A Basis For Generating
Expectancies For Verbs From Nouns
by K. McRael, M. Hare, J.L. Elman, T. Ferrett
2005
Presented by Vachagan Gratian
Generating expectancies help to make predictions about information underlaying the incoming text and limit the number of possible interpretations.
micro-level predictions
"n-grams", syntactic structure
macro-level predictions
semantic & pragmatic information, crossreferences
Generating expectancies
Consider two examples:
"He ate his grandma"
"He ate bit she is"
Generating expectancies
Remember the graph theoretic problem of probabilistic parsing:
E.g., if N=10, G= 100,000,000
G (number of graphs) = N N-2
Question 1:
What elements are used to generate these expectations?
Verbs?
... played ...
... game ...
Nonverbs? (Nouns, Adjectives, Prepositions, etc)
What about verb-final languages then?
Question 2:
What role play world knowledge and semantic parsing?
Scenario 1:
Only low-level, coarse-grained data is used
Scenario 2:
High-level data, eg. pragmatics, event knowledge, are part of the expectancy generation process.
Event knowledge knowledge about thematic roles associated with a verb or situation.
Event knowledge as a function
Nouns
prepositions
adjectives, etc.
Verb
Experminent 1
short SOA
50ms interval
Experminent 2
long SOA
300 ms interval
Purpose of the experiments: Demonstrate the presence of a noun can lead to predict an associated verb as a word-word priming task.
- particpants read prime (noun) silently
- and read target (verb) aloud
- as predicted, in both cases unrelated pairs showed higher latency and lower accuracy
What is Priming?
DOG
BARK
BITE
BONE
DOG
BARK
BITE
BONE
What is Priming?
The cerebellum has a very important role in the creation of associations between events or representations that are in temporal sequence (...) pairing motor actions to their expected sensorial outcomes and vice versa.
--Allen-Walker, L.S.T et al (2018
Forward vs Backward priming
FLOWER ROSE
ROSE SISTER
Backward priming happens when the second word helps to a assign a semantic role to the preceding one.
Conclusion and Questions
References
- Allen-Walker, L.S.T. et al (2018), "Facilitation of Fast Backward Priming After Left Cerebellar Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation". The Cerebellum, April 2018, Volume 17, Issue 2, pp 132–142.
- Collins, Allan M.; Loftus, Elizabeth F. (1975). "A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing". Psychological Review. 82 (6): 407–428.