The Gender Congruency Effect and the Selection of Freestanding and Bound Morphemes: Evidence From Croatian.

The authors report 3 picture-word interference experiments in which they explore some properties of the agreement process in speech production. In Experiment 1, Croatian speakers were asked to produce utterances in which the noun's gender value had an impact on the selection of gender-marked freestanding morphemes (pronouns) while ignoring the presentation of same- or different-gender distractor words. In Experiments 2 and 3, Croatian speakers were asked to name the same pictures using noun phrases in which the noun's gender value surfaced as an inflectional suffix. Different-gender distractors interfered more than same-gender distractors (the gender congruency effect) in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 and 3. These contrasting results show that the cause of the gender congruency effect is not at the level where lexical-grammatical information is selected but at the level of selection of freestanding morphemes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Learning hierarchical probabilistic logic programs

Machine Learning - Probabilistic logic programming (PLP) combines logic programs and probabilities. Due to its expressiveness and simplicity, it has been considered as a powerful tool for learning...     

IgGs-Abzymes from the Sera of Patients with Multiple Sclerosis Recognize and Hydrolyze miRNAs

Autoantibodies-abzymes hydrolyzing DNA, myelin basic protein, and oligosaccharides have been revealed in the sera of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). In MS, specific microRNAs are found in blood and cerebrospinal fluid, which are characterized by increased expression. Autoantibodies, specifically hydrolyzing four different miRNAs, were first detected in the blood of schizophrenia patients. Here, we present the first evidence that 23 IgG antibodies of MS patients effectively recognize and hydrolyze four neuroregulatory miRNAs (miR-137, miR-9-5p, miR-219-2-3p, and miR-219-5p) and four immunoregulatory miRNAs (miR-21-3p, miR-146a-3p, miR-155-5p, and miR-326). Several known criteria were checked to show that the recognition and hydrolysis of miRNAs is an intrinsic property of MS IgGs. The hydrolysis of all miRNAs is mostly site-specific. The major and moderate sites of the hydrolysis of each miRNA for most of the IgG preparations coincided; however, some of them showed other specific sites of splitting. Several individual IgGs hydrolyzed some miRNAs almost nonspecifically at nearly all internucleoside bonds or demonstrated a combination of site-specific and nonspecific splitting. Maximum average relative activity (RA) was observed in the hydrolysis of miR-155-5p for IgGs of patients of two types of MS—clinically isolated syndrome and relapsing-remitting MS—but was also high for patients with primary progressive and secondary progressive MS. Differences between RAs of IgGs of four groups of MS patients and healthy donors were statistically significant (p < 0.015). There was a tendency of decreasing efficiency of hydrolysis of all eight miRNAs during remission compared with the exacerbation of the disease.     

Cooperation and Competition in ALIAS: A Logic Framework for Agents that Negotiate

This paper presents ALIAS, an agent architecture based on intelligent logic agents, where the main form of agent reasoning is abduction. The system is particularly suited for solving problems where knowledge is incomplete, where agents may need to make reasonable hypotheses about the problem domain and other agents, and where the raised hypotheses have to be consistent for the overall set of agents. ALIAS agents are pro-active, exhibiting a goal-directed behavior, and autonomous, since each one can solve problems using its own private knowledge base. ALIAS agents are also social, because they are able to interact with other agents, in order to cooperatively solve problems. The coordination mechanisms are modeled by means of LAILA, a logic-based language which allows to express intra-agent reasoning and inter-agent coordination. As an application, we show how LAILA can be used to implement inter-agent dialogues, e.g., for negotiation. In particular, LAILA is well-suited to coordinate the process of negotiation aimed at exchanging resources between agents, thus allowing them to execute the plans to achieve their goals.     

Specification and Verification of Agent Interaction using Social Integrity Constraints

In this paper we propose a logic-based social approach to the specification and verification of agent interaction. We firstly introduce integrity constraints about social acts (called Social Integrity Constraints) as a formalism to express interaction protocols and to give a social semantics to the behavior of agents, focusing on communicative acts. Then, we discuss several possible kinds of verification of agent interaction, and we show how social integrity constraints can be used to verify some properties in this respect. We focus our attention on static verification of compliance of agent specifications to interaction protocols, and on run-time verification, based on agents' observable behavior. We adopt as a running example the NetBill security transaction protocol for the selling and delivery of information goods.     

COMPLIANCE VERIFICATION OF AGENT INTERACTION: A LOGIC-BASED SOFTWARE TOOL

In open societies of agents, where agents are autonomous and heterogeneous, it is not realistic to assume that agents will always act so as to comply with interaction protocols. Thus, the need arises for a formalism to specify constraints on agent interaction, and for a tool able to observe and check for agent compliance with interaction protocols. In this paper we present a JAVA-PROLOG software component built on logic programming technology, which can be used to verify compliance of agent interaction to protocols, and that has been integrated with the PROSOCS platform.     

Compositional model-theoretic semantics for logic programs

We present a compositional model-theoretic semantics for logic programs, where the composition of programs is modelled by the composition of the admissible Herbrand models of the programs. An Herbrand model is admissible if it is supported by the assumption of a set of hypotheses. On one hand, the hypotheses supporting a model correspond to an open interpretation of the program intended to capture possible compositions with other programs. On the other hand, admissible models provide a natural model-theory for a form of hypothetical reasoning, called abduction. The application of admissibel models to programs with negation is discussed. Antonio Brogi: Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Corso Italia 40, 56125 Pisa, ItalyResearch interests: Programming Language Design and Semantics, Logic Programming and Artificial Intelligence     

Distributed logic objects

This paper presents a language based on the logic programming paradigm that supports objects, messages and inheritance. The object-oriented extension is fairly simple: objects are clusters of processes, objects' state is represented by logical variables, message-passing communication between objects is performed via multi-head clauses, and inheritance is mapped into clause union. The language implementation is obtained by translating logic objects into a concurrent logic language based on multi-head clauses, taking advantage of its distributed implementation on a massively parallel architecture. The runtime support realizes some interesting features such as intensional messages and the transparency of object allocation, object migration and parallelism.