Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
Modern Arabic has a distinction from classical Arabic in terms of lexical, phonological, morphological and syntactic. According to Abbâs al-Sûsah in Muhbib Abdul Wahab, Contemporary Arabic has the following characteristics: 1) accuracy of the use of Arabic at all levels: sound, morphology, syntax, and semantics; 2) more widely used in written language (al-Lughah al maktûbah) than oral language, 3) fluency and diversity-free 'amiyah, 4) standard language that is officially prepared. Based on observations of writers who try to classify modern Arabic vocabulary, the fields of religion, language and literature are the fields with the least development of modern Arabic vocabulary, when compared to economic, political, legal, psychological, health and other vocabularies. This may be due to the fact that from the fields of religion, language and literature there are not many new vocabulary terms, this may be due to religious, linguistic and literary norms.
ABSTRACT Issues surrounding English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and its use by English as an additional language (EAL) students in higher education have become increasingly significant in recent years, fueled both by increased international student mobility and increased linguistic and cultural diversity within and outside of the student body. As well as posing language-related challenges, the transfer of EAL students to an English-speaking foreign university also demands the negotiation of new university expectations, channeled through a new cultural environment. While Academic Literacies research has identified that concepts such as power, identity, and culture play a role in academic writing, students’ own perceptions remain relatively unexplored. Consequently, this study analyzes the ways in which EAL students articulate their relationship with academic writing at a tertiary institution in Ireland. Data for this study were gathered through questionnaires and interviews and analyzed through discourse analysis through a critical lens. The findings suggest that while participants generally positively reflect on their ability to negotiate academic writing through the English language, there is nonetheless a high level of conflict between dominant linguistic norms and the students’ expression of their identity and culture.
Building a treebank from scratch can easily be an elaborate, highly time consuming task, especially when working with a minority language with moderately complex morphology and no existing resources. It is also then typically true that language experts and informants with suitable skill sets are a very scarce resource. In this experiment I have attempted to work in parallel on building NLP resources while gathering and annotating the treebank. In particular, I aim to build a decent coverage morphologically annotated lexicon suitable for rule-based morphological analysis as well as accompanying rules for basic morphosyntactic analysis. I propose here a workflow, that I have found useful in avoiding redoing same work with related NLP resource construction.
Machine translation (MT) is directly linked to its evaluation in order to both compare different MT system outputs and analyse system errors so that they can be addressed and corrected. As a consequence, MT evaluation has become increasingly important and popular in the last decade, leading to the development of MT evaluation metrics aiming at automatically assessing MT output. Most of these metrics use reference translations in order to compare system output, and the most well-known and widely spread work at lexical level. In this study we describe and present a linguistically-motivated metric, VERTa, which aims at using and combining a wide variety of linguistic features at lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic level. Before designing and developing VERTa a qualitative linguistic analysis of data was performed so as to identify the linguistic phenomena that an MT metric must consider (Comelles et al. 2017). In the present study we introduce VERTa’s design and architecture and we report the experiments performed in order to develop the metric and to check the suitability and interaction of the linguistic information used. The experiments carried out go beyond traditional correlation scores and step towards a more qualitative approach based on linguistic analysis. Finally, in order to check the validity of the metric, an evaluation has been conducted comparing the metric’s performance to that of other well-known state-of-the-art MT metrics.
Differences in nomenclature, regarding the legal reasoning of judex facti and judex juris decisions, occur in determining the act of taking part in a criminal act. This is due to different reasoning methods. The legal consideration approach to judex facti decisions, in verifying facts as norms, is performed lexically. The way the judge's logic works is by using deductive logic and verifying the facts of the defendant's actions to normalise elements that are merely restrictive. The judex juris decisions of judges and the judex facti legal judgments understand the act of participation in corruption case by using an inductive reasoning method. Judex juris decisions examine judex facti legal considerations by determining the major premise more extensively. Judges search for the legal principles underlying norms to verify the facts of the defendant's condition. The results of the verification and the conclusion of judex juris state that the defendant's actions are proven but there are no faults. Thus, judex facti decisions are cancelled and it is decided that the defendant is free from all legal charges.
The authors of the article focus on the difficulties experienced by younger students in mastering the spelling norms of the Russian language. This is the inability to immediately distinguish in the consciousness of the signified and signifying, the inability to correctly determine the word stress and a number of others. The teacher should know the methods of formation of students ' concept of "phoneme" and the ability to recognize other phonetic units of the language. It is emphasized that the phonetic work should precede the graphic one, based on the development of the speech-motor apparatus. The authors present a description of some methods of formation of the phonetic competence, such as: exercises on the distinction between words as lexical units and as a "phonetic word", the correct syllabification, accent, modelling, awareness similarsocial functions.
Word Crimes:Reclaiming The Language of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Donna Robinson Divine (bio) INTRODUCTION Of all the changes that can be documented in the seventy years since the founding of Israel, none is as dramatic and surprising as the country's status as a topic of intellectual inquiry. Once a trope for self-sacrifice and solidarity, a testament to the redemption of a bruised and battered people, the Jewish state, today, stands accused of practicing apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and of sustaining itself as a remnant of an outdated and thoroughly delegitimized colonial order. The Jewish state has not simply been re-branded; it has essentially been re-named. Once thought distinctive, Israel's singularity is now presented as an example of horrific bigotry if not savagery. How the change took hold in academia is best understood by focusing on the vocabulary that purports to show why the establishment of a Jewish State was an international crime that can only be undone by taking command of the language deployed to study Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians. The articles in this issue of Israel Studies explore this lexical transformation and describe how and why it acquired its totemic standing in the academy.1 Do words matter? Plato certainly believed they do, arguing that rhetoric in democracies blurred fact and fiction and undermined the capacity to see or understand truth.2 Hannah Arendt folds into her massive study of totalitarianism the corruption of language.3 George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984, is structured around its ruler's power to control language by colonizing the meaning of words and denying people the capacity for independent judgment and critical thinking.4 But while "fake news", "alternate facts", and "truth decay" have been incorporated into our daily news cycle, they are typically hurled at the views or rhetoric of opponents [End Page 1] rather than as terms provoking self-examination and a willingness to examine the accuracy of one's own convictions.5 Denunciations of this distressing relationship to truth and evidence, issued constantly on campuses and in the mainstream media, have rarely been addressed to the ways in which a new vocabulary has acquired canonical status for describing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Before turning to explore this linguistic alchemy, we must spend some time asking why engage in such an inquiry? Why not simply dismiss these words as irrelevant without examining how and why they were changed? Because the radical alteration of the way in which Israel is now described has come to exert such a strong hold on students and scholars and has so substantially degraded the study of Israel—and no less wildly misrepresents what can be said and written about Palestinians—polite denial is neither an adequate nor an intellectually respectable response. Let us not minimize the scope of this degradation. Students learning only this language graduate with a vocabulary that identifies Israel not simply as a force hostile to Palestinian interests but also as a major source of evil for the world. Earning cultural capital for their anti-Israel words and deeds, university professors, in increasing numbers, venture far outside their disciplinary training to propose boycotts against Israeli educational institutions in order to deny their students stipends and research opportunities. Not only are these activist faculty gatekeepers, they are also advancing their careers with their polemics published by highly ranked journals and by university presses whose peer review systems bend in service of political advocacy for an anti-Israel cause even as it cannot help but bestow an academic cachet on the work. Norms, once taken for granted by scholars, are either ignored or overridden if they transgress a line now drawn very clearly against finding anything positive to say about Israel. Two recent examples come to mind—a long article by Saree Makdisi in the prestigious literary journal Critical Inquiry, and Puar Jasbir's book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, the first distorting the Israeli political system while the second hurls bizarre claims against the Jewish state for practicing a policy intended to destroy Palestinians by undermining their health and well-being. It does not take a legal specialist to provide a corrective...
The Routledge Handbook of language and culture represents a comprehensive study on the inextricable relationship between language and culture. It is structured into seven parts and 33 chapters. Part 1, Overview and historical background, by Farzad Sharifian, starts with an outline of the book and a synopsis of research on language and culture. The second chapter, John Leavitt’s Linguistic relativity: precursors and transformations discusses further the historical development of the concept of linguistic relativity, identifying different schools’ of thought views on the relation between language and culture. He also tries to demystify some misrepresentations held towards Boas, Sapir, and Whorf’ theories (pp. 24-26). Chapter 3, Ethnosyntax, by Anna Gladkova provides an overview of research on ethnosyntax, starting from the theoretical basis laid by Sapir and Whorf and investigates the differences between a narrow sense of ethnosyntax, which focuses on cultural meanings of various grammatical structures and a broader sense, which emphasises the pragmatic and cultural norms’ impact on the choice of grammatical structures. John Leavitt presents in the fourth chapter, titled Ethnosemantics, a historical account of research on meaning across cultures, introducing three traditions, i.e. ‘classical’ ethnosemantics (also referred to as ethnoscience or cognitive anthropology), Boasian cultural semantics (linguistically inspired anthropology) and Neohumboldtian comparative semantics (word-field theory, or content-oriented Linguistics). In Chapter 5, Goddard underlines the fact that ethnopragmatics investigates emic (or culture-internal) approaches to the use of different speech practices across various world languages, which accounts for the fact that there exists a connection between the cultural values or norms and the speech practices peculiar to a speech community. One of the key objectives of ethnopragmatics is to investigate ‘cultural key words’, i.e. words that encapsulate culturally construed concepts. The concept of ‘linguaculture’ (or languaculture) is tackled in Risager’s Chapter 6, Linguaculture: the language–culture nexus in transnational perspective. The author makes reference to American scholars that first introduced this notion, Paul Friedrich, who looks at language and culture as a single domain in which verbal aspects of culture are mingled with semantic meanings, and Michael Agar, for whom culture resides in language while language is loaded with culture. Risager himself brought forth a new global and transnational perspective on the concept of linguaculture, i.e. the use of language (linguistic practice) is seen as flows in people’s social networks and speech communities. These flows enhance as people migrate or learn new languages, in permanent dynamics. Lidia Tanaka’s Chapter 7, Language, gender, and culture deals with research on language, gender, and culture. According to her, the language-gender relationship has been studied by researchers from various fields, including psychology, linguistics, and anthropology, who mainly consider gender as a construct that preserves inequalities in society, with the help of language, too. Tanaka lists diachronically different approaches to language and gender, focusing on three specific ones: gender stereotyped linguistic resources, semantically, pragmatically or lexically designated language features (including register) and gender-based spoken discourse strategies (talking-time imbalances or interruptions). In Chapter 8, Language, culture, and context, Istvan Kecskes delves into the relationship between language, culture, and context from a socio-cognitive perspective. The author considers culture to be a set of shared knowledge structures that encapsulate the values, norms, and customs that the members of a society have in common. According to him, both language and context are rooted in culture and carriers of it, though reflecting culture in a different way. Language encodes past experience with different contexts, whereas context reflects present experience. The author also provides relevant examples of formulaic language that demonstrate the functioning of both types of context, within the larger interplay between language, culture, and context. Sara Miller’s Chapter 9, Language, culture, and politeness reviews traditional approaches to politeness research, with particular attention given to ‘discursive approach’ to politeness. Much along the lines of the previous chapter, Miller stresses the role of context in judgements of (im)polite language, maintaining that individuals represent active agents who challenge and negotiate cultural as well as linguistic norms in actual communicative contexts. Chapter 10, Language, culture, and interaction, by Peter Eglin focuses on language, culture and interaction from the perspective of the correspondence theory of meaning. According to him, abstracting language and culture from their current uses, as if they were not interdependent would not lead to an understanding of words’ true meaning. David Kronenfeld introduces in Chapter 11, Culture and kinship language, a review of research on culture and kinship language, starting with linguistic anthropology. He explains two formal analytic definitional systems of kinship terms: the semantic (distinctions between kin categories, i.e. father vs mother) and pragmatic (interrelations between referents of kin terms, i.e. ‘nephew’ = ‘child of a sibling’). Chapter 12, Cultural semiotics, by Peeter Torop deals with the field of ‘semiotics of culture’, which may refer either to methodological instrument, to a whole array of methods or to a sub-discipline of general semiotics. In this last respect, it investigates cultures as a form of human symbolic activity, as well as a system of cultural languages (i.e. sign systems). Language, as “the preserver of the culture’s collective experience and the reflector of its creativity” represents an essential component of cultural semiotics, being a major sign system. Nigel Armstrong, in Chapter 13, Culture and translation, tackles the interrelation between language, culture, and translation, with an emphasis on the complexities entailed by translation of culturally laden aspects. In his opinion, culture has a double-sided dimension: the anthropological sense (referring to practices and traditions which characterise a community) and a narrower sense, related to artistic endeavours. However, both sides of culture permeate language at all levels. Chapter 14, Language, culture, and identity, by Sandra Schecter tackles several approaches to research on language, culture, and identity: social anthropological (the limits at play in the social construction of differences between various groups of people), sociocultural (the interplay between an individual’s various identities, which can be both externally and internally construed, in sociocultural contexts), participatory-relational (the manner in which individuals create their social–linguistic identities). Patrick McConvell, in Chapter 15, Language and culture history: the contribution of linguistic prehistory reviews research in this field where historical linguistic evidence is exploited in the reconstruction and understanding of prehistoric cultures. He makes an account of research in linguistic prehistory, with a focus on proto- and early Indo-European cultures, on several North American language families, on Africa, Australian, and Austronesian Aboriginal languages. McConvell also underlines the importance of interdisciplinary research in this area, which greatly benefits from studies in other disciplines, such as archaeology, palaeobiology, or biological genetics. Part four starts with Ning Yu’s Chapter 16, Embodiment, culture, and language, which gives an account of theory and research on the interplay between language, culture, and body, as seen from the standpoint of Cultural Linguistics. Yu presents a survey of embodiment (in embodied cognition research) from a multidisciplinary perspective, starting with the rather universalistic Conceptual Metaphor Theory. On the other hand, Cultural Linguistics has concentrated on the role played by culture in shaping embodied language, as various cultures conceptualise body and bodily experience in different ways. Chapter 17, Culture and language processing, by Crystal Robinson and Jeanette Altarriba deals with research in the field of how culture influence language processing, in particular in the case of bilingualism and emotion, alongside language and memory. Clearly, the linguistic and cultural character of each individual’s background has to be considered as a variable in research on cognition and cognitive processing. Frank Polzenhagen and Xiaoyan Xia, in Chapter 18, Language, culture, and prototypicality bring forth a survey of prototypicality across different disciplines, including cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology. According to them, linguistic prototypes play a critical part in social (re-)cognition, as they are socially diagnostic and function as linguistic identity markers. Moreover, individuals may develop ‘culturally blended concepts’ as a result of exposure to several systems of conceptual categorisation, especially in the case of L2 learning (language-contact or culture-contact situations). In Chapter 19, Colour language, thought, and culture, Don Dedrick investigates the issue of the colour words in different languages and how these influence cognition, a question that has been addressed by researchers from various disciplines, such as anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, or neuroscience. He cannot but observe the constant debate in this respect, and he argues that it is indeed difficult to reach consensus, as colour language occasionally reveals effects of language on thought and, at other times, it is impervious to such effects. Chapter 20, Language, culture, and spatial cognition, by Penelope Brown
How to be to Ukraine with its language? The author of the article reflects on the ways of further development of the Ukrainian language in Ukraine as the only state language and offers specific extraordinary measures to achieve this goal. In particular, the author considers a number of special measures for the early inclusion of children aged 3-6 years from Russian-speaking families into the sphere of phonetic, prosodic, grammatical and lexical norms of the Ukrainian language. At the stage of growing up (17-22 years old), the author recommends introducing compulsory higher education in Ukraine with a degree in the Ukrainian language and literature for all young people who have not passed special secondary oral and written secondary school exams in the Ukrainian language.
Gender role theory argues that men are socialized to adhere to masculine norms that foment resistance to help-seeking in general and medical care in particular. We hypothesize an automatic link in memory between medical care and masculinity among men, developed through gender role socialization, such that by the time men have reached adulthood, medical-related stimuli inescapably and unintentionally activate masculinity-relevant concepts. Across two studies we employ a lexical decision task with medical and non-medical primes to demonstrate an automatic link between medicine and masculinity (in addition to other concepts) among male university students. Further, we illustrate how self-affirmation may temporarily untether the two concepts. A novel “masculine-affirmation” was also explored, which increased the medicine–masculinity link.
Research aim is to identify the phenomena of verbal vulgarization of children’s cartoon discourse, to determine their functional-semantic loads and registers of reduced emotional evaluation, as well as the main socio-cultural types of corporate vulgar behavior. Research Methods. The study of the vulgarization of children’s media content was carried out with the help of: a) theoretical methods, b) psycholinguistic empirical methods – discourse-analysis of vulgarized dialogical situations; questionnaire related to the testing of registers of dialogical situations in cinema texts among the audience of student’s youth (80 humanitarian students (specialty “Journalism”) of the National University “Odesa Law Academy” aged 17-20 years). Results. The didactic role of animated cinema texts in the formation of media culture is noted. It was proposed the practical analysis of the modern children’s cartoons language in the context of the systematization of markers of affective vulgarity, such as slangisms, jargonisms, elements of common language, obscenisms. On the basis of a survey and psycholinguistic experiment, a stylistic evaluation of the perception of the selected lexical-phraseological material as such that contains the connotation “vulgarity” was confirmed, the attitude of the young generation of viewers to vulgarized cinema text was revealed. Conclusions. Among the main conclusions we may note that as a result of language vulgarization of modern consciousness, in particular children, the so-called conceptual sphere of human activity is changing. The new generation of viewers is focused on low, coarse communication, on the weakening of the feeling of beautiful, on the positive perception of the appropriate aesthetics of everyday life. According to the results of the questionnaire, these cinema texts are perceived neutral by 55 students, positively – 21 students, negatively – 4 students. The language of cartoon characters, which represent certain social groups of real society, is seen as the norm for any situation, and grumpiness, disrespect, psycho-emotional imbalance are seen as their “organic” color. Therefore, the majority, or the vast majority of the respondents, correlated the lexical-phraseological units as jargon that is, acceptable in the youth environment. Modern foreign animation that is presented as translated cinema text, loses the important function of being a mediadidactive source, that is, the medium of producing patterns of individual and collective linguistic behavior.
This study sheds light on Translation Universals in translated CEO letters in sustainability reports, which have been receiving growing attention under the new regulatory environment and recently-rising practice of integrated reporting. Taking a comparable corpus approach by coding 58 translated and non-translated letters published by KTOP30- and DOW30-listed firms with 31 variables representing four translation universals (explicitation, simplification, normalization, and levelling-out), it is found that letters translated from Korean into English exhibit significantly lower function words, lower connectives, and higher mean sentence length, all of which contradict to the existing TU hypotheses. The result of normalization is in line with the TU hypothesis where translated texts have a higher proportion of recurring lexical bundles. Also found is significant underrepresentation of punctuations in translated CEO letters. All of the differences in this study, whether conforming to TU hypotheses or not, reveal the influence of the corporate reporting genre as well as source language. This has meaningful implications for translation from L1 to L2, which is often the norm for professional translators in this genre in Korea.
Best–worst scaling is a judgment format in which participants are presented with K items and must choose the best and worst items from that set, along some underlying latent dimension. Best–worst scaling has seen recent use in natural-language processing and psychology to collect lexical semantic norms. In such applications, four items have always been presented on each trial. The present study provides reasoning that values other than 4 might provide better estimates of latent values. The results from simulation experiments and behavioral research confirmed this: Both suggest that, in the general case, six items per trial better reduces errors in the latent value estimates.
English Abstract: The special status of the German language, its multinational character and national variability are always in the focus of attention of different sciences and give practical material for research. It is the example of the German language that clearly demonstrates how strong the nonlinguistic factors can influence the history of its development. Thus, a pronounced dialectic and regional differentiation stems from the Reformation and feudal fragmentation of the Middle Ages. As a result of the political influence of one or another dynasty, the German-speaking region is far from heterogeneity, despite the geographical unity. The consequence of these factors has become the formation of different versions of the German language: Hochdeutsch (in the German’s territory), Osterreichisches Deutsch (in the Austria’s territory), Schweizer Deutsch (in the Switzerland’s territory). There are certainly distinctive features of the German language in Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. Being the dynamic system the language is responsive to all transformations taking place in the society and changes together with it. Unfortunately, not always these changes have positive and progressive character. In the XXI century the situation worsens by practically unlimited influence of the media, first of all, due to the possibilities of the global network. If in the second half of the XX century the statement that the media is the fourth power was rather declarative, then nowadays it has become evident. Online versions of different editions provide mass audience with almost real time information, sometimes in telegraphic style. In this case, unfortunately, it is not possible to preserve the purity of language in the broadest sense. The language becomes simpler from lexical, grammatical and syntactical points of view, saturated with foreign words (der Think-Tank, point of no return, das Statement) and uncharacteristic constructions (in 2019 instead of 2019), even the norms of pronunciation are violated (China). In the pursuit of the audience’s attention, in the desire not only to inform the public about a particular event but to portray it as a sensation, the media often resorts to different creative means, particularly on the lexical level (lindnern, sodern, der Kurz-Schluss, das Leyen-Theater, das Erdogate). The analysis of such items demonstrates the clear link between usually high-profile events taking place in the society and a rise of language phenomena that differ from normative rules. It is worth noting that therefore through language and the imposition of foreign norms manipulative influence impacts the mass audience, which can be countered by the well-considered and strict language policy at the national level. Russian Abstract: Особый статус немецкого языка, его полинациональность и национальная вариативность всегда находятся в центре внимания различных наук и дают практический материал для исследований. И именно на примере немецкого языка наглядно видно, насколько сильным может быть влияние экстралингвистических факторов на историю его развития. Так, достаточно ярко выраженная диалектная и региональная дифференциация берет свое начало в Реформации и феодальной раздробленности средних веков. В результате политического влияния той или иной династии немецкоязычный регион не отличается гетерогенностью, несмотря на географическое единство. Следствием подобных факторов стало формирование различных вариантов немецкого языка: Hochdeutsch (на территории Германии), Osterreichisches Deutsch (на территории Австрии), Schweizer Deutsch (на территории Швейцарии). Безусловно, есть также отличительные особенности немецкого языка в Люксембурге или Лихтенштейне. Будучи подвижной системой, язык чутко реагирует на все происходящие в обществе преобразования и изменяется вместе с ним. К сожалению, не всегда эти изменения носят положительный и прогрессивный характер. В XXI веке ситуация усугубляется практически безграничным влиянием СМИ, прежде всего, благодаря возможностям всемирной сети. Если во второй половине прошлого века утверждение, что СМИ являются четвертой властью, было скорее декларативным, то в настоящее время это стало очевидным. Online-версии различных изданий предоставляют массовой аудитории информацию практически в режиме реального времени, иногда в телеграфном стиле. В этом случае, к сожалению, не удается сохранять чистоту языка в самом широком смысле слова. Язык упрощается, как с лексической или грамматической точек зрения, так и синтаксически, насыщается иноязычными словами (der Think-Tank, point of no return, das Statement) и нетипичными конструкциями (in 2019 вместо 2019), даже нарушаются нормы произношения (China). В погоне за вниманием аудитории, желанием не просто проинформировать о том или ином событии, а представить его сенсационно, в СМИ зачастую прибегают к различным креативным способам, прежде всего, на лексическом уровне (lindnern, sodern, der Kurz-Schluss, das Leyen-Theater, das Erdogate). При анализе подобных наименований прослеживается четкая взаимосвязь между происходящими в обществе событиями, как правило, резонансными, и всплеском языковых явлений, отличных от нормативных правил. Стоит отметить, что таким образом, через язык и навязывание «чужих» норм оказывается манипулятивное воздействие на массовую аудиторию, противостоять которому возможно посредством хорошо продуманной и жесткой языковой политики на государственном уровне.
In Receive Our Memories, José Orozco, associate professor of history at Whittier College, offers a unique set of primary documents accompanied by a family history and local history, insightfully contextualized within the first half of twentieth-century Mexican history. It examines the life of a campesino (and great-grandfather of the author) Luz Moreno (1877–1953) from the town of San Miguel el Alto, Jalisco, through the 170 letters written to his eldest daughter Pancha (1901–2002), who had migrated to Stockton, California. Luz's letters reveal, from the perspective of a poor man in his own words, aspects of his philosophical inner self—one quite different from the taciturn and stoic outward persona. Indeed, Moreno's letters—sent to his eldest daughter from 1950, after she married rather late in life and emigrated, until his death a few years later—are as complex as they were frequent. Reserved and a man of few words in person, the ailing patriarch reveals in his letters to his favorite daughter his intense love for her and an “interior monologue,” while his prose “displays a conscious and persistent literary intent” (p. 10). In the historiography of immigration, Orozco's book is unique in that most letters examined to tell stories of migration are from the migrant's perspective, not from that of a family member left behind to struggle with the physical and emotional separation from a loved one. Orozco explains that Moreno “saw emigration as a threat to his religion, to the coherence of his family, and to the viability of a way of life that he once believed was immutable” (p. 40). In Moreno's own words from 1951, “Many go illegally to that Promised Land in search of the Dollar and they give more importance to it than to tending the corn in their own country. Compared to the Dollar, everything seems to be stacked against corn... What shall we do? Shall we only eat Dollars?” (p. 40). His letters and Orozco's analysis reveal the negative effects of modernity and modernization.Orozco has organized the content thematically and translated 80 of the original letters in these chapters, providing historical and historiographical context for each one. The themes include affective bonds, religion, poverty, letter writing and newspaper reading, and old age and dying. The first chapter tells the history of San Miguel el Alto and weaves the story of the entire Moreno clan into local and national political developments, with a focus on religious resistance. Especially rich in details about Pancha's life in Jalisco, this chapter decenters the somewhat persistent triumphalist narrative of the 1910 revolution through a careful depiction of these fervent Catholics and their participation in both Cristero rebellions (from 1926 and 1929 and from the mid-1930s to early 1940s, respectively) and the Sinarquista movement (from 1937 to 1950). Indeed, Orozco states that some Alteños considered the Cristero rebellions to be the true revolution rather than the 1910 movement against Porfirio Díaz. The story of the Moreno family highlights Catholic resistance to state power and the complexities of traditional, yet at times quite fluid, gender roles and norms. For example, Pancha served as secretary of feminine action for the Sinarquista party in the late 1930s and 1940s, for which she performed work considered acceptable for her gender such as sewing the party's flags, feeding members, and coordinating children's activities. But she also actively recruited new members, traveling with her uncle to neighboring locales. In 1916, the family had refused to let Pancha marry her sweetheart Juan; she defied them when he returned in 1950 to marry her, and the male family members eventually accepted the situation.Receive Our Memories demonstrates the elderly Luz Moreno's self-awareness of his life in poverty and how avid newspaper reading and his Catholic faith made him conscious of the global interconnectedness of “el miserable pueblo.” The letters also speak with sophistication to international political events and ideologies. Of particular concern to Moreno when writing to his daughter were the godlessness, greed, and capitalistic excesses of the United States and the threats that these posed to her Catholic soul. Perhaps less predictably, Moreno weighed in on heavy political and economic issues like the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the bracero program with tremendous detail. The book sheds light on the importance of the family economy (both in Jalisco and transnationally through remittances) and the indissoluble bonds of family in the face of migration. The text is accompanied by sketches by artist José Lozano, meant to harken back to “lexical-visual collaborations undertaken in the 1930s and 1940s” between Mexican artists and American radical intellectuals (p. x). Moreno's ability to connect to global political, economic, and social developments and his self-awareness about poverty and his relation to others in that struggle worldwide in his writings make them a unique source. It will be of interest to historians and anthropologists of Mexico and scholars studying the elderly, migration, and poverty in any geographic region. The letters combined with Orozco's careful contextualization of the economic, political, and religious milieus make the book ideal for undergraduate students and scholars alike.
Evidence from both behavioral and neuropsychological studies suggest that different types of organizational principles govern semantic representations of abstract and concrete words. The reviewed neuroimaging studies provide new evidence about the role of brain areas of the semantic network involved in the encoding of some types of information during processing of abstract and concrete concepts, better characterizing the neural underpinnings and the organizational principles of semantic representation of these types of word.
The article discusses specific features of the anecdote as a speech genre, analyzes communicative-pragmatic principles of creating a comic effect in anecdotes based on the wordplay. It is noted that the concept of «anecdote», despite the fact that it is widely used in modern literary criticism and linguistics, does not have a single interpretation and a precise theoretical definition, which is explained by its genre uniqueness and complexity of a cognitive-pragmatic nature. It is emphasized that the most important part of the work of this genre is its finale, originally known to the narrator. It is the last climax phrase that contains the unexpected and unpredictable final semantic resolution that constitutes the anecdote as such. Among the features inherent in the actual anecdotal texts are: small volume, lack of authorship, reproducibility, indefinite chronotope, stereotypicality of plot schemes, relatively constant set of characters, ambivalence of the meaning of language units, intertextuality, situational functioning, etc. The dominant category of the anecdote text is minimalism, manifested in the choice of details, the number of heroes, laconic form, the volume of compositional components. It is stated that formation of the types of anecdotes took place along two lines: folk and literary. A modern anecdote, in contrast to the literary jokes of previous years, as a rule, is a speech genre, not a literary one, which determines its specificity. It is noted that anecdotes are divided into situational (subject, referential), in which the comic nature of the described situation is not related to the linguistic design, and language (linguistic), which are based on the playing out of certain linguistic phenomena. The comic effect in the latter is based on purely linguistic mechanisms and depends on the choice of the used speech means. An integral part of creating a comic effect in linguistic anecdotes is violation of certain norms, or incongruence, in the implementation of which the leading role is played by the language game. The game potential of phonetic, lexical, word-building, morphological and syntactic means, as well as precedent phenomena involved in speech works of this type are described. Particular attention is paid to punning outplaying of polysemy and various types of homonymy as one of the most popular means of creating a language joke. It is concluded that peculiarity of the game means, used for creating a humorous effect, lies in their function: they have an additional evaluative connotation, express different degrees of negative loading and take part in creating comic ambiguity in the statement.
In the article has been modelled the linguistic database “Concept human in the phraseology of East Steppe Ukrainian dialects” based on ideographic, axiological, structural classifications of phraseological units.
Psychologists have made substantial progress at developing empirically validated formal expressions of how people perceive, learn, remember, think, and know. In this article, we present an academic search engine for cognitive psychology that leverages computational expressions of human cognition (vector-space models of semantics) to represent and find articles in the psychological record. The method shows how psychological theory can be used to inform and aid the design of psychologically intuitive computer interfaces.
This paper demonstrates latent word recurrent neural network language models (LW-RNN-LMs) for enhancing automatic speech recognition (ASR). LW-RNN-LMs are constructed so as to pick up advantages in both recurrent neural network language models (RNN-LMs) and latent word language models (LW-LMs). The RNN-LMs can capture long-range context information and offer strong performance, and the LW-LMs are robust for out-of-domain tasks based on the latent word space modeling. However, the RNN-LMs cannot explicitly capture hidden relationships behind observed words since a concept of a latent variable space is not present. In addition, the LW-LMs cannot take into account long-range relationships between latent words. Our idea is to combine RNN-LM and LW-LM so as to compensate individual disadvantages. The LW-RNN-LMs can support both a latent variable space modeling as well as LW-LMs and a long-range relationship modeling as well as RNN-LMs at the same time. From the viewpoint of RNN-LMs, LW-RNN-LM can be considered as a soft class RNN-LM with a vast latent variable space. In contrast, from the viewpoint of LW-LMs, LW-RNN-LM can be considered as an LW-LM that uses the RNN structure for latent variable modeling instead of an n-gram structure. This paper also details a parameter inference method and two kinds of implementation methods, an n-gram approximation and a Viterbi approximation, for introducing the LW-LM to ASR. Our experiments show effectiveness of LW-RNN-LMs on a perplexity evaluation for the Penn Treebank corpus and an ASR evaluation for Japanese spontaneous speech tasks.
This is a work-in-progress report, which aims to share preliminary results of a novel sequence-to-sequence schema for dependency parsing that relies on a combination of a BiLSTM and two Pointer Networks (Vinyals et al., 2015), in which the final softmax function has been replaced with the logistic regression. The two pointer networks co-operate to develop a latent syntactic knowledge, by learning the lexical properties of "selection" and the lexical properties of "selectability", respectively. At the moment and without fine-tuning, the parser implementation gets a UAS of 93.14% on the English Penn-treebank (Marcus et al., 1993) annotated with Stanford Dependencies: 2-3% under the SOTA but yet attractive as a baseline of the approach.
Different from the current syntax parsing based on deep learning, we present a novel Chinese parsing method, which is based on Sliding Match of Semantic String (SMOSS). (1) Training stage: In a treebank, headwords of tree nodes are represented by semantic codes given in the Synonym Dictionary (Tongyici Cilin). N-gram semantic templates are extracted from every layer of a syntax tree by means of sliding window to establish one N-gram semantic template library. (2) Parsing stage: Words of a sentence, including headwords of chunks, are represented by the semantic codes from Tongyici Cilin. With the sliding window method, N-gram semantic code strings are extracted to match with the templates in the N-gram semantic template library; subsequently, the mapping information of the matched templates is employed to guide the chunking of semantic code strings. The Chinese syntax parsing is completed through continuous matching and chunking. On the same training scale, N-gram semantic template can create favorable conditions for flexible matching and improve the syntax parsing performance. With train and test sets from the Tsinghua Chinese Treebank (TCT), the results are F1-score 99.71% (closed test) and F1-score 70.43% (open test), respectively.
This chapter highlights the depth of the relationship between language and emotions. It aims to clarify some important distinctions and terms with respect to the linguistic encoding of emotions. Anthropological research has long confirmed that people in different human groups deal with emotional experience in different ways and different languages also offer very different means to talk about it. The chapter shows that emotional experience involves both some physiological and neurological mechanisms, which – for some of them – may be universal, as well as the cognitive organization of these mechanisms into experience, governed by culturally specific social and linguistic norms. A basic criterion that differentiates between descriptive and expressive linguistic resources is the semiotic status of the linguistic devices in question. Descriptive resources consist mostly of lexical resources, that is words, and some constructions.
Deep Universal Dependencies is a collection of treebanks derived semi-automatically from Universal Dependencies (http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-2988). It contains additional deep-syntactic and semantic annotations. Version of Deep UD corresponds to the version of UD it is based on. Note however that some UD treebanks have been omitted from Deep UD.
People who experience trauma can develop enduring trauma-related symptoms. In daily life, post-trauma symptoms (e.g., elevated physiological arousal) can be triggered by affectively salient cues in the environment, especially by cues that act as trauma reminders. Trauma exposure is associated with enduring changes in two biological stress systems: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. In women, activity in both systems is additionally modulated by fluctuations in levels of sex hormones (e.g., estradiol), which could influence physiological responses to trauma reminders. Additionally, previous work has linked the sex hormone estradiol with affect, suggesting that menstrual cycle might influence trauma-related symptoms or daily affect more broadly within the context of trauma exposure. However, we do not yet have a clear understanding of how estradiol influences affective experiences post-trauma. We used a multi-method approach to examine the influence of estradiol on daily affective experiences in a non-clinical, trauma-exposed sample of 40 naturally cycling premenopausal women. The first specific goal of this study was to test the hypothesis that low estradiol would be related to trauma symptoms, including an asymmetrical profile of SNS and HPA axis stress reactivity to a naturalistic trauma reminder. Lower estradiol was related to greater number and severity of PTSD symptoms, and participants in low versus high estradiol menstrual cycle phases showed higher SNS and reduced HPA axis reactivity to a trauma reminder. These results suggest that lower estradiol is associated with a less adaptive profile of stress system reactivity and increased PTSD symptom expression. The second specific goal of this study was to test the influence of menstrual cycle phase on daily affect in a subset of 30 participants. We assessed affective experience over the course of a 10-day ecological momentary assessment (EMA) period, which included the early follicular (low estradiol) and late follicular (high estradiol) phases. We selected these menstrual cycle phases to capture a portion of the cycle where estradiol increased, whereas progesterone remained low, allowing us to test the effects of estradiol without the confound of progesterone. Participants reported more frequent aversive affective experiences, defined as negatively valenced, high arousal states, including PTSD symptoms, during the early versus late follicular phase. During the early versus late follicular phase, participants also reported greater negative and positive affect and showed greater variability in affective ratings. These results suggest that lower estradiol menstrual cycle phases are characterized by more frequent aversive affective experiences, greater affective lability and increased PTSD symptom severity. Together, these results have potential implications for clinical assessment, as menstrual cycle phase at the time of assessment could influence diagnosis of PTSD or symptom severity. Additionally, clinicians working with women with PTSD might anticipate greater affective lability and increased symptom severity during low estradiol phases of the menstrual cycle.
Over the last few decades, corpora with comprehensive syntactic annotation, known as treebanks or parsed corpora, have been created in various formats for major languages of the world (e.g., As modes of accessing annotation have become more linguistically sophisticated, so these corpus resources have become more relevant for linguistics in general by providing sources of insight into factors that only become visible through analysis generalized over structures: phenomena in co-occurrence, frequency, constituency, embeddability, scope, agreement, dependency, etc. These insights are spurring new research and refinements in both corpus techniques and theoretical understanding. While much research has concentrated on challenges inherent in the creation as well as correction of annotated corpora (e.g., Examples include linking corpora to external resources like lexical databases, abstracting the contents sufficiently to be of use to non-experts, exploration of crosslinguistic patterns, etc. This special issue consists of five articles focused on applying parsed corpora research in three areas: (I) enrichment and
Dependency parser is one of the most important fundamental tools in the natural language processing, which extracts structure of sentences and determines the relations between words based on the dependency grammar. The dependency parser is proper for free order languages, such as Persian. In this paper, data-driven dependency parser has been developed with the help of phrase-structure parser for Persian. The defined feature space in each parser is one of the important factors in its success. Our goal is to generate and extract appropriate features to dependency parsing of Persian sentences. To achieve this goal, new semantic and syntactic features have been defined and added to the MSTParser by stacking method. Semantic features are obtained by using word clustering algorithms based on syntagmatic analysis and syntactic features are obtained by using the Persian phrase-structure parser and have been used as bit-string. Experiments have been done on the Persian Dependency Treebank (PerDT) and the Uppsala Persian Dependency Treebank (UPDT). The results indicate that the definition of new features improves the performance of the dependency parser for the Persian. The achieved unlabeled attachment score for PerDT and UPDT are 89.17% and 88.96% respectively.
Modern health worries (MHW) represent individual differences in the perceived threat posed to health and well-being by aspects of modern life. Current evidence suggests that MHW are positively associated with trait negative emotionality, and given that trait negative emotionality is associated with state emotional reactivity to environmental stressors, it is reasonable to expect that persons with elevated MHW would show increased state emotional reactivity to MHW-related stimuli. Consequently, this study aimed to investigate the association of MHW with state emotional reactivity (i.e., valence and arousal) to MHW-related stimuli (i.e., images of air pollution). Combining these stimuli with other stimuli varying in valence and arousal allowed us to examine whether MHW are specifically associated with emotional reactivity induced by MHW-related stimuli. A total of 73 college students viewed 48 images encompassing eight different content areas, including a subset of MHW-related images (air pollution); each image was rated for valence and arousal. Participants also completed measures of MHW, trait negative emotionality (i.e., neuroticism), and demographics. After controlling for neuroticism and gender, results suggest that MHW only predicted valence rating for images of air pollution; conversely, MHW appears to be associated with arousal ratings in response to a variety of stimuli. Implications and limitations are discussed.
This paper presents the submission by the CMU-01 team to the SIGMORPHON 2019\ntask 2 of Morphological Analysis and Lemmatization in Context. This task\nrequires us to produce the lemma and morpho-syntactic description of each token\nin a sequence, for 107 treebanks. We approach this task with a hierarchical\nneural conditional random field (CRF) model which predicts each coarse-grained\nfeature (eg. POS, Case, etc.) independently. However, most treebanks are\nunder-resourced, thus making it challenging to train deep neural models for\nthem. Hence, we propose a multi-lingual transfer training regime where we\ntransfer from multiple related languages that share similar typology.\n
BACKGROUND: People experiencing mental illness require services that provide them with a sense of personal safety, a place where they can experience a reduction to their distress and assistance in managing their feelings. Interventions need to explore therapies that enhance feelings of personal safety and comfort for consumers and within a forensic mental health service, therapies and support that can assist in combating the antecedents to violent offending. The practice of Qigong is reported to have numerous health benefits; however, little has been reported regarding the possible benefits of Qigong for people experiencing severe mental illness and, more specifically, for people experiencing severe mental illness who have serious offending histories such as forensic consumers. This study explores the possibility of using Qigong to reduce personal frustrations that can lead to violence. OBJECTIVES: The object of this study was to explore whether Qigong is an effective intervention on positive affect traits for forensic mental health consumers, and whether other benefits are experienced. METHODS: An exploratory design using quantitative and qualitative approaches was used. Consumers participated in weekly Qigong groups delivered for a 10-wk period. Data were collected using an adapted version of the positive affect rating scale measuring the degree to which people experience different positive emotions. Qualitative measures were added to the scale to obtain a deeper understanding of the consumer experience, with 67 scales completed. CONCLUSIONS: Consumers in a forensic hospital responded positively to participating in Qigong groups. Strategies such as Qigong are interventions that mental health clinicians can use to promote positive feelings of personal relaxation, peacefulness, and safety. Qigong can promote positive affective traits for consumers in forensic hospitals. These positive affective traits can act as protective factors to inpatient aggression and violence. Forensic consumers report that Qigong is easy to learn and helpful for them in managing their frustrations. The findings from this study may add to the paucity of data discussing the use of Qigong with consumers as an effective relaxation intervention and possibly as an intervention in reducing negative affective states by promoting positive affective states, thereby reducing aggression and possible violence occurring within the forensic inpatient environment.
Lectometric approaches measure distances between language varieties (dialects, sociolects, registers etc.) by aggregating over observed differences in the realizations of a set of linguistic variables. In <em>lexical</em> lectometry, a variable consists of the alternative lexical expressions for one concept. In <em>corpus-based</em> lectometry, the observed realizations are culled from stratified corpora. Measuring semantically defined variables in corpora, and aggregating over them, poses specific methodological challenges that have been tackled in a number of studies (Heylen & Ruette 2013; Ruette et al. 2014; Ruette, Ehret & Szmrecsanyi 2016) with different statistical techniques, including Distributional Semantic Models. Yet so far, no general framework for corpus-based lexical lectometry has been formulated that systematically describes the issues and options in each step of the procedure so that it can be straightforwardly applied to new data and new languages, other than English (Ruette, Ehret & Szmrecsanyi 2016), Dutch (Geeraerts, Grondelaers & Speelman 1999) and Portuguese (Soares da Silva 2010). This paper can be characterized as a twofold extension of the previous studies. First, it aims to establish a general framework for lexical lectometry research that considers most if not all options for different steps. Second, we want to go beyond the Indo-European languages by extending the framework on a typologically unrelated language, i.e. Chinese varieties. For the general framework, we propose that a proper lexical lectometry research normally should involve the following steps: (1) compilation of a lectally stratified corpus; (2) sampling concepts as measuring points for lectometry; (3) identification of lexical expressions per concept; (4) disambiguation of lexical expressions in corpus data; (5) calculation of aggregated lexico-lectometric distances; (6) evaluation of measurement reliability and validity. For each step, we further provide possible options and caveats. For instance, step 2 and 3 can rely on existing concept-based lexical databases, like a synonym dictionary, or use corpus-driven keyword extraction and semantic vector space models. Step 4 can either make use of token-level distributional semantics models or rely on simpler n-gram language models. To assess the portability of the general framework, both in practical and linguistic-typological terms, we perform a lexical lectometric analysis for varieties of Chinese based on data from large-scale corpora of Mainland Chinese, Taiwan Chinese and Singapore Chinese.
Introduction: Hoarding behaviour is a common symptom seen in patients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The phenomenology and prevalence of hoarding in OCD have been under studied in India and the phenomenon is less explored on routine clinical examination. Aim: To study the prevalence and phenomenology of hoarding as a symptom in patients with OCD and tried to elucidate some differences between OCD patients with and without hoarding symptoms. Materials and Methods: A total of 50 patients with OCD and 50 relatives of psychiatric patients were the subjects for the study. The OCD group was administered the Yale Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (YBOCS), the Hoarding Rating Scale and the Clutter Image Rating Scale. The 50 cases of OCD were further divided on the presence and absence of hoarding as a symptom into 2 groups and the scores on the scales used were statistically analysed using descriptive statistics like frequency and percentages, chi-square test and unpaired t-test. Results: The mean duration of illness was 8.01±5.17 years and the mean age of onset of the illness was 27.28±7.11 years for all patients with OCD. OCD patients with hoarding had a shorter total duration of illness than those without hoarding. Newspapers and scrap were hoarded the most with sentimental reasons along with importance of goods were cited as reasons for the behaviour. The two groups showed significant differences on compulsive sub scale of the YBOCS and no differences were noted in the other scales used. Conclusion: Patients having OCD with hoarding as one of the symptoms may differ from those not having hoarding. However larger studies across diverse groups are needed to corroborate these findings.
Affect fluctuates in a moment-to-moment fashion, and it reflects the continuous relationship between the individual and the environment. Despite substantial research, there remain important open questions regarding how the continuous stream of sensory input is dynamically represented in experienced affect. Here, approaching affect as a temporally dependent process, we show that momentary affect is shaped by a combination of changes in recent stimuli (i.e. visually presented images for the current studies) and previously experienced affect. We also found that this temporally dependent relationship is influenced by context uncertainty. Participants, in each trial, viewed sequentially presented images and subsequently reported their affective experience, which was modeled based on images’ normative affect ratings and participants’ previously reported affect. Study 1 showed that self-reported valence and arousal in a given trial is partly shaped by the affective impact of the given images and previously experienced affect. In Study 2, we manipulated context uncertainty by controlling occurrence probabilities for normatively pleasant and unpleasant images in separate trials. Increasing context uncertainty (i.e. random occurrence of pleasant and unpleasant images) is associated with increased negative affect when the overall effect context is controlled. In addition, the relative contribution of the most recent image to momentary affect increased with increasing context uncertainty. Taken together, these findings provide clear behavioral evidence that affective experience fluctuates in a temporally dependent and continuous fashion based on recent changes in input variables and previous internal state, and that these fluctuations are sensitive to the affective context and its certainty.
The Plain Meaning Rule is often assailed on the grounds that it is unprincipled—that it substitutes for careful analysis an interpreter’s ad hoc and impressionistic intuition about the meaning of legal texts. But what if judges and lawyers had the means to test their intuitions about plain meaning systematically? Then initial linguistic impressions about the meaning of a legal text might be viewed as hypotheses to be tested, rather than determinative criteria upon which to base important decisions. There exists very little legal scholarship on corpus linguistics—the study of language function and use through large, electronic linguistic databases called corpora—and the role that corpus methods might play in legal interpretation. This omission becomes more and more striking as scholars and jurists (and even the United States Supreme Court) have found themselves persuaded by corpus-based arguments. This Article argues that the plain or ordinary meaning of a given term in a given context is an empirical matter that may be quantified through corpus-based methods. These methods, when applied to questions of legal ambiguity, present significant advantages over existing empirical approaches to plain meaning and over the prevailing intuition-based interpretive approach of many courts. Because large, sophisticated linguistic corpora are widely available and easy to use, and because corpus methods offer a more principled and systematic alternative to the impressionistic interpretation of legal texts, corpus linguistics may one day revolutionize the process of legal interpretation.
OBJECTIVE: Facial expressions communicate emotional states and regulate social bonds. An approach or avoidance-based valence might interact with direct or averted gaze to elicit different attentional allocation. These processes might be aberrant in major depression or first-episode psychosis and this requires empirical investigation. METHOD: This study examined higher order, controlled attentional processing of emotional facial expressions (happy, neutral, angry and fearful), with direct or averted gaze, using electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of the face-elicited Late Positive Potential (LPP), in young people diagnosed with major depression or first-episode psychosis, compared with a healthy control group. RESULTS: In the control group, there was no evidence of increased attentional allocation to emotional facial expressions, or to facial expressions with a matching emotional expression and gaze direction. There was no evidence, in the depression or first-episode psychosis groups, for a threat-based, attentional hypersensitivity to fearful or angry facial expressions, nor for this effect to be potentiated in response to angry direct or fearful averted gaze faces. However, the absence of such effects could not be concluded due to sample size and the absence of stimulus arousal and valence ratings. Importantly, there was significantly increased attentional allocation in the first-episode psychosis group to facial expressions regardless of emotional expression or gaze direction, compared to both the depression and control group. CONCLUSIONS: There might be an attentional hypersensitivity to facial expressions regardless of emotional expression or gaze direction in first-episode psychosis.
Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI; e.g., cutting or burning the skin without suicidal intent) is a dangerous and increasingly prevalent health-risk behavior. Despite advances in NSSI research over the past decade, many aspects of NSSI remain poorly understood. In particular, there are few strong predictors of NSSI, it is unclear how positive attitudes toward NSSI develop, and there are no empirically supported treatments for NSSI. In the present study, I addressed these topics with a multi-method, experimental, and longitudinal approach. For Aim 1 of the study, I examined baseline differences between NSSI (n = 58) and control (n = 86) adult participants on NSSI-themed versions of five measures that cover different aspects of attitudes: the implicit association test (IAT); the affect misattribution procedure (AMP); explicit affective ratings; startle eyeblink reactivity; and startle postauricular reactivity. Compared to the control group, the NSSI group displayed significantly more positive attitudes on all five measures. Moreover, AMP scores and explicit ratings prospectively predicted self-cutting frequency over the ensuing six months. For Aim 2, I employed pain offset relief conditioning in an attempt to induce more positive implicit attitudes toward NSSI in the control group. This conditioning significantly diminished startle eyeblink reactivity in the context of NSSI images, but did not significantly affect any other measures. For Aim 3, I tested the ability of aversive conditioning in the NSSI group to reverse positive implicit attitudes toward NSSI and to reduce NSSI behaviors over the subsequent six months. Aversive conditioning normalized startle eyeblink and postauricular reactivity, but did not significantly affect any other measures. Results also provided preliminary support for the hypothesis that aversive conditioning prospectively reduces self-cutting. In conjunction with my other recent studies (Franklin et al., 2010; 2011, 2012, 2013), these findings have prompted a new theoretical framework called the Benefits and Barriers model of NSSI.
Supertagging is a sequence prediction task where each word is assigned a piece of complex syntactic structure called a supertag. We provide a novel approach to multi-task learning for Tree Adjoining Grammar (TAG) supertagging by deconstructing these complex supertags in order to define a set of related but auxiliary sequence prediction tasks. Our multi-task prediction framework is trained over the exactly same training data used to train the original supertagger where each auxiliary task provides an alternative view on the original prediction task. Our experimental results show that our multi-task approach significantly improves TAG supertagging with a new state-of-the-art accuracy score of 91.39% on the Penn treebank supertagging dataset.
Transition-based parsing of natural language uses transition systems to build directed annotation graphs (digraphs) for sentences. In this paper, we define, for an arbitrary ordered digraph, a unique decomposition and a corresponding linear encoding that are associated bijectively with each other via a new transition system. These results give us an efficient and succinct representation for digraphs and sets of digraphs. Based on the system and our analysis of its syntactic properties, we give structural bounds under which the set of encoded digraphs is restricted and becomes a context-free or a regular string language. The context-free restriction is essentially a superset of the encodings used previously to characterize properties of noncrossing digraphs and to solve maximal subgraphs problems. The regular restriction with a tight bound is shown to capture the Universal Dependencies v2.4 treebanks in linguistics.
Most current language modeling techniques only exploit co-occurrence, semantic and syntactic information from the sequence of words. However, a range of information such as the state of the speaker and dynamics of the interaction might be useful. In this work we derive motivation from psycholinguistics and propose the addition of behavioral information into the context of language modeling. We propose the augmentation of language models with an additional module which analyzes the behavioral state of the current context. This behavioral information is used to gate the outputs of the language model before the final word prediction output. We show that the addition of behavioral context in language models achieves lower perplexities on behavior-rich datasets. We also confirm the validity of the proposed models on a variety of model architectures and improve on previous state-of-the-art models with generic domain Penn Treebank Corpus.
The practice of assessing brand management in construction in Ukraine is in a passive stage, but due to the entry into the Ukrainian market of foreign companies for which regular evaluation of their brand — the need for survival in a competitive environment, Ukrainian companies are beginning to pay more attention to the creation and formation of their competitive trading because of its high business image / rating. A modern toolkit based on appropriate approaches is used to form organizational and economic foundations. The article analyzes modern scientific approaches to assessing the economic potential of an enterprise, identifies the main trends and factors that affect the assessment of construction enterprises. The article is devoted to the study of theoretical and methodological assessments of branding of construction enterprises. The role and importance of innovation in ensuring the efficient operation of modern enterprises is emphasized. It is found that construction, especially innovative, is of great social importance and has a significant economic effect. The importance of determining the potential of innovative development of construction in general and construction enterprises in particular is substantiated. The purpose of this article is to systematically investigate the interpretation of the potential of innovative development of construction enterprises. The theoretical basis of the research is the scientific works of foreign and domestic scientists on the problems of identifying the essence of innovative development potential. A systematic study of the general characteristics of the construction company brand was conducted and the priority directions for choosing the development of the economic potential of the enterprises were determined. The necessity to understand the potential of the enterprise in the unity of all its elements, which are subject to the achievement of the overall goals of the enterprise, is substantiated. The weight of the component of the brand in the potential of the construction industry enterprises is substantiated. Some aspects of the development of theoretical and methodological approaches to the estimation of the intellectual capital of construction enterprises are formulated. Existing theoretical and methodological approaches to the brand assessment of construction enterprises are analyzed.
Neural networks have shown great potential in language modeling. Currently, the dominant approach to language modeling is based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Nonetheless, it is not clear why RNNs and CNNs are suitable for the language modeling task since these neural models are lack of interpretability. The goal of this paper is to tailor an interpretable neural model as an alternative to RNNs and CNNs for the language modeling task. This paper proposes a unified framework for language modeling, which can partly interpret the rationales behind existing language models (LMs). Based on the proposed framework, an interpretable neural language model (INLM) is proposed, including a tailored architectural structure and a tailored learning method for the language modeling task. The proposed INLM can be approximated as a parameterized auto-regressive moving average model and provides interpretability in two aspects: component interpretability and prediction interpretability. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed INLM outperforms some typical neural LMs on several language modeling datasets and on the switchboard speech recognition task. Further experiments also show that the proposed INLM is competitive with the state-of-the-art long short-term memory LMs on the Penn Treebank and WikiText-2 datasets.
The relationship between words in a sentence often tell us more about the underlying semantic content of a document than its actual words individually. Natural language understanding has seen an increasing effort in the formation of techniques that try to produce non-trivial features, in the last few years, especially after robust word embeddings models became prominent, when they proved themselves able to capture and represent semantic relationships from massive amounts of data. These new dense vector representations indeed leverage the baseline in natural language processing, but they still fall short in dealing with intrinsic issues in linguistics, such as polysemy and homonymy. Systems that make use of natural language at its core, can be affected by a weak semantic representation of human language, resulting in inaccurate outcomes based on poor decisions. In this subject, word sense disambiguation and lexical chains have been exploring alternatives to alleviate several problems in linguistics, such as semantic representation, definitions, differentiation, polysemy, and homonymy. However, little effort is seen in combining recent advances in token embeddings (e.g. words, documents) with word sense disambiguation and lexical chains. To collaborate in building a bridge between these areas, this work proposes a collection of algorithms to extract semantic features from large corpora as its main contributions, named MSSA, MSSA-D, MSSA-NR, FLLC II, and FXLC II. The MSSA techniques focus on disambiguating and annotating each word by its specific sense, considering the semantic effects of its context. The lexical chains group derive the semantic relations between consecutive words in a document in a dynamic and pre-defined manner. These original techniques' target is to uncover the implicit semantic links between words using their lexical structure, incorporating multi-sense embeddings, word sense disambiguation, lexical chains, and lexical databases. A few natural language problems are selected to validate the contributions of this work, in which our techniques outperform state-of-the-art systems. All the proposed algorithms can be used separately as independent components or combined in one single system to improve the semantic representation of words, sentences, and documents. Additionally, they can also work in a recurrent form, refining even more their results.
يعد القرآن الكريم من مصادر المعرفة، وقد تولدت منه فروع واسعة؛ إذ نُزل القرآن الكريم باللغة العربية، ولا يوجد خيار آخر لإتقان المعرفة الواردة فيه إلا من خلال تعلم اللغة العربية. تهدف هذه الدراسة إلى بيان مفهوم المدونة العربية القرآنية ومكوناتها، والكشف عن علاقة تعلم اللغة العربية بالقرآن الكريم، وبيان كيفية تعليم وتعلم القواعد العربية الأساسية عبر المدونة العربية القرآنية، وستتبع الدراسة المنهج الوصفي والتحليلي. إن وجود العلاقة بين اللغة العربية والقرآن الكريم، يدفع الطلبة المتخصصين في اللغة العربية أن يربطوا اللغة العربية بالقرآن؛ لذلك نرى أن المدونة العربية القرآنية تساعدهم على فهم القواعد القرآنية بطريقة مثيرة للاهتمام. في نظرة شاملة يمكن أن نستنتج أن المدونة العربية القرآنية هي واحدة من أهم الأدوات الحسابية التي تم إنتاجها في خدمة اللغة العربية؛ حيث توفر للمتعلمين ما يحتاجون إليه في مجال اللغة واللغويات والدراسات الحاسوبية، كما تمهد الطريق للباحثين لدراسة الهياكل المورفولوجية والنحوية من خلال دراسات الحوسبة العميقة للقرآن.
 الكلمات المفتاحية: المصرف القرآني، نموذج حاسوبي، المدونة العربية القرآنية، المعجم القرآني.
 Abstract 
 The Holy Quran is a source of knowledge and it has generated wide branches of knowledge. The Holy Quran was revealed in Arabic. Hence, there is no other option to master its knowledge except by learning the Arabic language. This study aims at explaining the concept of the Arabic Quranic Corpus and its components, revealing the relationship between learning the Arabic language and the Holy Quran, and showing how to teach and learn basic Arabic grammar through the Quranic Arabic Corpus. The study will follow the descriptive and analytical approach. The existence of the relationship between the Arabic language and the Holy Quran prompts Arabic learners to associate Arabic with the Qur'an. Therefore, we see that the Quranic Arabic Corpus helps them to understand Quranic rules in an interesting way. In a comprehensive view, we can conclude that the Arabic Quranic Corpus is one of the most important web-based medium produced to serve the Arabic language. It provides learners with what they need in the field of language, linguistics and computer studies, and paves the way for researchers to study morphological and grammatical structures through technology with detail description of grammars.
 Keywords: Quranic Treebank, Computational Model, Arabic Quranic Corpus, Qur’anic Dictionary.
Paper is dedicated to the testing of the concept of literacy, based on the questionnaire, carried out in the school year of 2018/2019 among the students of two secondary vocational schools in Vrsac, Belgrade and Grammar School in Vrsac (200 respondents). The primary hypothesis of the research was that detection and detailed study of high school students conceptosphere on literacy identify the fields to improve the teaching of Serbian as a mother tongue in secondary schools and the aim of work that, based on the collected and then processed data in analytical, cognitive and descriptive method, is to (a) isolate the dominant concepts of (non)literacy, (b) look at the tendencies of spreading and shaping the notion of literacy induced by the needs of modern life, and also that, in order to improve linguistic culture in all domains and all educational levels -(c) point to the possibility of improving the teaching of the Serbian language as a mother tongue. According to results of the survey secondary school students experience literacy in the 21 st century as a complex concept; from the one who is literate expecting linguistic knowledge, what are the basic, traditionally accepted parameters, and recognize illiteracy as the lack of ability to apply knowledge in the field of language. They also demonstrated that it is necessary to improve the efficiency of teaching approaches designed to improve functional literacy in a variety of communicative situations; increase the number of hours and exercises in the field of spelling, or nurture and acquire more comprehensive and knowledge in use and skills of different forms of literacy needed for managing in 21 st century; more attention should be paid to including relevant language handbooks in teaching; more explicit, on frequent and more familiar examples to students, point to the advantages of knowing and respecting the linguistic norm, paving the way for a better linguistic culture and enrichment of the mother tongue.
We study how to leverage off-the-shelf visual and linguistic data to cope with out-of-vocabulary answers in visual question answering task. Existing large-scale visual datasets with annotations such as image class labels, bounding boxes and region descriptions are good sources for learning rich and diverse visual concepts. However, it is not straightforward how the visual concepts can be captured and transferred to visual question answering models due to missing link between question dependent answering models and visual data without question. We tackle this problem in two steps: 1) learning a task conditional visual classifier, which is capable of solving diverse question-specific visual recognition tasks, based on unsupervised task discovery and 2) transferring the task conditional visual classifier to visual question answering models. Specifically, we employ linguistic knowledge sources such as structured lexical database (e.g. WordNet) and visual descriptions for unsupervised task discovery, and transfer a learned task conditional visual classifier as an answering unit in a visual question answering model. We empirically show that the proposed algorithm generalizes to out-of-vocabulary answers successfully using the knowledge transferred from the visual dataset.