LLC Poster Day 2017
h 17-19
Palazzo del Rettorato, Loggione del primo piano
via Verdi 8, Torino
LIST OF CONTRIBUTIONS
Cristina AMORETTI, Marcello FRIXIONE, Antonio LIETO
What kind of concept is DISEASE? What cognitive science can say to philosophy of medicine about concepts
The issue of defining the concept of DISEASE is much discussed in philosophy of medicine. Diverse as they are, disease definitions offer a classical view of the concept of DISEASE. However, as none of them is entirely satisfactory, some scholars have proposed to regard the concept of DISEASE as a non-classical one. In this work, we won’t take side in favour of either a classical or a non-classical approach, but critically evaluate the most relevant attempts to characterize the concept of DISEASE in non-classical terms, showing some of their limits and misunderstandings.
Guido BONINO, Paolo TRIPODI
Distant reading in the history of philosophy: Wittgenstein and academic success
Si tratta di un tentativo di applicare le tecniche del distant reading, introdotte e usate da Franco Moretti in storia della letteratura, alla storia della filosofia. In particolare, allo scopo di indagare alcuni aspetti del “declino” della tradizione wittgensteiniana nella filosofia anglo-americana contemporanea, abbiamo analizzato il corpus dei metadati delle tesi di dottorato in filosofia discusse nelle università statunitensi tra il 1980 e il 2010, e abbiamo osservato e interpretato una correlazione interessante tra il successo accademico di un dottore di ricerca in filosofia e il tema di cui la tesi tratta (in particolare, abbiamo registrato e discusso il fatto che occuparsi di Wittgenstein sembri essere decisamente meno conveniente, in vista della carriera accademica, dell'occuparsi di filosofi analitici come Kripke, Lewis, Fodor o Dummett).
Cristina BOSCO, Delia IRAZÚ HERNÁNDEZ FARÍAS, Mirko LAI, Viviana PATTI, Giancarlo RUFFO, Manuela SANGUINETTI, Emilio SULIS
Odi et Amo in Twitter: Anatomy and geography of happiness and hate
Per rilevare l’orientamento politico o per cogliere il grado di benessere percepito dalle persone, sono spesso applicate tecniche automatiche di rilevazione di opinioni e sentimenti (opinion mining e sentiment analysis) soprattutto ai testi che vengono quotidianamente prodotti in grande quantità dagli utenti sui social media. Lo stesso tipo di tecnologie viene utilizzato per rilevare, analizzare e monitorare contenuti di odio e ostilità (ad esempio messaggi omofobi e razzisti) che sono spesso veicolati dalla rete. In questi contesti è frequente l’uso di linguaggio figurato, in particolare dell’ironia, fenomeno importante da riconoscere per una corretta identificazione delle opinioni e dei sentimenti espressi nei testi. Il poster day è un occasione per condividere l'informazione sulle attività del gruppo su questi temi, anche in relazione ai progetti recentemente finanziati da Fondazione CRT (Hate speech e social media) e Compagnia di San Paolo (IhatePrejudice: Immigrants, hate, and prejudice in social media).
Fabrizio CALZAVARINI, Diego MARCONI
The empirical status of the pictorial view of meaning: A critical review
Advocates of the pictorial theory of meaning claimed that meaning of a word is a mental picture, and lexical semantic competence is closely connected to visual imagery. As a semantic theory, the pictorial theory was discredited in the 20th century. Nevertheless, there is evidence that visual imagery does play a role in semantic processing and is not just a possible side effect of it. High imageable [IMG] words (banana, smile, chair), as opposed to low IMG words (deduction, event, democracy) appear to facilitate several tasks related to semantic processing. Moreover, high IMG words turn out to selectively activate visual-related areas in the human cortex, to the difference of low IMG words. At least prima facie, such data could be seen as decisively vindicating the pictorial view of meaning, as far as high IMG words are concerned. In this work, we provide a critical review of the empirical data supporting the pictorial view of meaning. Our analysis suggests a word of caution. First, we are going to claim that the existing neuroimaging studies supporting the pictorial view of meaning are affected by some potential confounds and inconsistencies. Secondly, we will claim that neuropsychological data, i.e. data from patients with brain insults, do not conclusively demonstrate that visual imagery is a necessary component of semantic processing of high IMG words. Thirdly, we will claim that research on congenitally blind speakers might suggest that, in both the sighted and the blind, the facilitating factor in language understanding is not strictly visual.
Gustavo CEVOLANI
Rationality as truth approximation
I explore a new approach to the analysis of rational fallible belief based on the notion of truthlikeness (also known as verisimilitude). The central idea is that truth is the aim of inquiry, and that one should rationally belief X just in case X is estimated as close to the truth in a suitably defined sense. I study how this approach deals with well-known difficulties like the Lottery and Preface paradoxes, and how it compares with probabilism and the Lockean thesis.
Davide COLLA, Enrico MENSA, Daniele RADICIONI
Semantic keywords extraction and search for documents browsing
In questo lavoro presentiamo un sistema che permette di effettuare ricerche all’interno di una collezione di documenti testuali utilizzando un approccio semantico, basato cioè non sulla frequenza di termini ma sull’individuazione di concetti salienti sia all’interno dei documenti della collezione, sia all’interno della interrogazione inviata dall’utente. Il sistema è stato progettato per effettuare ricerche fra i documenti presentati nel corso dell’Hackathon HU4A (hackUniTO for Ageing), durante il quale sono stati raccolti 283 progetti di ricerca appartenenti a differenti ambiti disciplinari e focalizzati sul tema dell’ageing, su cui il sistema sarà testato.
Francesca GARBARINI, Fabrizio CALZAVARINI, Matteo DIANO, Monica BIGGIO, Carola BARBERO, Katiuscia SACCO, Daniele RADICIONI, Diego MARCONI
Lexical semantic competence and visual imagery: An fMRI study
Lexical competence, i.e. the ability to use words, includes both the ability to relate words to the external world as accessed through perception (referential tasks) and the ability to relate words to other words in inferential tasks of several kinds (Marconi, 1997). There is evidence from both traditional neuropsychology and more recent neuroimaging research that the two aspects of lexical competence may be implemented by partly different brain regions. However, some very recent experiments appear to show that typically visual areas are also engaged by purely inferential tasks, not involving visual perception of objects or pictures (Marconi et al., 2013). In the present study we investigate the role of visual imagery in lexical inferential tasks.
Anna GOY, Diego MAGRO, Marco ROVERA
Ontologies and historical archives: A way to tell new stories
The poster describes the ongoing activities within the Harlock'900 and PRiSMHA projects. Both projects aim at demonstrating how a rich semantic representation of the content of historical archival resources (a "semantic layer") can enhance the access and thus the possibilities of their exploitation. The semantic layer is based on a formal representation (relying on computational ontologies and established standards), supporting the detailed representation of historical events, including their location, temporal information, how the involved entities participate, and relations among events. Knowledge acquisition is supported by a crowdsourcing collaborative model, coupled with techniques for automatic information extraction from texts. The output is provided both through a final user interface and a set of APIs.
Jakob KOSCHOLKE
A weak symmetry condition for probabilistic measures of confirmation
We present a symmetry condition for probabilistic measures of confirmation which agrees with Eells and Fitelson's (2002) negated commutativity symmetry condition but is weaker than Crupi et al.'s (2007) disconfirmation symmetry condition. It is based on the idea that for any value a probabilistic measure of confirmation can assign there is a corresponding case where degrees of confirmation are symmetric. It turns out that a number of prominent measures of confirmation do not satisfy this condition and instead exhibit a rather odd behaviour in certain cases of disconfirmation. As we point out, this result also has important implications for probabilistic measures of information change, causal strength, explanatory power and coherence.
Enrico MENSA, Daniele RADICIONI, Antonio LIETO
COVER: A vectorial resource for computing conceptual similarity
In questo lavoro presentiamo una risorsa linguistica ad ampia copertura, COVER, che contiene i sensi più rilevanti per i 17K termini più frequenti del dizionario inglese. Si tratta di una risorsa vettoriale, sviluppata per combinare conoscenza di tipo enciclopedico e conoscenza di senso comune. I sensi presenti in COVER sono ancorati a un sistema di riferimento concettuale uniforme, basato su una risorsa linguistica esistente di nome BabelNet. Abbiamo valutato questa risorsa all’interno di una competizione internazionale sul task di somiglianza concettuale (dati due termini si tratta di stimare quanto siano simili; valori confrontati con i giudizi forniti da esseri umani). Abbiamo ottenuto risultati interessanti, che ci hanno permesso di migliorare ulteriormente la risorsa.
Luca ROVERSI, Gianluca CURZI
Linear logic and computation
Il poster vuole sintetizzare alcuni sviluppi della logica lineare, ponendo un forte accento sul modo in cui essa abbia contribuito a gettare luce sulla nozione di computazione sotto diversi punti di vista. Vengono considerati quindi alcuni temi "caldi" della ricerca in computer science, come la complessità computazionale, la geometria della computazione, la teoria della concorrenza, le semantiche denotazionali e categoriali, e infine la proof-search.
Katya TENTORI, Andrea PASSERINI, Vincenzo CRUPI
Judging forecasting accuracy: Human intuition vs. formal models
We developed a new experimental paradigm for eliciting ordinal judgments of accuracy concerning pairs of forecasts for which various combinations of associations/dissociations between the Quadratic, Logarithmic, and Spherical scoring rules are obtained. Overall, the Logarithmic model is the best predictor of people’s accuracy judgments, but there are cases in which these judgments — although normatively acceptable — systematically depart from what is expected by all models. These results represent an empirical evaluation of the descriptive adequacy of the three most popular scoring rules and offer insights for the development of new formal models that might favour a more natural elicitation of truthful and informative beliefs from human forecasters.
Pietro TERNA
SLAPP: Swarm-like agent-based protocol in Python
SLAPP is an agent-based general purpose shell in Python; it derives by the original Santa Fe project named Swarm. SLAPP is open source and fully documented at https://github.com/terna/SLAPP/
Marco VIOLA
Function-structure mapping in cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive neuroscience seeks to provide an integrated account of mind (i.e. the ensemble of all possible cognitive processes) and brain. However, there are several ways and several levels of abstraction to describe cognitive functions and brain structures, as well as many ways to conceive their relation. According to Price and Friston (2005), cognitive neuroscience should privilege taxonomies at the level that allows structures to predict functions, and vice versa, so to achieve a perfect one-to-one mapping. However, the relation between structures and functions according to our current theories is virtually always a many-to-many structures. This leaves us with two options: (1) to give up the goal of achieving one-to-one mapping; (2) to make radical or slight revisions to either the neural or the mental ontology (or both) in order to preserve the one-to-one mapping.