Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Despite the prevalence of infidelity, there is relatively little research regarding the long-term effects on the children. Combining the views of transgenerational theory with the existing literature on infidelity as a family stressor and infidelity as a trauma, this project examines the potential lasting effects of parental infidelity on the adult child. Study participants included a small sample of adults over the age of 18 who were aware of parental infidelity in their family of origin. Through a series of regression analyses using a moderator model, the researchers found that higher negative self schemata and affect ratings related to the perception of the infidelity were associated with more conservative attitudes toward sex. Suggestions for future utilization of the proposed model and the clinical implications of the findings are also discussed.
This study utilized a unique contact lens method to examine the influence of right hemisphere processing on affective judgments and pain perception. Under conditions of unilateral visual stimulation, participants completed affective ratings of films and underwent a cold pressor pain task. The goal was to examine differences in affective judgments of films projected to one or the other hemisphere and to examine the influence of this unilateral visual stimulation on pain sensitivity. The results failed to replicate a previous finding of differential affective judgments under conditions of right and left visual stimulation. Nonetheless, in female subjects, unilateral visual stimulation was significantly associated with pain lateralization. This finding is discussed in terms of attentional processes in pain perception and limitations of the current lens design.
Among the benefits of a flexible and modular lexical database are: the facility of building new modules from existing ones, the reuse of lexicographic data to both enhance the user experience and achieve NLP aims, the time saved in accomplishing these objectives, and the economy that comes from minimizing redundancy (van der Eijk, Bloksma, and van der Kraan 1992). LUPo, or the Portuguese Unisyn Lexicon, is one of the first speech-dedicated applications to take full advantage of a collection of lexical resources as the basis for a text-to-speech system. Consisting of a pronunciation lexicon and rule system for generating accent-specific phonetic transcriptions for Portuguese, LUPo circumvents the cost of producing high-quality phonetic transcriptions by hand, while attracting a wider pan Lusophone audience to the lexical database in which it resides, and providing the research community with a vast resource of Portuguese accent data for evaluating speech applications and testing theories.
The name-picture verification task is often used to assess the difficulty of prelexical processes (object recognition and semantic access) during picture naming. However, whether to use responses from word-picture match or from mismatch trials to index the difficulty of pre-lexical processes is debated. Levelt (2002) argued for the use of mismatch trials because on match trials the printed object name might facilitate picture recognition. However, in a study with speakers of Spanish Stadthagen-Gonzalez et al. (2009) showed that visual and conceptual properties of objects only correlated with the latencies of match responses but not with those of mismatch responses and therefore advocated the use of match responses. The present study aimed to replicate Stadthagen- Gonzalez et al. (2009) findings using native British English speakers and English norms for non-lexical and lexical variables. We replicated the finding that non-lexical variables affected the speed of match, but not mismatch responses. However, in addition, we found that lexical variables also affected the speed of match responses, which means that these latencies need to be interpreted with caution. In other words, neither match nor mismatch responses seem ideally suited to assess the difficulty of pre-lexical processes in picture naming. Levelt, W. J. M. (2002). Picture naming and word frequency. Language and Cognitive Processes, 17, 663–671. Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., Damian, M. F., Pérez, M. A., Bowers, J. S., & Marín, J. (2009). Name-picture verification as a control measure for object naming: A task analysis and norms for a
The paper introduces three chunk parsing tasks carried in current CIPS parsing evaluation workshop(CIPS-ParsEval-2009),which is organized by Tsinghua University and Northeastern University.They are base chunk parsing,functional chunk parsing and event description clause recognition tasks.The designing motivation and the classification standards of these three chunks are discussed in the paper.Based on the detailed syntactic annotations in Tsinghua Chinese Treebank(TCT),three benchmark chunk banks automatically extracted from TCT are built.The evaluation results of top-5 participating systems are also given.The data analysis from their statistics and the comparison with current chunk schemes show some characteristics of these three chunk parsing tasks.
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.
In the field of natural language processing (NLP), there often exist multiple corpora with different annotation standards for the same task. In this paper, we take syntactic parsing as a case study and propose a reranking method which is able to make direct use of disparate treebanks simultaneously without using techniques such as treebank conversion. The method proceeds in three steps: 1) build parsers on individual treebanks; 2) use parsers independently to generate n-best lists for each sentence in test set; 3) rerank individual n-best lists which correspond to the same sentence by using consensus information exchanged among these n-best lists. Experimental results on two open Chinese treebanks show that our method significantly outperforms the baseline system by 0.84% and 0.53% respectively.
PURPOSE: To prospectively evaluate the clinical effectiveness of snapshot inversion recovery (SNAPIR), which is a dedicated optimized inversion-recovery-prepared single-shot fast spin-echo T1-weighted sequence, in the delineation of normal fetal brain anatomy compared with that of the currently used T1-weighted gradient-echo protocol, which often yields images of poor quality due to motion artifacts and inadequate contrast. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This study was approved by the hospital research ethics committee, and informed written consent was obtained from all patients. Forty-one fetuses were examined at 19-37 weeks gestation (mean, 29 weeks gestation) by using both the standard T1-weighted protocol and the optimized T1-weighted SNAPIR protocol with a 1.5-T imager. Two independent blinded observers performed qualitative analysis, evaluating overall diagnostic quality, detailed anatomic delineation, and severity of motion artifacts. Quantitative analysis comprised calculation of contrast ratios (CRs) for the cortical gray matter, subplate, white matter, and cerebrospinal fluid. The Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to compare image rating scores, the paired t test was used to compare CRs, and κ statistics were used to test interobserver agreement. RESULTS: Both overall diagnostic quality (P <.001) and detailed anatomic delineation (P <.001) were enhanced with SNAPIR compared with the standard T1-weighted acquisition. Also, motion artifacts were less severe (P =.008) and less extensive (P <.001) with SNAPIR. Corresponding CRs were increased with SNAPIR in seven of eight examined regions. CONCLUSION: SNAPIR is a promising robust alternative to the current T1-weighted acquisitions; its role in the detection of disease requires further study.
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
Corpus-based techniques have proved to be very beneficial in the development of efficient and accurate approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD) despite the fact that they generally represent relatively shallow knowledge. It has always been thought, however, that WSD could also benefit from deeper knowledge sources. We describe a novel approach to WSD using inductive logic programming to learn theories from first-order logic representations that allows corpus-based evidence to be combined with any kind of background knowledge. This approach has been shown to be effective over several disambiguation tasks using a combination of deep and shallow knowledge sources. Is it important to understand the contribution of the various knowledge sources used in such a system. This paper investigates the contribution of nine knowledge sources to the performance of the disambiguation models produced for the SemEval-2007 English lexical sample task. The outcome of this analysis will assist future work on WSD in concentrating on the most useful knowledge sources.
In this paper, we present several ways to measure and evaluate the annotation and annotators, proposed and used during the building of the Czech part of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank. At first, the basic principles of the treebank annotation project are introduced (division to three layers: morphological, analytical and tectogrammatical). The main part of the paper describes in detail one of the important phases of the annotation process: three ways of evaluation of the annotators- inter-annotator agreement, error rate and performance. The measuring of the inter-annotator agreement is complicated by the fact that the data contain added and deleted nodes, making the alignment between annotations non-trivial. The error rate is measured by a set of automatic checking procedures that guard the validity of some invariants in the data. The performance of the annotators is measured by a booking web application. All three measures are later compared and related to each other. 1.
This paper presents a new perspective on the origin and development of the Mary-merry-marry merger, the conditioned merger, or neutralization, of mid and low front vowels before /r/ in dialects of North American English. The city of Montreal, Quebec represents one of very few regions in which this merger has not taken hold, despite the fact that a near-complete merger is found in the nearby rural region of Quebec’s Eastern Townships. This paper attempts to shed light on this puzzling geographic distribution using data from archival interviews conducted with Eastern Townshippers born between 1895 and 1915. An acoustic analysis of the vowels before /r/ is presented and compared with data from recent studies of Montreal English. Acoustic analysis of the mean values of the first and second vowel formants shows a great deal of variation in these speakers’ productions of the historically low front vowel before /r/. In some tokens it is clearly merged with the mid vowel, while in others the two phonemes remain clearly distinct. Further, this variation is found both between speakers and in the speech of individuals themselves. Although not entirely homogenous, the speech community does appear to share general norms with regard to which words are or are not merged. These results demonstrate that the merger was not a lexically abrupt sound change. Rather, the results are consistent with a theory of sound change via lexical diffusion, which implies a much longer timeline for this change than previously assumed, suggesting its origins may go back many more generations. As such, it is suggested that the current geolinguistic pattern of the merger may be traced to the different settlement histories of Montreal and the Eastern Townships.
The language in which Nikolaj S. Leskov wrote his prose is extremely complex. The writer's lexical material in particular is perceived "by the reader as strikingly original and not entirely conforming to the literary standards prevalent in Leskov's time. The aim of the present study is to identify and categorize lexical items in Leskov's vocabulary that have not been established in the Russian language other than in Leskov's usage. The discussion concentrates primarily on lexical innovations excerpted from Leskov's works. In order to give the reader a complete view of the intricate qualities of Leskov's language, some attention is devoted to the writer's use of stylistic devices. Included in the illustrative material are lexical items that, although not invented by Leskov, are nevertheless indicative of the writer's originality in utilizing the resources of the Russian lexicon. Chapter I serves to introduce Leskov to the reader. Linguistic creativity is shown to be an organic part of Leskov's life. The distinctive qualities of his language are viewed against the background of the literary atmosphere of his time. In chapter II the most important stylistic levels of Leskov's vocabulary are discussed. Lexical items from different stylistic strata illustrate the basic principle underlying Leskov's vocabulary selection. Chapters III and IV are devoted to a detailed analysis of neologisms that occur in Leskov's works. The cited material is analyzed from the viewpoint of morphological structure. The investigation of the methods with which Leskov formed new words confirms the reader's intuition that the writer has adhered closely to the norms for derivation in the Russian language. The neologisms listed in chapter IV are discussed from the viewpoint of meaning. It is demonstrated that Leskov intentionally used semasiological devices in order to produce a comic effect upon the reader. The lexical items that belong to this category are shown to be essential means of expression for Leskov's intended narrative purposes. Chapter V deals with foreign lexical elements in Leskov's usage. It is indicated that Leskov was in principle opposed to the introduction of words from foreign languages into the Russian lexicon. His disapproval of lexical borrowings is reflected in the numerous distortions of foreign words that appear in his vocabulary. It is also illustrated in this chapter that Leskov made use of morphemes from languages other than Russian to form invented words. The cited examples point to the conclusion that the material upon which Leskov drew to enrich his vocabulary comes from a variety of sources. The neologisms that are investigated in the present study were created by Leskov in a conscious effort to make the speech of the characters who appear in his stories as vivid as possible.
OBJECTIVES: It is well recognised that medical training can be extremely stressful and that high stress is a risk factor for a wide range of psychological and health-related consequences. The primary aims of this study were to introduce the Medical Student Stress Profile (MSSP) and to demonstrate its psychometric quality as a specific device for auditing medical student stress. Secondary aims were to establish the reliability, construct and criterion validity of this instrument and to explore the relationships between stress, coping, personality, motivation and emotional intelligence in medical students. METHODS: A battery of self-report measures including the MSSP was administered to a sample of 239 undergraduate and graduate-entry medical students. The battery included indices of stress, coping with and proneness to stress, as well as measures of emotional intelligence, motivation style, personality traits, educational environment perception and self-reported symptomatology. Psychometric evaluation of the MSSP was conducted along with a correlation analysis of stress concomitants. RESULTS: The MSSP revealed good psychometric properties and showed a substantial stress load in the participant sample. The pattern of correlations with concomitant measures conformed generally to expectations. Strong cohort effects were observed, which suggest the importance of future investigation into the role of the group in stress amelioration. Stress adversely affects ratings of the educational environment as measured by the Dundee Ready Education Environment Measure. CONCLUSIONS: The MSSP was specifically developed for the medical training context and may have utility for individual and group stress audits of medical students and as a device to inform remedial programmes in stress management in medical education.
We describe a method for the automatic extraction of a Stochastic Lexicalized Tree Insertion Grammar from a linguistically rich HPSG Treebank. The extraction method is strongly guided by HPSG–based head and argument decomposition rules. The tree anchors correspond to lexical labels encoding fine–grained information. The approach has been tested with a German corpus achieving a labeled recall of 77.33% and labeled precision of 78.27%, which is competitive to recent results reported for German parsing using the Negra Treebank.
In this paper, we focus on the challenge of automatically converting a constituency treebank (source treebank) to fit the standard of another constituency treebank (target treebank). We formalize the conversion problem as an informed decoding procedure: information from original annotations in a source treebank is incorporated into the decoding phase of a parser trained on a target treebank during the parser assigning parse trees to sentences in the source treebank. Experiments on two Chinese treebanks show significant improvements in conversion accuracy over baseline systems, especially when training data used for building the parser is small in size. 1
In this paper we explore two strategies to incorporate local morphosyntactic features in Hindi dependency parsing. These features are obtained using a shallow parser. We first explore which information provided by the shallow parser is most beneficial and show that local morphosyntactic features in the form of chunk type, head/non-head information, chunk boundary information, distance to the end of the chunk and suffix concatenation are very crucial in Hindi dependency parsing. We then investigate the best way to incorporate this information during dependency parsing. Further, we compare the results of various experiments based on various criterions and do some error analysis. All the experiments were done with two data-driven parsers, MaltParser and MSTParser, on a part of multi-layered and multi-representational Hindi Treebank which is under development. This paper is also the first attempt at complete sentence level parsing for Hindi.
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop \non Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. \nEditors: Markus Dickinson, Kaili Müürisep and Marco Passarotti. \nNEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 9 (2010), 55-66. \n© 2010 The editors and contributors. \nPublished by \nNorthern European Association for Language \nTechnology (NEALT) \nhttp://omilia.uio.no/nealt. \nElectronically published at \nTartu University Library (Estonia) \nhttp://hdl.handle.net/10062/15891.
Investigating local linguistic norms to discover larger patterns of language behaviour has been standard practice in sociolinguistic study. Looking closely at socially salient variables reveals patterns that problematize accepted trajectories of variation as traditional and newly emerging sociolinguistic identities interact. This paper integrates findings from multiple complementary projects to describe the forces influencing the stopping of interdental fricatives (dis ting for this thing), a highly salient marker of Newfoundland English, in and around St. John’s, the province’s major city. In urbanizing communities multivariate analysis reveals variation patterns typical of dialect erosion: older men maintain traditional norms while younger women move toward the standard, especially in linguistically salient contexts. In the same communities, a timing-based approach finds that young women seem to be agentively inserting stopped forms, suggesting that they have adopted a system with fricatives as the default choice. When we contrast urban and rural communities and affiliations, we find a more complex pattern: style shifting is greatest among urban males and rural females. We posit that these seemingly divergent patterns result from efforts by speakers to position themselves within the local social landscape during a period of rapid social change.
Current automatic wrappers using DOM tree and visual properties of data records to extract the required information from the search engine results pages generally have limitations such as the inability to check the similarity of tree structures accurately. Our study on the properties of data records shows that these data records located in search engine results pages are not only having similar visual properties and tree structures, but they are also related semantically in their contents. In this context, we propose an ontological technique using existing lexical database for English (WordNet) for the extraction of data records. We find that wrappers designed based on ontological technique are able to reduce the number of potential data regions to be extracted, thus they are able to improve the data extraction accuracy. We then use visual cue from the browser rendering engine to locate and extract the relevant data region from the web page by measuring the size of text and image of data records. Experimental results indicate that our technique is robust and performs better than the existing state of the art visual based wrappers.
For over 30 years, reference resolution, the process of determining what a noun phrase including a pronoun refers to in written and spoken language, has been an important and on-going area of research. Most existing pronominal reference resolution algorithms and systems are designed to use syntactic information and surface features (e.g. number and gender). These lines of research with regard to pronominal reference resolution have plateaued with accuracy rates in the vicinity of 80%(+/-10), depending on the domain and techniques used. This thesis explores how to incorporate multiple theories and algorithms into a single system (i.e. a pipeline of components each specializing in a certain aspect of reference resolution). Our framework combines subsystems that each specialize in an aspect of reference resolution for the pronoun it. The framework contains a total of five subsystems: (1) Creates a set of prospective antecedents that is previous forms such as noun phrases, clauses, and verb phrases that introduce possible referents. Rules established by our empirical study investigating the Givenness Hierarchy’s claim that the cognitive status of being in focus is necessary for being a referent of it are used to guide antecedent selection. (2) Uses binding theory to disqualify possible antecedents using syntactic information. (3) Uses number and gender to disqualify possible antecedents. (4) Creates a framework for semantic reasoning by integrating information from VerbNet, Propbank, and WordNet. The framework allows for reasoning about what type of semantic restrictions and constraints for a given verb can be enforced on the prospective antecedent of it. (5) When two or more forms remain in the set of prospective antecedents, a preference-based algorithm is employed to select the best guess from the set of possible antecedents. The framework created by this thesis includes a database and a computer system that implements a portion of the pipelined architecture. The database describes in tabular form all the information used to create the semantic reasoning subsystem, the parts of the Penn Treebank Wall Street Journal corpus used for testing, the information used by the number and gender subsystems, the results of each stage of the pipelined system, and the information used to create the preference-based algorithm for the best guess. The system integrates research from the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and computer science to create the next generation of reference resolution systems capable of understanding what we mean when we write or talk.
Since early 1990s, with the advancement of machine learning methods and the availability of data resources such as treebanks and parallel corpora, data-driven approaches to NLP have made significant progress. The success of such data-driven approaches has cast doubt on the relevance of linguistics to NLP. Conversely, NLP techniques are rarely used to help linguistics studies. We believe that there is room to expand the involvement of linguistics in NLP, and likewise, NLP in linguistics, and that the cross-pollination of ideas between the disciplines can greatly benefit both fields. We are pleased to present the workshop on NLP and Linguistics: Finding the Common Ground in order to focus on some of the work that uses NLP and linguistics for mutual benefit, and discuss future plans for continuing collaborations. The workshop is intended to spur discussion on how NLP and linguistics can help each other, including new methods in incorporating linguistic knowledge into statistical systems to advance the state of the art of NLP, and the feasibility of using NLP techniques to acquire linguistic knowledge for a large number of languages and to assist linguistic studies. Fifteen papers were submitted and nine were accepted (one later withdrew), and the accepted papers are oriented around the following themes: • Research that shows awareness of a particular linguistic phenomenon and its effects on statistical systems: Caines and Buttery discuss the zero auxiliary construction (You talking to me?), awareness of which can improve performance of NLP on spoken English. Samaradzic and Merlo suggest that awareness of different types of light verb constructions could affect word alignment. Su, Huang, and Chen show that the linguistic notion of evidentiality can be used for automatic detection of trustworthiness. • New methods in incorporating linguistic knowledge into statistical systems to improve the start of the art: The papers by Caines and Buttery, Cook and Stevenson, Samaradzic and Merlo, and Su, Huang, and Chen all present a number of linguistic features that can be used for modeling or other corpus-based tasks. • Research that demonstrates the feasibility of creating NLP systems to automatically acquire linguistic knowledge for a large number of languages: Mayer, Rohrdantz, Plank, Bak, Butt, and Keim examine a phonotactic constraint in 3,200 languages. Poornima and Good propose the repurposing of traditional word lists from historical and comparative linguistics to NLP applications. • Research that demonstrates the benefits of using NLP techniques to help particular linguistic studies: This volume is rich with examples of corpus-based techniques shedding light on linguistic phenomena, including the ambiguity of German past participles (Zarries, Cahill, Kuhn, and Rohrer), zero auxiliary constructions (Caines and Buttery), light verbs (Samaradzic and Merlo), a paradoxical reading of no X is too Y to Z (Cook and Stevenson), the phonotactic constraint of Similar Place Avoidance (Mayer, Rohrdantz, Plank, Bak, Butt, and Keim), and evidentiality (Su, Huang, and Chen). • The relative strengths and weaknesses of corpus-based and rule-based resources: Plank and van Noord examine the domain portability of rule-based and corpus-trained parsers. Zarries, Cahill, Kunh, and Rohrer show that a corpus-based analysis can help reduce ambiguity of German past participles in a rule-based parser.
The paper presents an approach to semi-automatic verb valency frame extraction from the Croatian Dependency Treebank. Our algorithm extracted 1923 verb valency frames for 594 different verbs. We discuss applicability of our method to semi-automatic verb valency lexicon creation and refinement, along with possibilities of utilizing it in the task of parsing Croatian texts.
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
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.
Message Oriented Middleware (MOM) is getting popular along with the development of heterogeneous platforms and applications. Most Message Oriented Middleware supports Publish/Subscribe scheme for message interoperation and it usually matches topics directly by matching keywords. Recent Semantic Message Oriented Middleware base on ontology which requires knowledge to be predefined. In this paper, we provide a semantic method for matching topics (keywords) by using a lexical database (WordNet). By expanding the publishing queries among topics (keywords), highly related topics can also be subscribed all at once. As a result, we propose a Semantic Publish/Subscribe Message Oriented Middleware which is suitable for many general purposes without special configurations.
Megastudies with processing efficiency measures for thousands of words allow researchers to assess the quality of the word features they are using. In this article, we analyse reading aloud and lexical decision reaction times and accuracy rates for 2,336 words to assess the influence of subjective frequency and age of acquisition on performance. Specifically, we compare newly presented word frequency measures with the existing frequency norms of Kucera and Francis (1967), HAL (Burgess & Livesay, 1998), Brysbaert and New (2009), and Zeno, Ivens, Millard, and Duvvuri (1995). We show that the use of the Kucera and Francis word frequency measure accounts for much less variance than the other word frequencies, which leaves more variance to be "explained" by familiarity ratings and age-of-acquisition ratings. We argue that subjective frequency ratings are no longer needed if researchers have good objective word frequency counts. The effect of age of acquisition remains significant and has an effect size that is of practical relevance, although it is substantially smaller than that of the first phoneme in naming and the objective word frequency in lexical decision. Thus, our results suggest that models of word processing need to utilize these recently developed frequency estimates during training or setting baseline activation levels in the lexicon.
Abstract. In this paper we present an evaluation of new techniques for automatically detecting sentiment polarity (Positive or Negative) in the students responses to Unit of Study Evaluations (USE). The study compares categorical model and dimensional model making use of five emotion categories: Anger, Fear, Joy, Sadness, and Surprise. Joy and Surprise are taken as a Positive polarity, whereas Anger, Fear and Sadness belong to Negative polarity in the binary classes, respectively. We evaluate the performances of category-based and dimension-based emotion prediction models on the 2,940 textual responses. In the former model, WordNet-Affect is used as a linguistic lexical resource and two dimensionality reduction techniques are evaluated: Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) and Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). In the latter model, ANEW (Affective Norm for English Words), a normative database with affective terms, is employed. Despite using generic emotion categories and no syntactical analysis, NMF-based categorical model and dimensional model result in better performances above the baseline. 1
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...
The aim of this paper is to show the potential of SciE-Lex, a lexical database of non-specialised (bio) medical terms, intended to help Spanish scientists, especially those in the medical community, to write native-like scientific articles in English. SciE-Lex provides morphological, semantic, syntactic and collocational information. In line with new trends in corpus and phraseological studies, which emphasise the importance of controlling multi-word expressions as a device to struccture discourse and improve language fluency, SciE-Lex is now being supplemented with 3- to 5 -word clusters and provides explicit information about their composition, function and textual distribution. Formulaic constructions are classified according to their function in the discourse. The new additions in SciE-Lex also illustrate the advantages that the electronic format can offer, such as the posibility of connecting formulaic constructions to headwords by means of hyperlinks and the indusion of information on the variability of prototypical expressions, accompanied by notes clarifying their usage patterns.
Reviewed by: Laboratory phonology 8 Jaye Padgett Laboratory phonology 8. Ed. by Louis Goldstein, D. H. Whalen, and Catherine T. Best. (Phonology and phonetics 4-2.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. Pp. xvi, 675. ISBN 9783110176780. $192 (Hb). This collection of papers is the end-product of the eighth Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon), held in New Haven, Connecticut, in June 2002, and hosted by Yale University and Haskins Laboratories. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Catherine P. Browman. If the LabPhon conferences and volumes were a bit renegade when they began, they are now more of an institution. It was still unusual in the 1980s to combine phonological theorizing with experimental methods and with theories drawn from phonetics and psycholinguistics, but to do so now seems more the norm. Out of thirteen papers published in the 1989 issue of Phonology, three incorporate experimental methodologies. (I construe ‘experimental’ broadly to include, for example, gestural or neural network modeling and formal learning theory.) In 2009 it was nine out of thirteen. (Six of these were from a special issue called ‘Phonological models and experimental data’; the reader can decide whether this strengthens or weakens the point.) The early ‘labphon’ movement can take credit for much of this change. This year we should see the inaugural publication of a laboratory phonology journal to replace the published volumes. In my view, this shift to a regular, peer-reviewed, and more accessible forum is very welcome. The book contains twenty-six contributions (including four commentary pieces) and an introduction. It is divided into three sections (two of them further subdivided): ‘Qualitative and variable faces of phonological competence’, ‘Sources of variation and their role in the acquisition of phonological competence’, and ‘Knowledge of language-specific organization of speech gestures’. I found these groupings to be nebulous; what comes through much more clearly is a second theme, on sign languages and comparisons between spoken and sign language. The deployment of laboratory methods and ‘philosophy’ in exploring sign languages is an exciting development. Other leitmotifs in the book draw on gestural phonology, exemplar modeling, acquisition, and the roles of abstract and categorical vs. concrete and gradient notions in representation and usage. Some of the papers are probably longer and less clearly written than they might be, but this is a minor complaint about a very interesting collection of works. Given space limitations here, I could not do justice to all twenty-six contributions; instead I focus on highlighting a few of them. Mirjam Ernestus and Harald Baayen, in ‘The functionality of incomplete neutralization in Dutch: The case of past-tense formation’ (27–49), replicate, for one speaker, the finding in Warner et al. 2004, 2006 of incomplete neutralization (IN) of final devoicing in Dutch, based on a reading task involving nonce verb forms. (Unlike in Warner et al., the forms were not presented as minimal pairs.) Particularly interesting are the results of their perception experiments using the speaker’s productions as stimuli. Ernestus and Baayen show that subjects not only detected IN but also used it to choose the appropriate past-tense ending (-te or -de) for the nonce verb stimulus forms, a task that requires the listener to infer the underlying voicing of the stem-final obstruent. The authors argue that IN, as well as their perception results, are due to the storage of lexical paradigms, among other things. Consider for example the form [vεrvεit] ‘widen’ and its infinitival form [vεrvεid n]. Even if the former is stored in its surface form (contrary to the assumption of [End Page 957] most generative phonologists), both the production and the perception of its final consonant will be influenced by activation of the associated form [vεrvεid n] (see also Bybee 2001). IN has posed a serious problem for the traditional understanding of the phonology-phonetics relation, in which discrete phonology is transduced into continuous phonetics, because if /vεrvεid/ is categorically devoiced to [vεrvεit] by phonology, then phonetic implementation has no means of recovering underlying voicing in order to produce IN. The storage and use of entire paradigms circumvents this problem. Since not all...
Background and Aim: Understanding and defining developmental norms of auditory comprehension is a necessity for detecting auditory-verbal comprehension impairments in children. We hereby investigated lexical auditory development of Persian (Farsi) speaking children.Methods: In this cross-sectional study, auditory comprehension of four 2-5 year old normal children of adult’s child-directed utterance at available nurseries was observed by researchers primarily to gain a great number of comprehendible words for the children of the same age. The words were classified into nouns, verbs and adjectives. Auditory-verbal comprehension task items were also considered in 2 sections of subordinates and superordinates auditory comprehension. Colored pictures were provided for each item. Thirty 2-5 year old normal children were randomly selected from nurseries all over Tehran. Children were tested by this task and subsequently, mean of their correct response were analyzed. Results: The findings revealed that there is a high positive correlation between auditory-verbal comprehension and age (r=0.804, p=0.001). Comparing children in 3 age groups of 2-3, 3-4 and 4-5 year old, showed that subordinate and superordinate auditory comprehension of the former group is significantly lower (p<0.05) than the others. Intra-group comparisons revealed no significant difference between nouns, verbs and adjectives (p>0.05), while the difference between subordinate and superordinate auditory comprehension was significant in all age groups (p<0.05).Conclusion: Auditory-verbal comprehension develop much faster at lower than older ages and there is no prominent difference between word linguistic classes including nouns, verbs and adjectives. Slower development of superordinate auditory comprehension implies semantic hierarchical evolution of words.
Entre la tradition de l'écriture et celle de l'oralité, l'écrit administratif, à Abidjan, est un écrit entre deux. Il se situe entre deux cultures que véhiculent une langue officielle au statut légitimé par la constitution et des langues locales issues de quatre groupes linguistiques et qui, bien que non enseignées, sont couramment pratiquées par les populations. Dans une telle situation de diglossie et contrairement aux pratiques orales en français qui, en Afrique francophone, mettent en relief une appropriation du français par des phénomènes d'interférences lexicales, syntaxiques et des adjonctions ou des troncations, l'écrit administratif apparaît comme un document correctement écrit des points de vue syntaxique et lexical. Cependant, comme dans toute rencontre, le contact des langues en présence influe sur le comportement langagier des locuteurs. Dans le cadre de l'écrit administratif, les locuteurs prennent appui sur les dispositifs langagiers oraux, mieux connus et mieux maîtrisés, pour construire leurs écrits. Ce dispositif, marqué essentiellement par une éthique de l'altérité qui fait de la parole un art, est source d'étrangeté du fait de son éloignement des normes conventionnelles de l'écrit administratif. Cette étrangeté qui n'est que la manifestation de l'étranger dans sa pratique du français administratif, révèle une esthétique discursive particulière. Ainsi, l'expression de l'identité linguistique, l'écrit administratif est également à percevoir comme le lieu d'une interculturalité et le locuteur un passeur favorisant le lien nécessaire entre les peuples et les cultures.
Moving to a new country and living in a new culture involves many processes of change and adaptation for the individual. Not only is the person surrounded by a new language, different norms, behaviour and traditions, but suddenly he or she is also an “immigrant” in this new society. This study was set out to examine the experience of being an immigrant in Sweden, with the aim to make the Swedish society more conscious about its own role in the acculturation process. By creating a better understanding of both hardships and remedies that individuals live through as immigrants in the Swedish society, we can more easily find the best way to live together. The study has a phenomenological approach and has been carried out with a qualitative method where open interviews have been used. The participant’s accounts have been analyzed based on the theory of acculturation and with the help of Sphinx Lexica, a program for lexical analysis. The analysis demonstrate that many of the participants share similar experiences, such as that some of the Swedish characteristics complicate the acculturation process and that the language constitutes a strenuous obstacle in the relationships with the Swedish people. As a Swede one should try to be more open and welcoming towards new people, thus not be afraid of what one might find “different” or “strange”. One should strive to look beyond certain stereotypes of immigrants in order to see the individual, and be especially aware of one’s own role regarding the outcomes in the meetings with people from other cultures.
This paper presents a rational argument based on examples of real language to make the case that lay definitions of parts-of-speech are more complex than commercial language pedagogy appreciates. Put simply, school grammars are misleading. They tend to pick the most convenient words for explanation and categorize them as if there were few or no variants within that category, when in reality, however, variation is the norm. Word class categories as presented in typical textbook illustration function as a handicap to future learning. I thus argue two points in this paper. First, that the definitions of lexical categories ought to be made in the form of respecting distinct linguistic dimensions and not in oversimplified and misleading one- dimensional categories which must be unlearned in order for learners to begin actually learning about how languages function. Secondly, a proper theory that radically separates the representation of linguistic expressions in the various grammatical components must be adopted for pedagogy to develop. I illustrate these points with examples drawn from English and Japanese.
The current study investigated typical, everyday Chinese interaction online and examined what linguistic meanings arise from this form of communication – not only semantic but also, importantly, pragmatic, discursive, contextual and lexical meanings etc. In particular, it set out to ascertain whether at least some of the cultural values and norms etc. known to exist in Chinese culture, as reflected in the Chinese language, are maintained or preserved in modern Chinese e-communication. To do all this, the author collected a sample set of data from Chinese online resources found in Singapore, including a range of blog sites and MSN chat rooms where interactants have kept their identities anonymous. A radically semantic approach was adopted – namely, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) model – to analyze meanings that arose from the data. The analyses were presented and compiled in the way of “cultural cyberscripts” – based on an NSM analytical method called “cultural scripts”. Through these cyberscripts, findings indicated that, while this form of e-communication does exhibit some departure from conventional socio-cultural values and norms, something remains linguistically and culturally Chinese that is unique to Chinese interaction online.