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18265 papers
Studies comparing memory and future event simulation find that future events are more positive, and more often depend on life script events (e.g., culturally normative landmark events) than past events. Previous research does not address the link between this positivity bias and the life stage of college-age participants or their reliance on these scripted events. To examine this positivity bias, narratives of past and anticipated future events were elicited from participants aged 18-74 years, and were examined for reliance on the life script and valence ratings. Results showed that, across age groups, future events were rated as more positive than past events, and that life script events were common in the distant future. Notably, whereas younger adult age groups wrote primarily about their own life script events, older participants more commonly wrote about attending the life script events of significant others, such as children and grandchildren. These findings suggest that simulated future events play a valuable role in self-enhancement across the lifespan. Furthermore, the life script can be viewed as a useful search mechanism when one is missing the episodic details that are more available in memories; however, it is not the source of positivity bias for future events.
We present a user-centered approach for defining the dependency syntactic specification for a treebank. We show that by collecting information on syntactic interpretations from the future users of the treebank, we can model so far dependency-syntactically undefined syntactic structures in a way that corresponds to the users’ intuition. By consulting the users at the grammar definition phase we aim at better usage of the treebank in the future. We focus on two complex syntactic phenomena: elliptical comparative clauses and participial NPs or NPs with a verb-derived noun as their head. We show how the phenomena can be interpreted in several ways and ask for the users’ intuitive way of modeling them. The results aid in constructing the syntactic specification for the treebank.
Social media applications such as Twitter provide a powerful medium through which users can communicate their observations with friends and with the world at large. We have witnessed live reporting of many events, from soccer games in Johannesburg to revolutions in Cairo and Tunis, and these reports have in many ways rivaled the content provided by the official media. Tapping into this valuable resource is a challenge, due to the heterogeneity and noise inherent in realtime text, diversity of languages, and fast-evolving linguistic norms. In this paper we seek to analyze a tweet stream to automatically discover points in time when an important event happens, and to classify such events based on the type of the sentiments they evoke, using only non-textual features of the tweeting pattern. This results not only in a robust way of analyzing tweet streams independent of the languages used; it also provides insights about how users behave on social media websites. For example, we observe that users often react to an exciting external event by decreasing the volume of communication with other users. We explain this effect through a model of how users switch between producing information or sentiments and sharing others’ news or sentiments. We develop and evaluate our models and algorithms using several Twitter data sets, focusing in particular on the tweets sent during the soccer World Cup of 2010. This data set has the feature that the underlying ground truth is welldefined and known whereby goals serve as events.
This release adds the following works to the treebank: Herodotus, <em>Histories</em> Cicero, <em>Letters to Atticus</em> Caesar, <em>The Gallic War</em> Sphrantzes, <em>Chronicles</em>
This paper presents a survey of Arabic treebanks to facilitate their reuse for the building of new linguistic resources. In our case, we created from a treebank an automatically induced Property Grammar (GP). So, we discussed characteristics of these treebanks to choose the appropriate one. To build our resource, we adopted an automatic technique, acquiring first a contextfree grammar (CFG) from the chosen treebank, and second, inducing a GP by generating relations between grammatical units described in the CFG.
BSL SignBank is an online, usage-based dictionary of British Sign Language, based on signs from the BSL Corpus (http://www.bslcorpusproject.org).
FigureCompulsive hoarding is a pattern of thoughts (obsessions) about discarding items and repetitive behaviors (compulsions) of collecting things. One in 20 people experiences compulsive hoarding, with severity ranging from mild to life-threatening. According to the American Psychiatric Association, the onset of symptoms is usually between ages 11 and 15, becoming problematic in the 20s and progressively increasing in severity with advancing age. Hoarding is twice as common among men as women, but women are more likely to seek treatment. One study demonstrated a genetic vulnerability, with at least one first-degree relative also exhibiting hoarding behavior. In this article, I'll give you an overview of hoarding disorder, including how to recognize it, available treatment options, and patient and family teaching points. Classifying hoarding behavior The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) has included a new diagnostic category for hoarding disorder. In the past, hoarding behaviors were included in the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) category, but research has demonstrated that hoarding is a distinct disorder requiring distinct treatment (see OCD or hoarding disorder?). By creating a separate diagnosis, the hope is that more research and development into specific treatments for hoarding behavior will occur. The DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for hoarding disorder start with persistent difficulties discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of the value. These behaviors result in an accumulation of possessions that clutter the active living areas of the home, workplace, yard, or vehicle, preventing normal use of the space. Other diagnostic criteria include: severe distress that occurs when any attempt is made to throw away items indecision about what to keep or discard suspicions of other people touching the items obsessional thoughts of running out of an item or needing it in the future checking the trash for accidentally discarded items functional impairment, such as loss of living space, social isolation, dysfunctional interpersonal relationships, financial problems, and health hazards. In addition, these symptoms can't be attributed to any medical condition, such as brain injury, or another mental illness, such as OCD or delusions from psychosis. Why can't hoarders let go? Brain imaging shows a pattern of brain changes in people with hoarding disorder. These individuals have less activity in the cingulate gyrus—the part of the brain that communicates with the limbic, or emotional, center and the neocortex, or thinking, center. If activity is reduced in the neocortex, a person may have difficulty with attention, problem solving, and decision making. And when communication between the neocortex and limbic system is compromised, a person assigns more emotional meaning to stimuli. This means that an individual with hoarding disorder can have trouble with both the emotional and cognitive aspects of stimuli.Table: OCD or hoarding disorder?Other studies have looked at the neuropsychological testing of compulsive hoarders who didn't exhibit any criteria for OCD. These studies also found brain hypoactivity, with slow decision making and difficulty with attention and spatial tasks, contributing to difficulty staying focused, organizing, and developing strategies for categorizing and sorting that are necessary for decreasing accumulation. The result for individuals with hoarding disorder? Making decisions about items, sorting them, and discarding them becomes unpleasant and insurmountable. So what drives the behavior of those with hoarding disorder? The behaviors of people with OCD are driven by reducing anxiety. However, the behaviors of the compulsive hoarder are driven by intrusive thoughts about not having something that may be deemed valuable and not being able to discard something. Individuals with OCD are usually aware of the irrationality of their thoughts or behaviors, but individuals with hoarding disorder lack this insight and don't see their behaviors as a problem. Usually, compulsive hoarders are identified by social agencies or law enforcement when the hoarding starts to present a community danger. Consequences of hoarding Hoarding disorder causes social and economic burdens, as well as environmental hazards and health risks. There's a high rate of divorce among compulsive hoarders; family members may experience frustration at and anxiety about their loved one's hoarding behaviors. People with this disorder miss more days of work and use mental health services five times more than the general population. In addition, individuals with hoarding disorder have increased medical comorbidities, such as stroke, gastric ulcers, diabetes, and heart disease. Often, compulsive hoarders fail to seek medical care either because they're embarrassed about their behavior or they don't feel that they have a problem. Environmental hazards In one study, 42% of hoarders had blocked access to the refrigerator, stove, and bathrooms, causing filthy or unsafe living conditions. Often, feces and urine were found in containers on the bed or in the house; dead animals were also found. People with hoarding disorder have clutter throughout their houses with small, navigable trails or areas that are no longer navigable. Excessively cluttered bathrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms cause sanitation, hygiene, and food preparation problems. The weight of the items may also lead to structural damage to the house that can result in collapse. Large amounts of clutter also pose a fire hazard, especially when outlets are blocked or electrical appliances are being used with things piled on or in them. If there was a fire, the house of a compulsive hoarder would be difficult to leave in an emergency and difficult for firefighters to get in quickly. Health risks Health risks include injuries from falls or objects falling from piles and infestations of fleas, rats, mice, or bed bugs. The cluttered condition makes it difficult for extermination to occur. Dust, mildew, and high ammonia levels from waste products can increase respiratory problems. Lastly, the risk of parasites and food-related illnesses are also increased. Financial burdens Individuals with hoarding disorder often spend most of their money buying items, causing problems with meeting financial obligations such as rent, heat, and food. With the cluttered environment making it hard to cook in the kitchen, the added expense of takeout food can also limit the money available for other bills. Legal difficulties are also increased for people with hoarding disorder. They may risk eviction or their homes being condemned for public safety reasons. Children may be removed from the home and the individual with hoarding disorder may be charged with child neglect. People who hoard animals may be charged with animal cruelty, which is a felony charge in some states. The cost of legal problems further increases the financial burden. Effects on children Often, compulsive hoarders have small children living with them. The children of parents with hoarding disorder may feel isolated and experience depression. Having friends over is most likely not an option because the child feels embarrassed with the living situation or may be told not to invite friends to the home. In addition, children are exposed to environmental and health hazards if there isn't a place to perform hygiene tasks, wash their clothes, or eat safely. Lastly, they often compete with the hoarded items for attention and love from the parent. Intervention mention There's no cure for hoarding, but you can help your patient develop healthier behaviors and attain a better quality of life. Nurse can screen for hoarding disorder and make a referral to mental health services. In fact, the Hoarding Rating Scale (HRS) and Clutter Image Rating Scale (CIRS) are screening tools that can be used to identify people at risk for this disorder. The HRS uses verbal cues, whereas the CIRS uses pictures to help screen for hoarding behaviors.Figure: Because the chance of relapse is high, educate the patient's family about what to expect during therapy.Mental health professionals may use family intervention, medications, and cognitive behavioral therapy to treat hoarding disorder. Family intervention When family members are interested in an intervention for their loved one's compulsive hoarding behaviors, they first meet with a therapist to learn about the disorder and treatment options. The family members must be cohesive and agreeable to the intervention because the person with hoarding disorder can't be helped if the family fears the consequences of the intervention. Sometimes the therapist will have the family practice the intervention before it actually occurs. Next, the family members arrange to talk as a unit to their loved one about the effect of the clutter on their lives and what help is available. Each of the family members explains in a nonjudgmental way why he or she is concerned. It's a critical element for all family members to communicate clearly that the treatment is mandatory. The intervention may take place in the hoarder's home or in a therapist's office. The therapist may be present during the initial intervention or available immediately after the intervention for the first therapy session. The goal is that when the individual with hoarding disorder faces a cohesive group of people who are concerned for him or her, it will be hard to hide or minimize the problem. The intervention is just the first step. Both the hoarder and his or her family members must commit to ongoing therapy to address the issues that surround the behaviors and learn how to handle future behaviors or issues that may arise during the change process. Medications Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are effective in treating the symptoms of OCD; however, they aren't as effective in treating people with hoarding disorder. If the individual with hoarding disorder has coexisting anxiety disorder or depression, he or she may benefit from treatment with SSRIs. Treatment of anxiety and depression may increase the success of engaging the compulsive hoarder in psychotherapy. Fluoxetine, sertraline, paroxetine, citalopram, and escitalopram are the SSRIs most commonly used. Potential adverse reactions of SSRIs include sexual dysfunction, gastrointestinal (GI) upset, mild sedation, and restlessness. For many patients, these adverse reactions diminish after 2 to 4 weeks of taking the medication. If they persist, the healthcare provider may prescribe a different type of SSRI. Patients shouldn't abruptly stop taking an SSRI; if they do, they may develop discontinuation syndrome. Symptoms of discontinuation syndrome include dizziness, headache, diarrhea, insomnia, irritability, nausea, and lowered mood. The FDA has a black box warning indicating that antidepressants may increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in some people. Patients taking SSRI medications should be closely monitored for an increase in depression or the start of suicidal ideation for the first 4 weeks of treatment.Table: Managing adverse reactions of antidepressantsSSRIs use the same drug metabolizing enzyme pathway in the liver as other medications, such as anticoagulants, cardiac drugs, or drugs used to treat diabetes. Be prepared to intervene if the patient is showing signs of a drug-drug interaction while taking an SSRI. For example, if an SSRI is prescribed for a patient taking warfarin, his or her international normalized ratio should be closely monitored to ensure adequate anticoagulation. The warfarin dosage may have to be adjusted up or down. Serotonin syndrome is a potentially life-threatening drug interaction. It can occur when two medications that increase the serotonin level are combined, potentiating serotonin neurotransmission. The increased serotonin level throws off the body's autonomic regulation. Symptoms of serotonin syndrome include hyperthermia, restlessness, tachycardia, labile BP, changes in mental status, diaphoresis, and tremors. Serotonin syndrome progresses rapidly; if the early signs aren't promptly recognized, the patient can develop seizures and respiratory failure leading to coma. If your patient develops serotonin syndrome, immediately discontinue all medications, notify the healthcare provider, and treat the symptoms. The healthcare provider may prescribe medications to block the effects of the SSRI and treat hyperthermia and seizures. Tricyclic antidepressants (TCAs) may also be used to help with coexisting anxiety or depression. TCAs have a high anticholinergic effect due to their action on histamine receptors. Sedation, dry mouth, weight gain, and constipation are some of the adverse reactions that may result in nonadherence (see Managing adverse reactions of antidepressants). Cardiotoxicity can occur with slowing of cardiac conduction due to increased PR and QRS intervals. In addition, TCAs can be fatal in overdose, which may cause safety concerns for patients with suicidal ideation. Clomipramine is effective in treating the symptoms of OCD and may be effective for treating hoarding disorder. When any psychiatric medication is prescribed, thoroughly explain its actions and adverse reactions in appropriate language to the patient and family (see Medications used to treat hoarding disorder). Awareness of cultural differences is also valuable when initiating psychotropic treatment. In your assessment history, determine any genetic or dietary/herbal influences on metabolism. If English isn't the patient's primary language, take steps to ensure that he or she understands the information you provide. Enlisting the support of translators is advantageous to aid in adherence. Cognitive behavioral therapy Cognitive behavioral therapy is effective in treating hoarding disorder and considered a first-line treatment. In this therapy, the goal is to change a person's automatic thoughts, which occur spontaneously and lead to dysfunctional thinking. According to this type of therapy, psychological pain stems from what the person thinks an event means rather than what actually happened. In hoarding disorder, cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on excessive acquisition, difficulty discarding possessions, disorganization, and clutter.Table: Medications used to treat hoarding disorderThe therapist can first help the patient identify his or her beliefs and attachments to an item. Then an exploration into feelings about getting rid of possessions occurs. Finally, a strategy for organization and decision making about removal of the clutter is taught. After treatment begins, the change is slow, with relapse twice as high due to the difficulty that the compulsive hoarder may have in understanding or accepting the disorder. Because the belongings are often viewed as an extension of the person who hoards, many patients will resist the change or procrastinate. Group treatment can be an important part of recovery for the compulsive hoarder. Shame and isolation can be decreased by getting people together who have a similar problem. By listening to each other's stories, groups can increase motivation and instill hope. The Internet may be helpful in supporting compulsive hoarders. Virtual self-help groups provide advice for dealing with the clutter or shame. Web-based cameras can allow family members who live far away to monitor a relapse into hoarding behavior. Also, virtual face-to-face therapy can be facilitated through sites such as Skype. Your eyes and ears are needed Nurses are key in the identification of patients with hoarding disorder. When a person seeks healthcare for a medical problem, you can listen to the patient and family's concerns about the living environment. Observe if the patient is collecting things during his or her hospital stay, such as medicine cups, silverware, or trays. Does the patient have trouble throwing out items while hospitalized? Part of your nursing assessment can include questions about collections that the patient may have, any difficulty he or she has discarding items from the collection, trouble organizing the collection, or hard feelings when someone else touches items from the collection. Talk to family members to get an additional view on the behaviors. The first step is to build trust with a caring attitude and nonjudgmental approach that demonstrates respect for the patient. Encourage the patient to talk about the effects of hoarding behaviors. To provide this open communication, first examine your own feelings about compulsive hoarding. Empathy with the patient involves trying to understand the attachment that he or she has to the belongings. Instead of confronting the patient about hoarding behaviors, help him or her identify feelings attached to the behaviors and the reasons that giving them up may be hard. Next, discuss the consequences of hoarding behaviors, such as eviction, loss of valuable relationships, and safety hazards. Then talk about the benefits of changing these behaviors, such as reuniting with loved ones and increased living space. Help the patient identify ways that he or she can improve home safety, such as removing clutter from hallways, stoves, and heating sources. Because discussion about hoarding behaviors can cause anxiety, teaching the patient relaxation techniques may be valuable. When social agencies or law enforcement are involved, include family members or social workers so that an action plan can be communicated to the agency. Referral to a mental health professional who has expertise in hoarding disorder can be valuable for both the patient and the family. Offer a list of practitioners or help the patient call for an appointment. Because the family will probably be involved in the intervention, include them during education about hoarding disorder and offer local resources that can help. With the family, stress the importance of not just emptying the house of all belongings as a quick solution to the problem; the hoarding behaviors will return. It's important that the compulsive hoarder be involved in removing the items so he or she can develop decision-making and sorting skills and have a sense of control over the environment. Lastly, after the patient with hoarding disorder is in treatment, family members should continue to encourage and coach healthy behaviors. It's important to acknowledge the patient's need for control and emotional attachment to the items. Also, family members must recognize that progress will be slow and the patient may relapse. Healthier and happier Although there's no cure for hoarding disorder, you can help your patient develop healthier behaviors and become more content with daily living and relationships. key points Nursing interventionsFigure Build trust with the patient and be nonjudgmental. Assess the patient's hoarding behaviors. Instruct the patient about stress reduction techniques. Teach the patient about the possible consequences or risks of hoarding behaviors. Help the patient set small, realistic goals to remove clutter. Educate the patient's family members about hoarding disorder and to expect slow change and possible relapse. on the webFigure American Psychiatric Association: http://www.psychiatry.org/hoarding-disorder Anxiety and Depression Association of America: http://www.adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd/hoarding-basics Columbia University Medical Center: http://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/hoarding/ International OCD Foundation: http://www.ocfoundation.org/hoarding/ Mayo Clinic: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/hoarding/DS00966 University of California, San Diego: http://psychiatry.ucsd.edu/OCD_hoarding.html
In my habilitation dissertation, meant to validate my capacity of and maturity for directingresearch activities, I present a panorama of several topics in computational linguistics, linguisticsand computer science.Over the past decade, I was notably concerned with the phenomena of compositionalityand variability of linguistic objects. I illustrate the advantages of a compositional approachto the language in the domain of emotion detection and I explain how some linguistic objects,most prominently multi-word expressions, defy the compositionality principles. I demonstratethat the complex properties of MWEs, notably variability, are partially regular and partiallyidiosyncratic. This fact places the MWEs on the frontiers between different levels of linguisticprocessing, such as lexicon and syntax.I show the highly heterogeneous nature of MWEs by citing their two existing taxonomies.After an extensive state-of-the art study of MWE description and processing, I summarizeMultiflex, a formalism and a tool for lexical high-quality morphosyntactic description of MWUs.It uses a graph-based approach in which the inflection of a MWU is expressed in function ofthe morphology of its components, and of morphosyntactic transformation patterns. Due tounification the inflection paradigms are represented compactly. Orthographic, inflectional andsyntactic variants are treated within the same framework. The proposal is multilingual: it hasbeen tested on six European languages of three different origins (Germanic, Romance and Slavic),I believe that many others can also be successfully covered. Multiflex proves interoperable. Itadapts to different morphological language models, token boundary definitions, and underlyingmodules for the morphology of single words. It has been applied to the creation and enrichmentof linguistic resources, as well as to morphosyntactic analysis and generation. It can be integratedinto other NLP applications requiring the conflation of different surface realizations of the sameconcept.Another chapter of my activity concerns named entities, most of which are particular types ofMWEs. Their rich semantic load turned them into a hot topic in the NLP community, which isdocumented in my state-of-the art survey. I present the main assumptions, processes and resultsissued from large annotation tasks at two levels (for named entities and for coreference), parts ofthe National Corpus of Polish construction. I have also contributed to the development of bothrule-based and probabilistic named entity recognition tools, and to an automated enrichment ofProlexbase, a large multilingual database of proper names, from open sources.With respect to multi-word expressions, named entities and coreference mentions, I pay aspecial attention to nested structures. This problem sheds new light on the treatment of complexlinguistic units in NLP. When these units start being modeled as trees (or, more generally, asacyclic graphs) rather than as flat sequences of tokens, long-distance dependencies, discontinu-ities, overlapping and other frequent linguistic properties become easier to represent. This callsfor more complex processing methods which control larger contexts than what usually happensin sequential processing. Thus, both named entity recognition and coreference resolution comesvery close to parsing, and named entities or mentions with their nested structures are analogous3to multi-word expressions with embedded complements.My parallel activity concerns finite-state methods for natural language and XML processing.My main contribution in this field, co-authored with 2 colleagues, is the first full-fledged methodfor tree-to-language correction, and more precisely for correcting XML documents with respectto a DTD. We have also produced interesting results in incremental finite-state algorithmics,particularly relevant to data evolution contexts such as dynamic vocabularies or user updates.Multilingualism is the leitmotif of my research. I have applied my methods to several naturallanguages, most importantly to Polish, Serbian, English and French. I have been among theinitiators of a highly multilingual European scientific network dedicated to parsing and multi-word expressions. I have used multilingual linguistic data in experimental studies. I believethat it is particularly worthwhile to design NLP solutions taking declension-rich (e.g. Slavic)languages into account, since this leads to more universal solutions, at least as far as nominalconstructions (MWUs, NEs, mentions) are concerned. For instance, when Multiflex had beendeveloped with Polish in mind it could be applied as such to French, English, Serbian and Greek.Also, a French-Serbian collaboration led to substantial modifications in morphological modelingin Prolexbase in its early development stages. This allowed for its later application to Polishwith very few adaptations of the existing model. Other researchers also stress the advantages ofNLP studies on highly inflected languages since their morphology encodes much more syntacticinformation than is the case e.g. in English.In this dissertation I am also supposed to demonstrate my ability of playing an active rolein shaping the scientific landscape, on a local, national and international scale. I describemy: (i) various scientific collaborations and supervision activities, (ii) roles in over 10 regional,national and international projects, (iii) responsibilities in collective bodies such as program andorganizing committees of conferences and workshops, PhD juries, and the National UniversityCouncil (CNU), (iv) activity as an evaluator and a reviewer of European collaborative projects.The issues addressed in this dissertation open interesting scientific perspectives, in whicha special impact is put on links among various domains and communities. These perspectivesinclude: (i) integrating fine-grained language data into the linked open data, (ii) deep parsingof multi-word expressions, (iii) modeling multi-word expression identification in a treebank as atree-to-language correction problem, and (iv) a taxonomy and an experimental benchmark fortree-to-language correction approaches.
哈金喜歡把玩中英文不同的語言特色，在創作中將兩者合而為一。他以本土化的英語論述重塑中文的諺語、譬喻與句構，翻譯、挪用並重組中文的語法，創造出饒富中文色彩的英語創作。閱讀哈金的詩集《殘骸》(Wreckage)，受過中文教育的讀者很容易就可以發現詩中有許多中國古典詩詞的翻譯及改寫。作品中的詩人引述古典詩詞，以抒發個人情懷，而讀者不禁會思考：哈金的詩作源頭到底有多大的成分是來自中國文學？我們能夠依據哪些特點以及哪些標準來辨識所謂的創意？我們要如何區分「創新」與「改造」？而這樣的區分是否會改變我們對於哈金詩作的解讀與評斷？在哈金的詩作中，對中國古典詩詞的引述與對美國現今情境的感觸，二者或並置、或融合、或相互對照、或互相影響，這其中透露著何種訊息？被翻譯的是什麼，是中國詩詞還是美國情感？被移植的又是什麼，是文學還是文化？當中國的詩文被翻譯成英文、移植至美國之後，意義是否會有所轉化？是否會因應哈金複雜的美國移民經驗而呈現出某種迥異於以往的新義？而哈金的三重身份－詩者、評者、譯者－是彼此互補或彼此衝突？而這種種文學、文化再現，又訴說了何種華人離散的意涵，這些將是本文討論的重點。 Ha Jin's works bespeak an impressive linguistic creativity. Reconfigurating Chinese language through a nativized discourse of English, Ha Jin has translated, appropriated, and reconstructed Chinese linguistic norms and specifics into English-language literature in remarkable fashion. Studying Ha Jin's ＂Wreckage＂, a reader with Chinese education will be ready to identity fragments of renowned Chinese classical verse. Thus the reader is invited to ponder: To what extent does Ha Jin draw his poetic inspiration from the corpus of Chinese literature? How shall we measure accredited creativity? How do we distinguish innovation from renovation, and do those distinctions change our reading of the poems? Although Ha Jin has written exclusively of the reality of Chinese politics and society (with ＂A Free Life＂ the only exception so far), this material does not obviate the possibility of reading his works as belonging to a tradition of US immigrant literature. In Ha Jin's poetry, the juxtaposition, interaction and fusion of classical Chinese verse and contemporary American sensibility can be telling. Which has been translated, the Chinese verse or the American sensibility? What has been transplanted and translated? Have the Chinese poetry texts, after being transplanted into the English verse, undergone a transformation of meaning and resurfaced with new significance corresponding to the complexity of Ha Jin's immigrant experiences in America? This paper aims to explore how Ha Jin's Chinese poetry texts show significance corresponding to the complexity of his immigrant experiences in America.
It is impossible not to communicate.(Buda Bela)Communication implies transmission of information, ideas, feelings by means of symbols (words, images, graphics etc.).(Berelson-Steiner)As each language has several variants and is in a continuous process of change, I should like to compare the correct and incorrect text, which is used mainly on radio and television, by presenting authentic texts from mass media in Romania. Once television came into being, the question was whether this would not put the radio into shade. In time, it was proved that both media sources are needed. They function not in parallel, they complete each other, but each of them has its own well established role in the audio-visual mass-media. Nevertheless, it is also true that radio journalists should revise their journalistic genre - right under the influence of television. It has been necessary for them to renew their radio phonic text.Television can transmit information without a text, only by means of the language of images. While on the radio, the audio effect creates satisfaction. The nuance, the power, intonation, articulation and sound on the radio are part of the given information, having also a special role in the transmission of information. These have been the reasons for the radio phonic text and the text of the radio announcer to have developed as a distinct branch of the media science.Any person in good health can speak, but to be able to communicate in different situations, to express the nuance, rhythm, intonation of a text, you should have a certain training, you should be a specialist. Speaking in public has precise rules: how much of the text should be assimilated by the speakerwhich is the best variant, if he assimilates the text in its entirety or if he keeps a distance from it. Can he have control over his emotions or, because of these, he breathes faster and the rhythm of the speech is more rapid; does he raise the pitch of his voice and speaks louder? (e.g. during sports transmissions). What is the role of the logical intonation and of the emotive one? How does the melody of speech influence the intonation of the word, of the sentence, of the text? These and other are the questions I will try to answer. Mass-media has a decisive role in modem society, because people of our days get information about everything going on in the world by means of it. In this way, a person acquires knowledge about the world. It is very important for the language, for the speech, by means of which information is transmitted to the receptor, to observe the correct linguistic norms, to be beautiful. Speaking is the most complex activity, which is not inborn, it is learnt from parents and in school. Speaking is a system of communication by several channels. The general content of words is changing according to intonation, rhythm, volume, articulation etc. In the development of language and speaking, mass-media has a decisive role. On the radio and television, quite often we can hear texts where we can sense that the presenter concentrates a lot on the articulation of consonants and vowels, on the tone of the voice, on intonation and punctuation. We can hear all these but we cannot hear the idea in itself. Although, radio cannot transmit by images - as it is the case with televisionit has also its own informational language: the human voice, the speech of the presenter. By the harmony between the meaning of the text and the phonetic elements, a new quality can be achieved: the auditive influence leads to the visual effect. This inner visuality has a special effect. Today, it is evident that television does not put the radio into the shade.The acoustic language (and the read text), especially the spontaneous live one is related to the personality of the speaker, to the situation and the receptor. As a rule it is emphatic, it is a complex communication.Besides articulation, the live speech contributes to communication by the common and alternative use of phonetic instruments. …
While some cross-modal associations might have psychobiological basis, other patterns of association might be acquired or cultural (cf. [5], [11], [4]). Stimuli perceived through different sensory organs via parallel brain pathways may be associated at a higher level if they both happen to have the same effect on emotional state, mood, or affective state ([14]). If the perceived input under-specifies an event, more complex cognitive processing mechanisms kick in ([7]). This process is not primarily ecological and might be mediated by emotion ([12]). \nResearch on crossmodal matching has provided evidence that many non-arbitrary and universal correspondences exist. Audio-visual correspondences may be based on amodal correspondences, for example, the loudness of sound and the luminosity of light ([14]). [13] showed that most cultures display word clusters near ‘red’, ‘green’, ‘yellow’, and ‘blue’ (in addition to ‘white’ and ‘black’), and argued that “focal colours” really are universal. \nBresin ([2]) derived 24 colours from a scheme of selecting approximately equal distances in colour parameters in HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) “space”. This produced a set where the colour patches are arguably more evenly distributed, from a perceptual point of view, than those in the two studies mentioned above. Bresin found correlations between colour parameters and the affective intent in music excerpts, i.e. listeners matched colours to music excerpt played with a certain ‘feeling’. As in [1] but more general, colour brightness was associated with positive emotion and darkness with negative emotion. \nPalmer ([12]) investigated colour association to classical music excerpt where tempo and tonal mode were manipulated. The authors found that colours of high saturation and brightness, and colours more towards yellow (‘warmth’) were selected for music stimuli in fast tempo, and that conversely, de-saturated (‘grayer’), ‘darker’, and blue colours were selected for music of slow tempo in minor mode. Furthermore, they claimed strong support for emotion as a mediating mechanism for the cross-modal associations. \nA review of the research provoked the idea that colour association to sound might be context-dependent. When associating colour to music, natural soundscapes, and ‘soundscape compositions’, do people use different strategies? Which musical features influence colour association? Can emotion mediate between musical features and colour association? \nWe designed an experiment to investigate a) correlations between visual colours defined by linear parameters and music stimuli with previously validated affect; b) correlations between the colour parameters and computational acoustic and musical features; and c) the multiple regressions onto colour parameters of affective ratings (emotions), psychoacoustic descriptors, and musical features.
This chapter explores the challenges of developing the field of Latin Computational Linguistics. Computational Linguistics aims at designing, implementing, and applying computational models for natural languages. A large part of Computational Linguistics research has been developed for English, or at least tested on this language. A crucial aspect of a fruitful exchange between the disciplines of Latin Linguistics and Computational Linguistics concerns the way Latin texts are collected, accessed, and investigated for linguistic analyses. So, any attempt into Latin Computational Linguistics is likely to start from corpora. Annotation provides each word form in a sentence with one or more labels that mark its attributes; for example, a morpho-syntactic annotation would add a 'genitive' tag to puellarum. The chapter advocates the use of corpora in Latin Linguistics by reporting on research based on Latin treebanks, to show their potential for Historical Linguistics research.Keywords: historical corpora; historical languages; historical Linguistics research; Latin Computational Linguistics; morpho-syntactic annotation
Bilingual Base Noun Phrase (BaseNP) extraction is one of the key tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP). This task is more challenging for the pair of English-Vietnamese due to the lack of available Vietnamese language resources such as treebanks, part-of-speech taggers, and parsers. In this paper, we propose a combination model that uses language characteristics based on statistics and the projection method to extract BaseNP correspondences from a bilingual corpus. The language characteristics used in this model include the word segmentation, word order and word classification [1]. Our model overcomes not only the lack of resources of Vietnamese, but also improves the performance of miss-alignment, null-alignment, overlap and conflict projection of the existing methods. The proposed model can be easily applied to other language pairs. Experiment on 66,646 pairs of sentences in the English-Vietnamese bilingual corpus shows that our proposed model is very satisfactory.
This work presents an improvement on a novel Selection Method to develop applications in the context of the Service-Oriented Computing paradigm. We have defined an Interface Compatibility procedure to assess Web Services by exploring the available information from WSDL documents. Such information involves data types from return, parameters and exceptions, and identifiers from parameters and operation names. The lexical database WordNet was originally used as a semantic basis to assess terms from identifiers. In this paper we use the DISCO database as an alternative, to evaluate the independence of the approach w.r.t. the semantic basis. We made a comparative analysis through different experiments with a data-set of 465 real-life Web Services and measured the results using metrics from the Information Retrieval field.
In this paper we present a system for experimenting with combinations of dependency parsers. The system supports initial training of different parsing models, creation of parsebank(s) with these models, and different strategies for the construction of ensemble models aimed at improving the output of the individual models by voting. The system employs two algorithms for construction of dependency trees from several parses of the same sentence and several ways for ranking of the arcs in the resulting trees. We have performed experiments with state-of-the-art dependency parsers including MaltParser (Nivre et al., 2006), MSTParser (McDonald, 2006), TurboParser (Martins et al., 2010), and MATEParser (Bohnet, 2010), on the data from the Bulgarian treebank – BulTreeBank. Our best result from these experiments is slightly better then the best result reported in the literature for this language (Martins et al.,
Incorporating knowledge for training a parser has been shown to remedy the weaknesses of probabilistic context-free grammar. Previous parsing systems have exploited content words semantic resource and word-formation knowledge. However, they are limited in that they do not take into account conjunction category refinement, which stands out to be helpful in predicting the syntactic structure and syntactic label in Chinese. We define a conjunction taxonomy representing intrinsic syntactic constraints, and show that refined categories in the taxonomy for conjunctions contribute to improved parsing performance. The taxonomy is used to supervise the splitting of these refined tags, and the automatic hierarchical state-split approach is employ to compensate the limitation in the scope and refinement degree of the taxonomy. The experiments are carried out on Penn Chinese Treebank, which show that our method can improve parsing performance significantly.
We suggest a new annotation scheme for unlexicalized PCFGs that is inspired by formal language theory and only depends on the structure of the parse trees. We evaluate this scheme on the TüBa-D/Z treebank w.r.t. several metrics and show that it improves both parsing accuracy and parsing speed considerably. We also show that our strategy can be fruitfully com-bined with known ones like parent annota-tion to achieve accuracies of over 90 % la-beled F1 and leaf-ancestor score. Despite increasing the size of the grammar, our annotation allows for parsing more than twice as fast as the PCFG baseline. 1
This paper reports on a corpus-based quantitative study of the use of nominalizations across China English and British English in two comparable media corpora. In contrast to previous corpus-based studies of nominalizations, we start by using a syntactic approach and proceed with some methodological innovations incorporating large lexical databases and syntactically annotated corpora. The data show that there are significant differences in the use of nominalizations across these two English varieties. It is hoped that this research will offer useful insights on variations in nominalization across different English varieties and also on the understanding of the two English varieties in question. 1
For reinforcing city sports park informatization management level and the society service quality of sports park, this paper researches combined multi-agent technology, and structures multimedia active service system framework of city sports park. It has elaborated functions of every feature and workflow of the system, and put forward Agent design procedure based on JADE. Whats more, it also adopts FIPAACl linguistic norms between Agents communication and puts forward some realized advice which makes the information based on the fundamental of Agent.
This paper presents results of dependency parsing of Old French, a language which is poorly standardized at the lexical level, and which displays a relatively free word order. The work is carried out on five distinct sample texts extracted from the dependency treebank Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF). Following Achim Stein's previous work, we have trained the Mate parser on each sub-corpus and cross-validated the results. We show that the parsing efficiency is diminished by the greater lexical variation of Old French compared to parse results on modern French. In order to improve the result of the POS tagging step in the parsing process, we applied a pre-treatment to the data, comparing two distinct strategies: one using a slightly post-treated version of the TreeTagger trained on Old French by Stein, and a CRF trained on the texts, enriched with external resources. The CRF version outperforms every other approach.
Recurrent neural network language models have solved the problems of data sparseness and dimensionality disaster which exist in traditional N-gram models. RNNLMs have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in speech recognition, machine translation and other tasks. In this paper, we improve the model performance by providing contextual word vectors in association with RNNLMs. This method can reinforce the ability of learning long-distance information using vectors training from Skip-gram model. The experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the perplexity performance significantly on Penn Treebank data. And we further apply the models to speech recognition task on the Wall Street Journal corpora, where we achieve obvious improvements in word-error-rate.
This paper presents a set of Bilingual Dictionary Drafting (BDD) methods including manual extraction from existing lexical databases and corpus based NLP tools, as well as their evaluation on the example of German-Basque as language pair. Our aim is twofold: to give support to a German-Basque bilingual dictionary project by providing draft Bilingual Glossaries and to provide lexicographers with insight into how useful BDD methods are. Results show that the analysed methods can greatly assist on bilingual dictionary writing, in the context of medium-density language pairs.
This work improves a novel Service Selection Method for the development of Service-Oriented Applications in the context of the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm. We have defined a Semantic-Structural Scheme to assess Web Services on Interface Compatibility exploring the available information from WSDL documents. The structural information involves data types from return, parameters and exceptions. The semantic information concerns identifiers from parameters and operation names. The lexical database WordNet is used as a semantic basis. Two appraisal values were defined: compatibility gap and adaptability gap. The former is centered on functional aspects. The latter explains the adaptation effort to a successful integration. We validated those appraisals values through different experiments with a data-set of 465 real-life Web Services and measured the results using three metrics from the Information Retrieval field.
Discourse relations bind smaller linguistic units into coherent texts. However, automatically identifying discourse relations is difficult, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked arguments. A more subtle challenge is that it is not enough to represent the meaning of each argument of a discourse relation, because the relation may depend on links between lower-level components, such as entity mentions. Our solution computes distributional meaning representations by composition up the syntactic parse tree. A key difference from previous work on compositional distributional semantics is that we also compute representations for entity mentions, using a novel downward compositional pass. Discourse relations are predicted from the distributional representations of the arguments, and also of their coreferent entity mentions. The resulting system obtains substantial improvements over the previous state-of-the-art in predicting implicit discourse relations in the Penn Discourse Treebank.
This study examines the methodology of global foreign accent ratings in studies on L2 speech production. In three experiments, we test how variation in raters, range within speech samples, as well as instructions and procedures affects ratings of accent in predominantly monolingual speakers of German, non-native speakers of German, as well as long-term emigrants from Germany, that is, L1 attriters. The findings show that rater differences do not result in systematic changes in rating patterns. In contrast, range effects and effects of familiarity with accented speech lead to shifts in absolute and relative ratings. Including more strongly foreign-accented samples leads to lower judgements for the entire group of L2 speakers compared to natives. Similarly, lower familiarity with foreign accent results in more variable and more strongly foreign-accented judgements. We discuss the implications for research on L2 pronunciation as well as for the interpretation of nativeness in L2 studies and language testing more generally.
This paper proposes a simple yet effective framework of soft cross-lingual syntax projection to transfer syntactic structures from source language to target language using monolingual treebanks and large-scale bilingual parallel text. Here, soft means that we only project reliable dependencies to compose high-quality target structures. The projected instances are then used as additional training data to improve the performance of supervised parsers. The major issues for this idea are 1) errors from the source-language parser and unsupervised word aligner; 2) intrinsic syntactic non-isomorphism between languages; 3) incomplete parse trees after projection. To handle the first two issues, we propose to use a probabilistic dependency parser trained on the target-language treebank, and prune out unlikely projected dependencies that have low marginal probabilities. To make use of the incomplete projected syntactic structures, we adopt a new learning technique based on ambiguous labelings. For a word that has no head words after projection, we enrich the projected structure with all other words as its candidate heads as long as the newly-added dependency does not cross any projected dependencies. In this way, the syntactic structure of a sentence becomes a parse forest (ambiguous labels) instead of a single parse tree. During training, the objective is to maximize the mixed likelihood of manually labeled instances and projected instances with ambiguous labelings. Experimental results on benchmark data show that our method significantly outperforms a strong baseline supervised parser and previous syntax projection methods. 1
This is the first attempt at characterizing reading difficulty in Hindi using naturally occurring sentences. We created the Potsdam-Allahabad Hindi Eyetracking Corpus by recording eye-movement data from 30 participants at the University of Allahabad, India. The target stimuli were 153 sentences selected from the beta version of the Hindi-Urdu treebank. We find that word- or low-level predictors (syllable length, unigram and bigram frequency) affect first-pass reading times, regression path duration, total reading time, and outgoing saccade length. An increase in syllable length results in longer fixations, and an increase in word unigram and bigram frequency leads to shorter fixations. Longer syllable length and higher frequency lead to longer outgoing saccades. We also find that two predictors of sentence comprehension difficulty, integration and storage cost, have an effect on reading difficulty. Integration cost (Gibson, 2000) was approximated by calculating the distance (in words) between a dependent and head; and storage cost (Gibson, 2000), which measures difficulty of maintaining predictions, was estimated by counting the number of predicted heads at each point in the sentence. We find that integration cost mainly affects outgoing saccade length, and storage cost affects total reading times and outgoing saccade length. Thus, word-level predictors have an effect in both early and late measures of reading time, while predictors of sentence comprehension difficulty tend to affect later measures. This is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration using eye-tracking that both integration and storage cost influence reading difficulty.
We describe a new dependency parser for English tweets, TWEEBOPARSER. The parser builds on several contributions: new syntactic annotations for a corpus of tweets (TWEEBANK), with conventions informed by the domain; adaptations to a statistical parsing algorithm; and a new approach to exploiting out-of-domain Penn Treebank data. Our experiments show that the parser achieves over 80% unlabeled attachment accuracy on our new, high-quality test set and measure the benefit of our contributions. Our dataset and parser can be found at http://www.ark.cs.cmu.edu/TweetNLP.
According to Tsinghua Chinese Treebank annotation methods, the authors extracted relation words and marked their categories. Then syntax, lexical and position features of automatic syntax tree with and without functional marker were extracted to recognize and classify relation words. Experiment results show that relative recognition accuracy is 95.7%, and relation words classification F1 is 77.2%.
In this paper, we analyze the impact of various dependency representations for various constructions on the general parsing accuracy and on the parsing accuracy of these constructions. We focus on the analysis of coordination constructions, complex predicates, and punctuation mark attachment. We use Latvian Treebank as a dataset, thus, providing insight for an inflective language with a rather free word order. Experiments with MaltParser, a transition-based parser, show clear difference in learnability of various representations for the considered constructions. Future work would include carrying out comparable experiments with a graph-based dependency parser like MSTParser.
This paper mainly introduced the research on constructing Mongolian Treebank based on phrase structure grammar. Having Considered related Mongolian Treebank work and Mongolian words characteristics, we developed a Mongolian syntactic tagset. The tagset includes two kinds of tags. One is syntactic constituent tag and the other is grammatical relation tag. On the basis of the tagset, we developed the Mongolian Treebank auxiliary processing system. Finally, we built a Treebank that contains 3645 sentences and did an experiment on this Treebank.
We develop an instance (token) based extension of the state of the art word (type) based part-ofspeech induction system introduced in (Yatbaz et al., 2012). Each word instance is represented by a feature vector that combines information from the target word and probable substitutes sampled from an n-gram model representing its context. Modeling ambiguity using an instance based model does not lead to significant gains in overall accuracy in part-of-speech tagging because most words in running text are used in their most frequent class (e.g. 93.69% in the Penn Treebank). However it is important to model ambiguity because most frequent words are ambiguous and not modeling them correctly may negatively affect upstream tasks. Our main contribution is to show that an instance based model can achieve significantly higher accuracy on ambiguous words at the cost of a slight degradation on unambiguous ones, maintaining a comparable overall accuracy. On the Penn Treebank, the overall many-to-one accuracy of the system is within 1% of the state-of-the-art (80%), while on highly ambiguous words it is up to 70% better. On multilingual experiments our results are significantly better than or comparable to the best published word or instance based systems on 15 out of 19 corpora in 15 languages. The vector representations for words used in our system are available for download for further experiments.
Constituent Context Model (CCM) is an effective generative model for grammar induction, the aim of which is to induce hierarchical syntactic structure from natural text. The CCM simply defines the Multinomial distribution over constituents, which leads to a severe data sparse problem because long constituents are unlikely to appear in unseen data sets. This paper proposes a Bayesian method for constituent smoothing by defining two kinds of prior distributions over constituents: the Dirichlet prior and the Pitman-Yor Process prior. The Dirichlet prior functions as an additive smoothing method, and the PYP prior functions as a back-off smoothing method. Furthermore, a modified CCM is proposed to differentiate left constituents and right constituents in binary branching trees. Experiments show that both the proposed Bayesian smoothing method and the modified CCM are effective, and combining them attains or significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance of grammar induction evaluated on standard treebanks of various languages.
We present an algorithm and implementation for extracting recurring fragments from treebanks. Using a tree-kernel method the largest common fragments are extracted from each pair of trees. The algorithm presented achieves a thirty-fold speedup over the previously available method on the Wall Street Journal dataset. It is also more general, in that it supports trees with discontinuous constituents. The resulting fragments can be used as a tree-substitution grammar or in classification problems such as authorship attribution and other stylometry tasks.
The feminist movement purports to improve conditions for women, and yet only a minority of women in modern societies self-identify as feminists. This is known as the feminist paradox. It has been suggested that feminists exhibit both physiological and psychological characteristics associated with heightened masculinization, which may predispose women for heightened competitiveness, sex-atypical behaviors, and belief in the interchangeability of sex roles. If feminist activists, i.e., those that manufacture the public image of feminism, are indeed masculinized relative to women in general, this might explain why the views and preferences of these two groups are at variance with each other. We measured the 2D:4D digit ratios (collected from both hands) and a personality trait known as dominance (measured with the Directiveness scale) in a sample of women attending a feminist conference. The sample exhibited significantly more masculine 2D:4D and higher dominance ratings than comparison samples representative of women in general, and these variables were furthermore positively correlated for both hands. The feminist paradox might thus to some extent be explained by biological differences between women in general and the activist women who formulate the feminist agenda.
Abstract This study was conducted to understand the relationship between familiarity and cross‐cultural acceptance for an ethnic sweet treat ( Y ackwa; K orean traditional cookie) by K orean, J apanese and F rench consumers. Descriptive analysis and consumer testing were performed on six Y ackwa samples. Overall, the samples received favorable responses from the foreign consumers. K orean consumers liked samples with a soft and cohesive texture, whereas J apanese and F rench consumers liked flaky and crispy texture. French consumers rated stronger sweetness to be more appropriate for Y ackwa compared to K orean and J apanese consumers. Texture liking was strongly correlated with familiarity rating in all three countries, indicating that the consumers' previous experience with similar products might affect their preference for certain textural attributes. Familiarity was correlated with all hedonic ratings by K orean consumers, who are most familiar with Y ackwa, but with overall and texture liking by J apanese consumers and flavor and texture liking by French consumers. These results suggest that familiarity partly contributes to a foreign consumers' hedonic rating. Practical Applications Globalization and cultural diversity have increased interest in ethnic foods. This trend is motivating food industries to expand into the ethnic food market sector. In this study, the sensory attributes and the cross‐cultural acceptability of Y ackwa ( K orean traditional cookie) were evaluated and the potential role of familiarity in determining consumer acceptance was measured. The outcome of this study will help food exporters, R&D scientists and food marketers in ethnic food market to optimize an ethnic food for other cultural communities by educating them to consider familiarity as an important factor for product development and promotion.