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Patents contain a large quantity of technical information that can be useful for new technical solutions design. The purpose of the research is to detect and extract information about the technical functions from text of several patents brought together in patent databases. Method is designed for informational support of solving creative problem of new technical decision synthesis. For technical functions extraction the natural language processing is performed. Ways of technical function implementations are represented by "object-condition-action" model. The extraneous syntactic parser is used for assigning of syntactic category to words from patent claims section. The context -sensitive grammar was developed for achieving compliance of parsed text words to "object-condition-action" model components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The body and the hands in sign languages are said to be iconic in the sense that there is mapping between the physical and visible form of the signs and their meanings. This fact about sign languages has led to a long history of debate about the nature of iconicity in such languages and how it relates to grammatical structure. In recent work, we have argued that the body and hands in a new sign language (developed within the last 2-3 generations) are used in grammatically different ways than in older, more established sign languages such as ASL (Meir, Padden, Aronoff, & Sandler 2007). We find that differences between new and established sign languages are prominent at several levels, particularly in the lexicalization patterns of verbs. Here, I argue that "iconicity" in sign languages is not a single unitary system which some have claimed declines over time with increased conventionalization, e.g., Frishberg (1975). We find that the iconic use of the body as subject emerges very early in the life of a sign language, and is powerfully present in the language, dominating its verb system. When we compare new sign languages with established sign languages, we see different configurations of iconicity alongside different grammars, notably the body denoting other roles. This suggests to us that iconicity and grammar co-evolve, building structure along with meaning over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]