By the time they reach early adulthood, English speakers are familiar with the meaning of thousands of words. In the last decades, computational simulations known as distributional semantic models have demonstrated that it is possible to induce word meaning representations solely from word co-occurrence statistics extracted from a large amount of text. However, while these models learn in batch mode from large corpora, human word learning proceeds incrementally after minimal exposure to new words. In this study, we run a set (...) of experiments investigating whether minimal distributional evidence from very short passages suffices to trigger successful word learning in subjects, testing their linguistic and visual intuitions about the concepts associated with new words. After confirming that subjects are indeed very efficient distributional learners even from small amounts of evidence, we test a DSM on the same multimodal task, finding that it behaves in a remarkable human-like way. We conclude that DSMs provide a convincing computational account of word learning even at the early stages in which a word is first encountered, and the way they build meaning representations can offer new insights into human language acquisition. (shrink)

Computational models of meaning trained on naturally occurring text successfully model human performance on tasks involving simple similarity measures, but they characterize meaning in terms of undifferentiated bags of words or topical dimensions. This has led some to question their psychological plausibility (Murphy, 2002;Schunn, 1999). We present here a fully automatic method for extracting a structured and comprehensive set of concept descriptions directly from an English part‐of‐speech‐tagged corpus. Concepts are characterized by weighted properties, enriched with concept–property types that approximate classical (...) relations such as hypernymy and function. Our model outperforms comparable algorithms in cognitive tasks pertaining not only to concept‐internal structures (discovering properties of concepts, grouping properties by property type) but also to inter‐concept relations (clustering into superordinates), suggesting the empirical validity of the property‐based approach. (shrink)

Computational models of meaning trained on naturally occurring text successfully model human performance on tasks involving simple similarity measures, but they characterize meaning in terms of undifferentiated bags of words or topical dimensions. This has led some to question their psychological plausibility (Murphy, 2002;Schunn, 1999). We present here a fully automatic method for extracting a structured and comprehensive set of concept descriptions directly from an English part‐of‐speech‐tagged corpus. Concepts are characterized by weighted properties, enriched with concept–property types that approximate classical (...) relations such as hypernymy and function. Our model outperforms comparable algorithms in cognitive tasks pertaining not only to concept‐internal structures (discovering properties of concepts, grouping properties by property type) but also to inter‐concept relations (clustering into superordinates), suggesting the empirical validity of the property‐based approach. (shrink)

Sophisticated senator and legislative onion. Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to semantic deviance based on phrase representations derived with compositional distributional semantic methods, that is, methods that derive word meanings from contextual information, and approximate phrase meanings (...) by combining word meanings. We present several simple measures extracted from distributional representations of words and phrases, and we show that they have a significant impact on predicting the acceptability of novel adjective-noun phrases even when a number of alternative measures classically employed in studies of compound processing and bigram plausibility are taken into account. Our results show that the extent to which an attributive adjective alters the distributional representation of the noun is the most significant factor in modeling the distinction between acceptable and deviant phrases. Our study extends current applications of compositional distributional semantic methods to linguistically and cognitively interesting problems, and it offers a new, quantitatively precise approach to the challenge of predicting when humans will find novel linguistic expressions acceptable and when they will not. (shrink)

Various types of continuity for preference relations on a metric space are examined constructively. In particular, necessary and sufficient conditions are given for an order-dense, strongly extensional preference relation on a complete metric space to be continuous. It is also shown, in the spirit of constructive reverse mathematics, that the continuity of sequentially continuous, order-dense preference relations on complete, separable metric spaces is connected to Ishihara's principleBD-ℕ, and therefore is not provable within Bishop-style constructive mathematics alone.

El paradigma tradicional en el sistema de patentes se basaba en que solo eran patentables las invenciones, lo que indirectamente excluía la materia viva. Sin embargo, la irrupción de la biotecnología en la propiedad industrial ha supuesto un sustancial vuelco en estas premisas, debido, entre otros factores, a que los seres vivos presentan una naturaleza dual, ya que son al mismo tiempo materia viva e información. Además, la aceleración de las investigaciones en lo referente a la biología sintética y a (...) la inteligencia artificial añade una complejidad creciente a nuestra temática. Pues bien, para analizar los problemas que genera la propiedad privada en lo referente a la vida, hemos creado un modelo con tres pares de variables, invención/ descubrimiento, materia/información, y materia inerte/viva. El objetivo último es clarificar las narrativas que subyacen tras los numerosos documentos que tratan de encauzar, regular y/o refutar las biopatentes. (shrink)