The present paper investigates temporal parameters of vowels occurring before the boundaries of major intonation units—intonational phrases and utterances. The research is based on the analysis of approximately 12 hours of speech from the Corpus of Professionally Read Speech (CORPRES). Our data show that before major prosodic boundaries the stressed vowel of the last word is lengthened, and so does the post-stressed vowel if immediately preceding the boundary; this is true even when the last word does not bear nuclear stress. The degree of lengthening is influenced by the presence of a pause after the boundary, the boundary “depth”, the location of nuclear stress in the unit, and pitch movement type. The temporal organization of two different pitch contours realized before a prosodic boundary is described as well.
Difficulties in algorithmic simulation of natural thinking point to the inadequacy of information encodings used to this end. The promising approach to this problem represents information by the qubit states of quantum theory, structurally aligned with major theories of cognitive semantics. The paper develops this idea by linking qubit states with color as fundamental carrier of affective meaning. The approach builds on geometric affinity of Hilbert space of qubit states and color solids, used to establish precise one-to-one mapping between them. This is enabled by original decomposition of qubit in three non-orthogonal basis vectors corresponding to red, green, and blue colors. Real-valued coefficients of such decomposition are identical to the tomograms of the qubit state in the corresponding directions, related to ordinary Stokes parameters by rotational transform. Classical compositions of black, white and six main colors (red, green, blue, yellow, magenta and cyan) are then mapped to analogous superposition of the qubit states. Pure and mixed colors intuitively map to pure and mixed qubit states on the surface and in the volume of the Bloch ball, while grayscale is mapped to the diameter of the Bloch sphere. Herewith, the lightness of color corresponds to the probability of the qubit’s basis state «1», while saturation and hue encode coherence and phase of the qubit, respectively. The developed code identifies color as a bridge between quantum-theoretic formalism and qualitative regularities of the natural mind. This opens prospects for deeper integration of quantum informatics in semantic analysis of data, image processing, and the development of nature-like computational architectures.
State-of-the-art models of artificial intelligence are developed in the black-box paradigm, in which sensitive information is limited to input-output interfaces, while internal representations are not interpretable. The resulting algorithms lack explainability and transparency, requested for responsible application. This paper addresses the problem by a method for finding Osgood’s dimensions of affective meaning in multidimensional space of a pre-trained word2vec model of natural language. Three affective dimensions are found based on eight semantic prototypes, composed of individual words. Evaluation axis is found in 300-dimensional word2vec space as a difference between positive and negative prototypes. Potency and activity axes are defined from six process-semantic prototypes (perception, analysis, planning, action, progress, and evaluation), representing phases of a generalized circular process in that plane. All dimensions are found in simple analytical form, not requiring additional training. Dimensions are nearly orthogonal, as expected for independent semantic factors. Osgood’s semantics of any word2vec object is then retrieved by a simple projection of the corresponding vector to the identified dimensions. The developed approach opens the possibility for interpreting the inside of black box-type algorithms in natural affective-semantic categories, and provides insights into foundational principles of distributive vector models of natural language. In the reverse direction, the established mapping opens machine-learning models as rich sources of data for cognitive-behavioral research and technology.
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