Classifiers

The book is about the numeral classifier system and the acquisition of Japanese classifiers by Japanese children. It consists of two parts. First, it provides a general typological characterization of numeral classifier phrases and discusses problems in determining what constitutes the nature of classifiers. It also discusses the semantic properties of numeral classifiers based on an analysis of four languages from four different language families. Second, it examines the acquisitions of Japanese numeral classifiers by Japanese preschool children, ages 3 to 6, with a primary emphasis on the development of comprehension. The importance of the study is that it reveals that young children have a much greater sensitivity to the conceptual underpinnings of the numeral classifier system than was previously considered to be the case. The research results also provide a converging source of evidence that young children often come to initially grasp the structure of the world in ways that are better understood in cognitive than perceptual terms. The implications will contribute to not only the area of language acquisition but also categorization and conceptual development.

Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.

Covering pattern classification methods, Combining Classifiers: Ideas and Methods focuses on the important and widely studied issue of how to combine several classifiers together in order to achieve improved recognition performance. It is one of the first books to provide unified, coherent, and expansive coverage of the topic and as such will be welcomed by those involved in the area. With case studies that bring the text alive and demonstrate 'real-world' applications it is destined to become essential reading.

The classification of patterns is an important area of research which is central to all pattern recognition fields, including speech, image, robotics, and data analysis. Neural networks have been used successfully in a number of these fields, but so far their application has been based on a 'black box approach' with no real understanding of how they work. In this book, Sarunas Raudys - an internationally respected researcher in the area - provides an excellent mathematical and applied introduction to how neural network classifiers work and how they should be used.. .

This volume offers a comprehensive account of the typology of noun classification across the world's languages. Every language has some means of categorizing objects into humans, or animates, or by their shape, form, size, and function. The most widespread are linguistic genders - grammatical classes of nouns based on core semantic properties such as sex (female and male), animacy, humanness, and also shape and size. Classifiers of several types also serve to categorize entities. Numeral classifiers occur with number words, possessive classifiers appear in the expressions of possession, and verbal classifiers are used on a verb, categorizing its argument. These varied sorts of genders and classifiers can also occur together. This volume elaborates on the expression, usage, history, and meanings of noun categorization devices, exploring their various facets across the languages of South America and Asia, which are known for the diversity of their noun categorization. The volume begins with a typological introduction that outlines the types of noun categorization devices and their expression, scope, functions, and development, as well as sociocultural aspects of their use. The following nine chapters provide in-depth studies of genders and classifiers of different types in a range of South American and Asian languages and language families, including Arawak languages, Zamucoan, Hmong, and Japanese.

This book studies the syntax and semantics of numeral classifiers in Mandarin and other Chinese languages. It explores how Chinese classifiers are semantically interpreted in syntactic contexts and how semantic functions of classifiers are realized at the syntactic level. The book is a contribution to formal Chinese linguistics, and to the understanding of grammatical properties of nominal phrases in Chinese and East Asian languages.

This book delivers a definite and compact knowledge on how hybridization can help improving the quality of computer classification systems. In order to make readers clearly realize the knowledge of hybridization, this book primarily focuses on introducing the different levels of hybridization and illuminating what problems we will face with as dealing with such projects. In the first instance the data and knowledge incorporated in hybridization were the action points, and then a still growing up area of classifier systems known as combined classifiers was considered. This book comprises the aforementioned state-of-the-art topics and the latest research results of the author and his team from Department of Systems and Computer Networks, Wroclaw University of Technology, including as classifier based on feature space splitting, one-class classification, imbalance data, and data stream classification.