Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Intelligent Neural Systems as InteGrated Heritage Tools (INSIGHT)." "Mike Kestemont" "Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (KMSKB), Antwerp Centre for Digital humanities and literary Criticism (ACDC), Royal Museums of Art and History (KMKG-MRAH), Ghent University, University of Liège, Institute for the Study of Literature in the Low Countries (ISLN)" "The INSIGHT project aims to advance the application of automated algorithms from the field of Artificial Intelligence to support cultural heritage institutions in their effort to keep up with their ongoing annotation initiatives for their expanding digital collections. We will focus on recent advances in Machine Learning, where the application of neural networks (Deep Learning) has recently led to significant breakthroughs, for instance, in the fields of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision. We will determine how state-of-the-art algorithms can be used to (semi-)automatically catalogue and describe digital objects, especially those for which no, little or incomplete metadata is available. The project focuses on making the digital collections of two federal museum clusters in Brussels ready to be exported to Europeana, i.e. the Royal Museums of Fine  Arts of Belgium and Royal Museums of Art and History." "Motoric, cognitive and linguistic writing process characteristics in Alzheimer's disease: a task validity, cross-sectional and longitudinal study." "Mariëlle Leijten" Management "Research has shown that Alzheimer (AD) patients manifest deterioration in language production. This research project aims to develop valid screening tasks that enable researchers and clinicians to characterize the longitudinal decline of on-line written language production in AD over a 12- month period. These aims will be addressed in three consecutive studies: 1. a task-validity study, 2. a cross-sectional study, and 3. a longitudinal study. Since findings from previous research indicate the need for a screening task that assesses multiple components of language, we will combine writing tasks that focus on motor and cognitive and linguistic aspects. The more general screening tasks (i.c., describing two pictures depicting a situation) that focus on the cognitive and linguistic aspects need to be validated first. The quality of the elicitation, and consequently of the screening tool, will benefit from a careful validation of the tasks at hand. Based on the findings of the task validity study, we will design an experimental cross-sectional study involving patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), mild AD and a healthy control group. The observation method used, keystroke logging, is non-intrusive, timesaving, and hence cost-reducing, when compared to other diagnostic tools. Finally, in a longitudinal study, the cross-sectional study will be replicated at three different moments (0-6-12 months) in order to document the (potential) cognitive decline." "Modal collocation and how delicate modal systems can be. A cognitive-functional corpus study of semantic and syntactic effects of collocation between modal verbs and modal adverbs in UK and US English." "Grammar and Pragmatics" "The research will investigate the dynamic nature of an aspect of language called 'modality', which enables speakers to assess the truth of what they say in terms of likelihood and obligations. Traditionally, the main recognised grammatical category of modality in English is built up of a paradigm of 'modal verbs' (can, could, will, would, shall, should, may, might and must). English, along with a large number of other languages, also has lexical ('more meaningful') means to express modality, for example 'modal adverbs' (probably, possibly, necessarily, certainly, well, ...)."