Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
We propose a lexical organisation for multilingual lexical databases (MLDB). This organisation is based on acceptions (word-senses). We detail this lexical organisation and show a mock-up built to experiment with it. We also present our current work in defining and prototyping a specialised system for the management of acception-based MLDB. Keywords: multilingual lexical database, acception, linguistic structure. Introduction Needs for large scale lexical resources for Natural Language Processing (NLP) in general and for Machine Translation (MT) in particular, increase every day. These resources are considered to represent the most expensive part of almost any NLP system. Hence, an increasing interest in the development of reusable dictionaries can be observed. To develop a Multilingual Lexical Database (MLDB), we think of two main approaches. First, the transfer approach where the links between the languages are realized via unidirectional bilingual dictionaries. This approach is...
The input and organization of terms play a central role in a dictionary-based translation system. The quality of the output text depends, for the most part, on the development of the dictionary. However, a lexical database cannot solve all problems of ambiguity. Moreover, it cannot take into account the effective usage of terms in specialized texts. This paper describes how terminology management is carried out in a machine-translation environment. We list a series of problems posteditors have to cope with and offer partial solutions to these problems. The material is based on work done in a translation firm where all translators are required to postedit machine translations.
The University of Delaware and the University of Dundee are collaborating on a project that is investigating the application of spatialization and spatial metaphors to interfaces for Augmentative and Alternative Communication. This paper outlines the project's motivation, goals, and methodological considerations. It presents a number of design principles obtained from a review of the HCI literature. Finally, it describes progress on the demonstration of this approach. This application called VAL provides a computer-based word board that retains spatial equivalence to the user's paper-based system. It also allows the user to access an extended lexicon through an interface to the WordNet lexical database.
Abstract Multiattribute theory is an important conceptual framework for assessing recreation choice. Methods of assessing attribute importance, varying in the amount of cueing they provide, can affect study results through context effects, attribute omission‐inclusion effects, and group rating effects. Attribute omission‐inclusion effects occur when important attributes are omitted or unimportant attributes are included on a list. Context effects may result when attributes are evaluated in the context of different sets. Group rating effects occur when respondents rate attributes that may or may not be salient to their decision. Three commonly used strategies of generating attributes—labeled the researcher‐generated, the modal salient beliefs, and the idio‐graphic methods, differing in their level of cueing, were compared. Results suggest that when different attribute sets are generated, omission‐inclusion effects can dramatically affect interpretation of findings. Context effects did not appear to influence attribute ratings. Group rating effects led to differences in valence ratings of some attributes. Use of different data collection strategies, varying in their level of cueing, would lead researchers to different conclusions about what was important to recre‐ationists in their site choices.
An automatic treebank conversion method is proposed in this paper to convert a treebank into another treebank. A new treebank associated with a different grammar can be generated automatically from the old one such that the information in the original treebank can be transformed to the new one and be shared among different research communities. The simple algorithm achieves conversion accuracy of 96.4% when tested on 8,867 sentences between two major grammar revisions of a large MT system.
A study analyzed patterns of usage of political vocabulary in Hong Kong English as found in newspaper reports of a leading Hong Kong English-medium newspaper and two other English-medium newspapers. Data were drawn from a computerized corpus and a clippings file. The report begins with an overview of the theoretical basis of the study of ideology in the lexicon of English as a world language. The second section discusses Hong Kong's sociopc,litical situation and some themes in official political discourse. Finally, the processes through which some of these themes are embedded in Hong Kong English are examined. Eight categories of vocabulary that exemplify two processes in the transformation of ideology into lexis (naming and metaphor) are identified: nominalization; naming by analogy; hollow or neutral names that conceal a document or institution's real function; re-lexicalization, cr giving a new name when it is claimed a new concept is at issue; mythical actors (e.g., average man); fixed collocations; intei-textual reference; and strategies used to dissociate the writer from his text. It is concluded that the vocabulary used does not accurately reflect cultural and linguistic norms of the indigenous populvtion, but is closely related to colonial ideologies. (MSE) *********************A************************************************* Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * from the original document. ***********************************************************************
Pierre Fiala: « L'interprétation en lexicométrie: une approche quantitative des données lexicales » Lexicometry is a set of methods of analysis applied to textual corpora. Interpretation rests on computerized procedures of lexical statistics together with methodological principles such as the reduction of external variables, the choice of the graphic unit, the norm of interpretation which is specific to the corpus. The interpretative stage treats meaning at the global level of the textual corpus, as a differential object reconstructed from quantitative lexical contrasts. It proceeds through matching and reorganizing statistical evidence.
After failing to solve items from the Remote Associates Test (RAT), subjects showed significant priming effects when the solutions were presented in a lexical-decision task (Experiment 1). Experiments 2 and 3 found no significant priming effect when subjects were asked merely to remember the RAT elements, or for targets that were associates of only two of the three elements in incoherent RAT items. Experiment 4 showed that identifying a correct solution took longer than lexical decision, and that the probability of correct identifications for a given item was uncorrelated to the priming effect for the item. Experiment 5 yielded item-difficulty norms for 68 RAT items as well as a replication of the priming effect observed for unsolved items in Experiment 1. In Experiment 6, a significant priming was observed for targets that were solutions to hard items but not for solutions to easy items. This research provides evidence for implicit problem-solving, which is nonconscious but not automatic, and is neither a perceptual nor a purely memory-related phenomenon.
In this paper, we outline the concept of a fuzzy class used in programs for eliciting computerized fuzzy ratings. Fuzzy ratings allow respondents to provide symmetrical or asymmetrical latitudes of acceptance around a preferred point. These ratings have been used in research testing career theories and person-environment fit models. The variables defining the fuzzy class and the various functions that can be performed by it are described in the paper. The idea of a fuzzy class may be of interest to those involved in expert systems, knowledge engineering, or in fuzzy classification and measurement in general. A program, FUZRATE, written in object-oriented C++ code that uses the concept of a fuzzy class, is available on request. Both source code and a binary (executable) file are available.
Critics have condemned English Romantic tragedies as a series of poor imitations of Renaissance tragedy. This paper tests such “literary-critical” questions through statistical comparisons of ten plays from each group. The measures chosen give evidence of a strong and consistent difference between the groups, going beyond historical changes in the language. The Romantic tragedies are more expository; the Renaissance ones include more commonplace interactions between characters. The later plays do not show the marked variations in function-word frequencies of their predecessors. Of the Renaissance plays, Shakespeare's show the closest affinity to the Romantic tragedies, and the most telling contrasts.
A lexicon is an essential part of any natural language processing system. The size, content and format of the lexicon is crucial in determining the power and sophistication of a natural language processing system. However, a lexicon which provides comprehensive, consistent and accurate lexical information and which is in a format facilitating fast retrieval is not easily available. This paper reports on a project which aims at the development of such a lexicon. The resulting lexicon is actually the modified and extended version of the machine tractable version of the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. The modification and extension concentrate mainly on the aspects of comprehensiveness, consistency, explicitness, accuracy and the dictionary format. The modified and extended version is considered a desirable source of lexical information for any natural language processing system.
We have revised the mainframe EYEBALL, written in the early 1970s and used by several researchers during that decade, to run on microcomputers. This program parses English language texts and provides a statistical description of many linguistic features which are of interest to those involved in stylistics. In order to produce an analytical approach which goes beyond the simple reporting of linguistic data, we have selected a small number of features which characterize noticeable elements of the language used and we have written programs to facilitate statistical comparisons among texts. While EYEBALL is not automatic, the interactive parsing routines are elegant enough that the users spend most of their time confirming accurate guesses, rather than having to determine the structure of each phrase and clause. We hope that the program will be used by humanities scholars who have not previously been inclined to wrestle with the barriers of mainframe computing in the past.
ABSTRACT: Nigeria is a member of the British Commonwealth, having once been a colony of Britain. The English language that developed as a result of the contact with Nigerian indigenous languages over three or more centuries, is the standard British variety mediated by some Nigerian linguistic colour. It can therefore be described as distinctly Nigerian, but British norm‐dependent. Years of political, social and economic interaction between Nigeria and the USA have motivated an increasing use of the American variety of English (in addition to British English) in Nigeria. This paper examines some of the linguistic features of the emerging Americanisms in Nigerian English, especially at the phonological and lexical levels, and attempts to account for these features. Findings point in the direction of a growing bidialectism ‐ American and British norms ‐ in Nigerian English. The paper also analyzes Nigerian usage quantitatively in relation to some sociological variables. It concludes that Nigerian speakers of English now face challenges much more complex than bi‐competence in the language.
The dramatically increased use of verbal report methodologies in psychological research has created a need for new tools to improve the efficiency and reliability of encoding these data. A computer-aided protocol encoding system called MPAS (Multiple Protocol Analysis System) presents individual protocol segments in a randomised order to one or more coders and then stores computer keyboard-entered codes for later output to an SPSS formatted data file. In the present paper, MPAS is described, and a brief example is provided of how MPAS can be used in a con-trolled laboratory study to rigorously analyze verbal protocol data.
TACT, a freeware program from the University of Toronto's Centre for Computing in the Humanities, is a highly sophisticated tool for text retrieval; although written for experienced critics and researchers, it can teach undergraduate students to read literature in new, fresh ways. Without requiring that the user become either a programmer, linguist, mathematician, or statistician,TACT introduces the literature student to the computer as a research tool. Studies of imagery and symbolism, of structural patterns, and of prosody can result from the student's careful tagging of a literary text and can yield significant insights into the work of literature. Students who use the computer as such a tool learn to read literary texts more closely and to think more clearly about literary problems.
This paper presents a method for constructing deterministic Prolog parsers from corpora of parsed sentences. Our approach uses recent machine learning methods for inducing Prolog rules from examples (inductive logic programming). We discuss several advantages of this method compared to recent statistical methods and present results on learning complete parsers from portions of the ATIS corpus. Introduction Recent approaches to constructing robust parsers from corpora primarily use statistical and probabilistic methods such as stochastic context-free grammars (Black et al., 1992; Pereira and Schabes, 1992). Although several current methods learn some symbolic structures such as decision trees (Black et al., 1993) and transformations (Brill, 1993), statistical methods still dominate. In this paper, we present a method that uses recent techniques in machine learning to construct symbolic, deterministic parsers from parsed corpora (treebanks). Specifically, our approach is implemented in...
Assessing the impact of disease and treatment of the emotional state and temperament of preschool children has been limited by the lack of sensitive and objective measurement techniques. To construct such a measure for longitudinal use, a sample of 179 children with febrile seizures and 85 normal children were used to develop the Minnesota Preschool Affect Rating Scales (MN-PARS). Video-taped play sessions were a source of behaviorally anchored ratings on 12 scales. Factor analysis yielded three factors of Negative Affect, Positive Affect, and Self-regulation with additional individual scales of Dependency and Activity Level. These scales and factors yield reliable ratings, as measured by interrater agreement and split-half techniques, as well as initial evidence of concurrent validity. Although they were developed for measuring the behavioral effects of phenobarbital on children with febrile seizures, these scales provide an objective means of measuring emotional expression and self-regulation useful for other studies.
The editions produced in the first three decades of the Cinquecento by Bembo, and by editors linked with him or the Aldine press, struck a balance between a tendency to steer all texts towards a uniformity based on Trecento Tuscan and on the other hand a respect for what the author originally wrote, even if this meant allowing a few archaisms or regionalisms to survive. A hierarchy of susceptibility to editorial change was established among the different linguistic categories: interventions are found most often in orthography and phonology, then in the area of morphology, and become gradually rarer in syntax, lexis and, where relevant, questions of metre. However, as one goes further from Bembo's influence, one finds less balance in Venetian editing between the normative approach and the conservative one, so that all aspects of ‘la scrittura’ become subject to the editor's pen. Sometimes this was because the texts concerned were much more strongly regional in character than, for instance, the Arcadia of 1504, as well as being of lesser literary stature. The kind of editing which took place in these cases was of particular linguistic significance because it helped to extend a norm to a wide range of writing. But, as we shall see, even texts such as those of Boccaccio could be radically rewritten. The problem was that, once such works were given the status of models, they then had to conform with the orthographical, grammatical and metrical rules and the lexical and stylistic ideals which they were thought, rightly or wrongly, to provide.
We propose a lexical organisation for multilingual lexical databases (MLDB). This organisation is based on acceptions (word-senses). We detail this lexical organisation and show a mock-up built to experiment with it. We also present our current work in defining and prototyping a specialised system for the management of acception-based MLDB.
Both traditional and computerized scholars face problems when they attempt empirical research on women writers and women readers using currently available computational tools. This essay discusses some factors that have inhibited empirical research; it develops its examples from work in progress on 18th century English poetry and on reader responses. A number of large linguistic and text databases are almost useless for research on women writers because works by women are either not included or represented by easily accessible, rather than editorially clean, texts. Traditional and contemporary reader response studies are also insufficiently empirical for reasons of sexual bias or flaws in research design.
The Documentation Project is a cooperative project between Faculties of Arts in the Norwegian universities. It aims to produce “the Norwegian universities' databases for language and culture” from the paper-based archives at the participating institutions. The project has been active on a national basis since 1992. This paper describes the methodologies involved and ongoing subprojects.
This paper presents a morphological analysis method for the Korean language. The characteristics and adjacency information of the words can be obtained from sentences in a large corpus. Generally a word can be analyzed to a result by applying the adjacency attributes and rules. However, we have to choose one from the several results for the ambiguous words. The collected morpheme's adjacency attributes and relations with neighbor words are recorded in a well designed dictionaries. With this information, abbreviated words as well as ambiguous words can be almost analyzed successfully. Efficiency of morphological analyzer depends on the information in the dictionaries. A morpheme dictionary and a phrase dictionary have been designed with lexical database, and necessary information extracted from the corpus is stored in the dictionaries.
Metaphors have computable semantics. A program called NETMET both generates metaphors and produces partial literal interpretations of metaphors. NETMET is based on Kittay's semantic field theory of metaphor and Black's interaction theory of metaphor. Input to NETMET consists of a list of literal propositions. NETMET creates metaphors by finding topic and source semantic fields, producing an analogical map from source to topic, then generating utterances in which terms in the source are identified with or predicated of terms in the topic. Given a metaphor, NETMET utilizes if-then rules to generate the implication complex of that metaphor. The literal leaves of the implication complex comprise a partial literal interpretation.
This paper considers the problem of quantifying literary style and looks at several variables which may be used as stylistic “fingerprints” of a writer. A review of work done on the statistical analysis of “change over time” in literary style is then presented, followed by a look at a specific application area, the authorship of Biblical texts.
The focus of the paper is on the use of computer corpora in language research. The historical background is touched on, with special reference to work within the International Computer Archive of Modern English (ICAME). Developments in the use of corpora are surveyed. Issues taken up include the representativeness and structure of corpora. Special attention is paid to pitfalls in the use of corpora. Corpus compilers must provide adequate documentation on the texts. Corpus users must know the corpus in order to evaluate whether it is appropriate for their research problem and in order to evaluate the results of their studies.
What do database (DB) querying and information retrieval imply for linguistics? What are data for the linguist? How can one envisage efficient access to data? I propose that DB querying in language sciences be designed linguistically and directly determined by linguistic data. Linguists from various backgrounds could then use a consensual query tool. An implemented data-directed DB querying system, which was developed for research on French interrogative structures, is presented in detail.
The main objective is to develop robust methods for the understanding and generation of both written and spoken human language, including but not limited to English. Penn is pursuing development of: (1) New mathematical and computational frameworks which are highly constrained, yet adequate to allow a simple, concise description of complex linguistic phenomena. These new frameworks are tested by the explicit encoding within each framework of a wide range of phenomena across a diverse set of human languages. (2) Both statistical and symbolic learning methods which automatically extract and effectively utilize the implicit linguistic knowledge in the Penn Treebank and the corpora of the Linguistic Data Consortium. These techniques have been tested against the performance of the best current methods.
The use of metacognitive strategies of learning and instruction such as content abstracts or previews, subtitles and captioning (on-screen foreign language subtitles) have been recurrent pedagogical tools for facilitating foreign language (L2) instruction. New technology has broadened their scope and multiplied the ways in which they can be used in L2 computer-based applications. A pilot test was carried out using a hypermedia instructional application for Spanish: “Operación Futuro.” The test addresses the question of how two types of metacognitive strategies, written and spoken Advance Organizers (AOs) and verbatim Captioning (CP) may facilitate L2 comprehension and recall.
Computer technology is applied extensively to biblical studies and many programs are available for all different categories of people interested in the Bible. This paper argues that text databases which offer additional features, such as links to morphological analyses or lexica, should influence the teaching of biblical languages. However, linguistic information in these databases is at present very limited and should be expanded to include the full spectrum of linguistic knowledge. Linguistic databases, developed specifically for researchers, should be integrated with concordance software, online grammars, etc., as well as cultural-historical material, to create a comprehensive biblical information system. Existing information should be included in such a system, but in converting paper documents to electronic publications, value should be added to the products by means of creating sophisticated methods of access and by integrating the material with other sources. Problems of compatibility and standardization are also briefly addressed.
552LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) from the preceding chapters. It reports on the methodology followed in the construction of WordNet, a lexical database of English made up of 54,000 entries organized into some 48,000 sets of synonyms. Working on the premise that 'the mental lexicon is organized by semantic relations' (201), WordNet attempts to model this organization. Miller & Fellbaum describe some of the relevant semantic relations that hold between lexical items and between classes oflexical items, and argue that correspondences between meaning and syntactic category are far from arbitrary. In sum, L&CS provides an excellent introduction to contemporary work in lexical semantics. For those already engaged in this area of linguistic research, it offers valuable new insights and suggests many directions for future research. It would make an ideal reference text for a cognitive science course with language as an important focus. Each article is very clearly written (and has been carefully proofread) and would be accessible to students with only a basic knowledge of linguistic metalanguage. The volume contains a language index, a name index, and a subject index which facilitate the reader's task. REFERENCES Bowerman, Melissa. 1990. Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate "linking rules"? Linguistics 28.1253-89. Gordon, Peter. 1985. Evaluating the semantic categories hypothesis: The case of the count/mass distinction. Cognition 20.209-42. Hale, Kenneth L. 1986. Notes on world view and semantic categories: Some Warlpiri examples. Features and projections, ed. by Pieter Muysken and Henk van Riemsdijk, 233-54. Dordrecht: Foris. Hopper, Paul J. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse. Lg. 56.251-99. Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Department of English[Received 8 February 1994.] The University of Queensland Brisbane, QId 4072 Australia Linguistic semantics. By William Frawley. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1992. Pp. xvii, 533. Paper $39.95. Reviewed by Victor Raskin, Purdue University By 'linguistic semantics', Frawley means 'the study of literal, decontextualized, grammatical meaning' (1). Other scholars have referred to similar enterprises as 'grammatical semantics', 'syntactical semantics', or 'semantics of syntax'. I will use the first of these terms (GS) for no principled reason. F makes it very clear, actually even before (xiii) the very first sentence of the text partially quoted above, that GS is what the book is about. I think it would have been even better if this had been reflected in the title as well. This review is going to be 'external' in the sense that it is written by a semanticist who is not comfortable with dividing linguistic semantics into GS and the rest of it, let alone with defining that rest of it out of linguistics and into philosophy or some such place. But I believe I understand enough about where GSers REVIEWS553 are coming from to suggest that they may also be uncomfortable with F's slippage away from GS proper, both in his theory and in his examples throughout the book. The book is a very substantial enterprise. Its 500-plus pages are divided into ten chapters, each with its own summary. Many sections, subsections, and sometimes groups of subsections are summarized as well. I found myself reading those summaries first and then delving into the sections, so I wonder if these summaries would not have worked better as road-mapping prefaces. The first two chapters stand apart both in their relative brevity and in their content, which is general theory. The remaining eight chapters deal each with one facet of meaning, often corresponding to a lexical category or a grammatical feature. Ch. 1, 'Semantics and linguistic semantics: Toward grammatical meaning' (1-16), briefly defines the nature of F's enterprise as the study of overtly grammatically encoded meaning. As an example of what is included in and what is excluded from that meaning, the causative and inchoative meanings of kill as 'cause to become dead' are included, while 'death' is not. In Ch. 2, 'Five approaches to meaning' (17-61), F discusses meaning as reference, meaning as logical form, meaning as context and use, meaning as culture, and meaning as conceptual structure. Loosely paraphrased, these can be presented in a more...
We describe a framework for vision processing (VP) which makes crucial use of a large lexical database which has been automatically derived from machine-readable dictionaries (MRDs). We suggest that MRDs encode much of the information about the physical and common-sense properties of objects needed for broad-coverage VP. Underlying this is the claim that organizing visual processing around a lexical database will allow for bidirectional mapping between images and linguistic descriptions of these images.
Examining the complex relationship between law and language enhances our understanding of the marginalization and subordination of linguistic Outsiders. This nexus between law and language has many manifestations. In this essay I discuss the biases about language that constrain traditional legal discourse while I explore strategies for its reframing by using the languages of Outsiders. Succinctly stated, this essay posits that traditional language norms create images or maintain stereotypes that stultify public discourse as well as impose cultural integration and linguistic assimilation with destructive consequences. The essay proposes that linguistic norms in law schools can be refashioned through pedagogical innovations to minimize their subordinating effects.
This paper describes a heuristic approach to automatically identifying which senses of a machinereadable dictionary (MRD) headword are semantically related versus those which correspond to fundamentally different senses of the word. The inclusion of this information in a lexical database profoundly alters the nature of sense disambiguation: the appropriate "sense" of a polysemous word may now correspond to some set of related senses. Our technique offers benefits both for on-line semantic processing and for the challenging task of mapping word senses across multiple MRDs in creating a merged lexical database.
The analysis of sound symbolism in poetry is one of the more promising applications of computational methods. This paper proposes using database software with spreadsheet capabilities to give maximum versatility in the examination of consonant alliteration. In this case the database is drawn from a 10th century anthology of classical Japanese verse called theKokinshû. In recent years scholars have pointed out a few obvious examples of sound symbolism inKokinshû poetry. This study attempts to show that with these few notable exceptions, poetry of the period seems to have striven toward a balance in sound, avoiding techniques such as word initial alliteration which might call attention to itself.
The Elemental Driving Simulator (EDS) is a PC-based software and hardware system for advising people with known or suspected cognitive impairment. It is elemental in its simplicity and in its simulation of the elements of driving-related cognitive abilities. The EDS explicitly addresses metacognition and quantitatively relates it to performance. A neuropsychological case example, with an EDS Personal Report, is complemented by statistical findings from (1) working-age drivers (norms), (2) patients with central nervous system impairment seeking driver rehabilitation, and (3) a large sample of older drivers. The EDS proved to be a challenging procedure that all the normals completed more consistently, efficiently, and accurately than the other groups. Clinically, it discriminated extreme cases and, for those who fell in between, it helped focus the issues for further assessment and intervention. The discussion addresses how much realism is necessary, as well as the psychometric limitations of on-road testing.
The statistical process of seriation arranges a set of objects along a one-dimensional line so that the distance between each pair of objects reflects the dissimilarity between them. The process has recently been cast into an algorithm which makes it feasible to seriate a few tens of objects efficiently on a personal computer. This algorithm is now used for establishing a chronology of the Troubadours according to certain melodic features in their works. Other musicological uses for seriation are proposed.
André Gide's collection offaits divers spans a period of fifty years and includes more than 650 documents. A database analysis offers an efficient means of handling such extensive material. Our goal is to trace statistically this author's varied interests as they evolved throughout his career.
This paper describes a method for the semi-automatic linking of lexical databases (LDBs) based on different source dictionaries and their partial merging. Equivalent entries from different dictionaries are mapped together and links are created between them at the sense level. The results can be modified interactively by the user and saved to form part of a new merged LDB whose entries will contain all the information included in the separate source LDBs. The aim is to provide a tool which makes it easier to compare and study lexical data derived from different sources and also to permit linguistic and lexical analyses of much richer data.
Eighty pianists each listened to 21 trials of solo piano music. Trials consisted of two different performances of the same excerpt, and the same music was played on all trials for any given subject. Over the 21 trials, seven different interpretations were presented in all possible pair-wise combinations. Forty subjects listened to a slow excerpt from Liszt's Totentanz, and the other forty listened to a fast excerpt from the same piece. The subjects' task was to select which of the two performances on each trial, if either, they preferred. Subjects were assigned randomly to one of four conditions: preference only, preference plus use of the musical score, preference plus use of rating scales, and preference plus use of both the musical score and rating scales ( n = 10 per treatment per excerpt). Results indicated that the use of the musical score and of rating scales both separately and in combination with each other did not improve consistency as compared to their nonuse. Subjects who responded to rating scales, however, were more consistent when they did not also use the musical score than when they did use it. Subjects were less consistent for the slow excerpt than they were for the fast excerpt, and consistency was unaffected by their piano experience. Presentation order within trials (first versus second excerpt) did not affect ratings; however, ratings on Trials 12-21 were slightly and significantly higher than ratings on Trials 1-10. Also, preference for a performance was not affected by preference for the performance immediately preceding it.
We should follow Mark Olsen's lead and think with maximum ambition of the role of the computer in supporting literary research of the highest order. Thus the computer enables us to answer one of the great questions of literary criticism: how does a given writer contribute to the changing language? We can now chart the influence of given writers by correlating their words and phrasing with computerized dictionaries so as to produce profiles and histories of the way words have entered the language.
: Attempts to improve the performance of handwriting recognition systems have often involved the exploitation of linguistic constraints such as syntax or semantics. In either case, successful implementation requires the creation of a lexical database containing the relevant information. However, to create a database of semantic information from scratch for a realistically sized vocabulary is an enormous task - which is a major reason why so many semantic theories fail to "scale up" from the small, artificial domains in which they were developed. A better approach is to use existing sources of semantic information, such as machine-readable dictionaries (from which definitions may be extracted) and text corpora (from which collocations may be derived). This paper describes the development of techniques that use such resources to improve the performance of handwriting recognition systems. KEY WORDS: handwriting recognition, semantic information, machine-readable dictionaries, text corpora...
ABSTRACT: Until the late nineteenth century French was the dominant international language of modern Western Europe, and, with the spread of empire, many other areas around the globe. Now French itself feels threatened by the spread of English. The protection of the French language has both ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ aspects. On the negative, defensive side, purists rail against the specific qualities of English, and the social values these are said to represent. The rejection of English and specifically American influence on the French language is related to the rejection of modernity, and of the nation‐state based on shared political principles rather than shared culture. On the positive, offensive side, international French‐language organizations promote French as the language of francophone brotherhood. This co‐operative effort, however, conflicts with the traditional formulation and role of linguistic norms in French society. With the changing composition of French society, the definition of the nation‐state in France, and the conception of linguistic norms of French, may be in the process of changing.