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18265 papers
This paper introduces GLARF, a framework for predicate argument structure. We report on converting the Penn Treebank II into GLARF by automatic methods that achieved about 90% precision/recall on test sentences from the Penn Treebank. Plans for a corpus of hand-corrected output, extensions of GLARF to Japanese and applications for MT are also discussed.
Corpora of phrase-structure-annotated text, or treebanks, are useful for supervised training of statistical models for natural language processing, as well as for corpus linguistics. Their primary drawback, however, is that they are very time-consuming to produce. To alleviate this problem, the standard approach is to make two passes over the text: first, parse the text automatically, then correct the parser output by hand.
Natural language processing technologies offer ease-of-use of computers for average users, and ease-of-access to on-line information. Natural language, however, is complex, and the traditional methods of parsing with a single grammar and parser may result in an inefficient and large system that is difficult to maintain and is fragile in dealing with language irregularities. This paper begins by reviewing an alternative effort in grammar decomposition (also known as grammar partitioning) for natural language parsing, which aims to alleviate these problems. We then propose a novel automatic approach for grammar partitioning, in comparison with a random method of partitioning. Our experiments show that syntactic GLR parsing is formidable for the Wall Street Journal corpus in the Penn Treebank when a single grammar is used. This is due to too many grammar rules for parsing table generation. However, grammar partitioning solves the problem and offers a viable alternative. Our results also show that our automatic grammar partitioning method based on the mutual information criterion fares better than a random partitioning method and exhibits efficiency in parsing as well as high parse coverage. 1
In this paper a new similarity-based learning algorithm, inspired by string edit-distance (Wagner and Fischer, 1974), is applied to the problem of bootstrapping structure from scratch. The algorithm takes a corpus of unannotated sentences as input and returns a corpus of bracketed sentences. The method works on pairs of unstructured sentences or sentences partially bracketed by the algorithm that have one or more words in common. It finds parts of sentences that are interchangeable (i.e. the parts of the sentences that are different in both sentences). These parts are taken as possible constituents of the same type. While this corresponds to the basic bootstrapping step of the algorithm, further structure may be learned from comparison with other (similar) sentences. We used this method for bootstrapping structure from the flat sentences of the Penn Treebank ATIS corpus, and compared the resulting structured sentences to the structured sentences in the ATIS corpus. Similarly, the algorithm was tested on the OVIS corpus. We obtained 86.04 % non-crossing brackets precision on the ATIS corpus and 89.39 % non-crossing brackets precision on the OVIS corpus.
Manual, large scale (computational) grammar development is time consuming, expensive and requires lots of linguistic expertise. More recently, a number of alternatives based on treebank resources (such as Penn-II, Susanne, AP treebank) have been explored. The idea is to automatically ``induce'' or rather read off (P)CFG grammars from the parse annotated treebank resources and to use the treebank grammars thus obtained in (probabilistic) parsing or as a starting point for further grammar development. The approach is cheap, fast, automatic, large scale, ``data driven'' and based on real language resources.\n\nTreebank grammars typically involve large sets of lexical tags and non-lexical categories as syntactic information tends to be encoded in monadic category symbols. They feature flat rules (trees) that can ``underspecify'' attachment possibilities. Treebank grammars do not in general follow Xbar architectural design principles (this is not to say that treebank grammars do not have design principles). As a consequence, treebank grammars tend to have very large CFG rule bases (e.g. Penn-II > 17,000 CFG rules for about 1 million words of text) with often only minimally differing rules. Even though treebank grammars are large, they are still incomplete, exhibiting unabated rule accession rates. From a grammar engineering point of view, the size of the rule base poses problems for maintainability, extendability and, if a treebank grammar is to be used as a CF-base in a LFG grammar, for functional (feature-structure) annotations. From the point of view of theoretical linguistics, flat treebank trees and treebank grammars extracted from such trees do not express linguistic generalisations. From the perspective of empirical and corpus linguistics, flat trees are well-motivated as they allow underspecification of subtle and often time consuming attachment decisions. Indeed, it is sometimes doubted whether highly general Xbar schemata usefully scale to ``real'' language.\n\nIn previous work we developed methodologies for automatic feature-structure annotation of grammars extracted from treebanks. Automatic annotation of ``raw'' treebank grammars is difficult as annotation rules often need to identify subsequences in the RHSs of flat treebank rules as they explicitly encode head, complement and modifier relations. Xbar based CFG rules should substantially facilitate automatic feature-structure annotation of grammar rules.\n\nIn the present paper we conduct a number of experiments to explore a space of possible grammars based on a small fragment of the AP treebank resource. Starting with the original treebank fragment we automatically extract a CFG G. We then apply an automatic structure preserving grammar compaction step which generalises categories in the original treebank fragment and reduces the number of rules extracted, resulting in a generalised treebank fragment and in a compacted grammar Gc. The generalised fragment is then manually corrected to catch missed constituents (and the like) resulting in an automatically extracted, compacted and (effectively manually) corrected grammar Gc,m. Manual correction proceeds in the ``spirit'' of treebank grammars (we do not introduce Xbar analyses). We then explore how many of the manual correction steps on treebank trees can be achieved automatically. We develop, implement and test an automatic treebank ``grooming'' methodology which is applied to the generalised treebank fragment to yield a compacted and automatically corrected grammar Gc,a. Grammars Gc,m and Gc,a are very similar to compiled out ``flat'' LFG-82 style grammars. We explore regular expression based compaction (both manual and automatic) to relate Gc,m to a LFG-82 style grammar design. Finally, we manually recode a subsection of the generalised and manually corrected treebank fragment into ``vanilla-flavour'' XBar based trees. From these we extract a compacted, manually corrected, XBar based grammar Gc,m,x. We evaluate our grammars and methods using standard labelled bracketing measures and according to how well they perform under automatic feature-structure annotation tasks.
Although generic (i.e. domain independent) and specialized (i.e. domain specific) lexical resources are usually developed with different aims, an integrated consultation seems to be necessary for many NLP based applications. We describe an integration procedure based on the definition of plug-in relations that are established to manage overlaps and inconsistencies between the two resources. The approach has been experimented connecting ItalWordNet, a generic lexical database for Italian, and Economic-WordNet, a specialized wordnet for the economic and financial domain. In this paper we address the issue of integrating the information included in a generic lexical database with the information included in a specialized (i.e. domain specific) lexical database. We restrict our investigation to wordnet-like lexical resources, that is lexical databases whose model is derived from WordNet (Miller, 1990) (Fellbaum, 1998). The aim is to define a set of procedures to allow an of the two resources, such that overlapping senses are merged and conflicting situations are properly managed. Our starting point are two existing wordnets for Italian: ItalWordnet (IWN)1, a generic wordnet deriving from EuroWordNet (Vossen, 1999), and Economic-wordnet (ECOWN), a wordnet for the economic and financial domain. The current application scenario is a recommender system (Magnini and Strapparava, 2001), which includes a 1 This research has been supported by SI-TAL (Integrated System for the Automatic Treatment of Language), a National Project devoted to the creation of large linguistic resources and software for Italian written and spoken language processing. document processing module based on a light form of word sense disambiguation. The experimental domain is that of financial news. As a first attempt to use the two resources in conjunction, a “specific-first” strategy was implemented, which, given a lemma in the document, first looks up in the specific wordnet and just in case of failure resorts to the generic wordnet. An evident drawback of this approach is that it does not cover cases of words belonging to both of the databases when the correct interpretation of the word is placed in the generic wordnet. For instance, in the phrase “building its share market” (taken from a financial news), the word “share” is used with the generic meaning of “portion”, while in the specialized wordnet we would have the economic sense of “share” as part of the capital stock. To overcome this limit we tried with a “union” strategy which, for a given lemma, considers the sum of the senses for that lemma in the two resources. The problem here is that senses for words belonging to both the databases tend to proliferate, making disambiguation harder. What seems necessary is a deeper integration of the respective word senses, such that overlapping senses are merged and conflicting situations are detected and solved. Our scenario allows some significant simplifications with respect to the general problem of merging two distinct ontologies (Hovy, 1998). On the one side we have a specialized database, whose content is supposed to be more accurate and precise as far as specialized information is concerned; on the other side we can assume that the generic resource guarantees a more uniform coverage as far as high level senses are concerned. These two assumptions provide us with a powerful precedence criterion to be used for managing inheritance in the integration procedure. The contribution of our work consists in a!# $ % &(' ) approach which allows the connecting of the generic and the specialized wordnets in a flexible and modular way. This is realized by means of a semi-automatic procedure with four main steps: (i) first, a minimum set of specialized “basic synsets” is identified; (ii) basic synsets are aligned to corresponding generic synsets and a particular plug-in configuration is selected; (iii) for each plug-in configuration a merging algorithm reconstructs the corresponding portion of the integrated wordnet; (iv) possible inconsistencies are solved. There are two main benefits of this approach. First, already existing specialized resources can be connected to a generic resource without any change in the resource being necessary, a part from the data conversion into a wordnet-like format. Second, the inheritance of linguistic oriented information makes the specialized resources usable in existing wordnet-based applications. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the lexical resources we have used. Section 3 introduces the basic notions of the plug-in approach with some technical details. Section 4 describes the plug-in procedure and reports the results of an application of the approach. Section 5 places our proposal in the context of related works. * +-,., / 0 132.5476 8,91 0 2;:, 4@?BA / 45., C D In this work we assume a taxonomic wordnetlike structure of the lexicon, where nodes in the hierarchy are synsets (i.e. synonym sets), and a rather large set of conceptual relations (e.g. Part-of, Cause, Hypernymy, Pertains-to, etc.) are available to build a semantic net among synsets. The EuroWordNet model has been adopted, which is rich enough to encompass most of the relations used in existing non wordnet-like terminological databases. We focus on the integration of already existing generic and specialized wordnets; both the data acquisition modalities and the evaluation of the quality of the resources do not affect our approach. As for generic lexical databases, typically they contain knowledge with no specific coverage and much attention is placed on coding linguistic-oriented information, such as subcategorization relations and fine-grained sense distinctions. There are several examples of existing generic lexical databases, including the English WordNet (Miller, 1990), monolingual wordnets for several European languages (e.g. Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Basque, etc.), the SENSUS (Hovy, 1998) and the Mikrokosmos (Mahesh, 1996) ontologies. Specialized databases focus on a certain domain, providing sub-hierarchies of highly specialized concepts with a limited use of lexical and linguistic relations. Synset variants tend to assume the shape of complex terms (i.e. multiwords) and the role of the domain expert is crucial for establishing correct relations. In addition high level knowlegde (i.e. the top ontology) tend to be simplified and domain oriented. Many specialized lexical databases have been developed, particularly for concrete applications, including, for example, a taxonomy for the medical domain (Gangemi et E F., 1999), the Art and Architecture Getty Thesaurus and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names. The plug-in model we present has been applied within the SI-TAL project to connect a generic wordnet and a specialized wordnet that have been created independently. GIH J K LNM O P Q R H (Roventini et S T., 2000) created as part of the EuroWordNet project and further developed through the introduction of adjectives and adverbs, is the lexical database involved in the plug-in as a generic resource and consists of about 45,000 lemmas. U5V W X W Y@Z V []\^W _ ` acb d is a specialized wordnet for the economic domain and consists of about 5,000 lemmas distributed in about 4,700 synsets. Table 1 summarizes the quantitative data of the two resources considered.
Abstract. We present a suite of applications used for the Italian Treebank which share their linguistic processor and end up finally in higher level annotation tool called “FILES”. The first application “FILES ” – Fully Integrated Linguistic Environment for Syntactic and Functional Annotation- is a prototype for a fully integrated linguistic environment for syntactic functional annotation of corpora. It takes as input tagged and disambiguated tokenized texts, a file containing the same text split into sentences, and a files containing the morphosyntactic and semantic features associated to each tagged token. Tokens may be aither single words, polywords, abbreviations or punctuation marks. An as yet separated module of “FILES ” is the syntactic constituency annotation environment which uses a shallow parser on the same tagged files and produces a fully bracketed output where each sentence is a record. Files contaning bracketed sentences are given as input to Syntactic Constituency Annotation Tool “SCAT” for manual verification. 1
This paper presents an open-domain textual Question-Answering system that uses several feedback loops to enhance its performance. These feedback loops combine in a new way statistical results with syntactic, semantic or pragmatic information derived from texts and lexical databases. The paper presents the contribution of each feedback loop to the overall performance of 76% human-assessed precise answers.
One of the primary tasks of Information Extraction is recognizing all of the different guises in which a particular type of event can appear. For instance, a meeting between two dignitaries can be referred to as A meets B or A and B meet, or a meeting between A and B took place/was held/opened/convened/finished/dragged on or A had/presided over a meeting/conference with B
Low interrater reliability coefficients are a common problem for behavior rating scales. One hypothesis to account for this is that raters have different frames of reference from which to judge behaviors. In the present study, the interrater reliability of the Devereux Behavior Rating Scale-School Form was examined, and the hypothesis that teacher frame of reference influences ratings was explored. Special and general education teachers rated the behavior of 51 children with emotional disturbance (ED), and general education teachers inde pendently rated the behavior of 51 matched control children. Interrater reliability coeffi cients were higher for the general education sample than for the sample of children with ED. Limited support was found for the hypoth esis that frame of reference may affect ratings. Findings suggest that many factors influence ratings and that teachers may benefit from rater training.
International audience
In the last decade, given the availability of corpora in several distinct languages, research on multilingual part-of-speech tagging started to grow. Amongst the novelties there is mWANN-Tagger (multilingual weightless artificial neural network tagger), a weightless neural part-of-speech tagger capable of being used for mostly-suffix-oriented languages. The tagger was subjected to corpora in eight languages of quite distinct natures and had a remarkable accuracy with very low sample deviation in every one of them, indicating the robustness of weightless neural systems for part-of-speech tagging tasks. However, mWANN-Tagger needed to be tuned for every new corpus, since each one required a different parameter configuration. For mWANN-Tagger to be truly multilingual, it should be usable for any new language with no need of parameter tuning. This article proposes a study that aims to find a relation between the lexical diversity of a language and the parameter configuration that would produce the best performing mWANN-Tagger instance. Preliminary analyses suggested that a single parameter configuration may be applied to the eight aforementioned languages. The mWANN-Tagger instance produced by this configuration was as accurate as the language-dependent ones obtained through tuning. Afterwards, the weightless neural tagger was further subjected to new corpora in languages that range from very isolating to polysynthetic ones. The best performing instances of mWANN-Tagger are again the ones produced by the universal parameter configuration. Hence, mWANN-Tagger can be applied to new corpora with no need of parameter tuning, making it a universal multilingual part-of-speech tagger. Further experiments with Universal Dependencies treebanks reveal that mWANN-Tagger may be extended and that it has potential to outperform most state-of-the-art part-of-speech taggers if better word representations are provided.
This paper describes how traditional andnon-traditional methods were used to identifyseventeen previously unknown articles that webelieve to be by Stephen Crane, published inthe New-York Tribune between 1889 and1892. The articles, printed without byline inwhat was at the time New York City's mostprestigious newspaper, report on activities ina string of summer resort towns on New Jersey'snorthern shore. Scholars had previouslyidentified fourteen shore reports as Crane's;these possible attributions more than doublethat corpus. The seventeen articles confirmhow remarkably early Stephen Crane set hisdistinctive writing style and artistic agenda. In addition, the sheer quantity of the articlesfrom the summer of 1892 reveals how vigorouslythe twenty-year-old Crane sought to establishhimself in the role of professional writer. Finally, our discovery of an article about theNew Jersey National Guard's summer encampmentreveals another way in which Crane immersedhimself in nineteenth-century military cultureand help to explain how a young man who hadnever seen a battle could write so convincinglyof war in his soon-to-come masterpiece,The Red Badge of Courage. We argue that thejoint interdisciplinary approach employed inthis paper should be the way in whichattributional research is conducted.
It is important to give useful clues for selecting desiredcontent from a number of retrieval results obtained (usually) from avague search request. Compared with monolingual retrieval, such asupport framework is inevitable and much more significant for filteringgiven translingual retrieval results. This paper describes an attempt toprovide appropriate translation of major keywords in each document in across-language information retrieval (CLIR) result, as a browsingsupport for users. Our idea of determining appropriate translation ofmajor keywords is based on word co-occurrence distribution in thetranslation target language, considering the actual situation of WWWcontent where it is difficult to obtain aligned parallel (multilingual)corpora. The proposed method provides higher quality of keywordtranslation to yield a more effective support in identifying the targetdocuments in the retrieval result. We report the advantage of thisbrowsing support technique through evaluation experiments includingcomparison with conditions of referring to a translated documentsummary, and discuss related issues to be examined towards moreeffective cross-language information extraction.
Results of the noun–verb pair comprehension and production tests from the Test Battery for Auslan Morphology and Syntax (A. Schembri et al., 2000) are presented, reanalyzed, and compared to data from 2 other cases dealing with noun–verb pairs: the Auslan lexical database and a comparison of Auslan and American Sign Language (ASL) signs. The data confirm the existence of formationally related noun–verb pairs in Auslan in which the verb displays a single movement and the noun displays a repeated movement. The data also suggest that the best exemplars of noun–verb pairs of this type in Auslan form a distinct set of iconic (mimetic) signs archetypically based on inherently reversible actions (such as opening and shutting). This strong iconic link perhaps explains why the derivational process appears to be of limited productivity, though it does appear to have 'spread' to a number of signs that appear to have no such iconicity. There appears to be considerable variability in the use of the derivational markings, particularly in connected discourse, even for signs of the 'open and shut' variety. Overall, the derivational process is apparently still closely linked to an iconic base, is incipient in the grammar of Auslan, and is best described as only partially grammaticalized. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 271 foice us to confronr aspects of out cultural history and identity we as Americans, perhaps Norm Americans, must confront: our rapacity, racism, machoism (sexism) in our dealing with this land and its peoples. They also present us with admirable acrs of choice, as we continue to define ourselves for worse or for bertei against a backdrop rhat threatens void but promises the sublime, climbable peaks of possibility. (212) In light of this statement, the book appeals to be written for the Kit Carsons of today, the multicultural polyglots who might make a fatal mistake (you know the kind). On this didactic point, and on Canfield's evident pleasure in studying Southwestern novels and films, Mavericks on the Border is a well-intended contribution to the revision of U.S. cultural and political history. Roberto Cantú California State University, Los Angeles Variation and Change in Spanish Cambridge University Press, 2000 By Ralph Penny Evet since William Labov's seminal woik on sound changes in progress in Martha's Vineyard (1963), one of the most important contributions of variationist sociolinguistics has been the possibility of detecting linguistic change in progress. The study of variance and its correlation with stylistic and social factors reveals the very source of linguistic change, and allows for an understanding of howpaiticulai innovations spread, shedding light on the mechanisms of both changes in progress and changes that have already been completed. These ideas underlie Penny's Variation and Change in Spanish, whose main merit is the attempt to integrate synchronic and diachronic perspectives into the study of the history of Spanish. In this book, instead of following the tradition of historical manuals that oiganize theii content around abrupt phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical changes across time, Penny emphasizes the vaiiation, both geogiaphical and social, that gave rise to change in Spanish. Undei this approach, the social history of the speakers is highlighted as Penny reconstructs some of the main mechanisms undetlying variation and change that are observable in former philological studies of Spanish. He emphasizes the changes caused by leveling of irregularities and simplification of structures, and argues that these two processes are rhe main forces driving Spanish evolution as a result of dialect contact and mixing due to constant population movement since the Middle Ages. In chapter 1, "Introduction," Penny briefly sets forth the theoretical framework and tetminology derived from historical sociolinguistics. In chapter 2, "Dialect, language, variety: definitions and relationships," the differences between dialect and language are discussed, clarifying common myths about this relationship among nonlinguists. The concepts of diglossia and diasystems ate applied to chaiacterize some of the relationships between the linguistic varieties in the Iberian Peninsula. Here Penny emphasizes the "seamlessness " of social and geographic dialectal continua, and thus regards the tree model, commonly used in historical linguistics, as inadequate due to, among other reasons, its individual branches that mask the continuity of the Peninsular Romance continuum. Chapter 3, "Mechanisms of Change," aims to present the ways in which linguistic innovations travel thtough both geogiaphical and social space. Grounded in the theory that linguistic innovations "ate passed from one individual to anothei through the accommodation processes which occur in face to face conracr" (63), Penny discusses leveling and simplification in late medieval and eatly modem Spanish. According to the authot, leveling explains (1) the reduction of the six medieval Spanish sibilants to three (in central and northern Spain) or two (elsewhere), (2) the variance between the initial IhI realization and dropping, and the final /h/-less solution, and (3) the merger of the voiced labial fricative and stop that initiated in the 15di century and the final IhI 272 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies victoiy. Simplification, a slightly different process, is responsible for (1) the merger of the perfect auxiliaries, (2) the history of strong preterites, and (3) the neai-meigei of the -er and -«-verb classes. After exemplifying cases of hyperdialectalism, reallocation of variants, and waves, Penny turns to the social factors thar govern rhe propagation of linguistic innovations, drawing from Leslie and James Milroys (1985) work on types of social networks. According to die Milroys, diffuse networks (weak ties among sevetal people) fosrer linguistic change...
The most important approaches to computer-assistedauthorship attribution are exclusively based onlexical measures that either represent the vocabularyrichness of the author or simply comprise frequenciesof occurrence of common words. In this paper wepresent a fully-automated approach to theidentification of the authorship of unrestricted textthat excludes any lexical measure. Instead we adapt aset of style markers to the analysis of the textperformed by an already existing natural languageprocessing tool using three stylometric levels, i.e.,token-level, phrase-level, and analysis-levelmeasures. The latter represent the way in which thetext has been analyzed. The presented experiments ona Modern Greek newspaper corpus show that the proposedset of style markers is able to distinguish reliablythe authors of a randomly-chosen group and performsbetter than a lexically-based approach. However, thecombination of these two approaches provides the mostaccurate solution (i.e., 87% accuracy). Moreover, wedescribe experiments on various sizes of the trainingdata as well as tests dealing with the significance ofthe proposed set of style markers.
This article compares the word frequencies of the few most commonwords in Spanish as revealed by a modern corpus of over fivethousand words with a corpus of Golden-Age Spanish texts of overa million words, and finds that although de is by far themost common word in contemporary Spanish, in the 16thand 17th Centuries it was considerably less frequent, and in many texts was less frequent than y, or quefor which shared very similar frequency figures. It is arguedthat this significant change in the Spanish language comes aboutin the 20th Century.
In an attempt to establish a possible ‘norm’ for the distribution of translation modalities in English → Portuguese translational relationship, a varied sample of three different text typologies (legal, technical, and corporate) with six representative texts of each typology was compared, producing a total of 9,000 lexical items. By applying Vinay & Darbelnet’s and Aubert’s models, it was possible to obtain a basic pattern of the distribution of the most used translation modalities as well as to verify certain variables, such as the correlation between a higher or lower fluctuation in the frequency of the modalities and different types of texts. From three different levels of data analysis, we observed a translation hierarchy in relation to the three most frequent categories: literal translation, transposition and modulation and also that legal texts on the one hand, and technical and corporate texts on the other, seemed to organise themselves into two major groups. We also obtained some elements which would enable us to sketch a correlation between the modalities of literal translation and technical and corporate texts, as well as a correlation between the modalities of modulation and transposition with modulation and legal texts.
Reviewed by: The Russian language today by Larissa Ryazanova-Clarke, Terence Wade Edward J. Vajda The Russian language today. By Larissa Ryazanova-Clarke and Terence Wade. London & New York: Routledge, 1999. Pp. xii, 369. This is the first comprehensive account of Russian language evolution devoted to the last fifteen years of the twentieth century. Although most recent changes involve vocabulary, some grammatical patterns have also entered a period of flux so that the momentous events attendant on the collapse of communism in Russia seem to have affected all layers of the language. One of the book’s strong points is its use of copious examples from contemporary literature and media sources to illustrate all of the changes it describes. The book also includes a good survey of scholarly and normative works devoted to evaluating changes in Russian language usage; these sources appear in Cyrillic without translation in the form of a final bibliography (340–58). Although the authors intend principally to give a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) account of Russian at the close of the twentieth century, they have much to say about how other specialists regard the changes taking place. They also begin their survey in 1917 rather than 1985, although linguistic developments of the communist era are already well documented in such works as The Russian language in the 20th century (Bernard Comrie, Gerald Stone, and Maria Polinsky, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Nevertheless, inclusion of this material provides a useful point of comparison for recent trends that might otherwise appear unique in the history of the language. In fact, Russian during the twentieth century has undergone several periods of rapid change, particularly in the early years of Bolshevik rule (1917–28). These years witnessed a significant renegotiation of the boundary between standard and substandard speech as well as seemingly irrevocable alterations in the status of religious and political terminology. Analogous processes are once again afoot, albeit sometimes in the opposite direction. The book is divided into two parts of roughly equal length. The two chapters of Part 1 (3–165) describe innovations in vocabulary, recounting decade by decade the adoption or rejection of vast numbers of lexical items. The past fifteen years get an entire chapter to themselves, and they deserve one as more new [End Page 397] vocabulary has entered Russian during this time than at any other since the early communist period. While English has adopted a mere handful of Russian words in this short time, it has unwittingly become the source of entire new vocabularies for post-communist Russia, donating such items as killer ‘assassin’, sejl ‘sale’, imidzh ‘public image’, electorat ‘voters’, and hundreds of others. New loans often trigger a restructuring in the function of native synonyms. These patterns, along with the unpredictable stylistic nuances the new loans themselves acquire, are explained on the basis of examples in context. Russian killer, for instance, turns out to be ‘somehow respectable, modern and even interesting’ (163) when compared to the old native ubijtsa ‘murderer’. The remaining four chapters, packaged together as Part 2, are devoted to recent structural changes ranging from derivational morphology to syntax. Ch. 3 (169–239) discusses new word-formation models and recent extensions of old ones. Ch. 4 (240–82) covers new trends in case use and syntax; chief among these are the creation of plural forms for many singularia tantum nouns, an expanding usage of the accusative for marking negated direct objects, and the use of certain transitive verbs without an object. Most of these changes appear to be receiving momentum from the easing of the strict linguistic norms once enforced for all publishing and broadcasting. Ch. 5 (283–306) discusses the merry-go-round of place name changes that has again swept the country. The final chapter, entitled ‘The state of the language’, traces the origins of innovation to factors as diverse as youth slang and the poor speaking skills of Russia’s contemporary parliamentarians. The opinions of a variety of specialists, from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to leading university grammarians, are also surveyed. The authors close with their own, rather positive assessment on the future evolution and international role of Russian. This well researched and often entertaining book is essential reading...
Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), where queriesand documents are in different languages, has of late become one ofthe major topics within the information retrieval community. Thispaper proposes a Japanese/English CLIR system, where we combine aquery translation and retrieval modules. We currently target theretrieval of technical documents, and therefore the performance of oursystem is highly dependent on the quality of the translation oftechnical terms. However, the technical term translation is stillproblematic in that technical terms are often compound words, and thusnew terms are progressively created by combining existing basewords. In addition, Japanese often represents loanwords based on itsspecial phonogram. Consequently, existing dictionaries find itdifficult to achieve sufficient coverage. To counter the firstproblem, we produce a Japanese/English dictionary for base words, andtranslate compound words on a word-by-word basis. We also use aprobabilistic method to resolve translation ambiguity. For the secondproblem, we use a transliteration method, which corresponds wordsunlisted in the base word dictionary to their phonetic equivalents inthe target language. We evaluate our system using a test collectionfor CLIR, and show that both the compound word translation andtransliteration methods improve the system performance.
The current state of affairs is characterised as one in which general SLA models have syntax as their core and pay less and variable attention to other linguistic levels, notably lexis. In order to improve the current situation we need involvement from both the vocabulary research community and SLA model builders. It is demonstrated how the former group readily borrows key concepts from psycholinguistics and SLA theory and rethinks them from a lexical point of view. However, such borrowing and recasting is often done in a piecemeal fashion to fit specific research issues. As for SLA model builders, some examples are discussed that are regarded as serious attempts at integrating lexis into a particular acquisition model. One is L2 reading research and vocabulary acquisition through reading, which illustrates a high degree of integration with common research goals and mutual theoretical inspiration. A second example underlines the fact that there is an obvious potential for including lexis in the ‘focus on form’ movement. It is our contention that more attention to lexis should supplement the predominantly grammatical ‘focus on form’ that is the current norm.
The following three papers have been originally read at a panel «Buddhist (Hybrid) Sanskrit» organized in the framework of the XIIth Conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies held in Lausanne (Switzerland) on August 24, 1999. The purpose of the panel was, as formulated in the call for papers, first, to reassess the seminal work of Franklin Edgerton which is mainly known as his monumental Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Grammar and Dictionary to which a series of his articles dealing with this language (labeled hereafter «Buddhist Sanskrit») are to be usefully added. The reassessment has been and still is deemed possible indeed on the basis of new analysis of the texts in Buddhist Sanskrit known to Edgerton as well of the texts discovered and published after Edgerton’s work has been completed. The second purpose was to reconsider the problem of the internal structural cohesion of the Buddhist linguistic tradition involving a thorough analysis of grammatical and lexical evidence in Buddhist Sanskrit texts. The three scholars who responded to the call and whose papers have been prepared for the present publication base their research on different data and use understandingly different approaches, but I like to stress that all are aware of the complex nature of the linguistic and literary phenomena they examine. Interestingly, two of them, S. Karashima and K. Lang, share unpremeditatingly, needless to say, several presuppositions which seem to me as fertile as promising for further research. The main point common to these two authors is that beyond the general bewildering picture of Buddhist data, commonly considered as escaping any attempt to uncover an underlying linguistic structure and norm, the authors still see at least regular phenomena following a technique which cannot be due to a haphazard use of the language material and forms. The position of R. Salomon is different as different as his evidence, as will be seen from his article.
This article reports on some data of a psycholinguistic study of first language attrition in german first generation immigrants. On the basis of the individual variation in performance evidenced by the data, I claim that L1 attrition in late bilinguals is not only the consequence of lack of L1 use. A comparison of the performance of three selected German-English bilinguals rather suggests that, among other factors, contact with other immigrants – as is the case in immigrant communities – might generate changes in linguistic competence. In this case it would be necessary to distinguish to types of intra-generational L1 attrition: (a) attrition in isolated immigrants who never use L1 in the host country, which mainly yields processing difficulties and problems in lexical retrieval, and (b) attrition in members of immigrant communities where changes of the linguistic norm within the community can take place, resulting in modifications of linguistic competence.
This study aims to understand the meaning and function of degree adverbs. There has been no reasonable basis to set up the list of degree adverbs. It means that there is a lack of understanding the meaning and function of these categories. Degree adverbs must be used as a term that indicates adverbs with the semantic feature ‘degree’: It is intra-lexical distinctive, multivalent, and a kind of relative concept. It necessarily accompanies ‘norms of judgment’ and also grade ‘degree scales’. The degree adverbs that this paper has treated such as maeu, mucheok, gajang, etc. do not have ‘degree’. Therefore, these are not appropriate to have the name like degree adverbs. We need to use more appropriate degree adverbs than the existing terms and it depends on their meanings and functions.
Internet search engines allow access to online information from all over the world. However, there is currently a general assumption that users are fluent in the languages of all documentsthat they might search for. This has for historical reasons usually been a choice between English and the locally supported language. Given the rapidly growing size of the Internet, it is likely that future users will need to access information in languages in which they are not fluent or have no knowledge of at all. This papershows how information retrieval and machine translation can becombined in a cross-language information access frameworkto help overcome the language barrier. We presentencouraging preliminary experimental results using English queries toretrieve documents from the standard Japanese language BMIR-J2retrieval test collection. We outline the scope and purpose ofcross-language information access and provide an example applicationto suggest that technology already exists to provide effective andpotentially useful applications.
This paper begins with the significance of language information processing technology for the progress of an information society, and then introduces that Institute of Computational Linguistics (ICL) of Peking University and other language resource data on web sites, such as HowNet, WordNet, TreeBank., achieved the results of these researches and actualities of the language resources at the foundational researches on language information processing. The last section of this paper prints out the tasks for further studies.
BalkaNet aims at building a multilingual lexical database consisting of WordNets in several Central and Eastern European languages. Even though it will be built in a similar way with EuroWordNet, new features will be implemented ranging from structuring the Inter-LingualIndex to ensure linking of conceptual equivalencies across WordNets to the development of an inter-networked WordNet Management so that each partner retains full responsibility and independence of his local WordNet whereas at the same time they will be able to view other WordNets and check their compatibility.
Research on recognition and generation of signed languages and the gestural component of spoken languages has been held back by the unavailability of large-scale linguistically annotated corpora of the kind that led to significant advances in the area of spoken language. A major obstacle has been the lack of computational tools to assist in efficient analysis and transcription of visual language data. Here we describe SignStream, a computer program that we have designed to facilitate transcription and linguistic analysis of visual language. Machine vision methods to assist linguists in detailed annotation of gestures of the head, face, hands, and body are being developed. We have been using SignStream to analyze data from native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) collected in our new video collection facility, equipped with multiple synchronized digital video cameras. The video data and associated linguistic annotations are being made publicly available in multiple formats.
We examine an everyday Caribbean oral gesture, kiss-teeth or (KST), exploring previously-unresolved problems of meaning. Such forms are as examples of African cultural continuity across the Diaspora, often overlooked despite continuing interest in historical links between Caribbean Creoles and African communication systems. Forms such as (KST) are typically treated as lexical items: dictionary entries provide overlapping lists of emotions or affective states (eg, “scorn, impatience”) for each of several entries (suck-teeth, chups, etc.). Such approaches are inadequate, as the meaning of (KST) is not a single semantic unit, while lists are incomplete, contingent and inadequate. We distinguish ideophones from metalinguistic labels; consider geographical distribution and diffusion with respect to both functions and particular forms; and analyze related signs as a set, with reference to shared pragmatic function. (KST) is an inherently evaluative and inexplicit oral gesture with a sound-symbolic component, and a remarkably stable set of functions across the Diaspora: an interactional resource with multiple possibilities for sequential organization, often used to negotiate moral positioning among speakers and referents, and closely linked to community norms and expectations of conduct and attitude. It participates in a system of indirect discourse, requiring co-construction of intention by speaker and hearers. Moreover, it functions in personal narratives to mark both internal and external evaluation, sometimes ambiguously. Each of the proposed functions is illustrated with data ranging from historical to contemporary, oral to literary, monologic to interactional. Esther Figueroa & Peter L Patrick
The author elaborates on the meanings of the adjectives „srpski“ and \n„srbijanski“ in general and in the phrases where both these adjectives refer to the \nrepublic of Serbia (both country and state) in particular. The latter can be seen in \nthe examples such as srpska (or srbijanska) vlada the government of Serbia. The \nauthor takes into consideration the existing body of literature about this subject \n(authors such as: Е. Fekete, М. Nikolič, І. Кlajn, and М. Sipka) and analyzes the \ninstances of ambiguity involving „srpski“ and „srbijanski“ (as in the example abоve). Using the lexical and semantic norms of the contemporary standard Serbian \nlanguage, the author points to the possibility of differentiating the usage of these \ntwo adjectives. Нe also emphasizes the need of further elaboration and verification \nof the linguistic standardization criteria in general and in the field of the lexicon \n(lexical meaning and usage) in particular.
An algorithm for analyzing difference scaling results is described. Frequency data on ordered categories that represent perceived differences for a unidimensional psychological attribute are modeled according to Thurstone’s judgment scaling model. The algorithm applies the gradient method for the maximum likelihood estimation of the model parameters. Two ways to calculate the start configuration for the model parameters are elaborated. The algorithm also provides asymptotic values for the standard errors of the estimates and three measures for the goodness of the model fit. An additional feature of DifScal is that it is suited to analyze incomplete data.
This article describes the challenges posed by optical musicrecognition – a topic in computer science that aims to convert scannedpages of music into an on-line format. First, the problem is described;then a generalised framework for software is presented that emphasises keystages that must be solved: staff line identification, musical objectlocation, musical feature classification, and musical semantics. Next,significant research projects in the area are reviewed, showing how eachfits the generalised framework. The article concludes by discussingperhaps the most open question in the field: how to compare the accuracy and success of rival systems, highlighting certain steps thathelp ease the task.
This paper is concerned with the investigation of the relevance and suitability of the data mining approach to serial documents. Conceptually the paper is divided into three parts. The first part presents the salient features of data mining and its symbiotic relationship to data warehousing. In the second part of the paper, historical serial documents are introduced, and the Ottoman Tax Registers (Defters) are taken as a case study. Their conformance to the data mining approach is established in terms of structure, analysis and results. A high-level conceptual model for the Defters is also presented. The final part concludes with a brief consideration of the implication of data mining for historical research.
In this paper, some electronically gathered data arepresented and analyzed about the presence of the pastin newspaper texts. In ten large text corpora of sixdifferent languages, all dates in the form of yearsbetween 1930 and 1990 were counted. For six of thesecorpora this was done for all the years between 1200and 1993. Depicting these frequencies on the timeline,we find an underlying regularly declining curve,deviations at regular places and culturally determinedpeaks at irregular points. These three phenomena areanalyzed.
Intercorrelations among stylistic and emotional variables and constructvalidity deduced from relationships to other ratings of U.S. presidentssuggest that power language (language that is linguistically simple,emotionally evocative, highly imaged, and rich in references to Americanvalues) is an important descriptor of inaugural addresses. Attempts topredict the use of power language in inaugural addresses from variablesrepresenting the times (year, media, economic factors) and the man(presidential personality) lead to the conclusion that time-basedfactors are the best predictors of the use of such language (81%prediction of variance in the criterion) while presidential personalityadds at most a small amount of prediction to the model. Changes in powerlanguage are discussed as the outcome of a tendency to opt for breadthof communication over depth.
In this paper a number of issues relating to theapplication of string processing techniques on musicalsequences are discussed. A brief survey of somemusical string processing algorithms is given and someissues of melodic representation, abstraction,segmentation and categorisation are presented. Thispaper is not intended to provide solutions tostring processing problems but rather tohighlight possible stumbling-block areas andraise awareness of primarily music‐elatedparticularities that can cause problems in matchingapplications.