The environmental issue has become central in the public debate, but the new scenario of the infosphere within which it takes place with its informal formation, does not seem to increase awareness ...but rather confusion and cognitive difficulty that holds citizens back from participating in public decisions on the environment. An alarm for pedagogy, ecopedagogy and science in general that should foster a dialogue based on a different approach to the co-construction of knowledge between expert and lay knowledge and new education.
Devising automatic tools to assist specialists in the early detection of mental disturbances and psychotic disorders is to date a challenging scientific problem and a practically relevant activity. ...In this work we explore how language models (that are probability distributions over text sequences) can be employed to analyze language and discriminate between mentally impaired and healthy subjects. We have preliminarily explored whether perplexity can be considered a reliable metrics to characterize an individual’s language. Perplexity was originally conceived as an information-theoretic measure to assess how much a given language model is suited to predict a text sequence or, equivalently, how much a word sequence fits into a specific language model. We carried out an extensive experimentation with healthy subjects, and employed language models as diverse as N-grams – from 2-grams to 5-grams – and GPT-2, a transformer-based language model. Our experiments show that irrespective of the complexity of the employed language model, perplexity scores are stable and sufficiently consistent for analyzing the language of individual subjects, and at the same time sensitive enough to capture differences due to linguistic registers adopted by the same speaker, e.g., in interviews and political rallies. A second array of experiments was designed to investigate whether perplexity scores may be used to discriminate between the transcripts of healthy subjects and subjects suffering from Alzheimer Disease (AD). Our best performing models achieved full accuracy and F-score (1.00 in both precision/specificity and recall/sensitivity) in categorizing subjects from both the AD class, and control subjects. These results suggest that perplexity can be a valuable analytical metrics with potential application to supporting early diagnosis of symptoms of mental disorders.
•Perplexity was found to be a reliable metrics to characterize individuals’ language.•Perplexity was used to recognize Alzheimer Disease patients from healthy controls.•Perplexity may be helpful in the early detection of psychotic disorders.
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The Word, as the creative principle of life, is a concept found in many cultures, from the Hebraic to the Uitotos (or Murui) of the Colombian Amazon. The author finds parallels between the immersion ...of Joyce´s Finnegans Wake in the Word as the key to unlocking different but interrelated dimensions of reality, and the cosmo-vision of the Murui. Finnegans Wake presents a panoptic view of practically the whole of life and history in the form of the dream world of a Dublin tavern owner. It deploys a complex use of word play, hidden meanings and mutations of language to depict both the conscious and subconscious perceptions of our primal humanity. Similarly, virtually every word of the Murui myths has multiple meanings and they embody a manual of correct thought and behavior ranging from spirituality to the practicalities of daily life. Their premier shamanic plants, mambe and ambil, derivatives of coca and tobacco, respectively, are the inspiration for the nightly colloquiums in their malocas (longhouses) where the meanings of their myths are teased out by the participants, guided by their medicine man, in a free-ranging conversation that, while it seems to be digressive, adheres, as does Joyce, to the inner logic of the Word. The author ends with some reflections on his own struggles, as a writer to grapple with the Word, which, as it communicates, also mystifies. For the Murui, this urge towards omniscience may have arisen because their survival depended on articulating all of the interrelated nuances of their environment.
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This research explores the intricate realm of nostalgia, employing advanced language analysis and the Event Reflection Task to systematically dissect the process of nostalgic recall. Through this ...methodological approach, distinct thematic elements are identified across 10 data sets ( N = 2,038). Eight recurrent topics in nostalgic content are unveiled, ranging from Family and Positive Affect to Longing and Place. The interplay of these thematic categories with the psychological consequences of nostalgia reveals a complex and multifaceted pattern. Notably, themes associated with positive affect exhibit a capacity to yield a plethora of favorable psychological outcomes, while those intertwined with negative emotion are bittersweet. This investigation paves the way for inquiries into potential cross-cultural disparities, the diversification of manipulation techniques, and the application of sophisticated analytical methodologies. As nostalgia’s dimensions continue to unfold, its implications widen, inviting researchers to unearth the profound depths of emotion and cognition entwined in the reverie of reminiscence.
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This volume is intended to be a practical manual to learn the basics of the Ainu language, in its varieties of Southern Hokkaidō and Sakhalin. Each lesson presents one specific topic that is ...investigated taking into account both varieties of the language. Three kinds of activities guide the student throughout each lesson to inductively make generalisations on the language that can be supported by linguistic evidence and, possibly, to revise the information they were given as a start of their analysis. In order to do this, the student learns to observe the data, recognize recurring patterns and exceptions, and formulate a description of the language behaviours illustrated by the given examples. At the end of each lesson the student actively gains knowledge of the Ainu language by producing themselves a set of descriptive rules. The course aims at giving the student some basic analytical tools to approach and analyse Ainu language sources. Furthermore, the student will gain knowledge about the genealogical relationship of the Ainu language and about important sociolinguistic issues relative to its past history and present status of vitality.
Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and ...inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual's mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders.
The state-of-the-art in automated processing of unstructured business documents has evolved from manual labor to advanced AI systems in the span of mere decades. Such systems involve learning ...techniques, rule or clause sets, neural models – either used alone or in combination – for the extraction to work. As an example, rule-based processes operate on a perceived layout or positioning of the information, whereas model-based frameworks adopt a semantic, and often uninspectable, approach. Verb-Based Semantic Role Labeling (VBSRL) is a novel system presented in a former paper that uses a hybrid foundation to inform the extraction phase via a set of rules modeling natural language. We propose a new VBSRL-based document processing method, aided by valuable and innovative architectural choices, which has been implemented for the Italian language and experimented upon with promising results. Even in its infancy, in fact, the first implementation of this system shows better results than comparable IE solutions, obtaining an aggregate, average F-measure of nearly 79%.
•Automating business document analysis is crucial and time consuming in enterprises.•Classification and information extraction for unstructured documents are hard tasks.•Document processing method via pre-processing, normalization and post-processing.•Information Extraction as Conceptual Dependency Theory plus Semantic Role Labeling.•Performances on real case scenario show better results than comparable IE solutions.
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