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Full-Text Articles in Semantics and Pragmatics

Synthetic Dataset For Understanding Negation In Text-Guided Image Editing, Nhat-Tan Bui Dec 2025

Synthetic Dataset For Understanding Negation In Text-Guided Image Editing, Nhat-Tan Bui

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Negation is a fundamental linguistic concept used by humans to convey information that they do not desire. Despite this, minimal research has focused on negation within text-guided image editing. This lack of research means that vision-language models (VLMs) for image editing may struggle to understand negation, implying that they struggle to provide accurate results. One barrier to achieving human-level intelligence is the lack of a standard collection by which research into negation can be evaluated. This thesis presents the first large-scale dataset, Negative Instruction (NeIn), for studying negation within instruction-based image editing. Our dataset comprises 366,957 quintuplets, i.e., source image, …


Memory For Metaphors: Verbatim Memory Held For Literal Sentences Vs. Metaphors, Taylor Suneson May 2023

Memory For Metaphors: Verbatim Memory Held For Literal Sentences Vs. Metaphors, Taylor Suneson

Psychological Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Certain literary features of text (metaphor, idiom, etc.) are said to be foregrounded, or stand out from the surrounding text. Prior research (Miall & Kuiken, 1994) demonstrates that foregrounded text slows readers down, which is consistent with attention being grabbed. Do features of literary text, more specifically metaphors, improve memory as a result of being foregrounded? The present study investigated the effect of reading metaphoric phrases on reading time, memory accuracy, and decision times. We predicted that when a textual phrase was read as a metaphor, verbatim memory would be better retained than when that same phrase was read as …


The Role Classifiers Play In Selecting The Referent Of A Word, Weiyi Ma, Peng Zhou, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff Mar 2023

The Role Classifiers Play In Selecting The Referent Of A Word, Weiyi Ma, Peng Zhou, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff

General Human Environmental Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

An important cue to the meaning of a new noun is its accompanying classifier. For example, in English, X in “a sheet of X” should refer to a broad, flat object. A classifier is required in Chinese to quantify nouns. Using children’s overt responses in an object/picture selection task, past research found reliable semantic knowledge of classifiers in Mandarin-reared children at around age three. However, it is unclear how children’s semantic knowledge differs across different types of classifiers and how this difference develops with age. Here we use an arguably more sensitive measure of children’s language knowledge (the intermodal preferential-looking …