Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
18265 papers
We propose an effective approach to automatically identify predicate heads in Chinese sentences based on statistical pre-processing and rule-based post-processing. In the preprocessing stage, the maximal noun phrases in a sentence are recognized and replaced by “NP ” labels to simplify the sentence structure. Then a CRF model is trained to recognize the predicate heads of this simplified sentence. In the post-processing stage, a rule base is built according to the grammatical features of predicate heads. It is then utilized to correct the preliminary recognition results. Experimental results show that our approach is feasible and effective, and its accuracy achieves 89.14 % on Tsinghua Chinese Treebank. 1
The article presents the Russian-Czech lexical database which is being compiled in the Institute of Slavonic Studies AS CR, defines its content, structure and functioning.
This paper presents a method for the automatic detection and correction of malapropism errors found in documents using the WordNet lexical database, a search engine (Google) and a paronyms dictionary. The malapropisms detection is based on the evaluation of the cohesion of the local context using the search engine, while the correction is done using the whole text cohesion evaluated in terms of lexical chains built using the linguistic ontology. The correction candidates, which are taken from the paronyms dictionary, are evaluated versus the local and the whole text cohesion in order to find the best candidate that is chosen for replacement. The testing methods of the application are presented, along with the obtained results.
Chinese parsing has received more and more attention, and in this paper, we use toolkit to perform parsing on the data of Tsinghua Chinese Treebank (TCT) used in CIPS, and we use Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) to train specific model for the head recognition. At last, we compare different results on different POS results. 1
DeSR is a statistical transition-based dependency parser which learns from annotated corpora which actions to perform for building parse trees while scanning a sentence. We describe the experiments performed for the ICON 2010 Tools Contest on Indian Dependency Parsing. DesR was configured to exploit specific features from the Indian treebanks. The submitted run used a stacked combination of four configurations of the DeSR parser and achieved the best unlabeled accuracy scores in all languages. The contribution to the result of various choices is analyzed.
Real world audio clips contain numerous acoustic sources. The rich acoustic information they carry cannot be fully described with single or even multiple terms about the acoustic sources alone. For instance, the label birds assigned to a birds singing clip that includes sounds of trees and a small river does not properly capture the experience it creates in the person listening to it. In this paper we introduce a novel scheme where the subjective experience of listening to sound clips containing mixture of sources is captured using affective measures. Furthermore, in contrast to the conventional approach of simple label-based methods, the affective ratings are then used to evaluate the performance of an example-based audio retrieval system. We argue that audio retrieval systems can benefit from using affective measures which are well established in experimental psychology, especially when dealing with real world audio clips. We present experimental results of our pilot study to support this motivation where the latent indexing framework has been employed for example-based retrieval on a collection of clips from the BBC sound effects library. The result of our study indicates that using the scheme of affective measures for representation and evaluation is indeed a promising direction to explore.
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
We describe an effective constituent projection strategy, where constituent projection is performed on the basis of dependency projection. Especially, a novel measurement is proposed to evaluate the candidate projected constituents for a target language sentence, and a PCFG-style parsing procedure is then used to search for the most probable projected constituent tree. Experiments show that, the parser trained on the projected treebank can significantly boost a state-of-the-art supervised parser. When integrated into a tree-based machine translation system, the projected parser leads to translation performance comparable with using a supervised parser trained on thousands of annotated trees. 1
This paper investigates whether high-quality annotations for tasks involving semantic disambiguation can be obtained without a major investment in time or expense. We examine the use of untrained human volunteers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in disambiguating prepositional phrase (PP) attachment over sentences drawn from the Wall Street Journal corpus. Our goal is to compare the performance of these crowdsourced judgments to the annotations supplied by trained linguists for the Penn Treebank project in order to indicate the viability of this approach for annotation projects that involve contextual disambiguation. The results of our experiments show that invoking majority agreement between multiple human workers can yield PP attachments with fairly high precision, confirming that this crowdsourcing approach to syntactic annotation holds promise for the generation of training corpora in new domains and genres.
There often exist multiple corpora for the same natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, such corpora are generally used independently due to distinctions in annotation standards. For the purpose of full use of readily available human annotations, it is significant to simultaneously utilize multiple corpora of different annotation standards. In this paper, we focus on the challenge of constituent syntactic parsing with treebanks of different annotations and propose a collaborative decoding (or co-decoding) approach to improve parsing accuracy by leveraging bracket structure consensus between multiple parsing decoders trained on individual treebanks. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, which outperforms stateof-the-art baselines, especially on long sentences. 1
Two of the main corpora available for training discourse relation classifiers are the RST Discourse Treebank (RST-DT) and the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), which are both based on the Wall Street Journal corpus. Most recent work using discourse relation classifiers have employed fully-supervised methods on these corpora. However, certain discourse relations have little labeled data, causing low classification performance for their associated classes. In this paper, we attempt to tackle this problem by employing a semi-supervised method for discourse relation classification. The proposed method is based on the analysis of feature cooccurrences in unlabeled data. This information is then used as a basis to extend the feature vectors during training. The proposed method is evaluated on both RST-DT and PDTB, where it significantly outperformed baseline classifiers. We believe that the proposed method is a first step towards improving classification performance, particularly for discourse relations lacking annotated data.
The paper introduces principles of rescript and lemmatization of lexemes with German origin for Lexical database of Baroque and Humanist Czech made in the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague.
The paper introduces principles of rescript and lemmatization of lexemes with German origin for Lexical database of Baroque and Humanist Czech made in the Czech Language Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague.
We investigate parsing accuracy on the Korean Treebank 2.0 with a number of different grammars. Comparisons among these grammars and to their English counterparts suggest different aspects of Korean that contribute to parsing difficulty. Our results indicate that the coarseness of the Treebank’s nonterminal set is a even greater problem than in the English Treebank. We also find that Korean’s relatively free word order does not impact parsing results as much as one might expect, but in fact the prevalence of zero pronouns accounts for a large portion of the difference between Korean and English parsing scores. 1
For centuries, scholars have explored the deep links among human languages. In this paper, we present a class of probabilistic models that use these links as a form of naturally occurring supervision. These models allow us to substantially improve performance for core text processing tasks, such as morphological segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic parsing. Besides these traditional NLP tasks, we also present a multilingual model for the computational decipherment of lost languages. 1. Overview Electronic text is currently being produced at a vast and unprecedented scale across the languages of the world. Natural Language Processing (NLP) holds out the promise of automatically analyzing this growing body of text. However, over the last several decades, NLP research efforts have focused on the English language, often neglecting the thousands of other languages of the world (Bender, 2009). Most of these languages are currently beyond the reach of NLP technology due to several factors. One of these is simply the lack of the kinds of hand-annotated linguistic resources that have helped propel the performance of English language systems. For complex tasks of linguistic analysis, hand-annotated corpora can be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive to produce. For example, the most widely used annotated corpus in the English language, the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al., 1994), took years for a team of professional linguists to produce. It is unrealistic to expect such resources to ever exist for the majority of the world’s languages.
We describe a process for converting the Penn Arabic Treebank into the CCG formalism. Previous efforts have yielded CCGbanks in English, German, and Turkish, thus opening these languages to the sophisticated computational tools developed for CCG and enabling further cross-linguistic development. Conversion from a context free grammar treebank to a CCGbank is a four stage process: head finding, argument classification, binarization, and category conversion. In the process of implementing a basic CCGbank conversion algorithm, we reveal properties of Arabic grammar that interfere with conversion, such as subject topicalization, genitive constructions, relative clauses, and optional pronominal subjects. All of these problematic phenomena can be resolved in a variety of ways- we discuss advantages and disadvantages of each in their respective sections. We detail these and describe our categorial analysis of each of these Arabic grammatical phenomena in depth, as well as technical details on their integration into the conversion algorithm. 1.
The Prague Dependency Treebank (henceforth PDT) is a large collection of texts in Czech. It contains several layers of rich annotation, ranging from morphology to deep syntax. It is unique in its size and theoretical background, especially for a language like Czech, which can be, with regard to the number of its speakers, considered a small language. In this article, we use PDT 2.0 to demonstrate that within real NLP systems, complex annotations may cut both ways. We present several issues that might pose problems when extracting data from PDT, and complex structures in general, and hint on possible solutions.
Respondents can vary strongly in the way they use rating scales. Specifically, respondents can exhibit a variety of response styles, which threatens the validity of the responses. The purpose of this article is to investigate how response style and content of the items affect rating scale responses. The authors develop a novel model that accounts for different types of response styles, content of items, and background characteristics of respondents. By imposing a bilinear parameter structure on a multinomial logit model, the authors graphically distinguish the effects on the response behavior of the characteristics of a respondent and the content of an item. The authors combine this approach with finite mixture modeling, yielding two segmentations of the respondents: one for response style and one for item content. They apply this latent-class bilinear multinomial logit model to the well-known List of Values in a cross-national context. The results show large differences in the opinions and the response styles of respondents and reveal previously unknown response styles. Some response styles appear to be valid communication styles, whereas other response styles often concur with inconsistent opinions of the items and seem to be response bias.
Habituation is a fundamental form of learning manifested by a decrement of neuronal responses to repeated sensory stimulation. In addition, habituation is also known to occur on the behavioral level, manifested by reduced emotional reactions to repeatedly presented affective stimuli. It is, however, not clear which brain areas show a decline in activity during repeated sensory stimulation on the same time scale as reduced valence and arousal experience and whether these areas can be delineated from other brain areas with habituation effects on faster or slower time scales. These questions were addressed using functional magnetic resonance imaging acquired during repeated stimulation with piano melodies. The magnitude of functional responses in the laterobasal amygdala and in related cortical areas and that of valence and arousal ratings, given after each music presentation, declined in parallel over the experiment. In contrast to this long-term habituation (43 min), short-term decreases occurring within seconds were found in the primary auditory cortex. Sustained responses that remained throughout the whole investigated time period were detected in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex extending to the dorsal part of the anterior insular cortex. These findings identify an amygdalocortical network that forms the potential basis of affective habituation in humans.
Latent variable grammars take an observed (coarse) treebank and induce more fine-grained grammar categories, that are better suited for modeling the syntax of natural languages. Estimation can be done in a generative or a discriminative framework, and results in the best published parsing accuracies over a wide range of syntactically divergent languages and domains. In this paper we highlight the commonalities and the differences between the two learning paradigms. 1
Discontinuities occur especially frequently in languages with a relatively free word order, such as German. Generally, due to the longdistance dependencies they induce, they lie beyond the expressivity of Probabilistic CFG, i.e., they cannot be directly reconstructed by a PCFG parser. In this paper, we use a parser for Probabilistic Linear Context-Free Rewriting Systems (PLCFRS), a formalism with high expressivity, to directly parse the German NeGra and TIGER treebanks. In both treebanks, discontinuities are annotated with crossing branches. Based on an evaluation using different metrics, we show that an output quality can be achieved which is comparable to the output quality of PCFG-based systems. In most constituency treebanks, sentence annotation is restricted to having the shape of trees without crossing branches, and the non-local dependencies induced by the discontinuities are modeled by an additional mechanism. In the Penn Treebank (PTB) (Marcus et al., 1994), e.g., this mechanism is a combination of special labels and empty nodes, establishing implicit additional edges. In the German TüBa-D/Z (Telljohann et al., 2006), additional edges are established by a combination of topological field annotation and special edge labels. As an example, Fig. 1 shows a tree from TüBa-D/Z with the annotation of (1). Note here the edge label ON-MOD on the relative clause which indicates that the subject of the sentence (alle Attribute) is modified. 1
In this paper we present an experimental toolbox for automatic tree-to-tree alignment based on local classification and alignment inference. The aligner implements a recurrent architecture for structural prediction using history features and a sequential classification procedure. The discriminative base classifier uses a log-linear model which enables simple integration of various features extracted from the data. The Lingua-Align toolbox provides a flexible framework for feature extraction including contextual properties and implements several alignment inference procedures. Various settings and constraints can be controlled via a simple frontend or called from external scripts. Lingua-Align supports different treebank formats and includes additional tools for conversion and evaluation. In our experiments we can show that our tree aligner produces results with high quality and outperforms unsupervised techniques proposed otherwise. It also integrates well with another existing tool for manual tree alignment which makes it possible to quickly integrate additional training material and to run semi-automatic alignment strategies. 1.
In the architecture of a natural language processing system based on linguistic knowledge, two types of component are important: the knowledge databases and the processing modules. One of the knowledge databases is the lexical database, which is responsible for providing the lexical unities and its properties to the processing modules. The systems that process two or more languages require bilingual and/or multilingual lexical databases. These databases can be constructed by aligning distinct monolingual databases. In this paper, we present the interlingua and the strategy of aligning the two monolingual databases in REBECA, which only stores concepts from the “wheeled vehicle” domain.
This paper proposes a method of correcting annotation errors in a treebank. By using a synchronous grammar, the method transforms parse trees containing annotation errors into the ones whose errors are corrected. The synchronous grammar is automatically induced from the treebank. We report an experimental result of applying our method to the Penn Treebank. The result demonstrates that our method corrects syntactic annotation errors with high precision.
This paper presents a requirement ontology which can represent both sentence level semantics which means semantics in the structure of a sentence, and word level semantics which means the meaning of a word. In this way, complete semantics of a sentence can be described. The Generalized Upper Model (GUM) is a widely used linguistically motivated ontology which supplies a hierarchy of general concepts for defining objects, actions and properties. WordNet is a worldwide used lexical database for English language. In the requirement ontology, structures of a sentence are described as relations between sentence components which are derived from GUM. And meanings of key words are explained by WordNet. Thus, semantics of natural language requirements (NLRs) are captured for further processing.
Mandarin Chinese is always classified as a topic-prominent language (Li and Thompson 1975). One of the characteristics of a topic-prominent language is that pronouns may drop since speakers and addressees know what they are talking about. It is this feature that makes topic-prominent languages or pronoun-drop languages interesting, for the dropped pronoun or the zero pronoun can be controlled by the topic in the previous discourse not just in the local sentence. Interestingly, there are three levels or layers in Chinese speech (Li, Ing Cherry 1985, Chu 1991), which causes foreigners to make some mistakes when they make Chinese sentences and paragraphs because they might not know how to use noun phrases, pronouns, and zero pronouns in a proper way. That’s why Chinese discourse grammar is important in teaching/learning Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language or as a second language. Jyun-Gwang Chen (2008) found the specific rules of the third person singular tā他 in Chinese discourse grammar from the linguistic database. His study is meaningful on the view of Chinese discourse grammar. Chen (2008) reported that the distributions of zero pronoun are the most unmarked and the most prevailing way of anaphora in Chinese. Pronouns and noun phrases are used markedly as event markers in Chinese speech (Chen 2008). However, it seems that Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan has changed a great deal since its establishment as national language in the early years of the republic and is still changing. Non-human pronoun它tā, for instance, is used more frequently nowadays. The purposes of the present study are to find out if there is language change of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, involving the use of pronoun它tā, and to what extent has the rules of its use been changed. In addition, we hope to discover what are the sociolinguistic factors involved in the changes. There are English-Chinese and Chinese-English translation exercises in our study. We elicit subjects to translate English pronoun it into Chinese in order to check if the zero anaphoric system of Mandarin Chinese has changed. Besides, an investigation of discourse database has been done to reconfirm our study purposes. The results of the translation exercises support our claim that Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan has changed. Currently, a few speakers keep using zero pronoun more often than non-human pronoun它tā, while other speakers tend to use less zero pronoun and more and more non-human pronoun它tā. A close examination of the discourse database also shows that the usage of non-human pronoun它tā in subject position and after-preposition position has increased these years with a significance level of p < 0.1. As for sociolinguistic factors involved, both gender difference and age difference were found. College males and high school males preferred to speak conservatively than our female subjects did. High school males and high school female used more disposal constructions than the other senior subjects did. The research questions of the present study are answered. Nevertheless, further study is absolutely needed. The instrument of the present study is Chinese-English and English-Chinese translation tests, and the sample numbers are quite restricted. Subjects’ performances may still be influenced by the written language. Even though to double check whether this is the case or not, we have also made a careful examination of a database corpus of transcripts from a popular TV show, which is not spontaneous discourse data. Thus, study based on spontaneous discourse database involving a sufficient of speakers is needed before a firm conclusion can be drawn.
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.
Studies of discourse relations have not, in the past, attempted to characterize what serves as evidence for them, beyond lists of frozen expressions, or markers, drawn from a few well-defined syntactic classes. In this paper, we describe how the lexicalized discourse relation annotations of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) led to the discovery of a wide range of additional expressions, annotated as AltLex (alternative lexicalizations) in the PDTB 2.0. Further analysis of AltLex annotation suggests that the set of markers is open-ended, and drawn from a wider variety of syntactic types than currently assumed. As a first attempt towards automatically identifying discourse relation markers, we propose the use of syntactic paraphrase methods.
The Arabic language has a very rich morphology where a word is composed of zero or more prefixes, a stem and zero or more suffixes. This makes Arabic data sparse compared to other languages, such as English, and consequently word segmentation becomes very important for many Natural Language Processing tasks that deal with the Arabic language. We present in this paper two segmentation schemes that are morphological segmentation and Arabic TreeBank segmentation and we show their impact on an important natural language processing task that is mention detection. Experiments on Arabic TreeBank corpus show 98.1 % accuracy on morphological segmentation and 99.4 % on morphological segmentation. We also discuss the importance of segmenting the text; experiments show up to 6F points improvement of the mention detection system performance when morphological segmentation is used instead of not segmenting the text. Obtained results also show up to 3F points improvement is achieved when the appropriate segmentation style is used. 1.
Animal research demonstrated that during fear conditioning the amygdala plays a central role in forming an association between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (US). Lesion studies conducted in patients who underwent a unilateral anterior temporal lobe resection, however; yielded contradictory findings. To date, it remains unclear whether amygdala damage only affects fear-conditioned startle responding or impairs both the latter and fear-conditioned skin conductance responding (SCR). Moreover inconsistency exists regarding the preservation of contingency knowledge in amygdala-damaged patients. In the current study, a differential fear conditioning task was presented to a unilaterally amygdala-damaged patient group and a healthy control group, recording fear-potentiated startle responses along with SCRs. Retrospectively, the valence of the CSs and contingency awareness was assessed. Unlike the control group, unilaterally amygdala-damaged patients showed neither in their SCRs nor in their valence ratings an effect of fear conditioning. The startle data, however, yielded in none of the two test groups fear-conditioned responding. Finally, considerably fewer patients (37.5%) than controls (95%) acquired correct memory of the presented contingency. Based on these findings we concluded that the fear conditioning impairment in amygdala-damaged patients was not restricted to SCRs, but also affected valence ratings and memory of the presented contingency. A broader theory of the amygdala as relevance detector is proposed in order to account for the diverse neurological findings obtained so far.
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), 211-222. \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.
Factorization is the operation of transforming a production in a Linear Context-Free Rewriting System (LCFRS) into two simpler productions by factoring out a subset of the nonterminals on the production’s righthand side. Factorization lowers the rank of a production but may increase its fan-out. We show how to apply factorization in order to minimize the parsing complexity of the resulting grammar, and study the relationship between rank, fanout, and parsing complexity. We show that it is always possible to obtain optimum parsing complexity with rank two. However, among transformed grammars of rank two, minimum parsing complexity is not always possible with minimum fan-out. Applying our factorization algorithm to LCFRS rules extracted from dependency treebanks allows us to find the most efficient parsing strategy for the syntactic phenomena found in non-projective trees. 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.
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.
Parser disambiguation with precision grammars generally takes place via statistical ranking of the parse yield of the grammar using a supervised parse selection model. In the standard process, the parse selection model is trained over a hand-disambiguated treebank, meaning that without a significant investment of effort to produce the treebank, parse selection is not possible. Furthermore, as treebanking is generally streamlined with parse selection models, creating the initial treebank without a model requires more resources than subsequent treebanks. In this work, we show that, by taking advantage of the constrained nature of these HPSG grammars, we can learn a discriminative parse selection model from raw text in a purely unsupervised fashion. This allows us to bootstrap the treebanking process and provide better parsers faster, and with less resources. 1
Internet dating is now ranked third as the way people meet, behind meeting at work or school, and through a friend or family member. This study researches the use of social and linguistic norms in online dating advertisements. Previous research has posed that social groups create unique identities and group members will selectively present themselves in ways consistent with these identities. Using Craigslist to assess the similarities and differences between genders and sexualities in online personal postings, an online quiz-like survey was created. This research reports on people's abilities to predict the sexual orientation and gender of the writer based on linguistic cues.
Ott, N. & R. Ziai (2010). Evaluating dependency parsing performance on german learner language. In M. Dickinson, K. Müürisep & M. Passarotti (eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Vol. 9 of NEALT Proceeding Series, 175–186.
Medium rank clauses, such as participial and infinitival clauses, have been shown in earlier studies to be more frequent in English than in Swedish. In-stead Swedish prefers complete, finite clauses. This constitutes a problem for English-Swedish machine translation. Here I report a study of such construc-tions using the LinES Parallel Treebank. I also show how the dependency annotation in LinES can be used to define clauses of different ranks. 1
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...
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...
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.
Objective: To investigate whether interviewer personality, sex or being of the same sex as the interviewee, and training account for variance between interviewers’ ratings in a medical student selection interview. Design, setting and participants: In 2006 and 2007, data were collected from cohorts of each year’s interviewers (by survey) and interviewees (by interview) participating in a multiple mini-interview (MMI) process to select students for an undergraduate medical degree in Australia. MMI scores were analysed and, to account for the nested nature of the data, multilevel modelling was used. Main outcome measures: Interviewer ratings; variance in interviewee scores. Results: In 2006, 153 interviewers (94% response rate) and 268 interviewees (78%) participated in the study. In 2007, 139 interviewers (86%) and 238 interviewees (74%) participated. Interviewers with high levels of agreeableness gave higher interview ratings (correlation coefficient [r]=0.26 in 2006; r=0.24 in 2007) and, in 2007, those with high levels of neuroticism gave lower ratings (r=− 0.25). In 2006 but not 2007, female interviewers gave higher overall ratings to male and female interviewees (t=2.99, P=0.003 in 2006; t = 2.16, P = 0.03 in 2007) but interviewer and interviewee being of the same sex did not affect ratings in either year. The amount of variance in interviewee scores attributable to differences between interviewers ranged from 3.1% to 24.8%, with the mean variance reducing after skills-based training (20.2% to 7.0%; t=4.42, P = 0.004). Conclusion: This study indicates that rating leniency is associated with personality and sex of interviewers, but the effect is small. Random allocation of interviewers, similar proportions of male and female interviewers across applicant interview groups, use of the MMI format, and skills-based interviewer training are all likely to reduce the effect of variance between interviewers.
Resumen: En el marco de la traducción automática árabe-inglés, el enfoque pseudointerlingüístico de UniArab ha logrado, incluso con oraciones simples, mejores resultados que los traductores automáticos basados en modelos estadísticos. El éxito de UniArab se cimienta en el modelo funcional de la Gramática del Papel y la Referencia, la cual es capaz de reconstruir la estructura lógica subyacente a un texto de entrada. No obstante, es preciso reemplazar la base de datos léxica de este traductor automático por una base de conocimiento más robusta con el fin de procesar textos lingüísticamente más complejos. De hecho, la integración de FunGramKB en la arquitectura de UniArab permite que este traductor automático utilice ahora una auténtica representación interlingüística denominada “estructura lógica conceptual”, dando lugar a un enfoque conceptualista que favorece la generación multilingüe. Palabras clave: traducción automática, UniArab, FunGramKB, base de conocimiento, estructura lógica, interlingua Abstract: In the field of the Arabic-to-English machine translation, the pseudo-interlingual approach of UniArab clearly outperforms existing statistical machine translators, even only with the processing of simple sentences. The success of UniArab is founded upon the functional model of Role and Reference Grammar, which is able to reconstruct the logical structure underlying the input. However, it is essential to replace the UniArab lexical database with a robust knowledge base which enables linguistically-complex texts to be processed adequately. Indeed, the integration of FunGramKB into the architecture of UniArab allows the system to use a real interlingual representation known as “conceptual logical structure”, resulting in a conceptualist approach which supports multilingual generation.