Search Results (15)

The rapid retrieval and precise acquisition of land use approval information are crucial for enhancing the efficiency and quality of land use approval, as well as for promoting the intelligent transformation of land use approval processes. As an advanced retrieval method, question-answering (Q&A) technology has become a core technical support for addressing current issues such as low approval efficiency and difficulty in obtaining information. However, existing Q&A technologies suffer from significant hallucination problems and limitations in considering spatiotemporal factors in the land use approval domain. To effectively address these issues, this study proposes a spatiotemporal–semantic coupling intelligent Q&A method for land use approval based on knowledge graphs (KGs) and intelligent agent technology, aiming to enhance the efficiency and quality of land use approval. Firstly, a land use approval knowledge graph (LUAKG) is constructed, systematically integrating domain knowledge such as policy clauses, legal regulations, and approval procedures. Then, by combining large language models (LLMs) and intelligent agent technology, a spatiotemporal–semantic coupling Q&A framework is designed. Through the use of spatiotemporal analysis tools, this framework can comprehensively consider spatial, temporal, and semantic factors when handling land approval tasks, enabling dynamic decision-making and precise reasoning. The research results show that, compared to traditional Q&A based on LLMs and Q&A based on retrieval-enhanced generation (RAG), the proposed method improves accuracy by 16% and 9% in general knowledge Q&A tasks. In the project review Q&A task, F1 scores and accuracy increase by 2% and 9%, respectively, compared to RAG-QA. Particularly, under the spatiotemporal–semantic multidimensional analysis, the improvement in F1 score and accuracy ranges from 2 to 6% and 7 to 10%, respectively. Full article

Apparently, Subjunctive tenses express temporal location, and, in some constructions, the past subjunctive can also express modal values. A long-standing debate exists over whether—even in the latter case—verbal tenses are temporal operators or whether in some constructions they convey temporal meaning, and in others they have a modal value, maybe derived from their basic temporal meaning. The assumption that the basic meaning of subjunctive tenses are of a temporal nature is challenged by the fact that the future subjunctive, which exists in Portuguese, has the same temporal interpretation as the present subjunctive, with which it is in complementary distribution. Moreover, no clear modal difference is observed between the future and present subjunctive tenses. In this paper, I present arguments against the separation of the temporal and modal values of the subjunctive tenses. I posit, instead, that a semantic analysis of subjunctive morphemes must consider ordered pairs of times and possible worlds; only in this way can we adequately capture the observed data and allow a comprehensive view of the system of subjunctive tenses in Portuguese (which will be extendable to Romance languages in general). If we accept this proposal, then the modal as temporal information associated with subjunctive tenses follows naturally, including the systematic futurate reading of subjunctive temporal clauses. Full article

User-generated data can reflect various viewpoints and experiences derived from people’s perception outcomes. The perceptual results can be obtained, often by combining subjective public perceptions of the landscape with physiological monitoring data. Accessing people’s perceptions of the landscape through text is a common method. It is hard to fully render nuances, emotions, and complexities depending only on text by superficial emotional tendencies alone. Numerical representations may lead to misleading conclusions and undermine public participation. In addition, the use of physiological test data does not reflect the subjective reasons for the comments made. Therefore, it is essential to deeply parse the text and distinguish between segments with different semantic differences. In this study, we propose a perceptual psychology-based workflow to extract and visualize multifaceted views from user-generated data. The analysis methods of FCN, LDA, and LSTM were incorporated into the workflow. Six areas in Fuzhou City, China, with 12 city parks, were selected as the study object. Firstly, 9987 review data and 1747 pictures with corresponding visitor trajectories were crawled separately on the Dianping and Liangbulu websites. For in-depth analysis of comment texts and making relevant heat maps. Secondly, the process of clauses was added to get a more accurate representation of the sentiment of things based on the LSTM sentiment analysis model. Thirdly, various factors affecting the perception of landscapes were explored. Based on such, the overall people’s perception of urban parks in Fuzhou was finally obtained. The study results show that (1) the texts in terms of ‘wind’, ‘temperature’, ‘structures’, ‘edge space (spatial boundaries)’, and ‘passed space’ are the five most representative factors of the urban parks in Fuzhou; (2) the textual analyses further confirmed the influence of spatial factors on perception in the temporal dimension; and (3) environmental factors influence people’s sense of urban parks concerning specificity, clocking behavior, and comfort feelings. These research results provide indispensable references for optimizing and transforming urban environments using user-generated data. Full article

Previous theories have established the mental model activation of processing different types of conditionals, stating that counterfactual conditionals expressing events that contradict known facts (e.g., “If it had rained, then they would not go to the park.”) are considered to trigger two mental models: (1) a hypothetical but factually wrong model (e.g., “rain” and “did not go to the park”) and (2) a corresponding real-world model (e.g., “did not rain” and “went to the park”). This study aimed to investigate whether pragmatic factors differentially influence readers’ comprehension and distinction between counterfactual and hypothetical conditional sentences in Mandarin Chinese. Participants were required to read and judge the comprehensibility of Chinese hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals, which were different in temporal indicators (past vs. future temporal indicators) in the antecedent. Different polarities (with vs. without negators) and different moving directions (different directional verbs: lai2 [come] vs. qu4 [go]) in the consequent were also manipulated. Linear mixed-effects models (LMEM) revealed that hypothetical conditionals (with future temporal indicators) were more comprehensible than counterfactual conditionals (with past temporal indicators). The semantic similarities within the subordinate clause revealed future temporal indicators had higher lexical–semantic co-occurrence than past indicators, suggesting that temporal indicators impact comprehension partly through lexical semantics in the premise, and hypothetical conditionals are more easily processed. However, the semantic similarity analysis of the main and the subordinate clauses showed no effect of temporal indicators, suggesting that lexical–semantic co-occurrence across clauses may not substantially contribute to the distinction between hypothetical conditionals and counterfactual conditionals. In conclusion, this study offers insights into the comprehension of Chinese conditional sentences by shedding light on the pragmatic factors influencing the activation of different mental models. Full article

This study investigates the factors that significantly constrain mood selection in Galician within uncertainty adverb constructions, applying a logistic regression model. This analysis identified several significant factors affecting the choice between the indicative and subjunctive moods, including the temporal context of the clause, the preceding adverb, and the interaction of fictional and nonfictional registers with the verb type of the predicate and the gender of the speaker/writer. Time reference and the preceding adverb emerged as primary factors conditioning mood choice, with present and future time frames and adverbs encoding weaker epistemic values significantly predisposing toward the subjunctive mood. This study also highlighted the influence of the gender of the speaker/writer, demonstrating the preference of women toward the indicative mood in fictional texts. Verb type and register interact in complex ways that only partially align with previous findings. The results of the present study contribute to a deeper understanding of syntactic variation in Galician, adding to a growing body of quantitative research on Galician grammar. Full article

Counterfactual conditionals posit hypothetical scenarios in which antecedent events contradict reality. This study examined whether and how the processing difficulty of Chinese counterfactual conditionals (yaobushi, equivalent to if it had not been for in English) can be affected by the length of temporal shifts of the events across clauses and the likelihood of the antecedent occurrence. Participants read Chinese counterfactuals that contained either long (e.g., qunian-xianzai [last year-right now]) or short temporal shifts (e.g., zuotian-xianzai [yesterday-right now]) within highly likely (e.g., sign up for school activity) or less likely contexts (e.g., sign up for Arctic scientific research). ERP results revealed a significant N400 interaction between the temporal shift length and antecedent likelihood on the temporal indicators in the consequent and the sentence-ending verbs. Specifically, the less likely events elicited larger negativity than highly likely events with short temporal shifts on the temporal indicator. On the sentence-ending word, the long temporal shift elicited enlarged negativity than the short temporal shift when the antecedent was highly likely. These findings have two key implications regarding the interplay of implied causality and falsity constraints during counterfactual comprehension. First, salient falsity constraints can override effects of causal coherence on processing. Second, greater negativity for unlikely antecedents suggests that counterfactual markers concurrently activate factual and hypothetical representations. Full article

Many languages of lowland South America mark remoteness distinctions in their TAM systems. In Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru) multiple remoteness distinctions are made in the past and the future. I argue that the temporal remoteness morphemes (TRMs) of Amahuaca can be understood as indications of the remoteness of the event time relative to the utterance time in matrix environments. In dependent clauses, however, the picture is more complicated. By exploring adjunct switch-reference clauses, I show that TRMs in dependent clauses display a previously unreported ambiguity reminiscent of ambiguities found with adjunct tense. Specifically, they can relate the time of the adjunct clause event to the time of the matrix event or to the utterance time. I suggest that this ambiguity may arise from the availability of multiple interpretation sites for adjunct TRMs, with the possible interpretations being constrained by the temporal semantics of switch-reference markers themselves. This work thus contributes to the empirical understanding of how TRMs are interpreted in dependent clauses, suggesting interesting potential parallels to the interpretation of adjunct tense. Full article

Metric temporal logic (MTL) is a popular real-time extension of linear temporal logic (LTL). This paper presents a new simple SAT-based bounded model-checking (SAT-BMC) method for MTL interpreted over discrete infinite timed models generated by discrete timed automata with digital clocks. We show a new translation of the existential part of MTL to the existential part of linear temporal logic with a new set of atomic propositions and present the details of the new translation. We compare the new method’s advantages to the old method based on a translation of the hard reset LTL (HLTL). Our method does not need new clocks or new transitions. It uses only one path and requires a smaller number of propositional variables and clauses than the HLTL-based method. We also implemented the new method, and as a case study, we applied the technique to analyze several systems. We support the theoretical description with the experimental results demonstrating the method’s efficiency. Full article

In this paper, we investigate constraints on the time reference of embedded clauses in Mandarin. We show that while English past-tensed embedded clauses disallow later-than-matrix readings in intensional contexts on a de dicto construal, Mandarin relative clauses with bare predicates yield temporally free readings across the board. We argue that the contrast between the temporal interpretations of bare embedded clauses in Mandarin vs. past-tensed embedded clauses in English is not due to a putative contrast between ‘tenseless’ languages (as Mandarin is traditionally assumed to be) and ‘tensed’ languages such as English. Mandarin is indeed not tenseless, but rather has a covert Non-Future tense, restricting the reference time of bare sentences to non-future times. Moreover, Mandarin superficially tenseless embedded clauses with overt—be it perfect, perfective, durative/progressive—aspectual marking do not allow later-than-matrix readings on a de dicto construal, just like tensed embedded clauses in English. We conclude that the freedom of interpretation of bare embedded clauses in Mandarin cannot be imputed to null semantically underspecified tense, but rather to null semantically underspecified aspect. Our analysis provides, to our knowledge, the first arguments for Non-Future tense in embedded contexts. Full article

The distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect has been identified in many languages across the world. This paper shows that even languages that do not have a dedicated perfective—imperfective distinction may endow a verbal construction that is not specifically aspectual with a perfective value. The crucial diagnostic for identifying perfectivity in a given non-aspectual construction is a difference in the temporal interpretation of clauses involving that construction, licensed by the actionality class of the main predicate: while stative verbs have a present interpretation, dynamic verbs yield a non-present (past or future) interpretation. This pattern of interaction is triggered by a phenomenon that has been referred to as the ‘present perfective paradox’, i.e., the impossibility of aligning dynamic situations with the time of speaking while at the same time conceptualizing them in their entirety. The latter type of construal is argued to be the main function of perfective aspect. The range of non-aspectual constructions with underlying perfective semantics includes ‘iamitive’ markers, an evidential, an epistemic supposition marker, a focus marker, a polar question marker, and a declarative marker. These constructions come from typologically different and genetically unrelated languages, illustrating the cross-linguistic salience of the category of perfective aspect. Full article

This article examines the use of the future subjunctive in two corpora of colonial Mexican texts. The first corpus consists of 255 documents dated 1561–1646 pertaining primarily to the historical area of New Galicia and dealing with matters of the Real Audiencia of Guadalajara. The second consists of 191 documents dated 1681–1816 written in the altiplano central of Mexico, which covers a large geographical area from Mexico City to Zacatecas. After describing the syntactic distribution of the future subjunctive in Medieval Spanish, we examine the evidence of its patterns of usage in Peninsular Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From there, we analyze the quantitative and qualitative data related to the 428 tokens of -re forms found in our corpora and the syntactic structures in which they appear. The data support findings that the future subjunctive first fell out of use in temporal adverbial clauses, while exhibiting the most apparent productivity in relative clauses. However, the corpora examined provide no evidence that the paradigm survived longer in Latin American Spanish than in Peninsular Spanish, as has been argued. Rather, this study suggests that by the eighteenth century, the future subjunctive was a highly stylized marker of formality or politeness in written Spanish. Full article

In this paper, we intend to describe and discuss the grammatical status of the V1-V2 (Cy/vy) constructions found in Mbya Guarani which can express simultaneous events, among other meanings, and which involve a single clause. We suggest here that this verbal complex can be treated as a case of asymmetrical verbal serialization because it contains verbs from a major lexical class, occupying the V1 slot, followed by a more restricted intransitive verbal class, such as movement, postural, or stative verbs, which stands in the V2 position. The curious property of these constructions is that V2 can be transitivized through the attachment of applicative or causative morphemes and “share” its object with transitive V1. “Object sharing” is another property attributed to serialization, as suggested by Baker and Baker and Stewart, which may be seen as a strong argument in favor of the present hypothesis. We will also provide evidence to distinguish Mbya Guarani V1-V2 (Cy/vy) complex from other constructions, such as temporal and purpose subordinate clauses, involving the particle vy. Full article

Current intelligent information systems require complex database approaches managing and monitoring data in a spatio-temporal manner. Many times, the core of the temporal system element is created on the relational platform. In this paper, a summary of the temporal architectures with regards to the granularity level is proposed. Object, attribute, and synchronization group perspectives are discussed. An extension of the group temporal architecture shifting the processing in the spatio-temporal level synchronization is proposed. A data reflection model is proposed to cover the transaction integrity with reflection to the data model evolving over time. It is supervised by our own Extended Temporal Log Ahead Rule, evaluating not only collisions themselves, but the data model is reflected, as well. The main emphasis is on the data retrieval process and indexing with regards to the non-reliable data. Undefined value categorization supervised by the NULL_representation data dictionary object and memory pointer layer is provided. Therefore, undefined (NULL) values can be part of the index structure. The definition and selection of the technology of the master index is proposed and discussed. It allows the index to be used as a way to identify blocks with relevant data, which is of practical importance in temporal systems where data fragmentation often occurs. The last part deals with the syntax of the Select statement extension covering temporal environment with regards on the conventional syntax reflection. Event_definition, spatial_positions, model_reflection, consistency_model, epsilon_definition, monitored_data_set, type_of_granularity, and NULL_category clauses are introduced. Impact on the performance of the data manipulation operations is evaluated in the performance section highlighting temporal architectures, Insert, Update and Select statements forming core performance characteristics. Full article

One longstanding complication with Earth data discovery involves understanding a user’s search intent from the input query. Most of the geospatial data portals use keyword-based match to search data. Little attention has focused on the spatial and temporal information from a query or understanding the query with ontology. No research in the geospatial domain has investigated user queries in a systematic way. Here, we propose a query understanding framework and apply it to fill the gap by better interpreting a user’s search intent for Earth data search engines and adopting knowledge that was mined from metadata and user query logs. The proposed query understanding tool contains four components: spatial and temporal parsing; concept recognition; Named Entity Recognition (NER); and, semantic query expansion. Spatial and temporal parsing detects the spatial bounding box and temporal range from a query. Concept recognition isolates clauses from free text and provides the search engine phrases instead of a list of words. Name entity recognition detects entities from the query, which inform the search engine to query the entities detected. The semantic query expansion module expands the original query by adding synonyms and acronyms to phrases in the query that was discovered from Web usage data and metadata. The four modules interact to parse a user’s query from multiple perspectives, with the goal of understanding the consumer’s quest intent for data. As a proof-of-concept, the framework is applied to oceanographic data discovery. It is demonstrated that the proposed framework accurately captures a user’s intent. Full article

Previous research has shown that comprehension of complex sentences involving wh-movement (e.g., object-relative clauses) elicits activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and left posterior temporal cortex. However, relatively little is known about the neural correlates of processing passive sentences, which differ from other complex sentences in terms of representation (i.e., noun phrase (NP)-movement) and processing (i.e., the time course of syntactic reanalysis). In the present study, 27 adults (14 younger and 13 older) listened to passive and active sentences and performed a sentence-picture verification task using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Passive sentences, relative to active sentences, elicited greater activation in bilateral IFG and left temporo-occipital regions. Participant age did not significantly affect patterns of activation. Consistent with previous research, activation in left temporo-occipital cortex likely reflects thematic reanalysis processes, whereas, activation in the left IFG supports processing of complex syntax (i.e., NP-movement). Right IFG activation may reflect syntactic reanalysis processing demands associated with the sentence-picture verification task. Full article