Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
ABSTRACT \nUCHI-SOTO (INSIDE-OUTSIDE): LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN \nCONTEXT FOR THE JAPANESE AS A FOREIGN \nLANGUAGE (JFL) LEARNER \nby \n?? Jamie Louise Goekler 2010 \nMaster of Arts in Teaching International Languages \nCalifornia State University, Chico \nFall 2010 \nJapanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) learners have frequently been exposed \nto learning materials which are neither contextualized culturally nor linguistically \nfrom the target language perspective. This research review addresses the cultural and \ncommunicative gaps which exist in many JFL textbooks and enhances JFL students??? \nawareness of similarities and differences between the Japanese culture and their own. \nTo teach JFL from an emic perspective, teachers must first provide students with cultural \nand communicative content that matches target culture and linguistic norms; students \nmust come to recognize the meaning of uchi (insider) and soto (outsider) if they \nare to communicate from an insider perspective. This body of research provides information \non cultural, linguistic, and paralinguistic factors essential to communicative \ncompetence \nx \nin Japanese. This information will help JFL students develop communicative competence \nby becoming linguistic and cultural insiders, viewing Japanese from an emic perspective. \nStudents will also learn about the implications of insider relationships and \nhow they influence language and social relations. This research details uchi-soto relationships, \nhierarchy, honorific language use, communication styles and strategies, gendered \nlanguage, and aidzuchi (Japanese discourse markers and techniques).
In this paper, we argue that there are two seemingly incompatible perceptions of discourse structure: a semantics-centered view and a syntax-centered view. In the semantics-based view, discourse structure is viewed as a structure that identifies the most important portions of the text and describes how they combine semantically. In the syntax-based view, discourse structure is viewed as an extension of syntax to the discourse level, which essentially links the syntactic trees for the individual sentences into one big tree structure. We will argue that these differences in perception may explain some of the central disagreements in the literature about the nature of discourse structure, in particular whether discourse structure is best viewed as a tree or a general graph. However, the two views are not as incompatible as they may seem at first sight, since the semantic discourse structure can be reinterpreted as a functor-argument structure that is derived from the syntactic tree structure. We describe the ramifications of the two views for the analysis of discourse markers, which are the focus of the discourse annotation in the Penn Discourse Treebank, and show how the syntax-based view can maintain a tree structure even for examples that seem to exhibit non-tree like properties in a semantics-based view.
The three syllable-final nasals /m/, /n/, and /ŋ/ in old Chinese have merged into two (/n, ŋ/) or only one (/ŋ/) nasal in modern Chinese languages. The perceptual confusability of place of articulation was investigated with speakers of Southern Min, a Chinese language which preserves all three final nasals. Three experiments of forced-choice nasal-identification were conducted: (1) complete CVN syllables embedded in noise, (2) CV-truncations of the CVN syllables, and (3) the excised nasal murmur, −N. The first experiment revealed that /m/ was the most and /n/ was the least confusable. Responses were highly accurate in the second experiment (above 85%) and around chance in the third experiment (below 40%), which indicated that listeners relied on the information in the vowel rather than the nasal murmur to identify final nasals. The vowel /i/ resulted in the most and /a/ the least misidentification of final nasals among /i, ə, a/. Low-level and falling tones resulted in more misidentification of final nasals than mid-level, high-level, and rising tones. Segment duration, F0, and formant transitions are analyzed across the vowel and tone types for insight into these findings. Lexical familiarity ratings did not show significant correlation with the perceptual results.
This article provides recent empirical evidence to support the argument that the everyday politics of race and fear of the non-desired Other still persist in Australia more than half a century after the official demise of the White Australia Policy. The article sheds so me insight into how Australian immigration policies are now deliberately designed to normalise and assimilate new migrants into narrow Anglo-Saxon cultural and linguistic norms, thereby inadvertently excluding people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who need Australian citizenship the most. The argument of the article is based on outcomes of a study on personal stories of African refugee background Australian citizens regarding their experiences with the Australian citizenship test; their opinions about the literacy-for-citizenship requirement; and their ideas about being and becoming Australian. The participants to the study expressed strong reservations with the idea of having to undertake a formal citizenship test that neither improves their understanding of the everyday way of life in Australia nor opens avenues for greater opportunities for socio-economic participation and recognition of the linguistic and cultural identities they bring to Australia.
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to evaluate the use of the periodically rotated overlapping parallel lines with enhanced reconstruction (PROPELLER) technique for artifact reduction and overall image quality improvement for intermediate-weighted and T2-weighted MRI of the shoulder. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: One hundred eleven patients undergoing MR arthrography of the shoulder were included. A coronal oblique intermediate-weighted turbo spin-echo (TSE) sequence with fat suppression and a sagittal oblique T2-weighted TSE sequence with fat suppression were obtained without (standard) and with the PROPELLER technique. Scanning time increased from 3 minutes 17 seconds to 4 minutes 17 seconds (coronal oblique plane) and from 2 minutes 52 seconds to 4 minutes 10 seconds (sagittal oblique) using PROPELLER. Two radiologists graded image artifacts, overall image quality, and delineation of several anatomic structures on a 5-point scale (5, no artifact, optimal diagnostic quality; and 1, severe artifacts, diagnostically not usable). The Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to compare the data of the standard and PROPELLER images. RESULTS: Motion artifacts were significantly reduced in PROPELLER images (p < 0.001). Observer 1 rated motion artifacts with diagnostic impairment in one patient on coronal oblique PROPELLER images compared with 33 patients on standard images. Ratings for the sequences with PROPELLER were significantly better for overall image quality (p < 0.001). Observer 1 noted an overall image quality with diagnostic impairment in nine patients on sagittal oblique PROPELLER images compared with 23 patients on standard MRI. CONCLUSION: The PROPELLER technique for MRI of the shoulder reduces the number of sequences with diagnostic impairment as a result of motion artifacts and increases image quality compared with standard TSE sequences. PROPELLER sequences increase the acquisition time.
Supervised learning algorithms often require large amounts of labeled data.Creating this data can be time consuming and expensive.Recent work has used untrained annotators on Mechanical Turk to quickly and cheaply create data for NLP tasks, such as word sense disambiguation, word similarity, machine translation, and PP attachment.In this experiment, we test whether untrained annotators can accurately perform the task of POS tagging.We design a Java Applet, called the Interactive Tagging Guide (ITG) to assist untrained annotators in accurately and quickly POS tagging words using the Penn Treebank tagset.We test this Applet on a small corpus using Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace where users earn small payments for the completion of short tasks.Our results demonstrate that, given the proper assistance, untrained annotators are able to tag parts of speech with approximately 90% accuracy.Furthermore, we analyze the performance of expert annotators using the ITG and discover nearly identical levels of performance as compared to the untrained annotators.
We employ syntactic parsing to describe and to discover lexico-grammatical features of English regional varieties. In the absence of suitable Treebanks, automatically parsed corpora (tree jungles) can be used. As an example we focus on Indian English, using the International Corpus of English (ICE), and the British National Corpus (BNC). We use a largely corpus-driven method. There are few differences in frequencies of syntactic relations between the corpora, but considerable differences when taking the intricate relations between grammar and lexis into account. We describe differences in the use of zero articles, verb-preposition constructions, and ditransitive verbs. We show that relatively small corpora can be used to discover subtle lexico-grammatical differences.
In this paper 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 usability of the treebank in the future. We focus on two complex syntactic phenomena: elliptical comparative clauses and participial NPs or NPs with a verbderived 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. 1
This paper presents a taxonomy of cognitive functions that supports formal functional modeling of cognitive technical systems (CTSs) and cognitive products. To date, there is little support for functional modeling of such systems and products even though their interdisciplinary complexity exceeds that of electro-mechanical products and makes modeling support in conceptual design even more important. The taxonomy of cognitive functions is based on literature research and consists of a set of cognitive capabilities on three hierarchical levels as well as a defined set of flows. Relationships among cognitive capabilities have been identified using WordNet, a lexical database of English. The application of the taxonomy is demonstrated through the example of a coffee robot waiter, which has been designed and prototyped in the research group of the authors. Through defining a common taxonomy of cognitive functions and flows, a common practice for functional modeling of cognitive products is defined thus supporting re-use of functional models. This creates the foundation for creating model-based design repositories for CTSs and cognitive products to support their future development.
We present an approach for Seman-tic Role Labeling (SRL) using Condi-tional Random Fields in a joint identifi-cation/classification step. The approach is based on shallow syntactic information (chunks) and a number of lexicalized fea-tures such as selectional preferences and automatically inferred similar words, ex-tracted using lexical databases and distri-butional similarity metrics. We use se-mantic annotations from the Proposition Bank for training and evaluate the system using CoNLL-2005 test sets. The addi-tional lexical information led to improve-ments of 15 % (in-domain evaluation) and 12 % (out-of-domain evaluation) on over-all semantic role classification in terms of F-measure. The gains come mostly from a better recall, which suggests that the addi-tion of richer lexical information can im-prove the coverage of existing SRL mod-els even when very little syntactic knowl-edge is available. 1
This paper examines the ways in which par-allelism can be used to speed the parsing of dense PCFGs. We focus on two kinds of parallelism here: Symmetric Multi-Processing (SMP) parallelism on shared-memory multi-core CPUs, and Single-Instruction Multiple-Thread (SIMT) parallelism on GPUs. We de-scribe how to achieve speed-ups over an al-ready very efficient baseline parser using both kinds of technology. For our dense PCFG parsing task we obtained a 60×speed-up us-ing SMP and SSE parallelism coupled with a cache-sensitive algorithm design, parsing sec-tion 24 of the Penn WSJ treebank in a little over 2 secs. 1
Animacy is known to play a role in postverbal argument ordering for various languages (W02, B08a, B08b). Together with definiteness, pronominality, and shortness, animacy favors positioning an argument first. Nevertheless, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish linear ordering from grammatical function or semantic role assignment, since those are also subject to various factors including animacy (K77). In order to investigate the role of animacy in French argument ordering, we limit ourselves to complements of ditransitive verbs with object and indirect object nominal complements. Using statistics on treebanks for language production and a questionnaire study for language perception, we show that animacy seems to play no role in the relative ordering.
This article gives a survey of the main issues confronting the compilers of monolingual dictionaries in the age of the Internet. Among others, it discusses the relationship between a lexical database and a monolingual dictionary, the role of corpus evidence, historical principles in lexicography vs. synchronic principles, the instability of word meaning, the need for full vocabulary coverage, principles of definition writing, the role of dictionaries in society, and the need for dictionaries to give guidance on matters of disputed word usage. It concludes with some questions about the future of dictionary publishing.OPSOMMING: Die samestelling van 'n eentalige woordeboek vir moedertaalsprekers. Hierdie artikel gee 'n oorsig van die hoofkwessies waarmee die samestellers van eentalige woordeboeke in die eeu van die Internet te kampe het. Dit bespreek onder andere die verhouding tussen 'n leksikale databasis en 'n eentalige woordeboek, die rol van korpusgetuienis, historiese beginsels vs sinchroniese beginsels in die leksikografie, die onstabiliteit van woordbetekenis, die noodsaak van 'n volledige woordeskatdekking, beginsels van die skryf van definisies, die rol van woordeboeke in die maatskappy, en die noodsaak vir woordeboeke om leiding te gee oor sake van betwiste woordgebruik. Dit sluit af met 'n aantal vrae oor die toekoms van die publikasie van woordeboeke.Sleutelwoorde: EENTALIGE WOORDEBOEKE, LEKSIKALE DATABASIS, WOORDEBOEKSTRUKTUUR, WOORDBETEKENIS, BETEKENISVERANDERING, GEBRUIK, GEBRUIKSAANTEKENINGE, HISTORIESE BEGINSELS VAN DIE LEKSIKOGRAFIE, SINCHRONIESE BEGINSELS VAN DIE LEKSIKOGRAFIE, REGISTER, SLANG, STANDAARDENGELS, WOORDESKATDEKKING, KONSEKWENSIE VAN VERSAMELINGS, FRASEOLOGIE, SINTAGMATIESE PATRONE, PROBLEME VAN KOMPOSISIONALITEIT, LINGUISTIESE PRESKRIPTIVISME, LEKSIKALE GETUIENIS
Unsupervised parsing induction has attracted a significant amount of attention over the last few years. However, current systems exhibit a degree of complexity that can shy away newcomers to the field. We challenge the need for such complexity and present a straightforward weak-EM based system. The results we obtained are close to state-of-the-art ones while still making it extremely simple to experiment with different sub-components. We use a k-best parser, an inductor for Probabilistic Bilexical Grammars (PBGs) [1] and a simple treebank builder. Since our algorithm is independent of the PBG inductor, it overlaps with other models from the literature such as Dependency Model with Valence [2]. Our algorithms are fully fleshed and easily reproducible. We experiment in 8 languages that inform intuitions in training- size dependent parameterization.
The paper focuses on proper names and, more specifically, personal names, toponyms and microtoponyms with a high degree of cultural embeddedness. The author draws on the classification of translation rules and methods (techniques) developed by Ermolovich, with a special focus on difficult cases of transfer where transliteration and transcription are employed. Two directions of translation are discussed: Polish into Russian and Russian into Polish. The paper analyses discrepancies between linguistic norms and usage, where problems originate from the existence of recognised equivalents, arbitrariness of transcription and globalisation (widespread use of the Internet). In the face of these challenges, consistency in a translation project is difficult to retain. The author proposes a set of practical exercises that can be used during translation classes (drawing on the analysis of original texts) in order to make beginner translation students aware of the existing problems and potential solutions. Examples of Polish realia in Russian texts and Russian realia in Polish texts are presented.
The possibility to analyse vast amounts of linguistic data has brought about changes both in methodology as well as in the ways we perceive certain language phenomena. A key insight gained by computational methods in language analysis is undoubtedly the importance of lexical co-occurrence and usage patterns for the description of lexical meaning. Corpus analysis and new methods in the analysis of pragmatic components of meaning have also yielded significant results in areas such as the treatment of semantic prosody. The present paper does not focus on what is traditionally subsumed under connotation or the speaker’s attitude (e.g., swear words, pejorative and offensive language, praise, excuses, requests, demands, etc.), but on ways in which the pragmatic (functional) meaning that arises from various contextual features can become an integral part of lexicographic descriptions. This is important for the treatment of all of those lexical items whose meanings reside in their function rather than in their bare lexical-semantic meaning, as this is particularly the case with phraseology and idiomatics. From another perspective, pragmatics turns out to be an effective means of sense discrimination in works of lexical and lexicographic relevance, as will be shown in the continuation.
"External sandhi is a linguistic phenomenon which refers to a set of sound changes that occur at word boundaries. These changes are similar to phonological processes such as assimilation and fusion when they apply at the level of prosody, such as in connected speech. External sandhi formation can be orthographically reflected in some languages. External sandhi formation in such languages, causes the occurrence of forms which are morphologically unanalyzable, thus posing a problem for all kind of NLP applications. In this paper, we discuss the implications that this phenomenon has for the syntactic annotation of sentences in Telugu, an Indian language with agglutinative morphology. We describe in detail, how external sandhi formation in Telugu, if not handled prior to dependency annotation, leads either to loss or misrepresentation of syntactic information in the treebank. This phenomenon, we argue, necessitates the introduction of a sandhi splitting stage in the generic annotation pipeline currently being followed for the treebanking of Indian languages. We identify one type of external sandhi widely occurring in the previous version of the Telugu treebank (version 0:2) and manually split all its instances leading to the development of a new version 0:5. We also conduct an experiment with a statistical parser to empirically verify the usefulness of the changes made to the treebank. Comparing the parsing accuracies obtained on versions 0:2 and 0:5 of the treebank, we observe that splitting even just one type of external sandhi leads to an increase in the overall parsing accuracies."
In this paper, we present results of an ongoing investigation of a manually aligned parallel treebank and an automatic tree aligner.We establish the features that show a significant correlation with alignment performance.We present those features with the biggest correlation scores and discuss their significance, with mention of future applications of these findings.
It is hypothesized that ratings of emotional stimuli are affected by a constant threat of traumatic events. Ratings of valence and arousal on the International Affective Picture System from young adults in the United States were compared to those of young Israeli adults. Israelis rated the pictures as less negative and less positive than did participants from the United States. Israeli women gave higher arousal ratings compared to the American women. These differences may be due to compulsory military service in Israel, during which exposure to traumatic events is more likely to occur, and to the timing of the study which followed a year of frequent suicide bomb attacks. The authors suggest that these findings may reflect mild symptoms of stress disorders.
While the 2007-2010 financial crisis has hit a variety of countries asymmetrically, the case of Spain is particularly illustrative: this country experienced a pronounced housing bubble partly funded via spectacular developments in its securitization markets leading to looser credit standards and subsequent financial stability problems. We analyze the sequential deterioration of credit in this country considering rating changes in individual securitized deals and on balance sheet bank conditions. Using a sample of 20, 286 observations on securities and rating changes from 2000Q1 to 2010Q1 we build a model in which loan growth, on balancesheet credit quality and rating changes are estimated simultaneously. Our results suggest that loan growth significantly affects on balance-sheet loan performance with a lag of at least two years. Additionally, loan performance is found to lead rating changes with a lag of four quarters. Importantly, bank characteristics (in particular, observed solvency, cash flow generation and cost efficiency) also affect ratings considerably. Additionally, these other bank characteristics seem to have a higher weight in the rating changes of securities issued by savings banks as compared to those issued by commercial banks. JEL Classification: G21, G12
This paper presents a simple yet effective semi-supervised method to improve Chinese word segmentation and POS tagging. We introduce novel features derived from large auto-analyzed data to enhance a simple pipelined system. The auto-analyzed data are generated from unlabeled data by using a baseline system. We evaluate the usefulness of our approach in a series of experiments on Penn Chinese Treebanks and show that the new features provide substantial performance gains in all experiments. Furthermore, the results of our proposed method are superior to the best reported results in the literature. 1
Data integration systems attempt to provide users with seamless and flexible access to information from multiple autonomous, distributed and heterogeneous data sources through a unified query interface. Besides data are continuously growing, maintained by different organizations and managed autonomously, querying data from heterogeneous data sources faces new challenges. As data integration has been automated, the ambiguity in concept interpretation also known as semantic heterogeneity has become one of the main obstacles to this process. Introduction of the Semantic Web Vision Ontologies WordNet ontology [3] is a large lexical database that is used in many schema matching algorithms to match schemas based on the semantics of attributes. In this paper ontology based semantic query reformulation technique is followed to improve the recall of the query. The reformulated query is optimized by removing disjunctive clauses in the query to reduce the computational cost of the semantic query execution. Experimental results show that the proposed optimization technique improves recall with minimal execution time.
There has been a rapid increase in the volume of research on data-driven dependency parsers in the past five years. This increase has been driven by the availability of treebanks in a wide variety of languages—due in large part to the CoNLL shared tasks—as well as the straightforward mechanisms by which dependency theories of syntax can encode complex phenomena in free word order languages. In this article, our aim is to take a step back and analyze the progress that has been made through an analysis of the two predominant paradigms for data-driven dependency parsing, which are often called graph-based and transition-based dependency parsing. Our analysis covers both theoretical and empirical aspects and sheds light on the kinds of errors each type of parser makes and how they relate to theoretical expectations. Using these observations, we present an integrated system based on a stacking learning framework and show that such a system can learn to overcome the shortcomings of each non-integrated system.
Identifying factors that improve the assessment of athletes' psychological functioning is imperative to make proper return-to-play decisions following concussion. Prior research indicates that an individual's affect is related to symptom reporting. The present study examines two novel methods of affect assessment in college athletes at baseline participating in a sports-concussion management program. A total of 256 athletes completed a neuropsychological baseline battery with measurements of psychological symptoms (BDI-Fast Screen, Post-Concussion Symptom Scale, and ImPact Total Symptom Score) and a measure of affective memory bias (the Affective Verbal Learning Test; AVLT). Examiners completed an observation-based rating of affect. Multivariate analysis of variance and χ2 analyses were conducted to examine the effect of affect on symptom reports. Examiners' Affect Ratings were predictive of broad symptom reporting, while the performance based index of affect (Affective Verbal Learning Test, AVLT) was more predictive of depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that performance on the AVLT may be a useful indicator of self-reported depression in a collegiate athlete sample. Additionally, these results demonstrate that examiners' behavioral assessments of affect are important in the assessment of psychological functioning in athletes. Continued work should focus on developing objective measures that are sensitive and valid for the evaluation of outcomes from concussion.
This paper is about the development of Pashto Treebank in the form of Extensible Markup Language (XML) code. A Chart Parser has been developed that uses Chart Parsing Algorithm for building parse trees for Pashto sentences. The output of the parser is the parsed text which can be obtained in one of its three forms such as reduced graph, parse tree and XML code. For parsing, the parser needs Context Free Grammar (CFG) of Pashto language and Tagged Input Text as input. The system has been tested on real world text taken from Pashto novels and web sites and tagged manually. Eighty seven (87) sentences were parsed by the parser in which fifty four (54) were correctly parsed with a single parse tree and the rest 33 were parsed with multiple trees and thus the accuracy obtained is 62.06%.
Recent applications including the Semantic Web, Web ontology and XML have sparked a renewed interest on graph-structured databases. Among others, twig queries have been a popular tool for retrieving subgraphs from graph-structured databases. To optimize twig queries, selectivity estimation has been a crucial and classical step. However, the majority of existing works on selectivity estimation focuses on relational and tree data. In this paper, we investigate selectivity estimation of twig queries on possibly cyclic graph data. To facilitate selectivity estimation on cyclic graphs, we propose a matrix representation of graphs derived from prime labeling - a scheme for reachability queries on directed acyclic graphs. With this representation, we exploit the consecutive ones property (C1P) of matrices. As a consequence, a node is mapped to a point in a two-dimensional space whereas a query is mapped to multiple points. We adopt histograms for scalable selectivity estimation. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation on the proposed technique and show that our technique controls the estimation error under 1.3% on XMARK and DBLP, which is more accurate than previous techniques. On TREEBANK, we produce RMSE and NRMSE 6.8 times smaller than previous techniques.
Discriminative parse reranking has been shown to be an effective technique to im-prove the generative parsing models. In this paper, we present a series of exper-iments on parsing the Tsinghua Chinese Treebank with hierarchically split-merge grammars and reranked with a perceptron-based discriminative model. In addition to the homogeneous annotation on TCT, we also incorporate the PCTB-based parsing result as heterogeneous annotation into the reranking feature model. The rerank-ing model achieved 1.12 % absolute im-provement on F1 over the Berkeley parser on a development set. The head labels in Task 2.1 are annotated with a sequence labeling model. The system achieved
Several studies have investigated the neural responses triggered by emotional pictures, but the specificity of the involved structures such as the amygdala or the ventral striatum is still under debate. Furthermore, only few studies examined the association of stimuli's valence and arousal and the underlying brain responses. Therefore, we investigated brain responses with functional magnetic resonance imaging of 17 healthy participants to pleasant and unpleasant affective pictures and afterwards assessed ratings of valence and arousal. As expected, unpleasant pictures strongly activated the right and left amygdala, the right hippocampus, and the medial occipital lobe, whereas pleasant pictures elicited significant activations in left occipital regions, and in parts of the medial temporal lobe. The direct comparison of unpleasant and pleasant pictures, which were comparable in arousal clearly indicated stronger amygdala activation in response to the unpleasant pictures. Most important, correlational analyses revealed on the one hand that the arousal of unpleasant pictures was significantly associated with activations in the right amygdala and the left caudate body. On the other hand, valence of pleasant pictures was significantly correlated with activations in the right caudate head, extending to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. These findings support the notion that the amygdala is primarily involved in processing of unpleasant stimuli, particularly to more arousing unpleasant stimuli. Reward-related structures like the caudate and NAcc primarily respond to pleasant stimuli, the stronger the more positive the valence of these stimuli is.
In addition to characterizing body image in these samples, the goals for this dissertation were to examine affective responses to bodies and to examine how affective regulation of body image affects prefrontal cortical function in the brain. Two models were used: 1) older versus younger women, and 2) women who had recovered from anorexia nervosa (AN) versus women who had never had an eating disorder. The study in Chapter 1 compared body image in younger versus older women using standardized questionnaires and behavioral measures of women’s responses to fatter and thinner images of their own bodies. Younger and older women reported similar body dissatisfaction, but younger women reported a higher drive for thinness and experienced more societal influence on their body image than older women. Images of one’s own body versus line drawings of bodies resulted in similar ratings of body dissatisfaction in younger and older women. These data suggest that age affects particular facets of body image, but that ratings of body image do not differ in normal, healthy younger and older women when personalized measures are used. For the study in Chapter 2, women assigned valence ratings to bodies of varying sizes, and then a subset of those bodies were used as distracters in a working memory task. Younger and older women both rated normal weight bodies as most positive, were slower to categorize bodies as positive than to categorize them as negative, and rated a smaller percentage of bodies as positive than as negative. Additionally, positive bodies were more disruptive to working memory performance than negative or neutral bodies in both younger and older women. Thus, despite older women experiencing less negative affect than younger women, these groups did not differ in their affective responses to Pruis Dissertation vii bodies or the disruption of working memory by bodies. This suggests that the positivity bias in aging does not extend to body stimuli in women nor influence the emotional disruption of working memory. The study in Chapter 3 used fMRI to examine brain activity in women who had recovered from AN versus healthy controls when bodies of varying sizes were used as distracter stimuli in a working memory task. Bodies rated as negative were more disruptive to working memory than bodies rated as neutral or positive in women who had recovered from AN and in controls. Although working memory performance was similar in both groups, underlying brain activity differed. The amygdala activated during the working memory task in women who had recovered from AN but not in controls, and the fusiform responded more in response to bodies in women who had recovered from AN than in control women. There was more suppression of medial prefrontal cortex activity in women who had recovered from AN than in controls when the distracter stimulus was a negative body. These results suggested that higher amygdala and fusiform activity in response to body stimuli occurred despite recovery and that medial prefrontal suppression may have permitted recovery in the face of continued negativity towards bodies in women who had recovered from AN. Overall, older women had similar behavioral outcomes regarding body stimuli as younger women, despite experiencing less negative affect and having overall better body image. Women who recovered from AN also had similar behavioral outcomes as control women; however, they had different underlying brain activation. This suggests that similar behavior relies on differential brain activity and that compensatory mechanisms Pruis Dissertation viii involve suppression of the default network in order to produce normal cognitive
The aim of this paper is twofold. We focus, on the one hand, on the task of dynamically annotating English compound nouns, and on the other hand we propose disambiguation methods and techniques which facilitate the annotation task. Both the aforementioned are part of a larger on-going effort which aims to create HPSG annotation for the texts from the Wall Street Journal (henceforward WSJ) sections of the Penn Treebank (henceforward PTB) with the help of a hand-written large-scale and wide-coverage grammar of English, the English Resource Grammar (henceforward ERG; Flickinger (2002)). As we show in this paper, such annotations are very rich linguistically, since apart from syntax they also incorporate semantics, which does not only ensure that the treebank is guaranteed to be a truly sharable, re-usable and multi-functional linguistic resource, but also calls for the necessity of a better disambiguation of the internal (syntactic) structure of larger units of words, such as compound nouns, since this has an impact on the representation of their meaning, which is of utmost interest if the linguistic annotation of a given corpus is to be further understood as the practice of adding interpretative linguistic information of the highest quality in order to give “added value ” to the corpus. 1.
Purpose: Catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT) is an enzyme responsible for the degradation of catecholamines, which have been implicated in the pathophysiology of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). The COMT val158met polymorphism (rs4680) is a functional single-nucleotide polymorphism that results in a valine-to-methionine substitution at codon 158. The low activity met allele has been associated with higher sensory and affective ratings of pain than the high activity val allele. We sought to explore a possible association of the COMT val158met polymorphism with IBS symptoms, abdominal pain, and bowel patterns. Methods: Women diagnosed with IBS (Rome II criteria) were recruited for this study (age 17-80, n=51). They had high abdominal pain scores (Rome II A2 ≥3 and A9≥3) and ≥ 25% days per month with pain. Subjects recorded symptoms in a daily diary for 28 days and also completed an SCL-90-R. Subjects with organic GI diseases were excluded. Subjects were matched against age-related controls without bowel symptoms. DNA was isolated from buccal swabs in subjects and from buffy coat preparations of whole blood in controls, and the COMT genotype was determined by PCR-based assay. Results: Although the alleles were distributed evenly throughout both the IBS and control groups, we found a trend for IBS patients to be met/met genotype vs. controls (n= 15, n=9, p=.136). Among the IBS group: 1) There was no difference in Rome II abdominal pain scores between genotypes. 2) Of met/met (n=15), 67% were more likely to have diarrhea predominant symptoms compared to val/val or val/met. 3) met/met was associated with greater daily GI symptoms than val/val and val/met [abdominal discomfort after eating, p=.017; abdominal distension, p=.048; intestinal gas, p=.048; flatulence, p=.05; and bloating, p=.061]. 4) Gas symptom composite increased with increasing Global Severity Index (GSI) score [p=0.006], gas increased with increasing fatigue [p=0.028], and abdominal pain after eating increased with both increasing GSI [p=0.017] and fatigue [p=0.044]. 5) met/met had a higher percentage of days with pain after eating [p=.023]. Conclusion: Our results demonstrate that the met/met genotype is associated with increased GI symptoms in patients with IBS. While there was no statistically significant difference in genotypes between IBS and control groups or Rome II abdominal pain scores among the IBS group this could be attributed to small study size and that IBS subjects were chosen for ‘high pain’ symptoms, thereby limiting variance. Our results indicate that further investigation is needed to describe the role of the COMT enzyme in IBS.
Change of first language (L1) status from the most stable language to a less accessible language over the life-span of a bilingual individual is termed ‘language attrition’. Such a shift in ease of L1 access has been reported to affect the lexicon (Pelc, 2001) more than other aspects of language. However, whether L1 attrition is affected by reduced L1-strength or increased second language (L2) interference is unresolved. This study was designed to understand the relative contributions of L1-strength (Ebbinghaus, 1885; Paradis, 2001, 2007) and L2-interference (Loftus & Loftus, 1980; Gürel, 2004) towards L1 attrition in L2-dominant bilingual individuals, and how attrition is affected by language use and proficiency. We used a cross-modal (picture-auditory word) and cross-linguistic (Bengali-English) lexical priming paradigm in order to test the nature of L1-L2 interaction in 27 Bengali-English-speaking individuals. Participants were divided into two groups (L1-dominant and L2-dominant) varying in relative L1-L2-proficiency. Familiarity ratings for English words and their translation equivalents permitted generating four word-pair categories: HighEnglish-HighBengali, LowEnglish-LowBengali, HighEnglish-LowBengali and LowEnglish-HighBengali. Reaction time (RT) and Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to a syllable-judgment task for the auditory word. Participants also rated themselves on language and reported language use. We hypothesized that if reduced L1-strength affected L1 attrition, Bengali words from all four word-pair categories would elicit longer RTs and larger negative ERPs than English words. In contrast, if L2-interference affected L1 attrition, all Bengali words except ones from the LowEnglish-HighBengali category would elicit longer RTs and larger negative ERPs compared to their English translations. Results showed participants’ L1-use and L2 self-ratings predicted performance in L1. Behavioral data showed longer RTs for Bengali than English in the HighBengali-HighEnglish category and longest RTs for English in the LowEnglish-HighBengali category. ERP data showed greater negativities to English and Bengali words from the category with low familiarity English ratings regardless of their Bengali ratings. Different results from the two measures of the lexical task suggest that each task reflects a different point in the process of lexical access. Overall, findings suggested that L2-interference into L1 plays a larger role in L1 attrition in L2-dominant individuals.
890 Reviews thatwhat is good German' isGerman used appropriately for the topic, comprehen sibly,and imaginatively?in Schiewe's terms (p. 373) it isGerman characterized by Angemessenheit, Pragnanz, and Variation. Rudolf Hoberg's essay entitled 'Besseres Deutsch: Was kann und soil eine wissenschaftlich begrundete Sprachpflege tun' is a succinct and eminently sensible summary ofwhat the criteria should be forgood German, by an academic linguistwho despite the stereotype does care deeply about quality in language?but is not convinced thatGerman civilization as we know it will perish when people no longerwrite sentences like 'Die Blumen sturben sicher, wenn du sie nicht bald begossest'. It is unlikely that the book will win over the self-appointed guardians of lin guistic excellence and sundry other pedants to the view thatmodern German has immense vitality and is in no way in decline. But what James and Lesley Milroy in their Authority in Language, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1999) refer to as the complaint tradition'?the idea that the language of the present is in often unspecified ways 'bad' compared with the language of the past?has a long history across many languages, and the desire for stable linguistic norms appears very deep-rooted. In themain, the essays in this book can be recommended without hesitation, but, unfortunately, theywill probably neither appeal tonor convince the public who have been avid consumers of Bastian Sick's books and who appear only too willing to be told that their command of theirnative language is inadequate. University of Manchester Martin Durrell Roman eines Lebens: Die Aktualitat der Bildung und ihreGeschichte imBildungsro man. ByWilhelm Vosskamp. Berlin: Berlin University Press. 2009. 210 pp. 39.90. ISBN 978-3-940432-42-1. Deconstruction was clever, but had pragmatic shortcomings. One was that ittended to undermine thehumanities' claim to educate rounded human beings, who would be not only critically independent but also responsible and able tomake decisions. If thehuman subject is an effectof language, learning thiswill not enhance a young person's sense of agency (or ability tomake an impact). Both the Berlin University Press, andWilhelm Vosskamp in this book, aremaking serious attempts to repair the damage. The BUP is doing this by means of itswhole, cleanly branded, cata logue of books designed to lightenWissenschaft and make itavailable to intelligent general readers, and Vosskamp by pleading the case for continuity between the enlightenment ideal of Bildung and the possibilities of self-development available to individuals in the information universe. Der Roman eines Lebens is thus two things at once. It is an intervention in the contemporary debate about higher education and a book about theBildungsroman. In the firstfunction it is entirely admirable, but as to the second, it is disappoint ing. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it isn't really a book with its own argument at all, but a collection of some of Vosskamp's articles on the Bildungsroman, stretching back to 1982, and including barely twenty-fiveoriginal MLR, 105.3, 2010 891 pages. The individual items are of course often extremely valuable. The character ization of the German discourse of Bildung and its contextualization in relation to contemporary Europe is handled with beautiful lucidity (the style throughout is exemplary in its rigour and clarity). The material about images and Utopia is compelling and insightful. The piece about Botho Strauss and Thomas Bernhard is thought-provoking, ifnot obviously relevant. The most persuasive component of Vosskamp's analyses in this volume, and the one forwhich he is justly renowned, ishis attention to the sort of reader identification that literature facilitates; a form of complex identification thatmakes itpossible to deal on the practical level of everyday life,aswell as on the level ofmoral and pragmatic decision-making, with philosophical aporia. However, without the Bildungsroman, these various pieces don't really cohere. And here we encounter a problem. For Vosskamp's argument about reader iden tification towork one has to believe thatmany readers were actually guided and focused by Goethe's rather ponderous Meister novels and that it actually makes sense (as itdoes in the case of theNovelle) to talk of a genre and a tradition here. Itmay be my own ignorance, but I don't believe these things...
On October 8‐10, 2009, an interdisciplinary group met in Beverley, Massachusetts, to evaluate the state of the art in the computational modeling of narrative. Three important findings emerged: (1) current work in computational modeling is described by three different levels of representation; (2) there is a paucity of studies at the highest, most abstract level aimed at inferring the meaning or message of the narrative; and (3) there is a need to establish a standard data bank of annotated narratives, analogous to the Penn Treebank.
MLR, 105.2, 2010 579 are integrated into a full lexical database of Paduan dialect literature from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. This volume is undoubtedly a welcome addition to our knowledge and under standing of themost remarkable author-actor of the Italian Renaissance. This is especially so textually, in itsbringing a significant and neglected work?in terms of theatre and ideas?to an anglophone audience, and in its raising provocative questions about the degree of daring and the limits of the polemical in Ruzante. At times, though, Carroll's (con)textual commentary and conclusions needed tobe more cautious or nuanced. Our knowledge of the relationship between themanu scripts, and between these and thefirsteditions, is still awork-in-progress, as isour grasp of the significance of the linguistic variants in the Beolco corpus in the ab sence of autograph texts and a secure Ruzantian usus scribendi. Our understanding of the playwright's complex network of patronage remains fragmentary. University of St Andrews Ronnie Ferguson Beyond theFamily Romance: The Legend ofPascoli. ByMaria Truglio. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2007. viii+203 pp. $45;?28. ISBN 978-0 8020-9191-8. Inmoving 'beyond the family romance', Maria Truglio's study ofGiovanni Pascoli seeks to break with the dominant mode of biographical scholarship on the author while also engaging psychoanalytical theory (especially Freud) beyond applied criticism. In following a predominantly structural model, Truglio does not advo cate a Freudian interpretation of Pascoli's texts somuch as consider the common preoccupation with origins, and especially with loss, shared by these two near contemporaries. Thus, Pascoli's poetry is just one thread of a wider argument that embraces such diverse subjects as sexuality, infanticide, and the relationship between science and religion, while skilfully bringing them back to the central nexus between the self and primordial sites of trauma. It is an ambitious project in which a unified methodology helps provide thematic coherence. Beginning by citing theOrpheus myth, Truglio establishes the dangers implicit in the backward look that leads both Pascoli and Freud into the search for an ori ginating moment that, likeEurydice, proves tobe slippery, intangible, and, inmany respects, infernal' (p. 3), a trope that recurs as a structuringmotif in her analysis as awhole. 'Turning back' proves to be a privileged path both to rediscovering the lost object and losing itagain, and Freud's concept of the 'uncanny' (as elaborated in his essay 'Das Unheimlich') ispresented as the central paradigm explaining the double moments of possession and dispossession, familiarity and strangeness that also shape the Pascolian poetic universe. The uncanny is examined in relation to the very space of origins?respectively, inPascoli, thenest (both cradle and grave), parent (absent fatheror abject mother), or nature (consoling and threatening)?that betrays an ambivalence or doubleness at themoment inwhich the subject would be constituted as whole ormeaningful. Rereading the complex poetics of Pascoli's IIfanciullino in the light of its struc 580 Reviews tural parallels with Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and revisiting Agamben's thesis on Pascoli's language as a Tingua morta', Truglio suggests that the pre-grammatical, ana-logical linguaggio (p. 46) that thefanciullino speaks, which lies at the very border ofmeaning and non-meaning, reactivates something akin to theKristevan 'semiotic chora\ rehearsing inparticularly intense fashion the identity of poetry as themiddle space ofmemory and desire, and the constituting annihilation of the self. In thisway, she convincingly argues for an interpretation of desire in Pascoli beyond the purely sexual (towhich some existing psychoana lytic readings, for example Gioanola's, have been limited) and demonstrates how impulses towards regression and return dovetail with the desire to keep the dead alive and the concomitant refusal tomourn. It is significant in this respect that the chapters of the study,while moving forward, proceed to take us ever furtherback. Beginning from the assassination of the father and the uncanniness of the nest, we move through the double space of borderline identities?the phantasmatic presences of the poetry of the scapigliati (especially Tarchetti and Boito) and Pascoli's own cari morti; the abject or infanti cidal mother?finally regressing to themyth (more ideal than real) of theGolden Age, a point of origin that reveals itself...
In the Chinese teaching and research,it often needs to draw syntax tree for analyzing of relationship among compositions of sentence.Drawn syntax tree manually has many defects,such as having huge workload,needing immense storage capacity and so on.This paper proposes a method to generate syntax tree automatically and display the syntax tree in web page by using VML technology.By comparing the syntax trees generated in this paper with the syntax trees from Treebank of PKU,the result shows that the method of coordinate computing proposed in this paper is more precision,which also demonstrates the efficiency of the visualization method.
Corpora of sentences annotated with grammatical information have been deployed by extending the basic lexical and morphological data with increasingly complex information, such as phrase constituency, syntactic functions, semantic roles, etc. As these corpora grow in size and the linguistic information to be encoded reaches higher levels of sophistication, the utilization of annotation tools and, above all, supporting computational grammars appear no longer as a matter of convenience but of necessity. In this paper, we report on the design features, the development conditions and the methodological options of a deep linguistic databank, the CINTIL DeepGramBank. In this corpus, sentences are annotated with fully fledged linguistically informed grammatical representations that are produced by a deep linguistic processing grammar, thus consistently integrating morphological, syntactic and semantic information. We also report on how such corpus permits to straightforwardly obtain a whole range of past generation annotated corpora (POS, NER and morphology), current generation treebanks (constituency treebanks, dependency banks, propbanks) and next generation databanks (logical form banks) simply by means of a very residual selection/extraction effort to get the appropriate “views ” exposing the relevant layers of information. 1.
The paper presents a system for querying treebanks in a uniform way. The system is able to work with both dependency and constituency\nbased treebanks in any language. We demonstrate its abilities on 11 different treebanks. The query language used by the system\nprovides many features not available in other existing systems while still keeping the performance efficient. The paper also describes\nthe conversion of ten treebanks into a common XML-based format used by the system, touching the question of standards and formats.\nThe paper then shows several examples of linguistically interesting questions that the system is able to answer, for example browsing\nverbal clauses without subjects or extraposed relative clauses, generating the underlying grammar in a constituency treebank, searching\nfor non-projective edges in a dependency treebank, or word-order typology of a language based on the treebank. The performance of\nseveral implementations of the system is also discussed by measuring the time requirements of some of the queries.
This paper describes an attempt to build a lexical database for the Yami language, an Austronesian endangered language. As the Yami language documentation and conservation projects have produced substantial corpora, we are now ready to construct the Yami online knowledge database based on the knowledge we have accumulated in the language. In this paper, we propose a model to build the Word Net-like Yami lexical semantics and database. The model is first described in detail, followed by an illustration of an ontology of fish in the implementation phase.
BACKGROUND: Recent advances have been made in the application of cognitive training strategies as interventions for mental disorders. One novel approach, cognitive control training (CCT), uses computer-based exercises to chronically increase prefrontal cortex recruitment. Activation of prefrontal control mechanisms have specifically been identified with attenuation of emotional responses. However, it is unclear whether recruitment of prefrontal resources alone is operative in this regard, or whether prefrontal control is important only in the role of explicit emotion regulation. This study examined whether exposure to cognitive tasks before an emotional challenge attenuated the effects of the emotional challenge. AIMS: We investigated whether a single training session could alter participants' reactivity to subsequent emotional stimuli on two computer-based tasks as well as affect ratings made during the study. We hypothesized that individuals performing the Cognitive Control (CC) task as compared to those performing the Peripheral Vision (PV) comparison task would (1) report reduced negative affect following the mood induction and the emotion task, and (2) exhibit reduced reactivity (defined by lower affective ratings) to negative stimuli during both the reactivity and recovery phases of the emotion task and (3) show a reduced bias towards threatening information. METHOD: Fifty-nine healthy participants were randomized to complete CC tasks or PV, underwent a negative mood induction, and then made valence and arousal ratings for IAPS images, and completed an assessment of attentional bias. RESULTS: RESULTS indicated that a single-session of CC did not consistently alter participants' responses to either task. However, performance on the CC tasks was correlated on subsequent ratings of emotional images. CONCLUSIONS: While overall these results do not support the idea that affective responding is altered by making healthy volunteers use their prefrontal cortex before the affective task, they are discussed in the context of study design issues and future research directions.
From the perspective of translation, Lestrygonians is a chapter that goes in the face of linguistic norm, subverting expectations of standard language use. The chapter consistently shows meaning to be unstable, self-generating along lines of flight, mushrooming around nodes of (semantic) tension. The cohesion of the text, as shown in the sandwich’ passage, depends on a series of such nodes, of linguistic occasions, associations and interfaces; Bloom’s associations and bricolage (or, to use Jean- Michel Rabaté’s pun, brick-holing)1 of words which direct and channel the text’s movements are called forth by the shape of phrases, homonymy and polysemy. Such instability of meaning and of the directions of the production of meaning certainly musters and breeds translation problems: the translator would have to aim at finding/ creating analogous interfaces in the target language (TL) that could account for, and function as points of departure for Bloom’s strings of associations, for the text’s nodes of meaning and tension.