks dynamics by abstracting away kinetic parameters. They allow to capture general features of systems dynamics, such as attractors or reachability properties, for which scalable analyses exist. The Systems Biology Graphical Notation Process Description language (SBGN-PD) has become a standard to represent reaction networks. However, no qualitative dynamics semantics taking into account all the main features available in SBGN-PD had been proposed so far. We propose two qualitative dynamics semantics for SBGN-PD reaction networks, namely the general semantics and the stories semantics, that we formalize using asynchronous automata networks. While the general semantics extends standard Boolean semantics of reaction networks by taking into account all the main features of SBGN-PD, the stories semantics allows to model several molecules of a network by a unique variable. The obtained qualitative models can be checked against dynamical properties and therefore validated with respect to biological knowledge. We apply our framework to reason on the qualitative dynamics of a large network (more than 200 nodes) modeling the regulation of the cell cycle by RB/E2F. The proposed semantics provide a direct formalization of SBGN-PD networks in dynamical qualitative models that can be further analyzed using standard tools for discrete models. The dynamics in stories semantics have a lower dimension than the general one and prune multiple behaviors (which can be considered as spurious) by enforcing the mutual exclusiveness between the activity of different nodes of a same story. Overall, the qualitative semantics for SBGN-PD allow to capture efficiently important dynamical features of reaction network models and can be exploited to further refine them.

Social Semantics for an Effective Enterprise

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Berndt, Sarah; Doane, Mike

2012-01-01

An evolution of the Semantic Web, the Social Semantic Web (s2w), facilitates knowledge sharing with "useful information based on human contributions, which gets better as more people participate." The s2w reaches beyond the search box to move us from a collection of hyperlinked facts, to meaningful, real time context. When focused through the lens of Enterprise Search, the Social Semantic Web facilitates the fluid transition of meaningful business information from the source to the user. It is the confluence of human thought and computer processing structured with the iterative application of taxonomies, folksonomies, ontologies, and metadata schemas. The importance and nuances of human interaction are often deemphasized when focusing on automatic generation of semantic markup, which results in dissatisfied users and unrealized return on investment. Users consistently qualify the value of information sets through the act of selection, making them the de facto stakeholders of the Social Semantic Web. Employers are the ultimate beneficiaries of s2w utilization with a better informed, more decisive workforce; one not achieved with an IT miracle technology, but by improved human-computer interactions. Johnson Space Center Taxonomist Sarah Berndt and Mike Doane, principal owner of Term Management, LLC discuss the planning, development, and maintenance stages for components of a semantic system while emphasizing the necessity of a Social Semantic Web for the Enterprise. Identification of risks and variables associated with layering the successful implementation of a semantic system are also modeled.

Semantic Deficits in Spanish-English Bilingual Children with Language Impairment

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Sheng, Li; Pena, Elizabeth D.; Bedore, Lisa M.; Fiestas, Christine E.

2012-01-01

Purpose: To examine the nature and extent of semantic deficits in bilingual children with language impairment (LI). Method: Thirty-seven Spanish-English bilingual children with LI (ranging from age 7;0 [years;months] to 9;10) and 37 typically developing (TD) age-matched peers generated 3 associations to 12 pairs of translation equivalents in…

Similarity Based Semantic Web Service Match

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Peng, Hui; Niu, Wenjia; Huang, Ronghuai

Semantic web service discovery aims at returning the most matching advertised services to the service requester by comparing the semantic of the request service with an advertised service. The semantic of a web service are described in terms of inputs, outputs, preconditions and results in Ontology Web Language for Service (OWL-S) which formalized by W3C. In this paper we proposed an algorithm to calculate the semantic similarity of two services by weighted averaging their inputs and outputs similarities. Case study and applications show the effectiveness of our algorithm in service match.

Weaknesses in Lexical-Semantic Knowledge Among College Students With Specific Learning Disabilities: Evidence From a Semantic Fluency Task.

PubMed

Hall, Jessica; McGregor, Karla K; Oleson, Jacob

2017-03-01

The purpose of this study is to determine whether deficits in executive function and lexical-semantic memory compromise the linguistic performance of young adults with specific learning disabilities (LD) enrolled in postsecondary studies. One hundred eighty-five students with LD (n = 53) or normal language development (ND, n = 132) named items in the categories animals and food for 1 minute for each category and completed tests of lexical-semantic knowledge and executive control of memory. Groups were compared on total names, mean cluster size, frequency of embedded clusters, frequency of cluster switches, and change in fluency over time. Secondary analyses of variability within the LD group were also conducted. The LD group was less fluent than the ND group. Within the LD group, lexical-semantic knowledge predicted semantic fluency and cluster size; executive control of memory predicted semantic fluency and cluster switches. The LD group produced smaller clusters and fewer embedded clusters than the ND group. Groups did not differ in switching or change over time. Deficits in the lexical-semantic system associated with LD may persist into young adulthood, even among those who have managed their disability well enough to attend college. Lexical-semantic deficits are associated with compromised semantic fluency, and the two problems are more likely among students with more severe disabilities.

Only time will tell - why temporal information is essential for our neuroscientific understanding of semantics.

PubMed

Hauk, Olaf

2016-08-01

Theoretical developments about the nature of semantic representations and processes should be accompanied by a discussion of how these theories can be validated on the basis of empirical data. Here, I elaborate on the link between theory and empirical research, highlighting the need for temporal information in order to distinguish fundamental aspects of semantics. The generic point that fast cognitive processes demand fast measurement techniques has been made many times before, although arguably more often in the psychophysiological community than in the metabolic neuroimaging community. Many reviews on the neuroscience of semantics mostly or even exclusively focus on metabolic neuroimaging data. Following an analysis of semantics in terms of the representations and processes involved, I argue that fundamental theoretical debates about the neuroscience of semantics can only be concluded on the basis of data with sufficient temporal resolution. Any "semantic effect" may result from a conflation of long-term memory representations, retrieval and working memory processes, mental imagery, and episodic memory. This poses challenges for all neuroimaging modalities, but especially for those with low temporal resolution. It also throws doubt on the usefulness of contrasts between meaningful and meaningless stimuli, which may differ on a number of semantic and non-semantic dimensions. I will discuss the consequences of this analysis for research on the role of convergence zones or hubs and distributed modal brain networks, top-down modulation of task and context as well as interactivity between levels of the processing hierarchy, for example in the framework of predictive coding.

Aging and Semantic Activation.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Howard, Darlene V.

Three studies tested the theory that long term memory consists of a semantically organized network of concept nodes interconnected by leveled associations or relations, and that when a stimulus is processed, the corresponding concept node is assumed to be temporarily activated and this activation spreads to nearby semantically related nodes. In…

Semantic access occurs outside of awareness for the ground side of a figure.

PubMed

Cacciamani, Laura; Mojica, Andrew J; Sanguinetti, Joseph L; Peterson, Mary A

2014-11-01

Traditional theories of vision assume that figures and grounds are assigned early in processing, with semantics being accessed later and only by figures, not by grounds. We tested this assumption by showing observers novel silhouettes with borders that suggested familiar objects on their ground side. The ground appeared shapeless near the figure's borders; the familiar objects suggested there were not consciously perceived. Participants' task was to categorize words shown immediately after the silhouettes as naming natural versus artificial objects. The words named objects from the same or from a different superordinate category as the familiar objects suggested in the silhouette ground. In Experiment 1, participants categorized words faster when they followed silhouettes suggesting upright familiar objects from the same rather than a different category on their ground sides, whereas no category differences were observed for inverted silhouettes. This is the first study to show unequivocally that, contrary to traditional assumptions, semantics are accessed for objects that might be perceived on the side of a border that will ultimately be perceived as a shapeless ground. Moreover, although the competition for figural status results in suppression of the shape of the losing contender, its semantics are not suppressed. In Experiment 2, we used longer silhouette-to-word stimulus onset asynchronies to test whether semantics would be suppressed later in time, as might occur if semantics were accessed later than shape memories. No evidence of semantic suppression was observed; indeed, semantic activation of the objects suggested on the ground side of a border appeared to be short-lived. Implications for feedforward versus dynamical interactive theories of object perception are discussed.

Distinct progression of the deterioration of thematic and taxonomic links in natural and manufactured objects in Alzheimer's disease.

PubMed

Simoes Loureiro, Isabelle; Lefebvre, Laurent

2016-10-01

Taxonomic and thematic relationships are core elements of lexico-semantic networks. However, the weight of both links differs in semantic memory, with distinct support for natural and manufactured objects: natural objects tend to be more taxonomically identified while manufactured objects benefit more from the underlying thematic relationships. Alzheimer's disease (AD) causes early semantic memory impairment characterized by a category-specific deterioration, where natural objects are more sensitive to the disease than manufactured objects. However, relatively few studies have examined the progressive deterioration of specific thematic versus taxonomic relations in both categories of objects in AD. To better understand semantic memory disorganization in AD and analyze the potential interaction effect between the category (natural/manufactured), the condition (thematic/taxonomic) and AD, we will investigate the lexico-semantic network in 82 AD patients (divided into three groups depending on their global cognitive deterioration and their performance in a preliminary semantic knowledge questionnaire (mild (AD1), moderate (AD2) and advanced (AD3) stages of semantic knowledge alteration). The experimental protocol contains two tasks: an implicit semantic priming paradigm and an explicit card-sorting test that uses the same items, equally divided between natural and manufactured objects. Results show a distinct taxonomic and thematic evolution pattern with early taxonomic deterioration. Natural objects are also more vulnerable to the disease. Lastly, there is an interaction effect between the category and the condition in the priming task indicating that natural objects are more taxonomically organized and manufactured objects benefit more from both thematic and taxonomic organizations, reinforcing the idea of the robustness of this category. The theoretical accounts of these observations will be discussed in detail. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Synonym extraction and abbreviation expansion with ensembles of semantic spaces.

PubMed

Henriksson, Aron; Moen, Hans; Skeppstedt, Maria; Daudaravičius, Vidas; Duneld, Martin

2014-02-05

Terminologies that account for variation in language use by linking synonyms and abbreviations to their corresponding concept are important enablers of high-quality information extraction from medical texts. Due to the use of specialized sub-languages in the medical domain, manual construction of semantic resources that accurately reflect language use is both costly and challenging, often resulting in low coverage. Although models of distributional semantics applied to large corpora provide a potential means of supporting development of such resources, their ability to isolate synonymy from other semantic relations is limited. Their application in the clinical domain has also only recently begun to be explored. Combining distributional models and applying them to different types of corpora may lead to enhanced performance on the tasks of automatically extracting synonyms and abbreviation-expansion pairs. A combination of two distributional models - Random Indexing and Random Permutation - employed in conjunction with a single corpus outperforms using either of the models in isolation. Furthermore, combining semantic spaces induced from different types of corpora - a corpus of clinical text and a corpus of medical journal articles - further improves results, outperforming a combination of semantic spaces induced from a single source, as well as a single semantic space induced from the conjoint corpus. A combination strategy that simply sums the cosine similarity scores of candidate terms is generally the most profitable out of the ones explored. Finally, applying simple post-processing filtering rules yields substantial performance gains on the tasks of extracting abbreviation-expansion pairs, but not synonyms. The best results, measured as recall in a list of ten candidate terms, for the three tasks are: 0.39 for abbreviations to long forms, 0.33 for long forms to abbreviations, and 0.47 for synonyms. This study demonstrates that ensembles of semantic spaces can

Synonym extraction and abbreviation expansion with ensembles of semantic spaces

PubMed Central

2014-01-01

that ensembles of semantic spaces can yield improved performance on the tasks of automatically extracting synonyms and abbreviation-expansion pairs. This notion, which merits further exploration, allows different distributional models – with different model parameters – and different types of corpora to be combined, potentially allowing enhanced performance to be obtained on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. PMID:24499679

Semantic priming from crowded words.

PubMed

Yeh, Su-Ling; He, Sheng; Cavanagh, Patrick

2012-06-01

Vision in a cluttered scene is extremely inefficient. This damaging effect of clutter, known as crowding, affects many aspects of visual processing (e.g., reading speed). We examined observers' processing of crowded targets in a lexical decision task, using single-character Chinese words that are compact but carry semantic meaning. Despite being unrecognizable and indistinguishable from matched nonwords, crowded prime words still generated robust semantic-priming effects on lexical decisions for test words presented in isolation. Indeed, the semantic-priming effect of crowded primes was similar to that of uncrowded primes. These findings show that the meanings of words survive crowding even when the identities of the words do not, suggesting that crowding does not prevent semantic activation, a process that may have evolved in the context of a cluttered visual environment.

Proactive interference in a semantic short-term memory deficit: role of semantic and phonological relatedness.

PubMed

Hamilton, A Cris; Martin, Randi C

2007-01-01

Previous research has indicated that patients with semantic short-term memory (STM) deficits demonstrate unusual intrusions of previously presented material during serial recall tasks (Martin and Lesch, 1996). These intrusions suggest excessive proactive interference (PI) from previous lists. Here, we explore one such patient's susceptibility to PI. Experiment 1 demonstrated patient M.L.'s extreme susceptibility to PI using a probe recognition task that manipulates the recency of negative probes (the recent negatives task). When stimuli consisted of letters, M.L. showed greatly exaggerated effects of PI, well outside of the range of healthy control participants. Experiment 2 used a variation of the recent negatives task to examine the relative contribution of semantic and phonological relatedness in PI. This task manipulated semantic and phonological relatedness of probes and recently presented list items. Relative to healthy control participants, patient M.L. showed exaggerated interference effects for both phonological and semantically related probes, both for probes related to the current list and for probes related to the previous list. These data have important implications for theories of semantic STM deficits. Specifically, these data suggest that it is not the rapid decay of semantic representations that is responsible for difficulties in short-term recall, but rather the abnormal persistence of previously presented material. We propose that this susceptibility to PI is the result of a deficit in control processes acting on STM.

Explicit semantic tasks are necessary to study semantic priming effects with high rates of repetition.

PubMed

Renoult, Louis; Wang, Xiaoxiao; Mortimer, Jennifer; Debruille, J Bruno

2012-04-01

The purpose of the present study was to clarify in which experimental conditions the semantic processing of repeated words is preserved. We contrasted a short (250 ms) and a long (1000 ms) stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) in two different experiments, using a relatively low proportion of related words (30%). One group of participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT) and a second group performed an explicit semantic matching task with the same words (except for pseudowords) and the same task parameters. In both tasks, word stimuli consisted solely of two prime and two target words repeated throughout the experiment. The effects of semantic priming on reaction time (RT) and the amplitude of the N400 ERP were absent for both the short and the long SOA in the LDT. In contrast, in the explicit semantic task, these effects were significant. In this task, the activity of N400 generators in the left superior temporal gyrus and the inferior parietal cortex significantly differentiated primed and unprimed trials but this effect did not interact with SOA. Our results indicate that task instruction is critical to preserve semantic processing with repeated presentations. Using explicit semantic designs, it may be possible to study associative or categorical relations between individual concepts. Copyright © 2011 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Towards a formal semantics for Ada 9X

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Guaspari, David; Mchugh, John; Wolfgang, Polak; Saaltink, Mark

1995-01-01

The Ada 9X language precision team was formed during the revisions of Ada 83, with the goal of analyzing the proposed design, identifying problems, and suggesting improvements, through the use of mathematical models. This report defines a framework for formally describing Ada 9X, based on Kahn's 'natural semantics', and applies the framework to portions of the language. The proposals for exceptions and optimization freedoms are also analyzed, using a different technique.

Semantic priming in the lexical decision task: roles of prospective prime-generated expectancies and retrospective semantic matching.

PubMed

Neely, J H; Keefe, D E; Ross, K L

1989-11-01

In semantic priming paradigms for lexical decisions, the probability that a word target is semantically related to its prime (the relatedness proportion) has been confounded with the probability that a target is a nonword, given that it is unrelated to its prime (the nonword ratio). This study unconfounded these two probabilities in a lexical decision task with category names as primes and with high- and low-dominance exemplars as targets. Semantic priming for high-dominance exemplars was modulated by the relatedness proportion and, to a lesser degree, by the nonword ratio. However, the nonword ratio exerted a stronger influence than did the relatedness proportion on semantic priming for low-dominance exemplars and on the nonword facilitation effect (i.e., the superiority in performance for nonword targets that follow a category name rather than a neutral XXX prime). These results suggest that semantic priming for lexical decisions is affected by both a prospective prime-generated expectancy, modulated by the relatedness proportion, and a retrospective target/prime semantic matching process, modulated by the nonword ratio.

Weaknesses in Lexical-Semantic Knowledge Among College Students With Specific Learning Disabilities: Evidence From a Semantic Fluency Task

PubMed Central

McGregor, Karla K.; Oleson, Jacob

2017-01-01

Purpose The purpose of this study is to determine whether deficits in executive function and lexical-semantic memory compromise the linguistic performance of young adults with specific learning disabilities (LD) enrolled in postsecondary studies. Method One hundred eighty-five students with LD (n = 53) or normal language development (ND, n = 132) named items in the categories animals and food for 1 minute for each category and completed tests of lexical-semantic knowledge and executive control of memory. Groups were compared on total names, mean cluster size, frequency of embedded clusters, frequency of cluster switches, and change in fluency over time. Secondary analyses of variability within the LD group were also conducted. Results The LD group was less fluent than the ND group. Within the LD group, lexical-semantic knowledge predicted semantic fluency and cluster size; executive control of memory predicted semantic fluency and cluster switches. The LD group produced smaller clusters and fewer embedded clusters than the ND group. Groups did not differ in switching or change over time. Conclusions Deficits in the lexical-semantic system associated with LD may persist into young adulthood, even among those who have managed their disability well enough to attend college. Lexical-semantic deficits are associated with compromised semantic fluency, and the two problems are more likely among students with more severe disabilities. PMID:28267833

Time-compressed spoken word primes crossmodally enhance processing of semantically congruent visual targets.

PubMed

Mahr, Angela; Wentura, Dirk

2014-02-01

Findings from three experiments support the conclusion that auditory primes facilitate the processing of related targets. In Experiments 1 and 2, we employed a crossmodal Stroop color identification task with auditory color words (as primes) and visual color patches (as targets). Responses were faster for congruent priming, in comparison to neutral or incongruent priming. This effect also emerged for different levels of time compression of the auditory primes (to 30 % and 10 % of the original length; i.e., 120 and 40 ms) and turned out to be even more pronounced under high-perceptual-load conditions (Exps. 1 and 2). In Experiment 3, target-present or -absent decisions for brief target displays had to be made, thereby ruling out response-priming processes as a cause of the congruency effects. Nevertheless, target detection (d') was increased by congruent primes (30 % compression) in comparison to incongruent or neutral primes. Our results suggest semantic object-based auditory-visual interactions, which rapidly increase the denoted target object's salience. This would apply, in particular, to complex visual scenes.

Sub-Lexical Phonological and Semantic Processing of Semantic Radicals: A Primed Naming Study

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Zhou, Lin; Peng, Gang; Zheng, Hong-Ying; Su, I-Fan; Wang, William S.-Y.

2013-01-01

Most sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters) are phonograms (phonetic compounds). A phonogram is composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, with the former usually implying the meaning of the phonogram, and the latter providing cues to its pronunciation. This study focused on the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals which are…

The posterior semantic asymmetry (PSA): An early brain electrical signature of semantic activation from written words.

PubMed

Koppehele-Gossel, Judith; Schnuerch, Robert; Gibbons, Henning

2018-06-06

This study replicates and extends the findings of Koppehele-Gossel, Schnuerch, and Gibbons (2016) of a posterior semantic asymmetry (PSA) in event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which closely tracks the time course and degree of semantic activation from single visual words. This negativity peaked 300 ms after word onset, was derived by subtracting right- from left-side activity, and was larger in a semantic task compared to two non-semantic control tasks. The validity of the PSA in reflecting the effort to activate word meaning was again attested by a negative correlation between the meaning-specific PSA increase and verbal intelligence, even after controlling for nonverbal intelligence. Extending prior work, current source density (CSD) transformation was used. CSD results were consistent with a left temporo-parietal cortical origin of the PSA. Moreover, no PSA was found for pictorial material, suggesting that the component reflects early semantic processing specific to verbal stimuli. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Left ventral occipitotemporal activation during orthographic and semantic processing of auditory words.

PubMed

Ludersdorfer, Philipp; Wimmer, Heinz; Richlan, Fabio; Schurz, Matthias; Hutzler, Florian; Kronbichler, Martin

2016-01-01

The present fMRI study investigated the hypothesis that activation of the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOT) in response to auditory words can be attributed to lexical orthographic rather than lexico-semantic processing. To this end, we presented auditory words in both an orthographic ("three or four letter word?") and a semantic ("living or nonliving?") task. In addition, a auditory control condition presented tones in a pitch evaluation task. The results showed that the left vOT exhibited higher activation for orthographic relative to semantic processing of auditory words with a peak in the posterior part of vOT. Comparisons to the auditory control condition revealed that orthographic processing of auditory words elicited activation in a large vOT cluster. In contrast, activation for semantic processing was only weak and restricted to the middle part vOT. We interpret our findings as speaking for orthographic processing in left vOT. In particular, we suggest that activation in left middle vOT can be attributed to accessing orthographic whole-word representations. While activation of such representations was experimentally ascertained in the orthographic task, it might have also occurred automatically in the semantic task. Activation in the more posterior vOT region, on the other hand, may reflect the generation of explicit images of word-specific letter sequences required by the orthographic but not the semantic task. In addition, based on cross-modal suppression, the finding of marked deactivations in response to the auditory tones is taken to reflect the visual nature of representations and processes in left vOT. Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Using ontological inference and hierarchical matchmaking to overcome semantic heterogeneity in remote sensing-based biodiversity monitoring

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nieland, Simon; Kleinschmit, Birgit; Förster, Michael

2015-05-01

Ontology-based applications hold promise in improving spatial data interoperability. In this work we use remote sensing-based biodiversity information and apply semantic formalisation and ontological inference to show improvements in data interoperability/comparability. The proposed methodology includes an observation-based, "bottom-up" engineering approach for remote sensing applications and gives a practical example of semantic mediation of geospatial products. We apply the methodology to three different nomenclatures used for remote sensing-based classification of two heathland nature conservation areas in Belgium and Germany. We analysed sensor nomenclatures with respect to their semantic formalisation and their bio-geographical differences. The results indicate that a hierarchical and transparent nomenclature is far more important for transferability than the sensor or study area. The inclusion of additional information, not necessarily belonging to a vegetation class description, is a key factor for the future success of using semantics for interoperability in remote sensing.

Synonyms Provide Semantic Preview Benefit in English

PubMed Central

Schotter, Elizabeth R.

2013-01-01

While orthographic and phonological preview benefits in reading are uncontroversial (see Schotter, Angele, & Rayner, 2012 for a review), researchers have debated the existence of semantic preview benefit with positive evidence in Chinese and German, but no support in English. Two experiments, using the gazecontingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975), show that semantic preview benefit can be observed in English when the preview and target are synonyms (share the same or highly similar meaning, e.g., curlers-rollers). However, no semantic preview benefit was observed for semantic associates (e.g., curlers-styling). These different preview conditions represent different degrees to which the meaning of the sentence changes when the preview is replaced by the target. When this continuous variable (determined by a norming procedure) was used as the predictor in the analyses, there was a significant relationship between it and all reading time measures, suggesting that similarity in meaning between what is accessed parafoveally and what is processed foveally may be an important influence on the presence of semantic preview benefit. Why synonyms provide semantic preview benefit in reading English is discussed in relation to (1) previous failures to find semantic preview benefit in English and (2) the fact that semantic preview benefit is observed in other languages even for non-synonymous words. Semantic preview benefit is argued to depend on several factors—attentional resources, depth of orthography, and degree of similarity between preview and target. PMID:24347813

Spatial information semantic query based on SPARQL

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Xiao, Zhifeng; Huang, Lei; Zhai, Xiaofang

2009-10-01

How can the efficiency of spatial information inquiries be enhanced in today's fast-growing information age? We are rich in geospatial data but poor in up-to-date geospatial information and knowledge that are ready to be accessed by public users. This paper adopts an approach for querying spatial semantic by building an Web Ontology language(OWL) format ontology and introducing SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language(SPARQL) to search spatial semantic relations. It is important to establish spatial semantics that support for effective spatial reasoning for performing semantic query. Compared to earlier keyword-based and information retrieval techniques that rely on syntax, we use semantic approaches in our spatial queries system. Semantic approaches need to be developed by ontology, so we use OWL to describe spatial information extracted by the large-scale map of Wuhan. Spatial information expressed by ontology with formal semantics is available to machines for processing and to people for understanding. The approach is illustrated by introducing a case study for using SPARQL to query geo-spatial ontology instances of Wuhan. The paper shows that making use of SPARQL to search OWL ontology instances can ensure the result's accuracy and applicability. The result also indicates constructing a geo-spatial semantic query system has positive efforts on forming spatial query and retrieval.

Semantic distance effects on object and action naming.

PubMed

Vigliocco, Gabriella; Vinson, David P; Damian, Markus F; Levelt, Willem

2002-10-01

Graded interference effects were tested in a naming task, in parallel for objects and actions. Participants named either object or action pictures presented in the context of other pictures (blocks) that were either semantically very similar, or somewhat semantically similar or semantically dissimilar. We found that naming latencies for both object and action words were modulated by the semantic similarity between the exemplars in each block, providing evidence in both domains of graded semantic effects.

The roles of scene gist and spatial dependency among objects in the semantic guidance of attention in real-world scenes.

PubMed

Wu, Chia-Chien; Wang, Hsueh-Cheng; Pomplun, Marc

2014-12-01

A previous study (Vision Research 51 (2011) 1192-1205) found evidence for semantic guidance of visual attention during the inspection of real-world scenes, i.e., an influence of semantic relationships among scene objects on overt shifts of attention. In particular, the results revealed an observer bias toward gaze transitions between semantically similar objects. However, this effect is not necessarily indicative of semantic processing of individual objects but may be mediated by knowledge of the scene gist, which does not require object recognition, or by known spatial dependency among objects. To examine the mechanisms underlying semantic guidance, in the present study, participants were asked to view a series of displays with the scene gist excluded and spatial dependency varied. Our results show that spatial dependency among objects seems to be sufficient to induce semantic guidance. Scene gist, on the other hand, does not seem to affect how observers use semantic information to guide attention while viewing natural scenes. Extracting semantic information mainly based on spatial dependency may be an efficient strategy of the visual system that only adds little cognitive load to the viewing task. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Action representation: crosstalk between semantics and pragmatics.

PubMed

Prinz, Wolfgang

2014-03-01

Marc Jeannerod pioneered a representational approach to movement and action. In his approach, motor representations provide both, declarative knowledge about action and procedural knowledge for action (action semantics and action pragmatics, respectively). Recent evidence from language comprehension and action simulation supports the claim that action pragmatics and action semantics draw on common representational resources, thus challenging the traditional divide between declarative and procedural action knowledge. To account for these observations, three kinds of theoretical frameworks are discussed: (i) semantics is grounded in pragmatics, (ii) pragmatics is anchored in semantics, and (iii) pragmatics is part and parcel of semantics. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Semantic Similarity in Biomedical Ontologies

PubMed Central

Pesquita, Catia; Faria, Daniel; Falcão, André O.; Lord, Phillip; Couto, Francisco M.

2009-01-01

In recent years, ontologies have become a mainstream topic in biomedical research. When biological entities are described using a common schema, such as an ontology, they can be compared by means of their annotations. This type of comparison is called semantic similarity, since it assesses the degree of relatedness between two entities by the similarity in meaning of their annotations. The application of semantic similarity to biomedical ontologies is recent; nevertheless, several studies have been published in the last few years describing and evaluating diverse approaches. Semantic similarity has become a valuable tool for validating the results drawn from biomedical studies such as gene clustering, gene expression data analysis, prediction and validation of molecular interactions, and disease gene prioritization. We review semantic similarity measures applied to biomedical ontologies and propose their classification according to the strategies they employ: node-based versus edge-based and pairwise versus groupwise. We also present comparative assessment studies and discuss the implications of their results. We survey the existing implementations of semantic similarity measures, and we describe examples of applications to biomedical research. This will clarify how biomedical researchers can benefit from semantic similarity measures and help them choose the approach most suitable for their studies. Biomedical ontologies are evolving toward increased coverage, formality, and integration, and their use for annotation is increasingly becoming a focus of both effort by biomedical experts and application of automated annotation procedures to create corpora of higher quality and completeness than are currently available. Given that semantic similarity measures are directly dependent on these evolutions, we can expect to see them gaining more relevance and even becoming as essential as sequence similarity is today in biomedical research. PMID:19649320

A Semantic Analysis Method for Scientific and Engineering Code

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Stewart, Mark E. M.

1998-01-01

This paper develops a procedure to statically analyze aspects of the meaning or semantics of scientific and engineering code. The analysis involves adding semantic declarations to a user's code and parsing this semantic knowledge with the original code using multiple expert parsers. These semantic parsers are designed to recognize formulae in different disciplines including physical and mathematical formulae and geometrical position in a numerical scheme. In practice, a user would submit code with semantic declarations of primitive variables to the analysis procedure, and its semantic parsers would automatically recognize and document some static, semantic concepts and locate some program semantic errors. A prototype implementation of this analysis procedure is demonstrated. Further, the relationship between the fundamental algebraic manipulations of equations and the parsing of expressions is explained. This ability to locate some semantic errors and document semantic concepts in scientific and engineering code should reduce the time, risk, and effort of developing and using these codes.

Sculpting the UMLS Refined Semantic Network.

PubMed

He, Zhe; Morrey, C Paul; Perl, Yehoshua; Elhanan, Gai; Chen, Ling; Chen, Yan; Geller, James

2014-01-01

The Refined Semantic Network (RSN) for the UMLS was previously introduced to complement the UMLS Semantic Network (SN). The RSN partitions the UMLS Metathesaurus (META) into disjoint groups of concepts. Each such group is semantically uniform. However, the RSN was initially an order of magnitude larger than the SN, which is undesirable since to be useful, a semantic network should be compact. Most semantic types in the RSN represent combinations of semantic types in the UMLS SN. Such a "combination semantic type" is called Intersection Semantic Type (IST). Many ISTs are assigned to very few concepts. Moreover, when reviewing those concepts, many semantic type assignment inconsistencies were found. After correcting those inconsistencies many ISTs, among them some that contradicted UMLS rules, disappeared, which made the RSN smaller. The authors performed a longitudinal study with the goal of reducing the size of the RSN to become compact. This goal was achieved by correcting inconsistencies and errors in the IST assignments in the UMLS, which additionally helped identify and correct ambiguities, inconsistencies, and errors in source terminologies widely used in the realm of public health. In this paper, we discuss the process and steps employed in this longitudinal study and the intermediate results for different stages. The sculpting process includes removing redundant semantic type assignments, expanding semantic type assignments, and removing illegitimate ISTs by auditing ISTs of small extents. However, the emphasis of this paper is not on the auditing methodologies employed during the process, since they were introduced in earlier publications, but on the strategy of employing them in order to transform the RSN into a compact network. For this paper we also performed a comprehensive audit of 168 "small ISTs" in the 2013AA version of the UMLS to finalize the longitudinal study. Over the years it was found that the editors of the UMLS introduced some new

Sculpting the UMLS Refined Semantic Network

PubMed Central

Morrey, C. Paul; Perl, Yehoshua; Elhanan, Gai; Chen, Ling; Chen, Yan; Geller, James

2014-01-01

Background The Refined Semantic Network (RSN) for the UMLS was previously introduced to complement the UMLS Semantic Network (SN). The RSN partitions the UMLS Metathesaurus (META) into disjoint groups of concepts. Each such group is semantically uniform. However, the RSN was initially an order of magnitude larger than the SN, which is undesirable since to be useful, a semantic network should be compact. Most semantic types in the RSN represent combinations of semantic types in the UMLS SN. Such a “combination semantic type” is called Intersection Semantic Type (IST). Many ISTs are assigned to very few concepts. Moreover, when reviewing those concepts, many semantic type assignment inconsistencies were found. After correcting those inconsistencies many ISTs, among them some that contradicted UMLS rules, disappeared, which made the RSN smaller. Objective The authors performed a longitudinal study with the goal of reducing the size of the RSN to become compact. This goal was achieved by correcting inconsistencies and errors in the IST assignments in the UMLS, which additionally helped identify and correct ambiguities, inconsistencies, and errors in source terminologies widely used in the realm of public health. Methods In this paper, we discuss the process and steps employed in this longitudinal study and the intermediate results for different stages. The sculpting process includes removing redundant semantic type assignments, expanding semantic type assignments, and removing illegitimate ISTs by auditing ISTs of small extents. However, the emphasis of this paper is not on the auditing methodologies employed during the process, since they were introduced in earlier publications, but on the strategy of employing them in order to transform the RSN into a compact network. For this paper we also performed a comprehensive audit of 168 “small ISTs” in the 2013AA version of the UMLS to finalize the longitudinal study. Results Over the years it was found that the

Semantic preview benefit during reading.

PubMed

Hohenstein, Sven; Kliegl, Reinhold

2014-01-01

Word features in parafoveal vision influence eye movements during reading. The question of whether readers extract semantic information from parafoveal words was studied in 3 experiments by using a gaze-contingent display change technique. Subjects read German sentences containing 1 of several preview words that were replaced by a target word during the saccade to the preview (boundary paradigm). In the 1st experiment the preview word was semantically related or unrelated to the target. Fixation durations on the target were shorter for semantically related than unrelated previews, consistent with a semantic preview benefit. In the 2nd experiment, half the sentences were presented following the rules of German spelling (i.e., previews and targets were printed with an initial capital letter), and the other half were presented completely in lowercase. A semantic preview benefit was obtained under both conditions. In the 3rd experiment, we introduced 2 further preview conditions, an identical word and a pronounceable nonword, while also manipulating the text contrast. Whereas the contrast had negligible effects, fixation durations on the target were reliably different for all 4 types of preview. Semantic preview benefits were greater for pretarget fixations closer to the boundary (large preview space) and, although not as consistently, for long pretarget fixation durations (long preview time). The results constrain theoretical proposals about eye movement control in reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Semantic Priming Effects in Normal versus Poor Readers

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Assink, Egbert M. H.; Van Bergen, Floor; Van Teeseling, Heleen; Knuijt, Paul P. N. A.

2004-01-01

The authors studied sensitivity to semantic priming, as distinct from semantic judgment, in poor readers. Association strength (high vs. low semantic association) was manipulated factorially with semantic association type (categoric vs. thematic association). Participants were 11-year-old poor readers (n = 15) who were matched with a group of…

Ontology Reuse in Geoscience Semantic Applications

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mayernik, M. S.; Gross, M. B.; Daniels, M. D.; Rowan, L. R.; Stott, D.; Maull, K. E.; Khan, H.; Corson-Rikert, J.

2015-12-01

The tension between local ontology development and wider ontology connections is fundamental to the Semantic web. It is often unclear, however, what the key decision points should be for new semantic web applications in deciding when to reuse existing ontologies and when to develop original ontologies. In addition, with the growth of semantic web ontologies and applications, new semantic web applications can struggle to efficiently and effectively identify and select ontologies to reuse. This presentation will describe the ontology comparison, selection, and consolidation effort within the EarthCollab project. UCAR, Cornell University, and UNAVCO are collaborating on the EarthCollab project to use semantic web technologies to enable the discovery of the research output from a diverse array of projects. The EarthCollab project is using the VIVO Semantic web software suite to increase discoverability of research information and data related to the following two geoscience-based communities: (1) the Bering Sea Project, an interdisciplinary field program whose data archive is hosted by NCAR's Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL), and (2) diverse research projects informed by geodesy through the UNAVCO geodetic facility and consortium. This presentation will outline of EarthCollab use cases, and provide an overview of key ontologies being used, including the VIVO-Integrated Semantic Framework (VIVO-ISF), Global Change Information System (GCIS), and Data Catalog (DCAT) ontologies. We will discuss issues related to bringing these ontologies together to provide a robust ontological structure to support the EarthCollab use cases. It is rare that a single pre-existing ontology meets all of a new application's needs. New projects need to stitch ontologies together in ways that fit into the broader semantic web ecosystem.

Anchoring effects in the judgment of confidence: semantic or numeric priming?

PubMed

Carroll, Steven R; Petrusic, William M; Leth-Steensen, Craig

2009-02-01

Over the last decade, researchers have debated whether anchoring effects are the result of semantic or numeric priming. The present study tested both hypotheses. In four experiments involving a sensory detection task, participants first made a relative confidence judgment by deciding whether they were more or less confident than an anchor value in the correctness of their decision. Subsequently, they expressed an absolute level of confidence. In two of these experiments, the relative confidence anchor values represented the midpoints between the absolute confidence scale values, which were either explicitly numeric or semantic, nonnumeric representations of magnitude. In two other experiments, the anchor values were drawn from a scale modally different from that used to express the absolute confidence (i.e., nonnumeric and numeric, respectively, or vice versa). Regardless of the nature of the anchors, the mean confidence ratings revealed anchoring effects only when the relative and absolute confidence values were drawn from identical scales. Together, the results of these four experiments limit the conditions under which both numeric and semantic priming would be expected to lead to anchoring effects.

Philosophy of Language. Course Notes for a Tutorial on Computational Semantics.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Wilks, Yorick

This course was part of a tutorial focusing on the state of computational semantics, i.e., the state of work on natural language within the artificial intelligence (AI) paradigm. The discussion in the course centered on the philosophers Richard Montague and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The course was divided into three sections: (1)…

Semantic Clustering of Search Engine Results

PubMed Central

Soliman, Sara Saad; El-Sayed, Maged F.; Hassan, Yasser F.

2015-01-01

This paper presents a novel approach for search engine results clustering that relies on the semantics of the retrieved documents rather than the terms in those documents. The proposed approach takes into consideration both lexical and semantics similarities among documents and applies activation spreading technique in order to generate semantically meaningful clusters. This approach allows documents that are semantically similar to be clustered together rather than clustering documents based on similar terms. A prototype is implemented and several experiments are conducted to test the prospered solution. The result of the experiment confirmed that the proposed solution achieves remarkable results in terms of precision. PMID:26933673

Web Video Event Recognition by Semantic Analysis From Ubiquitous Documents.

PubMed

Yu, Litao; Yang, Yang; Huang, Zi; Wang, Peng; Song, Jingkuan; Shen, Heng Tao

2016-12-01

In recent years, the task of event recognition from videos has attracted increasing interest in multimedia area. While most of the existing research was mainly focused on exploring visual cues to handle relatively small-granular events, it is difficult to directly analyze video content without any prior knowledge. Therefore, synthesizing both the visual and semantic analysis is a natural way for video event understanding. In this paper, we study the problem of Web video event recognition, where Web videos often describe large-granular events and carry limited textual information. Key challenges include how to accurately represent event semantics from incomplete textual information and how to effectively explore the correlation between visual and textual cues for video event understanding. We propose a novel framework to perform complex event recognition from Web videos. In order to compensate the insufficient expressive power of visual cues, we construct an event knowledge base by deeply mining semantic information from ubiquitous Web documents. This event knowledge base is capable of describing each event with comprehensive semantics. By utilizing this base, the textual cues for a video can be significantly enriched. Furthermore, we introduce a two-view adaptive regression model, which explores the intrinsic correlation between the visual and textual cues of the videos to learn reliable classifiers. Extensive experiments on two real-world video data sets show the effectiveness of our proposed framework and prove that the event knowledge base indeed helps improve the performance of Web video event recognition.

Phonological and Semantic Cues to Learning from Word-Types

PubMed Central

Richtsmeier, Peter

2017-01-01

Word-types represent the primary form of data for many models of phonological learning, and they often predict performance in psycholinguistic tasks. Word-types are often tacitly defined as phonologically unique words. Yet, an explicit test of this definition is lacking, and natural language patterning suggests that word meaning could also act as a cue to word-type status. This possibility was tested in a statistical phonotactic learning experiment in which phonological and semantic properties of word-types varied. During familiarization, the learning targets—word-medial consonant sequences—were instantiated either by four related word-types or by just one word-type (the experimental frequency factor). The expectation was that more word-types would lead participants to generalize the target sequences. Regarding semantic cues, related word-types were either associated with different referents or all with a single referent. Regarding phonological cues, related word-types differed from each other by one, two, or more phonemes. At test, participants rated novel wordforms for their similarity to the familiarization words. When participants heard four related word-types, they gave higher ratings to test words with the same consonant sequences, irrespective of the phonological and semantic manipulations. The results support the existing phonological definition of word-types. PMID:29187914

A Supramodal Neural Network for Speech and Gesture Semantics: An fMRI Study

PubMed Central

Weis, Susanne; Kircher, Tilo

2012-01-01

In a natural setting, speech is often accompanied by gestures. As language, speech-accompanying iconic gestures to some extent convey semantic information. However, if comprehension of the information contained in both the auditory and visual modality depends on same or different brain-networks is quite unknown. In this fMRI study, we aimed at identifying the cortical areas engaged in supramodal processing of semantic information. BOLD changes were recorded in 18 healthy right-handed male subjects watching video clips showing an actor who either performed speech (S, acoustic) or gestures (G, visual) in more (+) or less (−) meaningful varieties. In the experimental conditions familiar speech or isolated iconic gestures were presented; during the visual control condition the volunteers watched meaningless gestures (G−), while during the acoustic control condition a foreign language was presented (S−). The conjunction of the visual and acoustic semantic processing revealed activations extending from the left inferior frontal gyrus to the precentral gyrus, and included bilateral posterior temporal regions. We conclude that proclaiming this frontotemporal network the brain's core language system is to take too narrow a view. Our results rather indicate that these regions constitute a supramodal semantic processing network. PMID:23226488

Verb Production during Action Naming in Semantic Dementia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Meligne, D.; Fossard, M.; Belliard, S.; Moreaud, O.; Duvignau, K.; Demonet, J.-F.

2011-01-01

In contrast with widely documented deficits of semantic knowledge relating to object concepts and the corresponding nouns in semantic dementia (SD), little is known about action semantics and verb production in SD. The degradation of action semantic knowledge was studied in 5 patients with SD compared with 17 matched control participants in an…

The Role of Semantic Diversity in Word Recognition across Aging and Bilingualism

PubMed Central

Johns, Brendan T.; Sheppard, Christine L.; Jones, Michael N.; Taler, Vanessa

2016-01-01

Frequency effects are pervasive in studies of language, with higher frequency words being recognized faster than lower frequency words. However, the exact nature of frequency effects has recently been questioned, with some studies finding that contextual information provides a better fit to lexical decision and naming data than word frequency (Adelman et al., 2006). Recent work has cemented the importance of these results by demonstrating that a measure of the semantic diversity of the contexts that a word occurs in provides a powerful measure to account for variability in word recognition latency (Johns et al., 2012, 2015; Jones et al., 2012). The goal of the current study is to extend this measure to examine bilingualism and aging, where multiple theories use frequency of occurrence of linguistic constructs as central to accounting for empirical results (Gollan et al., 2008; Ramscar et al., 2014). A lexical decision experiment was conducted with four groups of subjects: younger and older monolinguals and bilinguals. Consistent with past results, a semantic diversity variable accounted for the greatest amount of variance in the latency data. In addition, the pattern of fits of semantic diversity across multiple corpora suggests that bilinguals and older adults are more sensitive to semantic diversity information than younger monolinguals. PMID:27458392

Anterior temporal lobes mediate semantic representation: Mimicking semantic dementia by using rTMS in normal participants

PubMed Central

Pobric, Gorana; Jefferies, Elizabeth; Ralph, Matthew A. Lambon

2007-01-01

Studies of semantic dementia and PET neuroimaging investigations suggest that the anterior temporal lobes (ATL) are a critical substrate for semantic representation. In stark contrast, classical neurological models of comprehension do not include ATL, and likewise functional MRI studies often fail to show activations in the ATL, reinforcing the classical view. Using a novel application of low-frequency, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over the ATL, we demonstrate that the behavioral pattern of semantic dementia can be mirrored in neurologically intact participants: Specifically, we show that temporary disruption to neural processing in the ATL produces a selective semantic impairment leading to significant slowing in both picture naming and word comprehension but not to other equally demanding, nonsemantic cognitive tasks. PMID:18056637

How semantic category modulates preschool children's visual memory.

PubMed

Giganti, Fiorenza; Viggiano, Maria Pia

2015-01-01

The dynamic interplay between perception and memory has been explored in preschool children by presenting filtered stimuli regarding animals and artifacts. The identification of filtered images was markedly influenced by both prior exposure and the semantic nature of the stimuli. The identification of animals required less physical information than artifacts did. Our results corroborate the notion that the human attention system evolves to reliably develop definite category-specific selection criteria by which living entities are monitored in different ways.

The differential contributions of pFC and temporo-parietal cortex to multimodal semantic control: exploring refractory effects in semantic aphasia.

PubMed

Gardner, Hannah E; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Dodds, Naomi; Jones, Theresa; Ehsan, Sheeba; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2012-04-01

Aphasic patients with multimodal semantic impairment following pFC or temporo-parietal (TP) cortex damage (semantic aphasia [SA]) have deficits characterized by poor control of semantic activation/retrieval, as opposed to loss of semantic knowledge per se. In line with this, SA patients show "refractory effects"; that is, declining accuracy in cyclical word-picture matching tasks when semantically related sets are presented rapidly and repeatedly. This is argued to follow a build-up of competition between targets and distractors. However, the link between poor semantic control and refractory effects is still controversial for two reasons. (1) Some theories propose that refractory effects are specific to verbal or auditory tasks, yet SA patients show poor control over semantic processing in both word and picture semantic tasks. (2) SA can result from lesions to either the left pFC or TP cortex, yet previous work suggests that refractory effects are specifically linked to the left inferior frontal cortex. For the first time, verbal, visual, and nonverbal auditory refractory effects were explored in nine SA patients who had pFC (pFC+) or TP cortex (TP-only) lesions. In all modalities, patient accuracy declined significantly over repetitions. This refractory effect at the group level was driven by pFC+ patients and was not shown by individuals with TP-only lesions. These findings support the theory that SA patients have reduced control over multimodal semantic retrieval and, additionally, suggest there may be functional specialization within the posterior versus pFC elements of the semantic control network.

Exploiting semantic linkages among multiple sources for semantic information retrieval

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Li, JianQiang; Yang, Ji-Jiang; Liu, Chunchen; Zhao, Yu; Liu, Bo; Shi, Yuliang

2014-07-01

The vision of the Semantic Web is to build a global Web of machine-readable data to be consumed by intelligent applications. As the first step to make this vision come true, the initiative of linked open data has fostered many novel applications aimed at improving data accessibility in the public Web. Comparably, the enterprise environment is so different from the public Web that most potentially usable business information originates in an unstructured form (typically in free text), which poses a challenge for the adoption of semantic technologies in the enterprise environment. Considering that the business information in a company is highly specific and centred around a set of commonly used concepts, this paper describes a pilot study to migrate the concept of linked data into the development of a domain-specific application, i.e. the vehicle repair support system. The set of commonly used concepts, including the part name of a car and the phenomenon term on the car repairing, are employed to build the linkage between data and documents distributed among different sources, leading to the fusion of documents and data across source boundaries. Then, we describe the approaches of semantic information retrieval to consume these linkages for value creation for companies. The experiments on two real-world data sets show that the proposed approaches outperform the best baseline 6.3-10.8% and 6.4-11.1% in terms of top five and top 10 precisions, respectively. We believe that our pilot study can serve as an important reference for the development of similar semantic applications in an enterprise environment.

Lateralized semantic priming: modulation by levodopa, semantic distance, and participants’ magical beliefs

PubMed Central

Mohr, Christine; Landis, Theodor; Brugger, Peter

2006-01-01

We tested levodopa effects on lateralized direct and indirect semantic priming in 40 healthy right-handed men in a placebo-controlled, double-blind procedure. Crucially, priming was also analyzed as a function of participants’ positive schizotypal features (magical ideation, MI), previously found to be associated with an enhanced semantic spreading activation (SSA) within the right hemisphere. Across both priming conditions, we observed increased semantic priming in the levodopa group 1) specifically after right visual field stimulations and 2) in high MI scorers. In both instances, increased semantic priming emerged from exceedingly long reaction times to unrelated targets reflecting 1) the left hemisphere’s specialization for closely related concepts and 2) an opposite association between MI and SSA in the levodopa as compared with the placebo group. As a final finding, low MI scorers under levodopa performed like high MI scorers under placebo. Our findings speak against a general dopaminergic focusing of SSA, but one that respects each hemisphere’s specialization. They also suggest that individuals’ schizotypal features are important determinants of dopamine-induced changes in hemispheric functioning. We note that, in psychiatric patients, dopamine antagonists reportedly restore unusual lateralization. We discuss this dissociation between schizotypy and schizophrenia as supporting previous notions of protective brain mechanisms operating in the healthy “psychosis-prone” brain. PMID:19412448

Semantic processing during morphological priming: an ERP study.

PubMed

Beyersmann, Elisabeth; Iakimova, Galina; Ziegler, Johannes C; Colé, Pascale

2014-09-04

Previous research has yielded conflicting results regarding the onset of semantic processing during morphological priming. The present study was designed to further explore the time-course of morphological processing using event-related potentials (ERPs). We conducted a primed lexical decision study comparing a morphological (LAVAGE - laver [washing - wash]), a semantic (LINGE - laver [laundry - wash]), an orthographic (LAVANDE - laver [lavender - wash]), and an unrelated control condition (HOSPICE - laver [nursing home - wash]), using the same targets across the four priming conditions. The behavioral data showed significant effects of morphological and semantic priming, with the magnitude of morphological priming being significantly larger than the magnitude of semantic priming. The ERP data revealed significant morphological but no semantic priming at 100-250 ms. Furthermore, a reduction of the N400 amplitude in the morphological condition compared to the semantic and orthographic condition demonstrates that the morphological priming effect was not entirely due to the semantic or orthographic overlap between the prime and the target. The present data reflect an early process of semantically blind morphological decomposition, and a later process of morpho-semantic decomposition, which we discuss in the context of recent morphological processing theories. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Semantic-gap-oriented active learning for multilabel image annotation.

PubMed

Tang, Jinhui; Zha, Zheng-Jun; Tao, Dacheng; Chua, Tat-Seng

2012-04-01

User interaction is an effective way to handle the semantic gap problem in image annotation. To minimize user effort in the interactions, many active learning methods were proposed. These methods treat the semantic concepts individually or correlatively. However, they still neglect the key motivation of user feedback: to tackle the semantic gap. The size of the semantic gap of each concept is an important factor that affects the performance of user feedback. User should pay more efforts to the concepts with large semantic gaps, and vice versa. In this paper, we propose a semantic-gap-oriented active learning method, which incorporates the semantic gap measure into the information-minimization-based sample selection strategy. The basic learning model used in the active learning framework is an extended multilabel version of the sparse-graph-based semisupervised learning method that incorporates the semantic correlation. Extensive experiments conducted on two benchmark image data sets demonstrated the importance of bringing the semantic gap measure into the active learning process.

Semantic Weight and Verb Retrieval in Aphasia

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Barde, Laura H. F.; Schwartz, Myrna F.; Boronat, Consuelo B.

2006-01-01

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia may have difficulty with verb production in comparison to nouns. Additionally, they may have greater difficulty producing verbs that have fewer semantic components (i.e., are semantically "light") compared to verbs that have greater semantic weight. A connectionist verb-production model proposed by Gordon and…

Workspaces in the Semantic Web

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Wolfe, Shawn R.; Keller, RIchard M.

2005-01-01

Due to the recency and relatively limited adoption of Semantic Web technologies. practical issues related to technology scaling have received less attention than foundational issues. Nonetheless, these issues must be addressed if the Semantic Web is to realize its full potential. In particular, we concentrate on the lack of scoping methods that reduce the size of semantic information spaces so they are more efficient to work with and more relevant to an agent's needs. We provide some intuition to motivate the need for such reduced information spaces, called workspaces, give a formal definition, and suggest possible methods of deriving them.

Semantic e-Learning: Next Generation of e-Learning?

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Konstantinos, Markellos; Penelope, Markellou; Giannis, Koutsonikos; Aglaia, Liopa-Tsakalidi

Semantic e-learning aspires to be the next generation of e-learning, since the understanding of learning materials and knowledge semantics allows their advanced representation, manipulation, sharing, exchange and reuse and ultimately promote efficient online experiences for users. In this context, the paper firstly explores some fundamental Semantic Web technologies and then discusses current and potential applications of these technologies in e-learning domain, namely, Semantic portals, Semantic search, personalization, recommendation systems, social software and Web 2.0 tools. Finally, it highlights future research directions and open issues of the field.

Neurology of anomia in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia.

PubMed

Mesulam, Marsel; Rogalski, Emily; Wieneke, Christina; Cobia, Derin; Rademaker, Alfred; Thompson, Cynthia; Weintraub, Sandra

2009-09-01

The semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is characterized by the combination of word comprehension deficits, fluent aphasia and a particularly severe anomia. In this study, two novel tasks were used to explore the factors contributing to the anomia. The single most common factor was a blurring of distinctions among members of a semantic category, leading to errors of overgeneralization in word-object matching tasks as well as in word definitions and object descriptions. This factor was more pronounced for natural kinds than artifacts. In patients with the more severe anomias, conceptual maps were more extensively disrupted so that inter-category distinctions were as impaired as intra-category distinctions. Many objects that could not be named aloud could be matched to the correct word in patients with mild but not severe anomia, reflecting a gradual intensification of the semantic factor as the naming disorder becomes more severe. Accurate object descriptions were more frequent than accurate word definitions and all patients experienced prominent word comprehension deficits that interfered with everyday activities but no consequential impairment of object usage or face recognition. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed three characteristics: greater atrophy of the left hemisphere; atrophy of anterior components of the perisylvian language network in the superior and middle temporal gyri; and atrophy of anterior components of the face and object recognition network in the inferior and medial temporal lobes. The left sided asymmetry and perisylvian extension of the atrophy explains the more profound impairment of word than object usage and provides the anatomical basis for distinguishing the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia from the partially overlapping group of patients that fulfil the widely accepted diagnostic criteria for semantic dementia.

Explaining Semantic Short-Term Memory Deficits: Evidence for the Critical Role of Semantic Control

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hoffman, Paul; Jefferies, Elizabeth; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A.

2011-01-01

Patients with apparently selective short-term memory (STM) deficits for semantic information have played an important role in developing multi-store theories of STM and challenge the idea that verbal STM is supported by maintaining activation in the language system. We propose that semantic STM deficits are not as selective as previously thought…

A Novel Approach to Semantic and Coreference Annotation at LLNL

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Firpo, M

A case is made for the importance of high quality semantic and coreference annotation. The challenges of providing such annotation are described. Asperger's Syndrome is introduced, and the connections are drawn between the needs of text annotation and the abilities of persons with Asperger's Syndrome to meet those needs. Finally, a pilot program is recommended wherein semantic annotation is performed by people with Asperger's Syndrome. The primary points embodied in this paper are as follows: (1) Document annotation is essential to the Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL); (2) LLNL does not currently have amore » system in place to meet its need for text annotation; (3) Text annotation is challenging for a variety of reasons, many related to its very rote nature; (4) Persons with Asperger's Syndrome are particularly skilled at rote verbal tasks, and behavioral experts agree that they would excel at text annotation; and (6) A pilot study is recommend in which two to three people with Asperger's Syndrome annotate documents and then the quality and throughput of their work is evaluated relative to that of their neuro-typical peers.« less

A Tri-network Model of Human Semantic Processing

PubMed Central

Xu, Yangwen; He, Yong; Bi, Yanchao

2017-01-01

Humans process the meaning of the world via both verbal and nonverbal modalities. It has been established that widely distributed cortical regions are involved in semantic processing, yet the global wiring pattern of this brain system has not been considered in the current neurocognitive semantic models. We review evidence from the brain-network perspective, which shows that the semantic system is topologically segregated into three brain modules. Revisiting previous region-based evidence in light of these new network findings, we postulate that these three modules support multimodal experiential representation, language-supported representation, and semantic control. A tri-network neurocognitive model of semantic processing is proposed, which generates new hypotheses regarding the network basis of different types of semantic processes. PMID:28955266

Semantic and Visual Memory After Alcohol Abuse.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Donat, Dennis C.

1986-01-01

Compared the relative performance of 40 patients with a history of alcohol abuse on tasks of short-term semantic and visual memory. Performance on the visual memory tasks was impaired significantly relative to the semantic memory task in a within-subjects analysis of variance. Semantic memory was unimpaired. (Author/ABB)

Collaborative E-Learning Using Semantic Course Blog

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lu, Lai-Chen; Yeh, Ching-Long

2008-01-01

Collaborative e-learning delivers many enhancements to e-learning technology; it enables students to collaborate with each other and improves their learning efficiency. Semantic blog combines semantic Web and blog technology that users can import, export, view, navigate, and query the blog. We developed a semantic course blog for collaborative…

Semantics of color in chromatism

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Serov, Nikolai V.

2002-06-01

The aim of this investigation is to describe the semantics of color in chromatism (from the ancient Greek triune notion of <>: (1) color as ideal (Id- plan), psychic; (2) tint as physical, verbal; material (M- plan), physiological, syntonic (S-plan), and (3) emotion as their informative-energetic correlation). Being a new field of science, chromatism links humanitarian and natural subjects by means of interdiscipline investigation of a real (f-m) man living in a real (color) surrounding environment. According to the definition for <>, color may be considered to be the most universal notion, permitting to assume the unity of both a man and an environment. Due to this assumption, we may give models of human intellect.

Grasping the invisible: semantic processing of abstract words.

PubMed

Zdrazilova, Lenka; Pexman, Penny M

2013-12-01

The problem of how abstract word meanings are represented has been a challenging one. In the present study, we extended the semantic richness approach (e.g., Yap, Tan, Pexman, & Hargreaves in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18:742-750, 2011) to abstract words, examining the effects of six semantic richness variables on lexical-semantic processing for 207 abstract nouns. The candidate richness dimensions were context availability (CA), sensory experience rating (SER), valence, arousal, semantic neighborhood (SN), and number of associates (NoA). The behavioral tasks were lexical decision (LDT) and semantic categorization (SCT). Our results showed that the semantic richness variables were significantly related to both LDT and SCT latencies, even after lexical and orthographic factors were controlled. The patterns of richness effects varied across tasks, with CA effects in the LDT, and SER and valence effects in the SCT. These results provide new insight into how abstract meanings may be grounded, and are consistent with a dynamic, multidimensional framework for semantic processing.

Before the N400: effects of lexical-semantic violations in visual cortex.

PubMed

Dikker, Suzanne; Pylkkanen, Liina

2011-07-01

There exists an increasing body of research demonstrating that language processing is aided by context-based predictions. Recent findings suggest that the brain generates estimates about the likely physical appearance of upcoming words based on syntactic predictions: words that do not physically look like the expected syntactic category show increased amplitudes in the visual M100 component, the first salient MEG response to visual stimulation. This research asks whether violations of predictions based on lexical-semantic information might similarly generate early visual effects. In a picture-noun matching task, we found early visual effects for words that did not accurately describe the preceding pictures. These results demonstrate that, just like syntactic predictions, lexical-semantic predictions can affect early visual processing around ∼100ms, suggesting that the M100 response is not exclusively tuned to recognizing visual features relevant to syntactic category analysis. Rather, the brain might generate predictions about upcoming visual input whenever it can. However, visual effects of lexical-semantic violations only occurred when a single lexical item could be predicted. We argue that this may be due to the fact that in natural language processing, there is typically no straightforward mapping between lexical-semantic fields (e.g., flowers) and visual or auditory forms (e.g., tulip, rose, magnolia). For syntactic categories, in contrast, certain form features do reliably correlate with category membership. This difference may, in part, explain why certain syntactic effects typically occur much earlier than lexical-semantic effects. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

What's Unique about Unique Entities? An fMRI Investigation of the Semantics of Famous Faces and Landmarks

PubMed Central

Olson, Ingrid R.

2012-01-01

Famous people and artifacts are referred to as “unique entities” (UEs) due to the unique nature of the knowledge we have about them. Past imaging and lesion experiments have indicated that the anterior temporal lobes (ATLs) as having a special role in the processing of UEs. It has remained unclear which attributes of UEs were responsible for the observed effects in imaging experiments. In this study, we investigated what factors of UEs influence brain activity. In a training paradigm, we systematically varied the uniqueness of semantic associations, the presence/absence of a proper name, and the number of semantic associations to determine factors modulating activity in regions subserving the processing of UEs. We found that a conjunction of unique semantic information and proper names modulated activity within a section of the left ATL. Overall, the processing of UEs involved a wider left-hemispheric cortical network. Within these regions, brain activity was significantly affected by the unique semantic attributes especially in the presence of a proper name, but we could not find evidence for an effect of the number of semantic associations. Findings are discussed in regard to current models of ATL function, the neurophysiology of semantics, and social cognitive processing. PMID:22021913

Towards semantic interoperability for electronic health records.

PubMed

Garde, Sebastian; Knaup, Petra; Hovenga, Evelyn; Heard, Sam

2007-01-01

In the field of open electronic health records (EHRs), openEHR as an archetype-based approach is being increasingly recognised. It is the objective of this paper to shortly describe this approach, and to analyse how openEHR archetypes impact on health professionals and semantic interoperability. Analysis of current approaches to EHR systems, terminology and standards developments. In addition to literature reviews, we organised face-to-face and additional telephone interviews and tele-conferences with members of relevant organisations and committees. The openEHR archetypes approach enables syntactic interoperability and semantic interpretability -- both important prerequisites for semantic interoperability. Archetypes enable the formal definition of clinical content by clinicians. To enable comprehensive semantic interoperability, the development and maintenance of archetypes needs to be coordinated internationally and across health professions. Domain knowledge governance comprises a set of processes that enable the creation, development, organisation, sharing, dissemination, use and continuous maintenance of archetypes. It needs to be supported by information technology. To enable EHRs, semantic interoperability is essential. The openEHR archetypes approach enables syntactic interoperability and semantic interpretability. However, without coordinated archetype development and maintenance, 'rank growth' of archetypes would jeopardize semantic interoperability. We therefore believe that openEHR archetypes and domain knowledge governance together create the knowledge environment required to adopt EHRs.

Naming unique entities in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia and Alzheimer's disease: Towards a better understanding of the semantic impairment.

PubMed

Montembeault, M; Brambati, S M; Joubert, S; Boukadi, M; Chapleau, M; Laforce, R Jr; Wilson, M A; Macoir, J; Rouleau, I

2017-01-27

While the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA) is characterized by a predominant semantic memory impairment, episodic memory impairments are the clinical hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, AD patients also present with semantic deficits, which are more severe for semantically unique entities (e.g. a famous person) than for common concepts (e.g. a beaver). Previous studies in these patient populations have largely focused on famous-person naming. Therefore, we aimed to evaluate if these impairments also extend to other semantically unique entities such as famous places and famous logos. In this study, 13 AD patients, 9 svPPA patients, and 12 cognitively unimpaired elderly subjects (CTRL) were tested with a picture-naming test of non-unique entities (Boston Naming Test) and three experimental tests of semantically unique entities assessing naming of famous persons, places, and logos. Both clinical groups were overall more impaired at naming semantically unique entities than non-unique entities. Naming impairments in AD and svPPA extended to the other types of semantically unique entities, since a CTRL>AD>svPPA pattern was found on the performance of all naming tests. Naming famous places and famous persons appeared to be most impaired in svPPA, and both specific and general semantic knowledge for these entities were affected in these patients. Although AD patients were most significantly impaired on famous-person naming, only their specific semantic knowledge was impaired, while general knowledge was preserved. Post-hoc neuroimaging analyses also showed that famous-person naming impairments in AD correlated with atrophy in the temporo-parietal junction, a region functionally associated with lexical access. In line with previous studies, svPPA patients' impairment in both naming and semantic knowledge suggest a more profound semantic impairment, while naming impairments in AD may arise to a greater extent from impaired lexical access

Semantic Processing of Mathematical Gestures

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lim, Vanessa K.; Wilson, Anna J.; Hamm, Jeff P.; Phillips, Nicola; Iwabuchi, Sarina J.; Corballis, Michael C.; Arzarello, Ferdinando; Thomas, Michael O. J.

2009-01-01

Objective: To examine whether or not university mathematics students semantically process gestures depicting mathematical functions (mathematical gestures) similarly to the way they process action gestures and sentences. Semantic processing was indexed by the N400 effect. Results: The N400 effect elicited by words primed with mathematical gestures…

Centrality-based Selection of Semantic Resources for Geosciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cerba, Otakar; Jedlicka, Karel

2017-04-01

Semantical questions intervene almost in all disciplines dealing with geographic data and information, because relevant semantics is crucial for any way of communication and interaction among humans as well as among machines. But the existence of such a large number of different semantic resources (such as various thesauri, controlled vocabularies, knowledge bases or ontologies) makes the process of semantics implementation much more difficult and complicates the use of the advantages of semantics. This is because in many cases users are not able to find the most suitable resource for their purposes. The research presented in this paper introduces a methodology consisting of an analysis of identical relations in Linked Data space, which covers a majority of semantic resources, to find a suitable resource of semantic information. Identical links interconnect representations of an object or a concept in various semantic resources. Therefore this type of relations is considered to be crucial from the view of Linked Data, because these links provide new additional information, including various views on one concept based on different cultural or regional aspects (so-called social role of Linked Data). For these reasons it is possible to declare that one reasonable criterion for feasible semantic resources for almost all domains, including geosciences, is their position in a network of interconnected semantic resources and level of linking to other knowledge bases and similar products. The presented methodology is based on searching of mutual connections between various instances of one concept using "follow your nose" approach. The extracted data on interconnections between semantic resources are arranged to directed graphs and processed by various metrics patterned on centrality computing (degree, closeness or betweenness centrality). Semantic resources recommended by the research could be used for providing semantically described keywords for metadata records or as

A meta-analysis of fMRI studies on Chinese orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing.

PubMed

Wu, Chiao-Yi; Ho, Moon-Ho Ringo; Chen, Shen-Hsing Annabel

2012-10-15

A growing body of neuroimaging evidence has shown that Chinese character processing recruits differential activation from alphabetic languages due to its unique linguistic features. As more investigations on Chinese character processing have recently become available, we applied a meta-analytic approach to summarize previous findings and examined the neural networks for orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing of Chinese characters independently. The activation likelihood estimation (ALE) method was used to analyze eight studies in the orthographic task category, eleven in the phonological and fifteen in the semantic task categories. Converging activation among three language-processing components was found in the left middle frontal gyrus, the left superior parietal lobule and the left mid-fusiform gyrus, suggesting a common sub-network underlying the character recognition process regardless of the task nature. With increasing task demands, the left inferior parietal lobule and the right superior temporal gyrus were specialized for phonological processing, while the left middle temporal gyrus was involved in semantic processing. Functional dissociation was identified in the left inferior frontal gyrus, with the posterior dorsal part for phonological processing and the anterior ventral part for semantic processing. Moreover, bilateral involvement of the ventral occipito-temporal regions was found for both phonological and semantic processing. The results provide better understanding of the neural networks underlying Chinese orthographic, phonological, and semantic processing, and consolidate the findings of additional recruitment of the left middle frontal gyrus and the right fusiform gyrus for Chinese character processing as compared with the universal language network that has been based on alphabetic languages. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Metasemantics: On the Limits of Semantic Theory

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Parent, T.

2009-01-01

METASEMANTICS is a wake-up call for semantic theory: It reveals that some semantic questions have no adequate answer. (This is meant to be the "epistemic" point that certain semantic questions cannot be "settled"--not a metaphysical point about whether there is a fact-of-the-matter.) METASEMANTICS thus checks our default "optimism" that any…

Vowelling and semantic priming effects in Arabic.

PubMed

Mountaj, Nadia; El Yagoubi, Radouane; Himmi, Majid; Lakhdar Ghazal, Faouzi; Besson, Mireille; Boudelaa, Sami

2015-01-01

In the present experiment we used a semantic judgment task with Arabic words to determine whether semantic priming effects are found in the Arabic language. Moreover, we took advantage of the specificity of the Arabic orthographic system, which is characterized by a shallow (i.e., vowelled words) and a deep orthography (i.e., unvowelled words), to examine the relationship between orthographic and semantic processing. Results showed faster Reaction Times (RTs) for semantically related than unrelated words with no difference between vowelled and unvowelled words. By contrast, Event Related Potentials (ERPs) revealed larger N1 and N2 components to vowelled words than unvowelled words suggesting that visual-orthographic complexity taxes the early word processing stages. Moreover, semantically unrelated Arabic words elicited larger N400 components than related words thereby demonstrating N400 effects in Arabic. Finally, the Arabic N400 effect was not influenced by orthographic depth. The implications of these results for understanding the processing of orthographic, semantic, and morphological structures in Modern Standard Arabic are discussed. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Semantic associative relations and conceptual processing.

PubMed

Di Giacomo, Dina; De Federicis, Lucia Serenella; Pistelli, Manuela; Fiorenzi, Daniela; Passafiume, Domenico

2012-02-01

We analysed the organisation of semantic network using associative mechanisms between different types of information and studied the progression of the use of these associative relations during development. We aimed to verify the linkage of concepts with the use of semantic associative relations. The goal of this study was to analyse the cognitive ability to use associative relations between various items when describing old and/or new concepts. We examined the performance of 100 subjects between the ages of 4 and 7 years on an experimental task using five associative relations based on verbal encoding. The results showed that children are able to use the five semantic associative relations at age 4, but performance with each of the different associative relations improves at different times during development. Functional and part/whole relations develop at an early age, whereas the superordinate relations develop later. Our study clarified the characteristics of the progression of semantic associations during development as well as the roles that associative relations play in the structure and improvement of the semantic store.

Distinct behavioural profiles in frontotemporal dementia and semantic dementia

PubMed Central

Snowden, J; Bathgate, D; Varma, A; Blackshaw, A; Gibbons, Z; Neary, D

2001-01-01

OBJECTIVE—To test predictions that frontotemporal dementia and semantic dementia give rise to distinct patterns of behavioural change.
METHODS—An informant based semistructured behavioural interview, covering the domains of basic and social emotions, social and personal behaviour, sensory behaviour, eating and oral behaviour, repetitive behaviours, rituals, and compulsions, was administered to carers of 41 patients with semantic dementia and with apathetic (FTD-A) and disinhibited (FTD-D) forms of frontotemporal dementia.
RESULTS—Consistent with prediction, emotional changes differentiated FTD from semantic dementia. Whereas lack of emotional response was pervasive in FTD, it was more selective in semantic dementia, affecting particularly the capacity to show fear. Social avoidance occurred more often in FTD and social seeking in semantic dementia. Patients with FTD showed reduced response to pain, whereas patients with semantic dementia more often showed exaggerated reactions to sensory stimuli. Gluttony and indiscriminate eating were characteristic of FTD, whereas patients with semantic dementia were more likely to exhibit food fads. Hyperorality, involving inedible objects, was unrelated to gluttony, indicating different underlying mechanisms. Repetitive behaviours were common in both FTD and semantic dementia, but had a more compulsive quality in semantic dementia. Behavioural differences were greater between semantic dementia and FTD-A than FTD-D. A logistic regression analysis indicated that emotional and repetitive, compulsive behaviours discriminated FTD from semantic dementia with 97% accuracy.
CONCLUSION—The findings confirm predictions regarding behavioural differences in frontotemporal and semantic dementia and point to differential roles of the frontal and temporal lobes in affect, social functioning, eating, and compulsive behaviour.

 PMID:11181853

On the Semantics of SPARQL

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Arenas, Marcelo; Gutierrez, Claudio; Pérez, Jorge

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is the standard data model for representing information about World Wide Web resources. In January 2008, it was released the recommendation of the W3C for querying RDF data, a query language called SPARQL. In this chapter, we give a detailed description of the semantics of this language. We start by focusing on the definition of a formal semantics for the core part of SPARQL, and then move to the definition for the entire language, including all the features in the specification of SPARQL by the W3C such as blank nodes in graph patterns and bag semantics for solutions.

A computational modeling of semantic knowledge in reading comprehension: Integrating the landscape model with latent semantic analysis.

PubMed

Yeari, Menahem; van den Broek, Paul

2016-09-01

It is a well-accepted view that the prior semantic (general) knowledge that readers possess plays a central role in reading comprehension. Nevertheless, computational models of reading comprehension have not integrated the simulation of semantic knowledge and online comprehension processes under a unified mathematical algorithm. The present article introduces a computational model that integrates the landscape model of comprehension processes with latent semantic analysis representation of semantic knowledge. In three sets of simulations of previous behavioral findings, the integrated model successfully simulated the activation and attenuation of predictive and bridging inferences during reading, as well as centrality estimations and recall of textual information after reading. Analyses of the computational results revealed new theoretical insights regarding the underlying mechanisms of the various comprehension phenomena.

Concept Map Engineering: Methods and Tools Based on the Semantic Relation Approach

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kim, Minkyu

2013-01-01

The purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of technologies that use natural language as the basis for concept map construction. In particular, this study focuses on the semantic relation (SR) approach to drawing rich and authentic concept maps that reflect students' internal representations of a problem situation. The…

Semantic Feature Distinctiveness and Frequency

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lamb, Katherine M.

2012-01-01

Lexical access is the process in which basic components of meaning in language, the lexical entries (words) are activated. This activation is based on the organization and representational structure of the lexical entries. Semantic features of words, which are the prominent semantic characteristics of a word concept, provide important information…

The semantic planetary data system

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Hughes, J. Steven; Crichton, Daniel; Kelly, Sean; Mattmann, Chris

2005-01-01

This paper will provide a brief overview of the PDS data model and the PDS catalog. It will then describe the implentation of the Semantic PDS including the development of the formal ontology, the generation of RDFS/XML and RDF/XML data sets, and the buiding of the semantic search application.

Semantic Relatedness for Evaluation of Course Equivalencies

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yang, Beibei

2012-01-01

Semantic relatedness, or its inverse, semantic distance, measures the degree of closeness between two pieces of text determined by their meaning. Related work typically measures semantics based on a sparse knowledge base such as WordNet or Cyc that requires intensive manual efforts to build and maintain. Other work is based on a corpus such as the…

ERPs, semantic processing and age.

PubMed

Miyamoto, T; Katayama, J; Koyama, T

1998-06-01

ERPs (N400, LPC and CNV) were elicited in two sets of subjects grouped according to age (young vs. elderly) using a word-pair category matching paradigm. Each prime consisted of a Japanese noun (constructed from two to four characters of the Hiragana) followed by one Chinese character (Kanji) as the target, this latter representing one of five semantic categories. There were two equally probable target conditions: match or mismatch. Each target was preceded by a prime, either belonging to, or not belonging to, the same semantic category. The subjects were required to respond with a specified button press to the given target according to the condition. We found RTs to be longer in the elderly subjects and under the mismatch condition. N400 amplitude was reduced in the elderly subjects under the mismatch condition and there was no difference between match and mismatch response, which were similar in amplitude to that under match condition for the young subjects. In addition, the CNV amplitudes were larger in the elderly subjects. These results suggested that functional changes in semantic processing through aging (larger semantic networks and diffuse semantic activation) were the cause of this N400 reduction, attributing a subsidiary role to attentional disturbance. We also discuss the importance of taking age-related changes into consideration in clinical studies.

Semantic Categories and Context in L2 Vocabulary Learning

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Bolger, Patrick; Zapata, Gabriela

2011-01-01

This article extends recent findings that presenting semantically related vocabulary simultaneously inhibits learning. It does so by adding story contexts. Participants learned 32 new labels for known concepts from four different semantic categories in stories that were either semantically related (one category per story) or semantically unrelated…

Semantic interpretation of search engine resultant

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nasution, M. K. M.

2018-01-01

In semantic, logical language can be interpreted in various forms, but the certainty of meaning is included in the uncertainty, which directly always influences the role of technology. One results of this uncertainty applies to search engines as user interfaces with information spaces such as the Web. Therefore, the behaviour of search engine results should be interpreted with certainty through semantic formulation as interpretation. Behaviour formulation shows there are various interpretations that can be done semantically either temporary, inclusion, or repeat.

Behavior Modification Through Covert Semantic Desensitization

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hekmat, Hamid; Vanian, Daniel

1971-01-01

Results support the hypothesized relationship between meaning and phobia. Semantic desensitization techniques based on counter conditioning of meaning were significantly effective in altering the semantic value of the word from unpleasantness to neutrality. (Author)

Semantic processing of EHR data for clinical research.

PubMed

Sun, Hong; Depraetere, Kristof; De Roo, Jos; Mels, Giovanni; De Vloed, Boris; Twagirumukiza, Marc; Colaert, Dirk

2015-12-01

There is a growing need to semantically process and integrate clinical data from different sources for clinical research. This paper presents an approach to integrate EHRs from heterogeneous resources and generate integrated data in different data formats or semantics to support various clinical research applications. The proposed approach builds semantic data virtualization layers on top of data sources, which generate data in the requested semantics or formats on demand. This approach avoids upfront dumping to and synchronizing of the data with various representations. Data from different EHR systems are first mapped to RDF data with source semantics, and then converted to representations with harmonized domain semantics where domain ontologies and terminologies are used to improve reusability. It is also possible to further convert data to application semantics and store the converted results in clinical research databases, e.g. i2b2, OMOP, to support different clinical research settings. Semantic conversions between different representations are explicitly expressed using N3 rules and executed by an N3 Reasoner (EYE), which can also generate proofs of the conversion processes. The solution presented in this paper has been applied to real-world applications that process large scale EHR data. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Approaching semantic interoperability in Health Level Seven

PubMed Central

Alschuler, Liora

2010-01-01

‘Semantic Interoperability’ is a driving objective behind many of Health Level Seven's standards. The objective in this paper is to take a step back, and consider what semantic interoperability means, assess whether or not it has been achieved, and, if not, determine what concrete next steps can be taken to get closer. A framework for measuring semantic interoperability is proposed, using a technique called the ‘Single Logical Information Model’ framework, which relies on an operational definition of semantic interoperability and an understanding that interoperability improves incrementally. Whether semantic interoperability tomorrow will enable one computer to talk to another, much as one person can talk to another person, is a matter for speculation. It is assumed, however, that what gets measured gets improved, and in that spirit this framework is offered as a means to improvement. PMID:21106995

Semantic transparency affects morphological priming . . . eventually.

PubMed

Heyer, Vera; Kornishova, Dana

2018-05-01

Semantic transparency has been in the focus of psycholinguistic research for decades, with the controversy about the time course of the application of morpho-semantic information during the processing of morphologically complex words not yet resolved. This study reports two masked priming studies with English - ness and Russian - ost' nominalisations, investigating how semantic transparency modulates native speakers' morphological priming effects at short and long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In both languages, we found increased morphological priming for nominalisations at the transparent end of the scale (e.g. paleness - pale) in comparison to items at the opaque end of the scale (e.g. business - busy) but only at longer prime durations. The present findings are in line with models that posit an initial phase of morpho-orthographic (semantically blind) decomposition.

Software analysis in the semantic web

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Taylor, Joshua; Hall, Robert T.

2013-05-01

Many approaches in software analysis, particularly dynamic malware analyis, benefit greatly from the use of linked data and other Semantic Web technology. In this paper, we describe AIS, Inc.'s Semantic Extractor (SemEx) component from the Malware Analysis and Attribution through Genetic Information (MAAGI) effort, funded under DARPA's Cyber Genome program. The SemEx generates OWL-based semantic models of high and low level behaviors in malware samples from system call traces generated by AIS's introspective hypervisor, IntroVirtTM. Within MAAGI, these semantic models were used by modules that cluster malware samples by functionality, and construct "genealogical" malware lineages. Herein, we describe the design, implementation, and use of the SemEx, as well as the C2DB, an OWL ontology used for representing software behavior and cyber-environments.

Semantic computing and language knowledge bases

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wang, Lei; Wang, Houfeng; Yu, Shiwen

2017-09-01

As the proposition of the next-generation Web - semantic Web, semantic computing has been drawing more and more attention within the circle and the industries. A lot of research has been conducted on the theory and methodology of the subject, and potential applications have also been investigated and proposed in many fields. The progress of semantic computing made so far cannot be detached from its supporting pivot - language resources, for instance, language knowledge bases. This paper proposes three perspectives of semantic computing from a macro view and describes the current status of affairs about the construction of language knowledge bases and the related research and applications that have been carried out on the basis of these resources via a case study in the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University.

Word add-in for ontology recognition: semantic enrichment of scientific literature.

PubMed

Fink, J Lynn; Fernicola, Pablo; Chandran, Rahul; Parastatidis, Savas; Wade, Alex; Naim, Oscar; Quinn, Gregory B; Bourne, Philip E

2010-02-24

In the current era of scientific research, efficient communication of information is paramount. As such, the nature of scholarly and scientific communication is changing; cyberinfrastructure is now absolutely necessary and new media are allowing information and knowledge to be more interactive and immediate. One approach to making knowledge more accessible is the addition of machine-readable semantic data to scholarly articles. The Word add-in presented here will assist authors in this effort by automatically recognizing and highlighting words or phrases that are likely information-rich, allowing authors to associate semantic data with those words or phrases, and to embed that data in the document as XML. The add-in and source code are publicly available at http://www.codeplex.com/UCSDBioLit. The Word add-in for ontology term recognition makes it possible for an author to add semantic data to a document as it is being written and it encodes these data using XML tags that are effectively a standard in life sciences literature. Allowing authors to mark-up their own work will help increase the amount and quality of machine-readable literature metadata.

Word add-in for ontology recognition: semantic enrichment of scientific literature

PubMed Central

2010-01-01

Background In the current era of scientific research, efficient communication of information is paramount. As such, the nature of scholarly and scientific communication is changing; cyberinfrastructure is now absolutely necessary and new media are allowing information and knowledge to be more interactive and immediate. One approach to making knowledge more accessible is the addition of machine-readable semantic data to scholarly articles. Results The Word add-in presented here will assist authors in this effort by automatically recognizing and highlighting words or phrases that are likely information-rich, allowing authors to associate semantic data with those words or phrases, and to embed that data in the document as XML. The add-in and source code are publicly available at http://www.codeplex.com/UCSDBioLit. Conclusions The Word add-in for ontology term recognition makes it possible for an author to add semantic data to a document as it is being written and it encodes these data using XML tags that are effectively a standard in life sciences literature. Allowing authors to mark-up their own work will help increase the amount and quality of machine-readable literature metadata. PMID:20181245

Progress in The Semantic Analysis of Scientific Code

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Stewart, Mark

2000-01-01

This paper concerns a procedure that analyzes aspects of the meaning or semantics of scientific and engineering code. This procedure involves taking a user's existing code, adding semantic declarations for some primitive variables, and parsing this annotated code using multiple, independent expert parsers. These semantic parsers encode domain knowledge and recognize formulae in different disciplines including physics, numerical methods, mathematics, and geometry. The parsers will automatically recognize and document some static, semantic concepts and help locate some program semantic errors. These techniques may apply to a wider range of scientific codes. If so, the techniques could reduce the time, risk, and effort required to develop and modify scientific codes.

Semantic web for integrated network analysis in biomedicine.

PubMed

Chen, Huajun; Ding, Li; Wu, Zhaohui; Yu, Tong; Dhanapalan, Lavanya; Chen, Jake Y

2009-03-01

The Semantic Web technology enables integration of heterogeneous data on the World Wide Web by making the semantics of data explicit through formal ontologies. In this article, we survey the feasibility and state of the art of utilizing the Semantic Web technology to represent, integrate and analyze the knowledge in various biomedical networks. We introduce a new conceptual framework, semantic graph mining, to enable researchers to integrate graph mining with ontology reasoning in network data analysis. Through four case studies, we demonstrate how semantic graph mining can be applied to the analysis of disease-causal genes, Gene Ontology category cross-talks, drug efficacy analysis and herb-drug interactions analysis.

linkedISA: semantic representation of ISA-Tab experimental metadata.

PubMed

González-Beltrán, Alejandra; Maguire, Eamonn; Sansone, Susanna-Assunta; Rocca-Serra, Philippe

2014-01-01

drive the query over the semantic representation of the experimental design. In addition, we defined queries over the linkedISA RDF representation and demonstrated its use over the linkedISA conversion of datasets from Nature' Scientific Data online publication. Our linked data approach has allowed us to: 1) make the ISA-Tab semantics explicit and machine-processable, 2) exploit the existing ontology-based annotations in the ISA-Tab experimental descriptions, 3) augment the ISA-Tab syntax with new descriptive elements, 4) visualise and query elements related to the experimental design. Reasoning over ISA-Tab metadata and associated data will facilitate data integration and knowledge discovery.

Neurology of anomia in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia

PubMed Central

Rogalski, Emily; Wieneke, Christina; Cobia, Derin; Rademaker, Alfred; Thompson, Cynthia; Weintraub, Sandra

2009-01-01

The semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is characterized by the combination of word comprehension deficits, fluent aphasia and a particularly severe anomia. In this study, two novel tasks were used to explore the factors contributing to the anomia. The single most common factor was a blurring of distinctions among members of a semantic category, leading to errors of overgeneralization in word–object matching tasks as well as in word definitions and object descriptions. This factor was more pronounced for natural kinds than artifacts. In patients with the more severe anomias, conceptual maps were more extensively disrupted so that inter-category distinctions were as impaired as intra-category distinctions. Many objects that could not be named aloud could be matched to the correct word in patients with mild but not severe anomia, reflecting a gradual intensification of the semantic factor as the naming disorder becomes more severe. Accurate object descriptions were more frequent than accurate word definitions and all patients experienced prominent word comprehension deficits that interfered with everyday activities but no consequential impairment of object usage or face recognition. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed three characteristics: greater atrophy of the left hemisphere; atrophy of anterior components of the perisylvian language network in the superior and middle temporal gyri; and atrophy of anterior components of the face and object recognition network in the inferior and medial temporal lobes. The left sided asymmetry and perisylvian extension of the atrophy explains the more profound impairment of word than object usage and provides the anatomical basis for distinguishing the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia from the partially overlapping group of patients that fulfil the widely accepted diagnostic criteria for semantic dementia. PMID:19506067

BIOSSES: a semantic sentence similarity estimation system for the biomedical domain.

PubMed

Sogancioglu, Gizem; Öztürk, Hakime; Özgür, Arzucan

2017-07-15

The amount of information available in textual format is rapidly increasing in the biomedical domain. Therefore, natural language processing (NLP) applications are becoming increasingly important to facilitate the retrieval and analysis of these data. Computing the semantic similarity between sentences is an important component in many NLP tasks including text retrieval and summarization. A number of approaches have been proposed for semantic sentence similarity estimation for generic English. However, our experiments showed that such approaches do not effectively cover biomedical knowledge and produce poor results for biomedical text. We propose several approaches for sentence-level semantic similarity computation in the biomedical domain, including string similarity measures and measures based on the distributed vector representations of sentences learned in an unsupervised manner from a large biomedical corpus. In addition, ontology-based approaches are presented that utilize general and domain-specific ontologies. Finally, a supervised regression based model is developed that effectively combines the different similarity computation metrics. A benchmark data set consisting of 100 sentence pairs from the biomedical literature is manually annotated by five human experts and used for evaluating the proposed methods. The experiments showed that the supervised semantic sentence similarity computation approach obtained the best performance (0.836 correlation with gold standard human annotations) and improved over the state-of-the-art domain-independent systems up to 42.6% in terms of the Pearson correlation metric. A web-based system for biomedical semantic sentence similarity computation, the source code, and the annotated benchmark data set are available at: http://tabilab.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/BIOSSES/ . gizemsogancioglu@gmail.com or arzucan.ozgur@boun.edu.tr. © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e

Semantic Metrics for Analysis of Software

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Etzkorn, Letha H.; Cox, Glenn W.; Farrington, Phil; Utley, Dawn R.; Ghalston, Sampson; Stein, Cara

2005-01-01

A recently conceived suite of object-oriented software metrics focus is on semantic aspects of software, in contradistinction to traditional software metrics, which focus on syntactic aspects of software. Semantic metrics represent a more human-oriented view of software than do syntactic metrics. The semantic metrics of a given computer program are calculated by use of the output of a knowledge-based analysis of the program, and are substantially more representative of software quality and more readily comprehensible from a human perspective than are the syntactic metrics.

Semantic retrieval and navigation in clinical document collections.

PubMed

Kreuzthaler, Markus; Daumke, Philipp; Schulz, Stefan

2015-01-01

Patients with chronic diseases undergo numerous in- and outpatient treatment periods, and therefore many documents accumulate in their electronic records. We report on an on-going project focussing on the semantic enrichment of medical texts, in order to support recall-oriented navigation across a patient's complete documentation. A document pool of 1,696 de-identified discharge summaries was used for prototyping. A natural language processing toolset for document annotation (based on the text-mining framework UIMA) and indexing (Solr) was used to support a browser-based platform for document import, search and navigation. The integrated search engine combines free text and concept-based querying, supported by dynamically generated facets (diagnoses, procedures, medications, lab values, and body parts). The prototype demonstrates the feasibility of semantic document enrichment within document collections of a single patient. Originally conceived as an add-on for the clinical workplace, this technology could also be adapted to support personalised health record platforms, as well as cross-patient search for cohort building and other secondary use scenarios.

Taxonomic and Thematic Semantic Systems

PubMed Central

Mirman, Daniel; Landrigan, Jon-Frederick; Britt, Allison E.

2017-01-01

Object concepts are critical for nearly all aspects of human cognition, from perception tasks like object recognition, to understanding and producing language, to making meaningful actions. Concepts can have two very different kinds of relations: similarity relations based on shared features (e.g., dog – bear), which are called “taxonomic” relations, and contiguity relations based on co-occurrence in events or scenarios (e.g., dog – leash), which are called “thematic” relations. Here we report a systematic review of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience evidence of this distinction in the structure of semantic memory. We propose two principles that may drive the development of distinct taxonomic and thematic semantic systems: (1) differences between which features determine taxonomic vs. thematic relations and (2) differences in the processing required to extract taxonomic vs. thematic relations. This review brings together distinct threads of behavioral, computational, and neuroscience research on semantic memory in support of a functional and neural dissociation, and defines a framework for future studies of semantic memory. PMID:28333494

Semantics-Based Interoperability Framework for the Geosciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sinha, A.; Malik, Z.; Raskin, R.; Barnes, C.; Fox, P.; McGuinness, D.; Lin, K.

2008-12-01

Interoperability between heterogeneous data, tools and services is required to transform data to knowledge. To meet geoscience-oriented societal challenges such as forcing of climate change induced by volcanic eruptions, we suggest the need to develop semantic interoperability for data, services, and processes. Because such scientific endeavors require integration of multiple data bases associated with global enterprises, implicit semantic-based integration is impossible. Instead, explicit semantics are needed to facilitate interoperability and integration. Although different types of integration models are available (syntactic or semantic) we suggest that semantic interoperability is likely to be the most successful pathway. Clearly, the geoscience community would benefit from utilization of existing XML-based data models, such as GeoSciML, WaterML, etc to rapidly advance semantic interoperability and integration. We recognize that such integration will require a "meanings-based search, reasoning and information brokering", which will be facilitated through inter-ontology relationships (ontologies defined for each discipline). We suggest that Markup languages (MLs) and ontologies can be seen as "data integration facilitators", working at different abstraction levels. Therefore, we propose to use an ontology-based data registration and discovery approach to compliment mark-up languages through semantic data enrichment. Ontologies allow the use of formal and descriptive logic statements which permits expressive query capabilities for data integration through reasoning. We have developed domain ontologies (EPONT) to capture the concept behind data. EPONT ontologies are associated with existing ontologies such as SUMO, DOLCE and SWEET. Although significant efforts have gone into developing data (object) ontologies, we advance the idea of developing semantic frameworks for additional ontologies that deal with processes and services. This evolutionary step will

Semantic Web Services Challenge, Results from the First Year. Series: Semantic Web And Beyond, Volume 8.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Petrie, C.; Margaria, T.; Lausen, H.; Zaremba, M.

Explores trade-offs among existing approaches. Reveals strengths and weaknesses of proposed approaches, as well as which aspects of the problem are not yet covered. Introduces software engineering approach to evaluating semantic web services. Service-Oriented Computing is one of the most promising software engineering trends because of the potential to reduce the programming effort for future distributed industrial systems. However, only a small part of this potential rests on the standardization of tools offered by the web services stack. The larger part of this potential rests upon the development of sufficient semantics to automate service orchestration. Currently there are many different approaches to semantic web service descriptions and many frameworks built around them. A common understanding, evaluation scheme, and test bed to compare and classify these frameworks in terms of their capabilities and shortcomings, is necessary to make progress in developing the full potential of Service-Oriented Computing. The Semantic Web Services Challenge is an open source initiative that provides a public evaluation and certification of multiple frameworks on common industrially-relevant problem sets. This edited volume reports on the first results in developing common understanding of the various technologies intended to facilitate the automation of mediation, choreography and discovery for Web Services using semantic annotations. Semantic Web Services Challenge: Results from the First Year is designed for a professional audience composed of practitioners and researchers in industry. Professionals can use this book to evaluate SWS technology for their potential practical use. The book is also suitable for advanced-level students in computer science.

Semantic diversity: a measure of semantic ambiguity based on variability in the contextual usage of words.

PubMed

Hoffman, Paul; Lambon Ralph, Matthew A; Rogers, Timothy T

2013-09-01

Semantic ambiguity is typically measured by summing the number of senses or dictionary definitions that a word has. Such measures are somewhat subjective and may not adequately capture the full extent of variation in word meaning, particularly for polysemous words that can be used in many different ways, with subtle shifts in meaning. Here, we describe an alternative, computationally derived measure of ambiguity based on the proposal that the meanings of words vary continuously as a function of their contexts. On this view, words that appear in a wide range of contexts on diverse topics are more variable in meaning than those that appear in a restricted set of similar contexts. To quantify this variation, we performed latent semantic analysis on a large text corpus to estimate the semantic similarities of different linguistic contexts. From these estimates, we calculated the degree to which the different contexts associated with a given word vary in their meanings. We term this quantity a word's semantic diversity (SemD). We suggest that this approach provides an objective way of quantifying the subtle, context-dependent variations in word meaning that are often present in language. We demonstrate that SemD is correlated with other measures of ambiguity and contextual variability, as well as with frequency and imageability. We also show that SemD is a strong predictor of performance in semantic judgments in healthy individuals and in patients with semantic deficits, accounting for unique variance beyond that of other predictors. SemD values for over 30,000 English words are provided as supplementary materials.

Shared Features Dominate Semantic Richness Effects for Concrete Concepts

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Grondin, Ray; Lupker, Stephen J.; McRae, Ken

2009-01-01

When asked to list semantic features for concrete concepts, participants list many features for some concepts and few for others. Concepts with many semantic features are processed faster in lexical and semantic decision tasks [Pexman, P. M., Lupker, S. J., & Hino, Y. (2002). "The impact of feedback semantics in visual word recognition:…

Usage of semantic representations in recognition memory.

PubMed

Nishiyama, Ryoji; Hirano, Tetsuji; Ukita, Jun

2017-11-01

Meanings of words facilitate false acceptance as well as correct rejection of lures in recognition memory tests, depending on the experimental context. This suggests that semantic representations are both directly and indirectly (i.e., mediated by perceptual representations) used in remembering. Studies using memory conjunction errors (MCEs) paradigms, in which the lures consist of component parts of studied words, have reported semantic facilitation of rejection of the lures. However, attending to components of the lures could potentially cause this. Therefore, we investigated whether semantic overlap of lures facilitates MCEs using Japanese Kanji words in which a whole-word image is more concerned in reading. Experiments demonstrated semantic facilitation of MCEs in a delayed recognition test (Experiment 1), and in immediate recognition tests in which participants were prevented from using phonological or orthographic representations (Experiment 2), and the salient effect on individuals with high semantic memory capacities (Experiment 3). Additionally, analysis of the receiver operating characteristic suggested that this effect is attributed to familiarity-based memory judgement and phantom recollection. These findings indicate that semantic representations can be directly used in remembering, even when perceptual representations of studied words are available.

Semantic web data warehousing for caGrid.

PubMed

McCusker, James P; Phillips, Joshua A; González Beltrán, Alejandra; Finkelstein, Anthony; Krauthammer, Michael

2009-10-01

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is developing caGrid as a means for sharing cancer-related data and services. As more data sets become available on caGrid, we need effective ways of accessing and integrating this information. Although the data models exposed on caGrid are semantically well annotated, it is currently up to the caGrid client to infer relationships between the different models and their classes. In this paper, we present a Semantic Web-based data warehouse (Corvus) for creating relationships among caGrid models. This is accomplished through the transformation of semantically-annotated caBIG Unified Modeling Language (UML) information models into Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies that preserve those semantics. We demonstrate the validity of the approach by Semantic Extraction, Transformation and Loading (SETL) of data from two caGrid data sources, caTissue and caArray, as well as alignment and query of those sources in Corvus. We argue that semantic integration is necessary for integration of data from distributed web services and that Corvus is a useful way of accomplishing this. Our approach is generalizable and of broad utility to researchers facing similar integration challenges.

Semantic web data warehousing for caGrid

PubMed Central

McCusker, James P; Phillips, Joshua A; Beltrán, Alejandra González; Finkelstein, Anthony; Krauthammer, Michael

2009-01-01

The National Cancer Institute (NCI) is developing caGrid as a means for sharing cancer-related data and services. As more data sets become available on caGrid, we need effective ways of accessing and integrating this information. Although the data models exposed on caGrid are semantically well annotated, it is currently up to the caGrid client to infer relationships between the different models and their classes. In this paper, we present a Semantic Web-based data warehouse (Corvus) for creating relationships among caGrid models. This is accomplished through the transformation of semantically-annotated caBIG® Unified Modeling Language (UML) information models into Web Ontology Language (OWL) ontologies that preserve those semantics. We demonstrate the validity of the approach by Semantic Extraction, Transformation and Loading (SETL) of data from two caGrid data sources, caTissue and caArray, as well as alignment and query of those sources in Corvus. We argue that semantic integration is necessary for integration of data from distributed web services and that Corvus is a useful way of accomplishing this. Our approach is generalizable and of broad utility to researchers facing similar integration challenges. PMID:19796399

Ontology Matching with Semantic Verification.

PubMed

Jean-Mary, Yves R; Shironoshita, E Patrick; Kabuka, Mansur R

2009-09-01

ASMOV (Automated Semantic Matching of Ontologies with Verification) is a novel algorithm that uses lexical and structural characteristics of two ontologies to iteratively calculate a similarity measure between them, derives an alignment, and then verifies it to ensure that it does not contain semantic inconsistencies. In this paper, we describe the ASMOV algorithm, and then present experimental results that measure its accuracy using the OAEI 2008 tests, and that evaluate its use with two different thesauri: WordNet, and the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). These results show the increased accuracy obtained by combining lexical, structural and extensional matchers with semantic verification, and demonstrate the advantage of using a domain-specific thesaurus for the alignment of specialized ontologies.

Semantic Context Detection Using Audio Event Fusion

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Chu, Wei-Ta; Cheng, Wen-Huang; Wu, Ja-Ling

2006-12-01

Semantic-level content analysis is a crucial issue in achieving efficient content retrieval and management. We propose a hierarchical approach that models audio events over a time series in order to accomplish semantic context detection. Two levels of modeling, audio event and semantic context modeling, are devised to bridge the gap between physical audio features and semantic concepts. In this work, hidden Markov models (HMMs) are used to model four representative audio events, that is, gunshot, explosion, engine, and car braking, in action movies. At the semantic context level, generative (ergodic hidden Markov model) and discriminative (support vector machine (SVM)) approaches are investigated to fuse the characteristics and correlations among audio events, which provide cues for detecting gunplay and car-chasing scenes. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and provide a preliminary framework for information mining by using audio characteristics.

A Complex Network Approach to Distributional Semantic Models

PubMed Central

Utsumi, Akira

2015-01-01

A number of studies on network analysis have focused on language networks based on free word association, which reflects human lexical knowledge, and have demonstrated the small-world and scale-free properties in the word association network. Nevertheless, there have been very few attempts at applying network analysis to distributional semantic models, despite the fact that these models have been studied extensively as computational or cognitive models of human lexical knowledge. In this paper, we analyze three network properties, namely, small-world, scale-free, and hierarchical properties, of semantic networks created by distributional semantic models. We demonstrate that the created networks generally exhibit the same properties as word association networks. In particular, we show that the distribution of the number of connections in these networks follows the truncated power law, which is also observed in an association network. This indicates that distributional semantic models can provide a plausible model of lexical knowledge. Additionally, the observed differences in the network properties of various implementations of distributional semantic models are consistently explained or predicted by considering the intrinsic semantic features of a word-context matrix and the functions of matrix weighting and smoothing. Furthermore, to simulate a semantic network with the observed network properties, we propose a new growing network model based on the model of Steyvers and Tenenbaum. The idea underlying the proposed model is that both preferential and random attachments are required to reflect different types of semantic relations in network growth process. We demonstrate that this model provides a better explanation of network behaviors generated by distributional semantic models. PMID:26295940

Categorizing words through semantic memory navigation

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Borge-Holthoefer, J.; Arenas, A.

2010-03-01

Semantic memory is the cognitive system devoted to storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. Empirical data indicate that semantic memory is organized in a network structure. Everyday experience shows that word search and retrieval processes provide fluent and coherent speech, i.e. are efficient. This implies either that semantic memory encodes, besides thousands of words, different kind of links for different relationships (introducing greater complexity and storage costs), or that the structure evolves facilitating the differentiation between long-lasting semantic relations from incidental, phenomenological ones. Assuming the latter possibility, we explore a mechanism to disentangle the underlying semantic backbone which comprises conceptual structure (extraction of categorical relations between pairs of words), from the rest of information present in the structure. To this end, we first present and characterize an empirical data set modeled as a network, then we simulate a stochastic cognitive navigation on this topology. We schematize this latter process as uncorrelated random walks from node to node, which converge to a feature vectors network. By doing so we both introduce a novel mechanism for information retrieval, and point at the problem of category formation in close connection to linguistic and non-linguistic experience.

The Influence of Semantic Neighbours on Visual Word Recognition

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Yates, Mark

2012-01-01

Although it is assumed that semantics is a critical component of visual word recognition, there is still much that we do not understand. One recent way of studying semantic processing has been in terms of semantic neighbourhood (SN) density, and this research has shown that semantic neighbours facilitate lexical decisions. However, it is not clear…

Semantic Mapping: A Text Perspective.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Harste, Jerome C.

Children's early writing is analyzed in this paper according to different perspectives such as function, grapho-phonemics, syntax, and semantics. Emphasis is given to the semantic perspective of decoding the text and to the study of coherence in text as it is viewed by the reader. Proposition analysis is used to map the coherence of samples of…

Towards semantically sensitive text clustering: a feature space modeling technology based on dimension extension.

PubMed

Liu, Yuanchao; Liu, Ming; Wang, Xin

2015-01-01

The objective of text clustering is to divide document collections into clusters based on the similarity between documents. In this paper, an extension-based feature modeling approach towards semantically sensitive text clustering is proposed along with the corresponding feature space construction and similarity computation method. By combining the similarity in traditional feature space and that in extension space, the adverse effects of the complexity and diversity of natural language can be addressed and clustering semantic sensitivity can be improved correspondingly. The generated clusters can be organized using different granularities. The experimental evaluations on well-known clustering algorithms and datasets have verified the effectiveness of our approach.

Towards Semantically Sensitive Text Clustering: A Feature Space Modeling Technology Based on Dimension Extension

PubMed Central

Liu, Yuanchao; Liu, Ming; Wang, Xin

2015-01-01

The objective of text clustering is to divide document collections into clusters based on the similarity between documents. In this paper, an extension-based feature modeling approach towards semantically sensitive text clustering is proposed along with the corresponding feature space construction and similarity computation method. By combining the similarity in traditional feature space and that in extension space, the adverse effects of the complexity and diversity of natural language can be addressed and clustering semantic sensitivity can be improved correspondingly. The generated clusters can be organized using different granularities. The experimental evaluations on well-known clustering algorithms and datasets have verified the effectiveness of our approach. PMID:25794172

Automatic image orientation detection via confidence-based integration of low-level and semantic cues.

PubMed

Luo, Jiebo; Boutell, Matthew

2005-05-01

Automatic image orientation detection for natural images is a useful, yet challenging research topic. Humans use scene context and semantic object recognition to identify the correct image orientation. However, it is difficult for a computer to perform the task in the same way because current object recognition algorithms are extremely limited in their scope and robustness. As a result, existing orientation detection methods were built upon low-level vision features such as spatial distributions of color and texture. Discrepant detection rates have been reported for these methods in the literature. We have developed a probabilistic approach to image orientation detection via confidence-based integration of low-level and semantic cues within a Bayesian framework. Our current accuracy is 90 percent for unconstrained consumer photos, impressive given the findings of a psychophysical study conducted recently. The proposed framework is an attempt to bridge the gap between computer and human vision systems and is applicable to other problems involving semantic scene content understanding.

When the Wedding March becomes sad: Semantic memory impairment for music in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia.

PubMed

Macoir, Joël; Berubé-Lalancette, Sarah; Wilson, Maximiliano A; Laforce, Robert; Hudon, Carol; Gravel, Pierre; Potvin, Olivier; Duchesne, Simon; Monetta, Laura

2016-12-01

Music can induce particular emotions and activate semantic knowledge. In the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), semantic memory is impaired as a result of anterior temporal lobe (ATL) atrophy. Semantics is responsible for the encoding and retrieval of factual knowledge about music, including associative and emotional attributes. In the present study, we report the performance of two individuals with svPPA in three experiments. NG with bilateral ATL atrophy and ND with atrophy largely restricted to the left ATL. Experiment 1 assessed the recognition of musical excerpts and both patients were unimpaired. Experiment 2 studied the emotions conveyed by music and only NG showed impaired performance. Experiment 3 tested the association of semantic concepts to musical excerpts and both patients were impaired. These results suggest that the right ATL seems essential for the recognition of emotions conveyed by music and that the left ATL is involved in binding music to semantics. They are in line with the notion that the ATLs are devoted to the binding of different modality-specific properties and suggest that they are also differentially involved in the processing of factual and emotional knowledge associated with music.

Semantic memory impairment for biological and man-made objects in individuals with amnestic mild cognitive impairment or late-life depression.

PubMed

Callahan, Brandy L; Joubert, Sven; Tremblay, Marie-Pier; Macoir, Joël; Belleville, Sylvie; Rousseau, François; Bouchard, Rémi W; Verret, Louis; Hudon, Carol

2015-06-01

Amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) and late-life depression (LLD) both increase the risk of developing Alzheimer disease (AD). Very little is known about the similarities and differences between these syndromes. The present study addresses this issue by examining the nature of semantic memory impairment (more precisely, object-based knowledge) in patients at risk of developing AD. Participants were 17 elderly patients with aMCI, 18 patients with aMCI plus depressive symptoms (aMCI/D+), 15 patients with LLD, and 29 healthy controls. All participants were aged 55 years or older and were administered a semantic battery designed to assess semantic knowledge for 16 biological and 16 man-made items. Overall performance of aMCI/D+ participants was significantly worse than the 3 other groups, and performance for questions assessing knowledge for biological items was poorer than for questions relating to man-made items. This study is the first to show that aMCI/D+ is associated with object-based semantic memory impairment. These results support the view that semantic deficits in aMCI are associated with concomitant depressive symptoms. However, depressive symptoms alone do not account exclusively for semantic impairment, since patients with LLD showed no semantic memory deficit. © The Author(s) 2014.

Chemical Entity Semantic Specification: Knowledge representation for efficient semantic cheminformatics and facile data integration

PubMed Central

2011-01-01

Background Over the past several centuries, chemistry has permeated virtually every facet of human lifestyle, enriching fields as diverse as medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, warfare, and electronics, among numerous others. Unfortunately, application-specific, incompatible chemical information formats and representation strategies have emerged as a result of such diverse adoption of chemistry. Although a number of efforts have been dedicated to unifying the computational representation of chemical information, disparities between the various chemical databases still persist and stand in the way of cross-domain, interdisciplinary investigations. Through a common syntax and formal semantics, Semantic Web technology offers the ability to accurately represent, integrate, reason about and query across diverse chemical information. Results Here we specify and implement the Chemical Entity Semantic Specification (CHESS) for the representation of polyatomic chemical entities, their substructures, bonds, atoms, and reactions using Semantic Web technologies. CHESS provides means to capture aspects of their corresponding chemical descriptors, connectivity, functional composition, and geometric structure while specifying mechanisms for data provenance. We demonstrate that using our readily extensible specification, it is possible to efficiently integrate multiple disparate chemical data sources, while retaining appropriate correspondence of chemical descriptors, with very little additional effort. We demonstrate the impact of some of our representational decisions on the performance of chemically-aware knowledgebase searching and rudimentary reaction candidate selection. Finally, we provide access to the tools necessary to carry out chemical entity encoding in CHESS, along with a sample knowledgebase. Conclusions By harnessing the power of Semantic Web technologies with CHESS, it is possible to provide a means of facile cross-domain chemical knowledge integration with full

Chemical Entity Semantic Specification: Knowledge representation for efficient semantic cheminformatics and facile data integration.

PubMed

Chepelev, Leonid L; Dumontier, Michel

2011-05-19

Over the past several centuries, chemistry has permeated virtually every facet of human lifestyle, enriching fields as diverse as medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, warfare, and electronics, among numerous others. Unfortunately, application-specific, incompatible chemical information formats and representation strategies have emerged as a result of such diverse adoption of chemistry. Although a number of efforts have been dedicated to unifying the computational representation of chemical information, disparities between the various chemical databases still persist and stand in the way of cross-domain, interdisciplinary investigations. Through a common syntax and formal semantics, Semantic Web technology offers the ability to accurately represent, integrate, reason about and query across diverse chemical information. Here we specify and implement the Chemical Entity Semantic Specification (CHESS) for the representation of polyatomic chemical entities, their substructures, bonds, atoms, and reactions using Semantic Web technologies. CHESS provides means to capture aspects of their corresponding chemical descriptors, connectivity, functional composition, and geometric structure while specifying mechanisms for data provenance. We demonstrate that using our readily extensible specification, it is possible to efficiently integrate multiple disparate chemical data sources, while retaining appropriate correspondence of chemical descriptors, with very little additional effort. We demonstrate the impact of some of our representational decisions on the performance of chemically-aware knowledgebase searching and rudimentary reaction candidate selection. Finally, we provide access to the tools necessary to carry out chemical entity encoding in CHESS, along with a sample knowledgebase. By harnessing the power of Semantic Web technologies with CHESS, it is possible to provide a means of facile cross-domain chemical knowledge integration with full preservation of data

Knowledge of the human body: a distinct semantic domain.

PubMed

Coslett, H Branch; Saffran, Eleanor M; Schwoebel, John

2002-08-13

Patients with selective deficits in the naming and comprehension of animals, plants, and artifacts have been reported. These descriptions of specific semantic category deficits have contributed substantially to the understanding of the architecture of semantic representations. This study sought to further understanding of the organization of the semantic system by demonstrating that another semantic category, knowledge of the human body, may be selectively preserved. The performance of a patient with semantic dementia was compared with the performance of healthy controls on a variety of tasks assessing distinct types of body representations, including the body schema, body image, and body structural description. Despite substantial deficits on tasks involving language and knowledge of the world generally, the patient performed normally on all tests of body knowledge except body part naming; even in this naming task, however, her performance with body parts was significantly better than on artifacts. The demonstration that body knowledge may be preserved despite substantial semantic deficits involving other types of semantic information argues that body knowledge is a distinct and dissociable semantic category. These data are interpreted as support for a model of semantics that proposes that knowledge is distributed across different cortical regions reflecting the manner in which the information was acquired.

Activation of semantic information at the sublexical level during handwriting production: Evidence from inhibition effects of Chinese semantic radicals in the picture-word interference paradigm.

PubMed

Chen, Xuqian; Liao, Yuanlan; Chen, Xianzhe

2017-08-01

Using a non-alphabetic language (e.g., Chinese), the present study tested a novel view that semantic information at the sublexical level should be activated during handwriting production. Over 80% of Chinese characters are phonograms, in which semantic radicals represent category information (e.g., 'chair,' 'peach,' 'orange' are related to plants) while phonetic radicals represent phonetic information (e.g., 'wolf,' 'brightness,' 'male,' are all pronounced /lang/). Under different semantic category conditions at the lexical level (semantically related in Experiment 1; semantically unrelated in Experiment 2), the orthographic relatedness and semantic relatedness of semantic radicals in the picture name and its distractor were manipulated under different SOAs (i.e., stimulus onset asynchrony, the interval between the onset of the picture and the onset of the interference word). Two questions were addressed: (1) Is it possible that semantic information could be activated in the sublexical level conditions? (2) How are semantic and orthographic information dynamically accessed in word production? Results showed that both orthographic and semantic information were activated under the present picture-word interference paradigm, dynamically under different SOAs, which supported our view that discussions on semantic processes in the writing modality should be extended to the sublexical level. The current findings provide possibility for building new orthography-phonology-semantics models in writing. © 2017 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

The Nombela 2.0 semantic battery: an updated Spanish instrument for the study of semantic processing.

PubMed

Moreno-Martínez, F Javier; Rodríguez-Rojo, Inmaculada C

2015-01-01

In this study, the Nombela 2.0 semantic battery is presented. This is a new version of its earlier precedent: the battery Nombela (I), in an attempt to improve it (dealing with ceiling effects) and reducing the application time by decreasing the number of tasks. The battery is constructed on a common set of 98 stimuli, including both living and nonliving semantic domains. It consists of five tasks designed to explore category specificity by tapping semantic production and comprehension, using both visual and verbal input. All of the items were rated according to Spanish norms, as stated in a previous study of our group, and all of the tasks were matched across domain on six nuisance variables. The present study has two goals: (i) to make available the updated version (2.0) of the Nombela semantic memory battery and (ii) to characterize and compare the neuropsychological profiles of two different patient groups: mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer disease, with regard to normal controls.

Effect of hearing loss on semantic access by auditory and audiovisual speech in children.

PubMed

Jerger, Susan; Tye-Murray, Nancy; Damian, Markus F; Abdi, Hervé

2013-01-01

This research studied whether the mode of input (auditory versus audiovisual) influenced semantic access by speech in children with sensorineural hearing impairment (HI). Participants, 31 children with HI and 62 children with normal hearing (NH), were tested with the authors' new multimodal picture word task. Children were instructed to name pictures displayed on a monitor and ignore auditory or audiovisual speech distractors. The semantic content of the distractors was varied to be related versus unrelated to the pictures (e.g., picture distractor of dog-bear versus dog-cheese, respectively). In children with NH, picture-naming times were slower in the presence of semantically related distractors. This slowing, called semantic interference, is attributed to the meaning-related picture-distractor entries competing for selection and control of the response (the lexical selection by competition hypothesis). Recently, a modification of the lexical selection by competition hypothesis, called the competition threshold (CT) hypothesis, proposed that (1) the competition between the picture-distractor entries is determined by a threshold, and (2) distractors with experimentally reduced fidelity cannot reach the CT. Thus, semantically related distractors with reduced fidelity do not produce the normal interference effect, but instead no effect or semantic facilitation (faster picture naming times for semantically related versus unrelated distractors). Facilitation occurs because the activation level of the semantically related distractor with reduced fidelity (1) is not sufficient to exceed the CT and produce interference but (2) is sufficient to activate its concept, which then strengthens the activation of the picture and facilitates naming. This research investigated whether the proposals of the CT hypothesis generalize to the auditory domain, to the natural degradation of speech due to HI, and to participants who are children. Our multimodal picture word task allowed us

The MMI Semantic Framework: Rosetta Stones for Earth Sciences

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rueda, C.; Bermudez, L. E.; Graybeal, J.; Alexander, P.

2009-12-01

Semantic interoperability—the exchange of meaning among computer systems—is needed to successfully share data in Ocean Science and across all Earth sciences. The best approach toward semantic interoperability requires a designed framework, and operationally tested tools and infrastructure within that framework. Currently available technologies make a scientific semantic framework feasible, but its development requires sustainable architectural vision and development processes. This presentation outlines the MMI Semantic Framework, including recent progress on it and its client applications. The MMI Semantic Framework consists of tools, infrastructure, and operational and community procedures and best practices, to meet short-term and long-term semantic interoperability goals. The design and prioritization of the semantic framework capabilities are based on real-world scenarios in Earth observation systems. We describe some key uses cases, as well as the associated requirements for building the overall infrastructure, which is realized through the MMI Ontology Registry and Repository. This system includes support for community creation and sharing of semantic content, ontology registration, version management, and seamless integration of user-friendly tools and application programming interfaces. The presentation describes the architectural components for semantic mediation, registry and repository for vocabularies, ontology, and term mappings. We show how the technologies and approaches in the framework can address community needs for managing and exchanging semantic information. We will demonstrate how different types of users and client applications exploit the tools and services for data aggregation, visualization, archiving, and integration. Specific examples from OOSTethys (http://www.oostethys.org) and the Ocean Observatories Initiative Cyberinfrastructure (http://www.oceanobservatories.org) will be cited. Finally, we show how semantic augmentation of web

Rule-based support system for multiple UMLS semantic type assignments

PubMed Central

Geller, James; He, Zhe; Perl, Yehoshua; Morrey, C. Paul; Xu, Julia

2012-01-01

Background When new concepts are inserted into the UMLS, they are assigned one or several semantic types from the UMLS Semantic Network by the UMLS editors. However, not every combination of semantic types is permissible. It was observed that many concepts with rare combinations of semantic types have erroneous semantic type assignments or prohibited combinations of semantic types. The correction of such errors is resource-intensive. Objective We design a computational system to inform UMLS editors as to whether a specific combination of two, three, four, or five semantic types is permissible or prohibited or questionable. Methods We identify a set of inclusion and exclusion instructions in the UMLS Semantic Network documentation and derive corresponding rule-categories as well as rule-categories from the UMLS concept content. We then design an algorithm adviseEditor based on these rule-categories. The algorithm specifies rules for an editor how to proceed when considering a tuple (pair, triple, quadruple, quintuple) of semantic types to be assigned to a concept. Results Eight rule-categories were identified. A Web-based system was developed to implement the adviseEditor algorithm, which returns for an input combination of semantic types whether it is permitted, prohibited or (in a few cases) requires more research. The numbers of semantic type pairs assigned to each rule-category are reported. Interesting examples for each rule-category are illustrated. Cases of semantic type assignments that contradict rules are listed, including recently introduced ones. Conclusion The adviseEditor system implements explicit and implicit knowledge available in the UMLS in a system that informs UMLS editors about the permissibility of a desired combination of semantic types. Using adviseEditor might help accelerate the work of the UMLS editors and prevent erroneous semantic type assignments. PMID:23041716

Semantic Preview Benefit in English: Individual Differences in the Extraction and Use of Parafoveal Semantic Information

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Veldre, Aaron; Andrews, Sally

2016-01-01

Although there is robust evidence that skilled readers of English extract and use orthographic and phonological information from the parafovea to facilitate word identification, semantic preview benefits have been elusive. We sought to establish whether individual differences in the extraction and/or use of parafoveal semantic information could…

Semantic Entity Pairing for Improved Data Validation and Discovery

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Shepherd, Adam; Chandler, Cyndy; Arko, Robert; Chen, Yanning; Krisnadhi, Adila; Hitzler, Pascal; Narock, Tom; Groman, Robert; Rauch, Shannon

2014-05-01

One of the central incentives for linked data implementations is the opportunity to leverage the rich logic inherent in structured data. The logic embedded in semantic models can strengthen capabilities for data discovery and data validation when pairing entities from distinct, contextually-related datasets. The creation of links between the two datasets broadens data discovery by using the semantic logic to help machines compare similar entities and properties that exist on different levels of granularity. This semantic capability enables appropriate entity pairing without making inaccurate assertions as to the nature of the relationship. Entity pairing also provides a context to accurately validate the correctness of an entity's property values - an exercise highly valued by data management practices who seek to ensure the quality and correctness of their data. The Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO) semantically models metadata surrounding oceanographic researchcruises, but other sources outside of BCO-DMO exist that also model metadata about these same cruises. For BCO-DMO, the process of successfully pairing its entities to these sources begins by selecting sources that are decidedly trustworthy and authoritative for the modeled concepts. In this case, the Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R) program has a well-respected reputation among the oceanographic research community, presents a data context that is uniquely different and valuable, and semantically models its cruise metadata. Where BCO-DMO exposes the processed, analyzed data products generated by researchers, R2R exposes the raw shipboard data that was collected on the same research cruises. Interlinking these cruise entities expands data discovery capabilities but also allows for validating the contextual correctness of both BCO-DMO's and R2R's cruise metadata. Assessing the potential for a link between two datasets for a similar entity consists of aligning like

An investigation of time course of category and semantic priming.

PubMed

Ray, Suchismita

2008-04-01

Low semantically similar exemplars in a category demonstrate the category-priming effect through priming of the category (i.e., exemplar-category-exemplar), whereas high semantically similar exemplars in the same category demonstrate the semantic-priming effect (i.e., direct activation of one high semantically similar exemplar by another). The author asked whether the category- and semantic-priming effects are based on a common memory process. She examined this question by testing the time courses of category- and semantic-priming effects. She tested participants on either category- or semantic-priming paradigm at 2 different time intervals (6 min and 42 min) by using a lexical decision task using exemplars from categories. Results showed that the time course of category priming was different from that of semantic priming. The author concludes that these 2 priming effects are based on 2 separate memory processes.

Developing Visualization Techniques for Semantics-based Information Networks

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Keller, Richard M.; Hall, David R.

2003-01-01

Information systems incorporating complex network structured information spaces with a semantic underpinning - such as hypermedia networks, semantic networks, topic maps, and concept maps - are being deployed to solve some of NASA s critical information management problems. This paper describes some of the human interaction and navigation problems associated with complex semantic information spaces and describes a set of new visual interface approaches to address these problems. A key strategy is to leverage semantic knowledge represented within these information spaces to construct abstractions and views that will be meaningful to the human user. Human-computer interaction methodologies will guide the development and evaluation of these approaches, which will benefit deployed NASA systems and also apply to information systems based on the emerging Semantic Web.

The Suffix "-oso" in Central American Spanish.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Scavnicky, Gary Eugene A.

1982-01-01

Examines the lexical formative "-oso," which is added to nominal and verbal roots to form adjectives to denote possession of the quality contained in the primitive, in Central American Spanish. Concludes it is used with traditional Spanish denotations and has undergone various semantic shifts and is being applied to roots in a completely…

Episodic Memory, Semantic Memory, and Fluency.

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Schaefer, Carl F.

1980-01-01

Suggests that creating a second-language semantic network can be conceived as developing a plan for retrieving second-language word forms. Characteristics of linguistic performance which will promote fluency are discussed in light of the distinction between episodic and semantic memory. (AMH)

Semantique et psychologie (Semantics and Psychology)

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Le Ny, Jean-Francois

1975-01-01

Semantic activities constitute a sub-class of psychological activities; from this point of departure the article discusses such topics as: idiosyncrasies, meaning and causality, internal determinants, neo-associationism, componential theories, noun- and verb-formation, sentences and propositions, semantics and cognition, mnemesic compontents, and…

Preserved semantic priming effect in alexia.

PubMed

Mimura, M; Goodglass, H; Milberg, W

1996-09-01

BH, a left-handed patient with alexia and nonfluent aphasia, was presented with a lexical-decision task in which words and pronounceable pseudowords were preceded by semantically related or unrelated picture primes (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, BH was given an explicit reading task using the word lists from Experiment 1. Performance on Experiment 2 disclosed severe reading deficits in both oral reading and semantic matching of the words to pictures. However, in Experiment 1, BH demonstrated a significant semantic priming effect, responding more accurately and more quickly to words preceded by related primes than by unrelated primes. The present results suggest that even in a patient with severe alexia, implicit access to semantic information can be preserved in the absence of explicit identification. The possibility of categorical gradient in implicit activation (living vs. nonliving) in BH was also discussed, which, however, needs to be clarified in the further investigation.

Semantics by analogy for illustrative volume visualization☆

PubMed Central

Gerl, Moritz; Rautek, Peter; Isenberg, Tobias; Gröller, Eduard

2012-01-01

We present an interactive graphical approach for the explicit specification of semantics for volume visualization. This explicit and graphical specification of semantics for volumetric features allows us to visually assign meaning to both input and output parameters of the visualization mapping. This is in contrast to the implicit way of specifying semantics using transfer functions. In particular, we demonstrate how to realize a dynamic specification of semantics which allows to flexibly explore a wide range of mappings. Our approach is based on three concepts. First, we use semantic shader augmentation to automatically add rule-based rendering functionality to static visualization mappings in a shader program, while preserving the visual abstraction that the initial shader encodes. With this technique we extend recent developments that define a mapping between data attributes and visual attributes with rules, which are evaluated using fuzzy logic. Second, we let users define the semantics by analogy through brushing on renderings of the data attributes of interest. Third, the rules are specified graphically in an interface that provides visual clues for potential modifications. Together, the presented methods offer a high degree of freedom in the specification and exploration of rule-based mappings and avoid the limitations of a linguistic rule formulation. PMID:23576827

Programming with process groups: Group and multicast semantics

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Birman, Kenneth P.; Cooper, Robert; Gleeson, Barry

1991-01-01

Process groups are a natural tool for distributed programming and are increasingly important in distributed computing environments. Discussed here is a new architecture that arose from an effort to simplify Isis process group semantics. The findings include a refined notion of how the clients of a group should be treated, what the properties of a multicast primitive should be when systems contain large numbers of overlapping groups, and a new construct called the causality domain. A system based on this architecture is now being implemented in collaboration with the Chorus and Mach projects.

Remote semantic memory is impoverished in hippocampal amnesia

PubMed Central

Klooster, Nathaniel B.; Duff, Melissa C.

2015-01-01

The necessity of the hippocampus for acquiring new semantic concepts is a topic of considerable debate. However, it is generally accepted that any role the hippocampus plays in semantic memory is time limited and that previously acquired information becomes independent of the hippocampus over time. This view, along with intact naming and word-definition matching performance in amnesia, has led to the notion that remote semantic memory is intact in patients with hippocampal amnesia. Motivated by perspectives of word learning as a protracted process where additional features and senses of a word are added over time, and by recent discoveries about the time course of hippocampal contributions to on-line relational processing, reconsolidation, and the flexible integration of information, we revisit the notion that remote semantic memory is intact in amnesia. Using measures of semantic richness and vocabulary depth from psycholinguistics and first and second language-learning studies, we examined how much information is associated with previously acquired, highly familiar words in a group of patients with bilateral hippocampal damage and amnesia. Relative to healthy demographically matched comparison participants and a group of brain-damaged comparison participants, the patients with hippocampal amnesia performed significantly worse on both productive and receptive measures of vocabulary depth and semantic richness. These findings suggest that remote semantic memory is impoverished in patients with hippocampal amnesia and that the hippocampus may play a role in the maintenance and updating of semantic memory beyond its initial acquisition. PMID:26474741

Towards Semantic e-Science for Traditional Chinese Medicine

PubMed Central

Chen, Huajun; Mao, Yuxin; Zheng, Xiaoqing; Cui, Meng; Feng, Yi; Deng, Shuiguang; Yin, Aining; Zhou, Chunying; Tang, Jinming; Jiang, Xiaohong; Wu, Zhaohui

2007-01-01

Background Recent advances in Web and information technologies with the increasing decentralization of organizational structures have resulted in massive amounts of information resources and domain-specific services in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The massive volume and diversity of information and services available have made it difficult to achieve seamless and interoperable e-Science for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. Therefore, information integration and service coordination are two major challenges in e-Science for TCM. We still lack sophisticated approaches to integrate scientific data and services for TCM e-Science. Results We present a comprehensive approach to build dynamic and extendable e-Science applications for knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM based on semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The semantic e-Science infrastructure for TCM supports large-scale database integration and service coordination in a virtual organization. We use domain ontologies to integrate TCM database resources and services in a semantic cyberspace and deliver a semantically superior experience including browsing, searching, querying and knowledge discovering to users. We have developed a collection of semantic-based toolkits to facilitate TCM scientists and researchers in information sharing and collaborative research. Conclusion Semantic and knowledge-based techniques are suitable to knowledge-intensive disciplines like TCM. It's possible to build on-demand e-Science system for TCM based on existing semantic and knowledge-based techniques. The presented approach in the paper integrates heterogeneous distributed TCM databases and services, and provides scientists with semantically superior experience to support collaborative research in TCM discipline. PMID:17493289

Disorganised schizotypy is selectively associated with poorer semantic processing in non-clinical individuals.

PubMed

Tan, Eric Josiah; Rossell, Susan Lee

2017-10-01

The nature and severity of semantic memory (SM) impairments in schizophrenia has been related to symptoms, mainly formal thought disorder (FTD), and other clinical factors like length of illness. Symptom-related studies in schizophrenia are often confounded by clinical factors, for example medication and hospitalisations. We completed a schizotypy analogue study to examine the relationship between SM processing and FTD using an analogue schizotypy score referred to as cognitive disorganisation. Sixty individuals without a history of mental illness (M=22.92, SD=2.70) completed a schizotypy questionnaire and three semantic tasks - naming pictures, category fluency and semantic priming. Only decreasing fluency was associated with increasing cognitive disorganisation scores (p=0.029). In line with the prevailing dyssemantic theories, the results highlight that cognitive disorganisation is associated with some difficulties in SM processes, though not all. The observed differential relationships of SM processes to disorganised schizotypy are discussed in relation to previous work, and in terms of potential developmental trajectories for SM impairment in schizophrenia. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

e-Science and biological pathway semantics

PubMed Central

Luciano, Joanne S; Stevens, Robert D

2007-01-01

Background The development of e-Science presents a major set of opportunities and challenges for the future progress of biological and life scientific research. Major new tools are required and corresponding demands are placed on the high-throughput data generated and used in these processes. Nowhere is the demand greater than in the semantic integration of these data. Semantic Web tools and technologies afford the chance to achieve this semantic integration. Since pathway knowledge is central to much of the scientific research today it is a good test-bed for semantic integration. Within the context of biological pathways, the BioPAX initiative, part of a broader movement towards the standardization and integration of life science databases, forms a necessary prerequisite for its successful application of e-Science in health care and life science research. This paper examines whether BioPAX, an effort to overcome the barrier of disparate and heterogeneous pathway data sources, addresses the needs of e-Science. Results We demonstrate how BioPAX pathway data can be used to ask and answer some useful biological questions. We find that BioPAX comes close to meeting a broad range of e-Science needs, but certain semantic weaknesses mean that these goals are missed. We make a series of recommendations for re-modeling some aspects of BioPAX to better meet these needs. Conclusion Once these semantic weaknesses are addressed, it will be possible to integrate pathway information in a manner that would be useful in e-Science. PMID:17493286

Semantic categorization: a comparison between deaf and hearing children.

PubMed

Ormel, Ellen A; Gijsel, Martine A R; Hermans, Daan; Bosman, Anna M T; Knoors, Harry; Verhoeven, Ludo

2010-01-01

Learning to read is a major obstacle for children who are deaf. The otherwise significant role of phonology is often limited as a result of hearing loss. However, semantic knowledge may facilitate reading comprehension. One important aspect of semantic knowledge concerns semantic categorization. In the present study, the quality of the semantic categorization of both deaf and hearing children was examined for written words and pictures at two categorization levels. The deaf children performed better at the picture condition compared to the written word condition, while the hearing children performed similarly at pictures and written words. The hearing children outperformed the deaf children, in particular for written words. In addition, the results of the deaf children for the written words correlated to their sign vocabulary and sign language comprehension. The increase in semantic categorization was limited across elementary school grade levels. Readers will be able to: (1) understand several semantic categorization differences between groups of deaf and hearing children; (2) describe factors that may affect the development of semantic categorization, in particular the relationship between sign language skills and semantic categorization for deaf children. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Semantic Processing Impairment in Patients with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

PubMed Central

Jaimes-Bautista, Amanda G.; Rodríguez-Camacho, Mario; Martínez-Juárez, Iris E.; Rodríguez-Agudelo, Yaneth

2015-01-01

The impairment in episodic memory system is the best-known cognitive deficit in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Recent studies have shown evidence of semantic disorders, but they have been less studied than episodic memory. The semantic dysfunction in TLE has various cognitive manifestations, such as the presence of language disorders characterized by defects in naming, verbal fluency, or remote semantic information retrieval, which affects the ability of patients to interact with their surroundings. This paper is a review of recent research about the consequences of TLE on semantic processing, considering neuropsychological, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging findings, as well as the functional role of the hippocampus in semantic processing. The evidence from these studies shows disturbance of semantic memory in patients with TLE and supports the theory of declarative memory of the hippocampus. Functional neuroimaging studies show an inefficient compensatory functional reorganization of semantic networks and electrophysiological studies show a lack of N400 effect that could indicate that the deficit in semantic processing in patients with TLE could be due to a failure in the mechanisms of automatic access to lexicon. PMID:26257956

Individual differences in white matter microstructure predict semantic control.

PubMed

Nugiel, Tehila; Alm, Kylie H; Olson, Ingrid R

2016-12-01

In everyday conversation, we make many rapid choices between competing concepts and words in order to convey our intent. This process is termed semantic control, and it is thought to rely on information transmission between a distributed semantic store in the temporal lobes and a more discrete region, optimized for retrieval and selection, in the left inferior frontal gyrus. Here, we used diffusion tensor imaging in a group of neurologically normal young adults to investigate the relationship between semantic control and white matter tracts that have been implicated in semantic memory retrieval. Participants completed a verb generation task that taps semantic control (Snyder & Munakata, 2008; Snyder et al., 2010) and underwent a diffusion imaging scan. Deterministic tractography was performed to compute indices representing the microstructural properties of the inferior fronto-occipital fasciculus (IFOF), the uncinate fasciculus (UF), and the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF). Microstructural measures of the UF failed to predict semantic control performance. However, there was a significant relationship between microstructure of the left IFOF and ILF and individual differences in semantic control. Our findings support the view put forth by Duffau (2013) that the IFOF is a key structural pathway in semantic retrieval.

Somatotopic Semantic Priming and Prediction in the Motor System

PubMed Central

Grisoni, Luigi; Dreyer, Felix R.; Pulvermüller, Friedemann

2016-01-01

The recognition of action-related sounds and words activates motor regions, reflecting the semantic grounding of these symbols in action information; in addition, motor cortex exerts causal influences on sound perception and language comprehension. However, proponents of classic symbolic theories still dispute the role of modality-preferential systems such as the motor cortex in the semantic processing of meaningful stimuli. To clarify whether the motor system carries semantic processes, we investigated neurophysiological indexes of semantic relationships between action-related sounds and words. Event-related potentials revealed that action-related words produced significantly larger stimulus-evoked (Mismatch Negativity-like) and predictive brain responses (Readiness Potentials) when presented in body-part-incongruent sound contexts (e.g., “kiss” in footstep sound context; “kick” in whistle context) than in body-part-congruent contexts, a pattern reminiscent of neurophysiological correlates of semantic priming. Cortical generators of the semantic relatedness effect were localized in areas traditionally associated with semantic memory, including left inferior frontal cortex and temporal pole, and, crucially, in motor areas, where body-part congruency of action sound–word relationships was indexed by a somatotopic pattern of activation. As our results show neurophysiological manifestations of action-semantic priming in the motor cortex, they prove semantic processing in the motor system and thus in a modality-preferential system of the human brain. PMID:26908635

Semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes

PubMed Central

Hwang, Alex D.; Wang, Hsueh-Cheng; Pomplun, Marc

2011-01-01

The perception of objects in our visual world is influenced by not only their low-level visual features such as shape and color, but also their high-level features such as meaning and semantic relations among them. While it has been shown that low-level features in real-world scenes guide eye movements during scene inspection and search, the influence of semantic similarity among scene objects on eye movements in such situations has not been investigated. Here we study guidance of eye movements by semantic similarity among objects during real-world scene inspection and search. By selecting scenes from the LabelMe object-annotated image database and applying Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to the object labels, we generated semantic saliency maps of real-world scenes based on the semantic similarity of scene objects to the currently fixated object or the search target. An ROC analysis of these maps as predictors of subjects’ gaze transitions between objects during scene inspection revealed a preference for transitions to objects that were semantically similar to the currently inspected one. Furthermore, during the course of a scene search, subjects’ eye movements were progressively guided toward objects that were semantically similar to the search target. These findings demonstrate substantial semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes and show its importance for understanding real-world attentional control. PMID:21426914

Semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes.

PubMed

Hwang, Alex D; Wang, Hsueh-Cheng; Pomplun, Marc

2011-05-25

The perception of objects in our visual world is influenced by not only their low-level visual features such as shape and color, but also their high-level features such as meaning and semantic relations among them. While it has been shown that low-level features in real-world scenes guide eye movements during scene inspection and search, the influence of semantic similarity among scene objects on eye movements in such situations has not been investigated. Here we study guidance of eye movements by semantic similarity among objects during real-world scene inspection and search. By selecting scenes from the LabelMe object-annotated image database and applying latent semantic analysis (LSA) to the object labels, we generated semantic saliency maps of real-world scenes based on the semantic similarity of scene objects to the currently fixated object or the search target. An ROC analysis of these maps as predictors of subjects' gaze transitions between objects during scene inspection revealed a preference for transitions to objects that were semantically similar to the currently inspected one. Furthermore, during the course of a scene search, subjects' eye movements were progressively guided toward objects that were semantically similar to the search target. These findings demonstrate substantial semantic guidance of eye movements in real-world scenes and show its importance for understanding real-world attentional control. Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Semantic amnesia without dementia: documentation of a case.

PubMed

Rusconi, M L; Zago, S; Basso, A

1997-06-01

We described the case of a patient affected by a progressive semantic memory disorder associated with prevalent temporal lobe atrophy. This deficit seems to be "pure" in the sense that it has not been found to overlap with other cognitive deficits (intellectual, linguistic, perceptual, visuo-spatial etc.) for a long time. Furthermore, despite his impaired semantic knowledge, the autobiographical memory of the patient was largely intact. This case therefore represents a form of "semantic amnesia" without dementia, and supports the hypothesis that there is a partial distinction between "semantic" and "episodic" memory.

Semantic search during divergent thinking.

PubMed

Hass, Richard W

2017-09-01

Divergent thinking, as a method of examining creative cognition, has not been adequately analyzed in the context of modern cognitive theories. This article casts divergent thinking responding in the context of theories of memory search. First, it was argued that divergent thinking tasks are similar to semantic fluency tasks, but are more constrained, and less well structured. Next, response time distributions from 54 participants were analyzed for temporal and semantic clustering. Participants responded to two prompts from the alternative uses test: uses for a brick and uses for a bottle, for two minutes each. Participants' cumulative response curves were negatively accelerating, in line with theories of search of associative memory. However, results of analyses of semantic and temporal clustering suggested that clustering is less evident in alternative uses responding compared to semantic fluency tasks. This suggests either that divergent thinking responding does not involve an exhaustive search through a clustered memory trace, but rather that the process is more exploratory, yielding fewer overall responses that tend to drift away from close associates of the divergent thinking prompt. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Musical and verbal semantic memory: two distinct neural networks?

PubMed

Groussard, M; Viader, F; Hubert, V; Landeau, B; Abbas, A; Desgranges, B; Eustache, F; Platel, H

2010-02-01

Semantic memory has been investigated in numerous neuroimaging and clinical studies, most of which have used verbal or visual, but only very seldom, musical material. Clinical studies have suggested that there is a relative neural independence between verbal and musical semantic memory. In the present study, "musical semantic memory" is defined as memory for "well-known" melodies without any knowledge of the spatial or temporal circumstances of learning, while "verbal semantic memory" corresponds to general knowledge about concepts, again without any knowledge of the spatial or temporal circumstances of learning. Our aim was to compare the neural substrates of musical and verbal semantic memory by administering the same type of task in each modality. We used high-resolution PET H(2)O(15) to observe 11 young subjects performing two main tasks: (1) a musical semantic memory task, where the subjects heard the first part of familiar melodies and had to decide whether the second part they heard matched the first, and (2) a verbal semantic memory task with the same design, but where the material consisted of well-known expressions or proverbs. The musical semantic memory condition activated the superior temporal area and inferior and middle frontal areas in the left hemisphere and the inferior frontal area in the right hemisphere. The verbal semantic memory condition activated the middle temporal region in the left hemisphere and the cerebellum in the right hemisphere. We found that the verbal and musical semantic processes activated a common network extending throughout the left temporal neocortex. In addition, there was a material-dependent topographical preference within this network, with predominantly anterior activation during musical tasks and predominantly posterior activation during semantic verbal tasks. Copyright (c) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Toward semantic-based retrieval of visual information: a model-based approach

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Park, Youngchoon; Golshani, Forouzan; Panchanathan, Sethuraman