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The effects of insulting political campaign rhetoric were examined in a laboratory setting. In Study 1, subjects categorized as for, against, or undecided about the issue of French language rights in English Canada read a political debate transcript focusing on this issue in which one candidate insulted or did not insult the other candidate. Backlash was evident on trait ratings: the insult source was rated more negatively in the insult condition than in the control condition, whereas ratings of the target were unaffected. Affective ratings of both candidates were lower in the insult condition than in the control condition. Subjects’ attitudes about French language rights also influenced their impressions of the candidates, but did not interact with the insult manipulation. In Study 2, subjects read debate transcripts embedded with insults that attacked either controllable target attributes, uncontrollable target attributes, or that contained no insults. The major findings of Study 1 were replicated, with the additional finding that insults directed at uncontrollable traits of the target produced effects in the same direction as but more extreme than those effects noted for controllable‐trait insults. These findings are discussed in terms of political campaign tactics and the application of attribution theory to political person perception.
Contains two files: mara1.dat and mara2.dat. Together these appear to constitute a Maranao lexical database with English glosses. These files were taken from two 3.5-inch microdisks labeled to indicate that they have accompanying tapes numbered 9 and 10. The tapes were not with the microdisks, and there is no indication of who created the lexical database or tapes.
For the analysis of continuous discourse in a wide range of corpora, it is essential both to model and to expand whole-language lexical resources (e.g.,Roget’s International Thesaurus), in order to make such whole-language lexical resources adaptable to differentiated-discourse domains by means of rapid extensibility. Thus, rapidly extensible lexicons are of interest as special-domain extensions to a whole-language lexicon. My presentation argues for the validity of this approach, with specific reference to a viable conceptual, whole-language, foundational lexicon,Roget’s International Thesaurus (1962).
Could a troupe of monkeys really produce Shakespeare if allowed to bang away at the word processor long enough? This age old question, commonly referred to as the Eddington problem, relates to fundamental issues of probability, and is examined in this article in a new light. Based on earlier research by the physicist William Bennett, Jr., the author describes a data structure which enables the computer to simulate the hypothetical monkeys. Exploiting principles of cryptology, the computer leads the simulated monkeys closer to their goal. Though the intent of the article is to encourage humanistic speculation, the final result proves to be quite practical and may come as a surprise to computer scientists and humanists alike.
Benoît de Cornulier's writings on French poetry concentrate on metrical boundaries, or caesura; however, the the criteria upon which he bases his analyses are useful in studying rhythm, or the relationship between syllables within the alexandrine's twohémistiches. This study focuses on three aspects of rhythm in French poetry: the definition of rhythm following Cornulier; the development of a method using the computer to detect rhythmic patterns in traditional isometrical alexandrines; the results of such a study when applied to three classical seventeenth-century plays which are composed of isometrical alexandrines (Corneille'sPolyeucte, Racine'sPhèdre, and Molière'sLe Tartuffe).
In this paper we propose to define selectional preference and semantic similarity as information-theoretic relationships involving conceptual classes, and we demonstrate the applicability of these definitions to the resolution of syntactic ambiguity. The space of classes is defined using WordNet [8], and conceptual relationships are determined by means of statistical analysis using parsed text in the Penn Treebank.
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This paper is concerned with the question of how to extract lexical knowledge from Machine-Readable Dictionaries (MRDs) within a lexical database which integrates a lexicon development environment. Our long term objective is the creation of a large lexical knowledge base using semiautomatic techniques to recover syntactic and semantic information from MRDs. In doing so, one finds that reliance on a single MRD source induces inadequacies which could be efficiently redressed through access to combined MRD sources. In the general case, the integration of information from distinct MRDs remains a problem hard, perhaps impossible, to solve without the aid of a complete, linguistically motivated database which provides a reference point for comparison. Nevertheless, advances can be made by attempting to correlate dictionaries which are not too dissimilar. In keeping with these observations, we describe a software package for correlating MRDs based on sense merging techniques and show how such a tool can be employed in augmenting a lexical knowledge base built from a conventional MRD with thesaurus information.
FrameBuilder, a tool for computational lexicography, makes possible the efficient creation of theoretically sound and internally consistent lexical/semantic definitions to a lexical database by a linguistically inexperienced user. The first section describes FrameBuilder as a frame generation component (lexicon builder) of a natural language processing (NLP) system Subsequent sections detail the linguistic theoretical foundation of FrameBuilder, and describe how this expertise is encoded into a system of reasoning-based heuristics for linguistic semantic analysis.
The word senses in a published dictionary are a valuable resource for natural language processing and textual criticism alike. In order that they can be further exploited, their nature must be better understood. Lexicographers have always had to decide where to say a word has one sense, where two. The two studies described here look into their grounds for making distinctions. The first develops a classification scheme to describe the commonly occurring distinction types. The second examines the task of matching the usages of a word from a corpus with the senses a dictionary provides. Finally, a view of the ontological status of dictionary word senses is presented.
Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 119 Reviews Though nagging. these problems do not undermine the values and virtues of the study. What a pleasure to read! Darr writes with clarity, economy. and substance. She knows scholarship and how to teach it. Synagogues. churches. and introductory college courses can benefit from her work. Not least. the graciousness of its demeanor and the generosity of its vision are a welcome gift in an age of verbal assault. Phyllis Trible Union Theological Seminary New York. NY 10027 HEBREW LINGUISTICS: A JOURNAL FOR HEBREW DESCRIPTIVE, COMPUTATION AL, AND APPLIED LINGuIsTIcs. No. 31-32. Maya Fruchtman, ed. Pp ix + 114. Ramat-Gan. Israel: Bar-Han University, 1991. Paper. This double issue contains six articles (and a response to one of them) in Hebrew. with English abstracts and one short correction-note in English regarding the inappropriateness of characterizing Jewish languages as pidgins/creoles. The emphasis is on computational linguistics and discourse analysis. The issue opens with an article by Michal Ephratt, which proposes an algorithm for recognizing linguistic jokes, such as puns, which rely on multiple interpretation of sentences, where the "punch" is attained by the gap between the normal, "least costly" reading and the least expected. "most costly" one. Hanna David, and Hillel Weiss in his comments on her article, discuss a more general computational issue involving the application of complex mathematical models to analyze and characterize literary texts versus the use of the computer as a tool for (a) storing extensive. complex bodies of literary corpora. and (b) subsequent pulling out data that are relevant to precise determination of literary hypotheses. Weiss points out that use of mathematical algorithms in computational literary analysis has become marginal and that most computational work today centers on the building up of extensive literary data bases. At the same time. he outlines his own computational algorithm for distinguishing between poetry and prose. Hebrew Studies 33 (1992) 120 Reviews Zahava Goldstein and Michael Moore test a mathematical model for predicting active vocabulary on Hebrew-speaking children. In Israel, evaluation of vocabulary has always been performed by sampling words out of a dictionary and asking what they mean-an unsophisticated, often misleading procedure. The model applied here provides for reliable prediction of individuals' active vocabulary based on frequency of distribution in written or spoken samples. Yitzhak Zadka's note is a comment on an earlier article in Hebrew Linguistics, which discusses the modal meaning of ~eyn ~el mi lifnot ("there is nobody to tum to"). Zadka points out that the modality of this structure is not restricted to existential sentences of this type; rather, it covers a variety of patterns involving an attributive infinitive. Yitzhak Roeh and Raphael Nir demonstrate how Israeli news discourse tends to employ indirect speech to assure "objectivity," while keeping direct speech transmission to a minimum. It is therefore of particular interest to study partial deviations from the indirect speech standard in the news, as manifest in the use of direct speech elements in indirect speech or in mimetic direct speech. Such departures are permitted only to the extent that their effects (whether empathy, respect, etc., or suspicion, irony, etc.) conform with the "national consensus" and mainstream ideology, reflecting notions of "appropriateness," norms and values-and their hierarchical ranking. Lea Sarig shows how discourse analysis can account for linguistic dissimilarities emerging from comparison of a translation with its source text. "Discrepancies" in employing means of cohesion in translation from Arabic to Hebrew can be attributed to the translator's attempt to improve cohesion of discourse in the target language. Thus, grammatical anaphora may be replaced by lexical repetition/variation when the distance between the antecedent and the anaphor is substantial; the opposite conversion may occur when repetition is felt to be redundant. Connectives may be deleted, replaced by other grammatical items, or added, depending on the translator 's sense of optimal cohesion in the target language. The strength of Hebrew Linguistics continues to be in its interdisciplinary nature and in its offering Hebraists and scholars from other disciplines who wish to contribute to Hebrew language study a forum for discussion and exchange. With the general increase in interdisciplinary research and the "coming of age" of the...
This paper describes a natural language generation system known as VINCI, which accepts as input a formal description of some subset of a natural language, and generates strings in the language. With the help of an attribute grammar formalism, the system can be used to simulate on a computer components of several current linguistic theories. The program, implemented in C, runs under a variety of operating systems, including UNIX, MS-DOS and VM/CMS. In this paper we consider not only the design of the system, but also some of its applications in linguistic modelling and second language acquisition research.
OBJECTIVE: Since previous work indicated smaller than normal temporal lobe structures in schizophrenic patients, the authors tested the hypothesis that this abnormality might be reflected in abnormally large sylvian fissures. METHOD: The subjects were 48 schizophrenic patients and 51 normal comparison subjects matched groupwise with regard to age and sex. CSF spaces (sylvian fissures, temporal lobe sulci, temporal horns, third ventricle, lateral ventricles, and superficial cerebral sulci) were visually assessed with the magnetic resonance imaging rating protocol of the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD). RESULTS: The sylvian fissures of the schizophrenic patients were found to be bilaterally wider than those of the comparison subjects. There were no other significant differences. CONCLUSIONS: Schizophrenic patients appear to have larger than normal sylvian fissures, which may reflect smaller superior temporal gyri.
To date, no fully suitable data model for lexical databases has been proposed. As lexical databases have proliferated in multiple formats, there has been growing concern over the reusability of lexical resources. In this paper, we propose a model based on feature structures which overcomes most of the problems inherent in classical database models, and in particular enables accessing, manipulating or merging information structured in multiple ways. Because of their widespread use in the representation of linguistic information, the applicability of feature structures to lexical databases seems natural, although to our knowledge this has not yet been implemented. The use of feature structures in lexical databases also opens up the possibility of compatibility with computational lexicons.
Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. I wish to thank Dr Lynn Williams of the University of Exeter for reading a draft of this article and making several suggestions.2. The Guernica Statute of Autonomy (1979) had effect in the three Spanish Basque provinces of Alava, Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya which became the three members of the Basque Autonomous Community. One of the aims of the 1982 Ley de normalización del uso del euskera is to protect every speaker's right to use Basque in the spheres of administration, education and in all means of communication. In Navarra, the fourth Spanish Basque province, the co-official status of Basque was recognized by the Parlamento Foral Navarro in November 1980.3. I follow Haugen's (1966) terminology here and interpret ‘vernacular’ as an underdeveloped language in the functional sense. E. Haugen, ‘Dialect, language, nation’, American Anthropologist, LXVIII (1966), 922–35.4. E. B. Ryan, ‘Why do Low-Prestige Language Varieties Persist?’, in H. Giles and R. N. St Clair (eds.), Language and Social Psychology, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979), 145–57.5. Pedro de Yrizar, Contribución a la dialectología de la lengua vasca, I (Zarauz: Caja de Ahorros Provincial de Guipúzcoa, 1981).6. Bonaparte made five trips to various parts of the Basque Country between 1856 and 1869. His extensive research allowed a detailed classification of the regional varieties; one of his major contributions was the Carte des sept provinces basques montrant la délimitation actuelle de l’Euskara et sa division en dialectes, sous-dialectes et variétés, completed in 1863 and published in London in 1866.7. Bonaparte, 98.8. K. Rotaetxe, ‘La norma vasca: codificación y desarrollo’, Revista española de lingüística, XVII, 2 (1987) 219–44.9. P. Lafitte, Grammaire basque (Navarro-labourdin littéraire) (Bayonne: 1944)10. See K. Rotaetxe, 228—30, for an account of the grammatical and orthographic reforms carried out in the process of standardization and the extent to which they eliminated the characteristics of vizcaíno.11. Rotaetxe, 240–43.12. J. I. Olabuénaga et al., La lucha del euskara en la Comunidad Autónoma Vasca (Vitoria: Servicio Central de Publicaciones del Gobierno Vasco, 1983). This work is a presentation of the results of the 1981 Census and of extensive surveys concerning language competence, use and attitudes carried out in the Autonomous Community at the beginning of the 1980s.13. K. Rotaetxe does not make a distinction here between learning Basque and learning Batua. It is probably true that in the case of most learners Batua is the norm adhered to, and this would explain why those living in Vizcaya encounter difficulties when attempting to put their newly acquired language to use. It should be remembered, however, that some establishments in Vizcaya teach a standard form of vizcaíno. It is quite possible that the low percentage of successful learners in Vizcaya includes precisely those speakers who have been educated in this standard vizcaíno.14. The higher success rate in Alava could seem rather surprising if it is remembered that the Basque spoken there is similar to that spoken in Vizcaya and is classified as a variety of vizcaíno: it could be argued that learners in Alava will be faced by the same problems of linguistic distance from Batua as those confronting their counterparts in Vizcaya. It is very likely that this is so for learners in those areas of Alava where Basque is spoken by the majority of the population. However, in Alava as a whole, the awareness of the distance between vizcaíno and Batua is not as acute as it is in Vizcaya, since the Basque-speakers form a very small minority and do not constitute a strong vizcaíno-speaking community. In Vitoria, capital of Alava and of the Basque Autonomous Community, there is a higher percentage of Basque-speakers, but they have migrated from several parts of the Basque Country and do not form a linguistically homogeneous group. The polarization vizcaíno/Batua does not, therefore, occur to the same degree.15. The grammatical calques on Castilian are not so much an intrinsic feature of Batua as a reflection of the fact that most people who write in Basque also write in Castilian, and tend to translate from Castilian when writing in Basque.16. Whereas Batua, therefore, is sometimes criticized for reproducing Castilian syntax, there are some lexical items which illustrate how Batua uses native Basque formations whilst the regional dialects use Castilian loan-words (for example eskribatu, ‘to write’ of vizcaíno from the Castilian escribir is translated as idatzi in Batua). Some native Basque speakers regard these features of the Batua lexicon as excessively purist, whereas others seem to interpret them as indications of their own linguistic inadequacy. It is worth remembering, however, that the extent of Castilian influence on native Basque-speakers’ vocabulary is possibly not as great as they themselves sometimes claim.17. Inventario de arquitectura rural alavesa (Vitoria: Diputación Foral de Alava, 1981).18. Inventario, 184.19. he informant was given the freedom to complete the forms of the Padrón either in Basque (Batua) or in Castilian. The question dealing with language competence was presented in the following way in Castilian: Conocimiento de euskara Señale con una X su nivel de comprensión, habla, lectura y escritura. 1. Nada 2. Con dificultad 3. Bien 20. The form of categorization adopted in the presentation of the Padrón results is designed to give each informant a nivel global de euskara. The informant is classified according to his own evaluation of his competence in the four skills of Comprehension, Speaking, Reading and Writing. The Classifications are: Euskaldunes alfabetizados: individuals who understand, speak, read and write Basque well. Euskaldunes parcialmente alfabetizados: individuals who understand and speak Basque well, but read and write the language with difficulty. Euskaldunes no alfabetizados: individuals who understand and speak Basque well, but are unable to read and write the language. Cuasi-euskaldunes alfabetizados: individuals who understand Basque well or with difficulty, speak Basque with difficulty, and read and write well or with difficulty. Cuasi-euskaldunes no alfabetizados: individuals who understand Basque well or with difficulty, speak Basque with difficulty, but are unable to read and write the language. Cuasi-euskaldunes pasivos: individuals who understand Basque well or with difficulty, but are unable to speak the language. Erdaldunes: individuals who are unable to understand or speak Basque. Although an attempt has been made to allow for the fact that there is not, in the case of every speaker, a constant reduction in levels of competence from Comprehension to Speaking, Speaking to Reading, and Reading to Writing (that is, there is a recognition that some individuals will be more competent in written skills than in oral skills), the seven groupings referred to do not appear to cover all the permutations provided by the informants’ evaluations of their competence in the four skills.21. The variety of words used to refer to the Basque language can lead to confusion. Euskara batua (or Batua) refers to the standard norm. In Castilian, non-standardized dialectal forms are often referred to as vasco or vascuence.22. J. I. Ruiz Olabuénaga, Atlas lingüístico vasco (Vitoria: Servicio Central de Publicaciones del Gobierno Vasco, 1984); J. I. Ruiz Olabuénaga et al., La lucha del euskara.23. The informant was given the freedom to complete the questionnaire either in Basque (Batua) or in Castilian. (All interviews, however, were conducted in Castilian.) The question dealing with language competence was presented in the following way in Castilian:24. These age-divisions were decided upon for two reasons. For purposes of comparison it was important to respect the age-cohorts used in the presentation of the results of the Padrón. At the same time the divisions attempt to take into account some of the historical factors which have affected the use and acquisition of Basque.25. When the interview was conducted in the absence of other Basque-speakers it is very unlikely that the informant felt that he was being tested: my very limited knowledge of Basque did not allow me to challenge his evaluations. However, the fact remains that it was probably more difficult for an informant to stretch the truth when confronted with the researcher than when allowed to complete the questionnaire in privacy.26. Olabuénaga et al., La lucha, 28.27. I am grateful to I. Agote (Política lingüística, Gobierno Vasco) for suggesting the possibility of adapting these evaluation methods to sociolinguistic surveys.28. J. L. M. Trim, Developing a Unit/Credit Scheme of Adult Language Learning (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980).29. M. Oskarsson, Approaches to Self-assessment in Foreign Language Learning (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980).30. When asked in my survey to state which was their first language, 11 of the 75 informants answered ‘Castilian’, 58 answered ‘Basque’ and six answered ‘Both Castilian and Basque’. Those who have Castilian as their native language are most likely to be adults who have moved to Aramayona from other parts of Spain. In some cases their offspring, although competent Basque speakers because of their exposure to the language at school, will claim Castilian to be their native tongue.31. Padrón municipal de habitantes de la Comunidad Autónoma de Euskadi 3. Educación y euskara (Vitoria: Instituto Vasco de Estadística [EUSTAT], 1988).32. It must be remembered that these tables have been compiled from questions which were originally presented to the informants in Basque and Castilian. See Notes 12 and 16 for the original terms used. Note that in the Padrón the levels of competence followed the order Nada, Con dificultad and Bien, whereas in my survey the order was the reverse (Fácilmente, Con dificultad and Nada). In order to ensure consistency, I have arranged the results of the Padrón in Table 7 in the order Bien, Con dificultad and Nada.
Blanchet, Philippe - Remarks on "Peuchère" or the role of the imaginary in the evolution of languages in Provence (additions to the article 11 Aunt Portal's complex". Rousselot looks at the effect of the idealization of the norm in the shift to French by the South-Eastern bourgeoisie ("portalism"). This analysis must be tempered by saying that adapting the lexical items of Provençal to regional French can be explained by other mechanisms and this is also true of other processes (the "accent"). On the other hand, idealization of the Occitan norm ("à la française") and systematization of the regional French (Francitan), has hardly spread in Provence where regional French has taken on great importance as a vehicle of identity and prestige, while provençal is resisting the force of a coercitive norm.
In this paper, we describe lexical needs for spoken and written French surface processing, like automatic text correction, speech recognition and synthesis.We present statistical observations made on a vocabulary compiled from real texts like articles. These texts have been used for building a recorded speech database called BREF. Developed by the Limsi, within the research group GDR-PRC CHM (Groupe De Recherche - Programme de Recherches Concertées, Communication Homme-Machine --- Research Group - Concerted Research Program, Man Machine Communication), this database is intended for dictation machine development and assessment.In this study, the informations available in our lexical database BDLEX (Base de Données LEXicales - Lexical Database) are used as reference materials. Belonging to the same research group than BREF, BDLEX has been developed for spoken and written French. Its purpose is to create, organize and provide lexical materials intended for automatic speech and text processing.Lexical covering takes an important part in such system assessment. Our first purpose is to value the rate of lexical covering that a 50, 000 word lexicon can reach.By comparison between the vocabulary provided (LexBref, composed of 84, 900 items, mainly distinct inflected forms) and the forms generated from BDLEX, we obtain about 62% of known forms, taking in account some acronyms and abbreviations.Then, we approach the unexpected word question looking into the 38% of left forms. Among them we can find numeration, neologisms, foreign words and proper names, as well as other acronyms and abbreviations. So, to obtain a large text covering, a lexical component must take in account all these kinds of words and must be fault tolerant, particularly with typographic faults.Last, we give a general description of the BDLEX project, specially of its lexical content. We describe some lexical data recently inserted in BDLEX according to the observations made on real texts. It concerns more particularly the lexical item representation using phonograms (i.e. letters/sounds associations), informations about acronyms and abbreviations as well as morphological knowledge about derivative words. We also present a set of linguistic tools connected to BDLEX and working on the phonological, orthographical and morphosyntactical levels.
This paper describes the use of a small but syntactically rich parsed corpus of English in probabilistic parsing. Software has been developed to extract probabilistic systemic-functional grammars (SFGs) from the Polytechnic of Wales Corpus in several formalisms, which could equally well be applied to other parsed corpora. To complement the large probabilistic grammar, we discuss progress in the provision of lexical resources, which range from corpus wordlists to a large lexical database supplemented with word frequencies and SFG categories. The lexicon and grammar resources may be used in a variety of probabilistic parsing programs, one of which is presented in some detail: The Realistic Annealing Parser. Compared to traditional rule-based methods, such parsers usually implement complex algorithms, and are relatively slow, but are more robust in providing analyses to unrestricted and even semi-grammatical English.
Our work aims at the optimization of existing tools for computer-assisted description and analysis of textual data. More specifically, we have been involved in the thematic description of clauses and clause complexes of Quebec budget speeches from 1934 to 1960. Our main objective is to enhance the work already done in this direction by elaborating the analytic framework through a study of the thematic structure of these discourses. We first set out the general context of our work by briefly explaining the research project on political discourse under the Duplessis Regime in Quebec (1936–60) and giving a brief survey of the parsing strategy applied to the corpus. Second, we present the theoretical background of thematic analysis and the operational model that we are using here. Finally, we try to illustrate the relevance of such methodological work on research data.
Does gender affect reactions to violations of expected conversational behavior? This study examined ratings of interactants involved in interruptive exchanges. Audio recordings of two-person interactions that varied in gender composition but were identical in script features were rated by judges on several scales, including the degree to which participants were seen to be argumentative, rude, and assertive. Results showed that interrupter sex did not affect ratings even though interrupters were evaluated differently than those they interrupted. However, gender composition significantly affected two of three derived factors, disrespect and assertiveness, such that when a woman interrupted a man, the pair was rated significantly more disrespectful and assertive than either of the two same-sex pairs. Conversational interruptions that occur among mixed-sex pairs are often interpreted not merely as individual infractions but as an assault on the established power relations.
The paper sets out twenty proposals for the development and evaluation of Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) programs. These proposals emerge from special characteristics of language instruction and of the use of computers to assist in language instruction. We combine theoretically-based assumptions with empirical findings drawn from investigation of language courseware for Hebrew speakers in Israel. We first list four unique features of language instruction: (1) the object-language-meta-language distinction; (2) computer as written medium vs. language as primary spoken medium; (3) teaching of second language skills vs. linguistics; (4) the computer as an electronic tool vs. the computer as a cognitive entity simulating the speaker. We then show how these unique characteristics of language instruction (mother-tongue and foreign language) impose special proposals on language courseware. These proposals should be observed in the development of language courseware and in the evaluation of such programs. Clearly, these proposals integrate with general courseware proposals.
Confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the structure of 5-item affect rating scales designed to measure positive affect and negative affect. A proposed circumplex affect structure was the source of scales constructed to represent a cluster of positive terms, including pleasantness and activation; the negative terms represented anxiety, depression, and hostility. The hypothesized simple-structured positive and negative trait affect factors, with a moderate correlation between them, were found in all cases. Equivalent structure was confirmed for younger adults, middle-aged, and older adults of good health and above-average education. Although the hypothesized simple-structured positive and negative factors emerged for all other groups, three other tests of factor equivalence failed to be confirmed: trait and state factors in the older adult group were not identical. Factors derived from healthy and frail elders were structurally different. Variability among frail elders and variability over 30 days within the same person, when factored, also showed nonequivalence. Although the scales are extremely useful in assessing affect, comparisons across some subject groups should be made with caution.
Predictability and controllability of events influence attributions and affect in many research domains. In face-to-face social interaction, behavior is predictable from actor&apos;s own past behavior (internal determinants) and from partner&apos;s past behavior (social determinants). This study assessed how affect ratings are related to predictability of vocal activity from internal and social determinants. Time and frequency domain analysis of on-off vocal activity from 55 dyadic gettingacquainted conversations provided indexes of predictability from internal and social determinants. Greater predictability of vocal activity patterns from both internal and social determinants was associated with more positive affect. Future research should take internal as well as social determinants of behavior into account. The study of behavioral dialogues is emerging as an important research paradigm in social, developmental, and clinical psychology (Warner, 1991a). Investigators have examined time series data on the behavior, affect, or physiological states of social interaction partners to assess how social behavior is structured in time and how the behaviors of partners are interdependent.
The purpose of this essay is to introduce into Catalan linguistic history of the early 19th century. Focusin on the sociolinguistic context of one of the epoch's most important texts, the catalan grammar of Ballot. I show that the concept of "linguistic conflict" is not an adequate category to discribe the diglossic relation of Catalan and Spanish at this time. In a second part I concretate on some aspects of Ballot's linguistic norm The fact that this norm is not even executed by the author of the recommendation that precedes the second edition of the grammar gives evidence to the lack of linguistic conscience.
Morphological information is useful for parsing, lemmatization, and in several natural language applications: text generation, machine translation, document retrieval, etc. In this paper, we shall be less concerned with what morphological processing systems are like (cf. Sproat 1992) than with the applications of computational morphology. We first present the kind of morphological information used by NLP (natural language processing) systems. That information is inflectional or derivational and may be encoded in lexical databases or retrieved dynamically through simple processing. The best known computational systems are presented, including some new methods to automatically acquire morphological information. Secondly, several technological applications using morphological information are described. In these sections, we have chosen to favor the description of some representative works in the corresponding fields, so as to illustrate how morphology is involved; we do not lay claim to exhaustiveness. This review aims at showing how truly useful morphology is for NLP systems.
The purpose of the present study was to identify the physiological characteristics corresponding to three affects (fear, anger, and joy), which were elicited through real situations in a laboratory. The subjects were asked to rate their psychological responses using the Affect Rating Scales for each affective situation. Physiological indices (diastolic and systolic blood pressures, heart rate, respiration rate and frequency of galvanic skin response) were measured. The subjects' affects can be characterized by two functions obtained through discriminant analysis. One discriminant function separated positive from negative affects; the other set apart anger from the remaining affects.
Pillet Elisabeth - Social revolt and questioning linguistic norms: a rediscovery of the poet Gaston Couté. Gaston Couté (1880-1911) became famous ca. 1900 in Paris cabarets. Couté projected a revolutionary image of peasants, both in content (progressive ideas, a complex image of country life, opposing former stereotypes) and in form (regional French, popular genres, original style). This image contradicted the picture of peasants produced in mainstream literature. Couté, long forgotten, was rediscovered in the 70 's and 80 's, as part of the alternative cultural trends. Analysis of contemporary criticism shows that his admirers then particularly appreciated Couté 's use of a popular vernacular, and established a close link between rebellion against the social order and challenging linguistic norms.
Word sense disambiguation has been recognized as a major problem in natural language processing research for over forty years. Both quantitive and qualitative methods have been tried, but much of this work has been stymied by difficulties in acquiring appropriate lexical resources. The availability of this testing and training material has enabled us to develop quantitative disambiguation methods that achieve 92% accuracy in discriminating between two very distinct senses of a noun. In the training phase, we collect a number of instances of each sense of the polysemous noun. Then in the testing phase, we are given a new instance of the noun, and are asked to assign the instance to one of the senses. We attempt to answer this question by comparing the context of the unknown instance with contexts of known instances using a Bayesian argument that has been applied successfully in related tasks such as author identification and information retrieval. The proposed method is probably most appropriate for those aspects of sense disambiguation that are closest to the information retrieval task. In particular, the proposed method was designed to disambiguate senses that are usually associated with different topics.
Lexical collocations have particular statistical distributions. We have developed a set of statistical techniques for retrieving and identifying collocations from large textual corpora. The techniques we developed are able to identify collocations of arbitrary length as well as flexible collocations. These techniques have been implemented in a lexicographic tool, Xtract, which is able to automatically acquire collocations with high retrieval performance. Xtract works in three stages. The first stage is based on a statistical technique for identifying word pairs involved in a syntactic relation. The words can appear in the text in any order and can be separated by an arbitrary number of other words. The second stage is based on a technique to extract n-word collocations (or n-grams) in a much simpler way than related methods. These collocations can involve closed class words such as particles and prepositions. A third stage is then applied to the output of stage one and applies parsing techniques to sentences involving a given word pair in order to identify the proper syntactic relation between the two words. A secondary effect of the third stage is to filter out a number of candidate collocations as irrelevant and thus produce higher quality output. In this paper we present an overview of Xtract and we describe several uses for Xtract and the knowledge it retrieves such as language generation and machine translation.
Priming for semantically related concepts was investigated using a lexical decision task designed to reveal automatic semantic priming. Two experiments provided further evidence that priming in a single presentation lexical decision task (McNamara & Altarriba, 1988) derives from automatic processes. Mediated priming, but no inhibition or backward priming was found in this type of lexical decision task. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that automatic priming was found only for associated word pairs, as determined by word association norms, and not for word pairs that are semantically related but not associated. It is argued that automatic priming in the lexical decision task occurs at a lexical level not at a semantic level.
Receptive vocabulary of Hispanic children in Miami was tested in both English and Spanish with complementary standardized tests, the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-R) and the Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes Peabody (TVIP-H). 105 bilingual first graders, of middle to high socioeconomic status relative to national norms, were divided according to the language(s) spoken in their homes. Both groups, whether they spoke only Spanish in the home (OSH) or both English and Spanish in the home (ESH), performed near the mean of 100 in Spanish receptive vocabulary (TVIP-H means 97.0 and 96.5); in contrast, ESH group children scored more than 1 SD higher in English than OSH group children (PPVT-R means 88.0 and 69.7, respectively). It appears, therefore, that learning 2 languages at once does not harm receptive language development in the language of origin, while it does lay the groundwork for superior performance in the majority language. Furthermore, an analysis of translation equivalents, items shared by both tests, shows that a statistically significant portion of bilingual children's lexical knowledge does not overlap in their 2 languages and is therefore not reflected in single-language scores.
The Renfrew Word Finding Scale (Renfrew, 1988) was administered to 30 Indian (Group A) and 30 White (Group B) Durban English speaking children aged between eight and nine years to determine its suitability for assessment of expressive vocabulary. Mean scores for both groups were statistically compared to the British norms in terms of mean raw scores and mean mental age. Mean scores for groups A and B were compared to each other. Item analyses were carried out to obtain further information regarding possible lexical characteristics for each group and common problems with certain items. Both groups performed significantly poorer than expected according to the British norms. Group A was significantly lower than Group B, thus indicating the test's unsuitability for use with these population groups in its present form.
BOOK NOTICES 865 Syllables, tones, and verb paradigms. (Studies in Chinantec languages, 4.) Ed. by William R. Merrifield and Calvin R. Rensch. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1990. Pp. vii, 130. Paper $10.00. This slim paperback contains six papers written in the 1970s, originally intended to comprise the first volume in a series on the Chinantec languages. (The Chinantec languages are spoken in a northern area of the Mexican state of Oaxaca.) Due to delays in publication, this book is instead the fourth volume in SIL' s Chinantec series. In tone and quality this collection resembles a set of departmental working papers. The expositions are sketchy in places, sometimes requiring a greater familiarity with Chinantec data than one can acquire from the article at hand. The editors' introduction does not explain why they have pulled together these particular papers, which have little in common as a set other than their focus on Chinantec. The authors often cite their own previous work, as well as the work of other authors in this book. For these reasons the publication seems targeted more for 'in-house' consumption than for the attention of linguists at large. 'Comaltepec Chinantec tone' (3-20), by Judi Lynn Anderson, Isaac H. Martinez, & Wanda Pace, discusses the interaction of tone, stress, and syllable structure, with particular attention to sandhi phenomena. A stressed syllable may bear one of seven different surface tone configurations: a level tone low, mid, or high, or a contour low-mid, low-high, high-mid, or high-low. In 'Comaltepec Chinantec verb inflection ' (21-62), Wanda Pace derives the surface tones from five underlying tones (L, M, H, LM, LH), discussing in addition some of the sandhi rules that give rise to the surface tone patterns. This analysis serves as an introduction to the complex verbal system, in which person, number, aspect, and lexical class are indicated largely by variations in tone, stress, and vowel length in the verbal root. In 'The Lealeo Chinantec syllable' (63-73), James E. Rupp relates the shape of the Chinantec syllable to tone. Calvin R. Rensch, in 'Phonological realignment in Lealeo Chinantec' (75-89), traces the development of certain features from ProtoChinantec to the Lealeo dialects. 'Quiotepec Chinantec tone' (91-105), by Richard Gardner & William R. Merrifield, presents the tonology of the Quiotepec dialect. Finally, in 'Moving and arriving in the Chinantla' (107-30), David O. Westley & William R. Merrifield describe the syntax and semantics of Chinantec verbs ofmotion, focussing on the intriguing way in which deixis is grammaticalized m the verbal inflection system. The exposition in some of these papers is weakened by the use of idiosyncratic descriptive devices. It is, of course, the norm for areal studies to have a distinct lingo; but then the editors of this sort of anthology owe it to the reader to footnote some of the less common descriptors early on in the book. The theoretical underpinnings of some analyses are also unclear, and this problem is exacerbated by some sloppy rule-writing (24) and other uninsightful attempts at 'formalizing' generalizations (70). Taken together, though, this collection of papers is a fairly good source for some fascinating Chinantec data. [Brian M. Sietsema, MerriamWebster Inc. and Westfield State College.] Bridges between psychology and linguistics: A Swarthmore Festschrift for Lila Gleitman. Ed. by Donna Jo Napoli and Judy Anne Kegl. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991. Pp. xii, 299. Lila Gleitman is well known among linguists for her research on language and cognition in blind and deaf children, 'motherese', and reading. The 14 articles in this volume honor her four years at Swarthmore College, where she founded linguistics and psycholinguistics in 1968. Almost all of the authors are Swarthmore alumni, most have studied under Gleitman, and several have included personal acknowledgements attesting to her influence on their careers. The papers are succinctly previewed in the Introduction (vii-xii), but the inappropriateness of the title's bridge metaphor soon becomes apparent. These diverse articles may form a continuum from psychology to linguistics, but they do not explicitly address links between the two. Most do not reflect Gleitman's particular research interests, and only three of her publications are cited in the entire book (a fourth is...
Proper Names (PNs) present a problem for the automatic processing and understanding of naturally occurring text. Due to their poor coverage in existing lexical resources and the continual appearance of new names, they represent a large body of unknown lexical data. Moreover, the complexity of the constructions in which they can appear and their own internal structure make them difficult to process, even if they are initially known. Yet the successful analysis of names is often crucial to the full understanding of a text. This paper proposes a solution to the problem and describes a natural language processing (NLP) system, FUMES, which makes use of the internal structure of names and the descriptive information that regularly accompanies them to produce lexical and knowledge base entries for unknown PNs. We present some preliminary results showing the viability of this approach for the identification of proper names.
Nonhuman primates provide useful models for studying a variety of medical, biological, and behavioral topics. Four years of joystick-based automated testing of monkeys using the Language Research Center’s Computerized Test System (LRC-CTS) are examined to derive hints and principle for comparable testing with other species-including humans. The results of multiple parametric studies are reviewed, and reliability data are presented to reveal the surprises and pitfalls associated with video-task testing of performance.
The advancement of computer technologies, particularly the development of hypertext and interactive video, has presented to the academic community a new and effective tool for teaching and learning. An application of these technologies led to the concept of a hypermedia resource library—a set of integrated interactive computer modules that allow the user to browse and study topically specific content in a unique way. Such modules electronically present textual, graphic, and real-time video materials that instruct and quiz the user, offer a means for computer-based laboratory experimentation and data analysis, and provide statistical evaluation of the user’s progress. This paper will focus on the technology of computer-based hypermedia and the specific concept within this context of the artificially intelligent hypermedia resource library.
MINDS (Mental Information Processing and Neuropsychological Diagnostic System) was developed with the goal of integrating a number of independent and stand-alone test programs that are used in the diagnosis of psychological and neuropsychological health. The system runs under MS-DOS. The shell program integrates subject information with data obtained through the use of the individual test programs. The current test battery comprises tasks on memory, attention, and motor performance; these tasks require the use of additional peripheral response devices, which are controlled via a multiple I/O interface card. Questionnaires are also included; they have been developed with the author language shell program MicroCAT. MINDS is programmed to allow easy integration of new tests. As an example, the Motor Planning Test is described. The equivalence of the computerized questionnaires with existing tests is also discussed.
This paper reports on the history and development of a new undergraduate course teaching computing for humanities students at the University of Aberdeen, and assesses some new teaching approaches developed in the course. It is noted that teaching computing to humanities students appears to be viewed with suspicion by some Computer Science and Humanities Departments. The two camps seem to fear, for different reasons, that issues and practices important to their disciplines will be compromised or watered down. This paper describes an attempt to reverse any such attitudes on the part of staff and students and to take undergraduates considerably beyond mere word processing and computer literacy. Various methods and techniques used in the course are presented and their value assessed. The importance of using a consistent computer interface to helping students form a stable conceptual model of computers is considered. We reflect on the value of teaching more about Human Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence than is usual in Humanities Computing courses. A number of lessons are drawn from the course.
This paper describes the lexical database tool LOLA (Linguistic-Oriented Lexical database Approach) which has been developed for the construction and maintenance of lexicons for the machine translation system LMT. First, the requirements such a tool should meet are discussed, then LMT and the lexical information it requires, and some issues concerning vocabulary acquisition are presented. Afterwards the architecture and the components of the LOLA system are described and it is shown how we tried to meet the requirements worked out earlier. Although LOLA originally has been designed and implemented for the German-English LMT prototype, it aimed from the beginning at a representation of lexical data that can be reused for other LMT or MT prototypes or even other NLP applications. A special point of discussion will therefore be the adaptability of the tool and its components as well as the reusability of the lexical data stored in the database for the lexicon development for LMT or for other applications.