Journal of Biomedical Semantics最新文献

{"title":"Disjunction Triggers Exhaustivity Implicatures in 4- to 5-Year-Olds: Investigating the Role of Access to Alternatives","authors":"Nicole Gotzner, D. Barner, S. Crain","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz021","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Children’s difficulty deriving scalar implicatures has been attributed to a variety of factors including processing limitations, an inability to access scalar alternatives, and pragmatic tolerance. The present research explores the nature of children’s difficulty by investigating a previously unexplored kind of inference—an exhaustivity implicature that is triggered by disjunction. We reasoned that if children are able to draw quantity implicatures but have difficulties accessing alternative lexical expressions from a scale, then they should perform better on exhaustivity implicatures than on scalar implicatures, since the former do not require spontaneously accessing relevant scalar alternatives from the lexicon. We conducted two experiments. Experiment 1 found that 4- to 5-year-olds consistently computed exhaustivity implicatures to a greater extent than scalar implicatures. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children are more likely to compute exhaustivity implicatures with disjunction compared to conjunction. We conclude that children often fail to derive scalar implicatures because (1) they struggle to access scalar alternatives and (2) disjunction (but not conjunction) makes subdomain alternatives particularly salient. Thus, the findings suggest that exhaustivity implicatures can be derived without reference to a scale of alternatives.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"92 1","pages":"219-245"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85880991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Do Children Interpret 'or' Conjunctively?","authors":"Dimitrios Skordos, Roman Feiman, Alan C. Bale, D. Barner","doi":"10.1093/JOS/FFZ022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/JOS/FFZ022","url":null,"abstract":"Preschoolers often struggle to compute scalar implicatures (SI) involving disjunction (or), in which they are required to strengthen an utterance by negating stronger alternatives, e.g., to infer that, “The girl has an apple or an orange” likely means she doesn’t have both. However, recent reports surprisingly find that a substantial subset of children interpret disjunction as conjunction, concluding instead that the girl must have both fruits. According to these studies, children arrive at conjunctive readings not because they have a non-adult-like semantics, but because they lack access to the stronger scalar alternative and, and employ doubly exhaustified disjuncts when computing implicatures. Using stimuli modeled on previous studies, we test English-speaking preschoolers and replicate the finding that many children interpret or conjunctively. However, we speculate that conditions which replicate this finding may be pragmatically infelicitous, such that results do not offer a valid test of children’s semantic competence. We show that when disjunctive statements are uttered in contexts that render the speaker’s intended question more transparent, conjunctive readings disappear almost entirely. INTERPRETATION OF DISJUNCTION 4 Older preschoolers and kindergarteners often struggle to compute scalar implicatures (SIs) involving quantifiers like some (Smith, 1980; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003) and logical operators like disjunction (Braine & Rumain, 1981; Chierchia et al., 2001). For example, when presented with an utterance containing some like the one in (1a), many children fail to derive the implicature in (1c). Similarly, when presented with a sentence like the one in (2a) many children fail to derive an exclusive interpretation of or characterized by (2c): (1) a. The boy took some of the bananas. b. The boy took all of the bananas. c. The boy took some, but not all of the bananas. (2) a. The girl has an apple or an orange. b. The girl has an apple and an orange. c. The girl has an apple or an orange, but not both. On most accounts, deriving a scalar implicature involves accessing a stronger alternative statement that is generated by replacing one scalar term (e.g., some, or) with another, stronger, one (e.g., all, and). For example, to derive an implicature for the sentence containing some in (1a), children must access and negate the stronger alternative in (1b). Likewise, to derive the implicature for the sentence containing or in (2a), children must access and negate the stronger alternative in (2b). On standard accounts of disjunction, a failure to do so should result in an inclusive interpretation, wherein the listener concludes that the utterance in (2a) is acceptable even when the girl has both an apple and an orange (Crain & Khlentzos, 2010; Gazdar, 1979; McCawly, 1993; Pelletier, 1977). INTERPRETATION OF DISJUNCTION 5 Children’s difficulties with SI have been variously attributed to general processing limitations (Chierchi","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"35 1","pages":"247-267"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90220516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Kripkeans of the world, unite!","authors":"F. Islam, Giosuè Baggio","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffaa001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffaa001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This paper revisits a study by Machery et al. (2004), suggesting that, in experimental versions of Kripke’s (1980) fictional cases on the use of proper names, Westerners are more likely than East Asian participants to show intuitions compatible with Kripke’s causal-historical (CH) theory of reference. We conducted two experiments, recruting participants from Norway and Bangladesh, either in English (experiment 1; N = 75) or in the participants’ native languages (experiment 2; N = 60), using modified cases and a new approach to data analysis. We replicated the results of Machery et al. (2004), but we show that the residual finding—i.e., that participants who are not aligned with CH produce responses consistent with a definite descriptions (DD) theory of reference—does not hold. Most participants in our experiments, and nearly all those who do not provide CH answers, respond as predicted by a theory that accommodates speaker’s reference in reasoning about uses of proper names, not according to DD. We suggest that cross-cultural variation in this task is real. However, explanations of variation within or across cultures need not invoke competing theories of reference (CH vs DD), and can be unified within a single, broadly Kripkean analysis that honors the basic distinction between semantic reference and speaker’s reference.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"5 1","pages":"297-309"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75630294","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Temporal information extraction from mental health records to identify duration of untreated psychosis.","authors":"Natalia Viani,&nbsp;Joyce Kam,&nbsp;Lucia Yin,&nbsp;André Bittar,&nbsp;Rina Dutta,&nbsp;Rashmi Patel,&nbsp;Robert Stewart,&nbsp;Sumithra Velupillai","doi":"10.1186/s13326-020-00220-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s13326-020-00220-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) is an important clinical construct in the field of mental health, as longer DUP can be associated with worse intervention outcomes. DUP estimation requires knowledge about when psychosis symptoms first started (symptom onset), and when psychosis treatment was initiated. Electronic health records (EHRs) represent a useful resource for retrospective clinical studies on DUP, but the core information underlying this construct is most likely to lie in free text, meaning it is not readily available for clinical research. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a means to addressing this problem by automatically extracting relevant information in a structured form. As a first step, it is important to identify appropriate documents, i.e., those that are likely to include the information of interest. Next, temporal information extraction methods are needed to identify time references for early psychosis symptoms. This NLP challenge requires solving three different tasks: time expression extraction, symptom extraction, and temporal \"linking\". In this study, we focus on the first step, using two relevant EHR datasets.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>We applied a rule-based NLP system for time expression extraction that we had previously adapted to a corpus of mental health EHRs from patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia (first referrals). We extended this work by applying this NLP system to a larger set of documents and patients, to identify additional texts that would be relevant for our long-term goal, and developed a new corpus from a subset of these new texts (early intervention services). Furthermore, we added normalized value annotations (\"2011-05\") to the annotated time expressions (\"May 2011\") in both corpora. The finalized corpora were used for further NLP development and evaluation, with promising results (normalization accuracy 71-86%). To highlight the specificities of our annotation task, we also applied the final adapted NLP system to a different temporally annotated clinical corpus.</p><p><strong>Conclusions: </strong>Developing domain-specific methods is crucial to address complex NLP tasks such as symptom onset extraction and retrospective calculation of duration of a preclinical syndrome. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first clinical text resource annotated for temporal entities in the mental health domain.</p>","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"11 1","pages":"2"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1186/s13326-020-00220-2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10217154","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Explanation of the Veridical Uniformity Universal","authors":"Shane Steinert-Threlkeld","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz019","url":null,"abstract":"A semantic universal, which we here dub the Veridical Uniformity Universal, has recently been argued to hold of responsive verbs (those that take both declarative and interrogative complements). This paper offers a preliminary explanation of this universal: verbs satisfying it are easier to learn than those that do not. This claim is supported by a computational experiment using artificial neural networks, mirroring a recent proposal for explaining semantic universals of quantifiers. This preliminary study opens up many avenues for future work on explaining semantic universals more generally, which are discussed in the conclusion.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"4 1","pages":"129-144"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87035733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Plurality in Buriat and Structurally Constrained Alternatives","authors":"Lisa Bylinina, Alexander Podobryaev","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz017","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 We offer a solution to a puzzle in the number interpretation of nominals in Buriat. Buriat has a two-way number opposition in morphology (unmarked vs. plural), but semantically, both forms may be number neutral. We show that even though the number neutrality of unmarked nominals is heavily restricted, it does not boil down to (pseudo-)incorporation. Our proposal is that unmarked nominals can be either singular (projecting a NumP) or numberless (lacking a NumP). In case they are singular, they are semantically strictly atomic, but when there are numberless they are truly number neutral, just like the plurals. The plurality inferences of plurals and the consistent number neutrality of numberless nouns are accounted for in a Katzirian system with structurally defined alternatives.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"120 1","pages":"117-128"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77965972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Aspect and Thematic Roles","authors":"Toshiyuki Ogihara","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz020","url":null,"abstract":"In this work, I propose a new semantic analysis of the Japanese progressive/resultative morpheme -te iru, which also leads to an improved account of the English progressive and contributes to cross-linguistic theory of aspect. The proposal is based on the modal analysis of the English progressive proposed by Portner (1998) and Ferreira (2016), but it is modified to accommodate the Japanese data. Crucially, the target state (resultative) reading of -te iru is available when the subject entity is a theme/undergoer; this is not controlled by the length of the event being described. To implement this idea, this work develops a formal system in which each thematic role predicate has its own temporal argument, and this time does not necessarily equal the temporal trace of the event in question. Specifically, a theme bears the target state role associated with an event e at a time that immediately follows the temporal trace of e. In addition, to describe and explain the behavior of -te iru, the traditional idea of “inertia worlds” according to which the relevant possible worlds are identical up to the utterance time is modified to allow them to differ in the past as well as in the future. It is noted that this modification is justified for the English progressive as well as for the Japanese -te iru form. This proposal allows us to predict that the behavior of achievements in English and Japanese is alike in simple past sentences and nominalized cases, but differs from each other in sentences containing the aspectual morphemes in question.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"3 1","pages":"83-115"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74248270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Plural Marking and d-Linking in Spanish Interrogatives","authors":"Mora Maldonado","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 What is the semantic import of number morphology? This question has been traditionally addressed by focusing on singular and plural noun phrases. The present work brings interrogative phrases into the picture. We analyse Spanish bare interrogative ‘quién’ and its plural counterpart ‘quiénes’. Unlike which-questions in both English and Spanish, the behaviour of quién- and quiénes-interrogatives cannot be easily explained by most accounts of semantic number. In contrast, we argue that the distribution of these interrogatives in Spanish can be well accounted for by assuming that the plural ‘quiénes’ triggers a strong plurality presupposition, and can only be used in d-linking contexts, whereas ‘quién’ carries no specific requirement, as far as its semantics is concerned. As a result, our proposal shows that current approaches to number marking need to be refined in order to account for cross-linguistic and within-language variation.","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"15 1","pages":"145-170"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91083854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Overt Even Operator over Covert-Based Focus Alternatives: The Case of Hebrew BIXLAL1","authors":"Y. Greenberg","doi":"10.1093/jos/ffz010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffz010","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"298 1","pages":"1-42"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2020-02-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76261062","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"OHMI: the ontology of host-microbiome interactions.","authors":"Yongqun He, Haihe Wang, Jie Zheng, Daniel P Beiting, Anna Maria Masci, Hong Yu, Kaiyong Liu, Jianmin Wu, Jeffrey L Curtis, Barry Smith, Alexander V Alekseyenko, Jihad S Obeid","doi":"10.1186/s13326-019-0217-1","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s13326-019-0217-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>Host-microbiome interactions (HMIs) are critical for the modulation of biological processes and are associated with several diseases. Extensive HMI studies have generated large amounts of data. We propose that the logical representation of the knowledge derived from these data and the standardized representation of experimental variables and processes can foster integration of data and reproducibility of experiments and thereby further HMI knowledge discovery.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>Through a multi-institutional collaboration, a community-based Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions (OHMI) was developed following the Open Biological/Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry principles. As an OBO library ontology, OHMI leverages established ontologies to create logically structured representations of (1) microbiomes, microbial taxonomy, host species, host anatomical entities, and HMIs under different conditions and (2) associated study protocols and types of data analysis and experimental results.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>Aligned with the Basic Formal Ontology, OHMI comprises over 1000 terms, including terms imported from more than 10 existing ontologies together with some 500 OHMI-specific terms. A specific OHMI design pattern was generated to represent typical host-microbiome interaction studies. As one major OHMI use case, drawing on data from over 50 peer-reviewed publications, we identified over 100 bacteria and fungi from the gut, oral cavity, skin, and airway that are associated with six rheumatic diseases including rheumatoid arthritis. Our ontological study identified new high-level microbiota taxonomical structures. Two microbiome-related competency questions were also designed and addressed. We were also able to use OHMI to represent statistically significant results identified from a large existing microbiome database data analysis.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>OHMI represents entities and relations in the domain of HMIs. It supports shared knowledge representation, data and metadata standardization and integration, and can be used in formulation of advanced queries for purposes of data analysis.</p>","PeriodicalId":15055,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biomedical Semantics","volume":"10 1","pages":"25"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2019-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6937947/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"37500985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}