Papers reviewed and determined not to be word norm studies. Use the flag icon to report errors or suggest re-inclusion.
16504 papers
Despite emoji often being assumed to be a form of emotional communication, the emotional affordances of these are not yet fully established. The current study employed the Emoji Spatial Stroop Task to explore whether spatial iconicity affects semantic-relatedness judgments relating to emoji stimuli. Namely, emoji stimuli were displayed in various vertical positions and valence perceptions were measured. A 3 (emoji valence; positive, negative, neutral) x 3 (vertical position; upper, lower, central) within-participants design was used to determine the impacts on valence perceptions. Valence perceptions were obtained from ratings on how positive/negative participants perceived stimuli to be on an 11-point Likert scale (−5 negative, 0 neutral and +5 positive). Findings from 157 participants revealed that, after controlling for current mood, both emoji valence and their vertical positioning impacted significantly on valence ratings. The valence × positioning interaction effect was also significant, highlighting a congruence effect whereby positive emoji in higher vertical space were rated significantly more positively than when in central or lower space, and negative emoji were rated significantly more negatively when displayed in lower vertical space compared to central or upper space. These congruence effects suggest we may embody emoji as symbolic objects to represent abstract emotional concepts.
The purpose of the article is to study the structural (syntactic) aspect of pleonastic formations, build a structural concept and thereby prove their semantic significance, as well as informative interpretation. The object of analysis is pleonastic expressions and their pragmatic functions based on the material of publicist and artistic discourses. The subject of analysis is the comparison of the transaction (transmission) of the author’s and the “communicative isolation” of the meaningful lexical unit – pleonasm. The result of the study is the recognition of the normality of the use of this phenomenon, but subject to certain conditions: only models with homogeneous components with the meaning of a person, phenomenon, quality, state, basically, complement, clarify the conceptual content of the expression. The semantics of the object or subject is redundant in models with predicative units. These constructions are usually found in colloquial and publicistic styles, which does not allow them to be attributed to the norm of the modern Russian literary language. Structural models with a subordinate relationship with the meaning of an object, attribute, action (agreement) are also considered superfluous.
As part of its ambitious Belt and Road initiative, the Chinese government, cognizant of the fact that establishing strong people-to-people bonds locally, regionally, and internationally will be key to the initiative’s success and that languages will play a pivotal role in facilitating this, has called for the diversification of language programmes beyond English at the tertiary and pre-tertiary levels. The aim is to boost the plurilingual and pluricultural competence (PPC) of Chinese citizens, who are often already multilingual because of their knowledge of Chinese dialects and minority languages. This article reports on a study involving 248 university students from over 20 provinces in China that explored the interactions between their reported PPC, translingual dispositions, interculturalism, orientations toward cultural differences, and identity-related views. The results revealed that the participants’ translingual dispositions entailed engaging in language negotiation practices to a greater extent than in resisting linguistic norms or exploring language. Moreover, the more multilingual the participants were, the more fluidly they reported moving between languages and the greater was their PPC, which was also positively and statistically significantly predicted by their age, ethnic background, acceptance of cultural differences, and views about their personal identity.
The relevance of the topic is determined by the need to deepen and describe the functioning of the inhomogeneous French language in the French-speaking cantons of Switzerland using specific lexical material. The analysis of intra and extralinguistic influences and their reflection in the Franco-Swiss literary version of the language is important for contact linguistics, and its relevance is due to the lack of depth of analysis of this issue. The analyst is particularly interested in the fact that in Switzerland, the French language exists within the legal framework of official multilingualism, in active interaction with three other equal national languages of the Confederation: German, Italian and Romansh. At the same time, the deviations of the French-Swiss national variant from the general French linguistic norm manifest themselves mainly at the lexical and semantic level. The object of the study is the French language in the Swiss Confederation, its lexical, semantic and stylistic characteristics.
Streets are an important component of urban landscapes and reflect the image, quality of life, and vitality of public spaces. With the help of the Google Cityscapes urban dataset and the DeepLab-v3 deep learning model, we segmented panoramic images to obtain visual statistics, and analyzed the impact of built environment attributes on a restaurant’s popularity. The results show that restaurant reviews are affected by the density of traffic signs, flow of pedestrians, the bicycle slow-moving index, and variations in the terrain, among which the density of traffic signs has a significant negative correlation with the number of reviews. The most critical factor that affects ratings on restaurants’ food, indoor environment and service is pedestrian flow, followed by road walkability and bicycle slow-moving index, and then natural elements (sky openness, greening rate, and terrain), traffic-related factors (road network density and motor vehicle interference index), and artificial environment (such as the building rate), while people’s willingness to stay has a significant negative effect on ratings. The qualities of the built environment that affect per capita consumption include density of traffic signs, pedestrian flow, and degree of non-motorized design, where the density of traffic signs has the most significant effect.
We introduce a graph polynomial that distinguishes tree structures to represent dependency grammar and a measure based on the polynomial representation to quantify syntax similarity. The polynomial encodes accurate and comprehensive information about the dependency structure and dependency relations of words in a sentence, which enables in-depth analysis of dependency trees with data analysis tools. We apply the polynomial-based methods to analyze sentences in the ParallelUniversal Dependencies treebanks. Specifically, we compare the syntax of sentences and their translations in different languages, and we perform a syntactic typology study of available languages in the Parallel Universal Dependencies treebanks. We also demonstrate and discuss the potential of the methods in measuring syntax diversity of corpora.
Abstract Temporal adverbial clause is an important language structure and exhibits different features in English and Chinese, which brings about difficulties for Chinese EFL learners. Based on the theory of Dependency Grammar, the study attempts to investigate the ordering distribution of temporal adverbial clauses by Chinese EFL learners at the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels. The results show that: 1) Chinese EFL learners at different proficiencies tend to precede temporal adverbial clause to main clause. With the increase of proficiency, the postposition of temporal adverbial clauses by learners increases and is approaching to the ordering preference of target language. 2) The ordering distribution of subordinators for temporal adverbial clauses by Chinese EFL learners is consistent with native English, showing a tendency of 100% preposition, which ascribes to the high frequency and salience of subordinators in English. 3) MDD is one of the significant motivations that cause the preference of prepositional temporal adverbial clauses by Chinese EFL learners. As a kind of natural language, interlanguage has a unique cognitive mechanism which distinguishes from both native and target language. This study provides a more comprehensive theoretical reference for learners at different proficiencies to understand and learn temporal adverbial clauses, as well as data support from empirical research for language teaching.
The article describes the possibilities of using the entries of associative dictionaries as a teaching material in Russian as a foreign language. The data which is presented in the article can also be useful when working with other languages. The article allows to get acquainted with the associative norm of the Russian language and its purposeful consolidation in the minds of students in order to form images of the language that reflect the national Russian culture. Linguistic and non-linguistic consciousness is formed as a result of mastering everyday culture in the process of socialization and the process of acquiring national culture. However, a student of Russian as a foreign language is limited in this, since their learning process takes place mainly at the lexical level, so the selection of authentic material for classes is of critical importance for the successful integration of the student into the culture of the Russian ethnic group.
The article discusses the modus concept of “graduality”, the author gives her own definition of the concept. To describe the structure of the modus concept “graduality”, it is proposed to use cognitive matrix analysis developed by N.N. Boldyrev. The main provisions of this type of analysis are summarized. The author believes that the structure of the concept of “graduality” consists of a core (knowledge that the feature of an object, state or action can vary, that is, manifest itself to varying degrees) and the matrix itself, which includes such conceptual areas as “comparison”, “feature”, “the degree of feature manifestation”, “norm”, “quantity”, “quality”, “assessment”, “language representation”. It is argued that on the basis of the concept of “graduality”, a category of graduality is formed in the language, which, like other language categories, is developing. The paper for the first time expresses the opinion that the formation and development of the category of graduality in the English language have their own conceptual foundations. An attempt is made to identify the conceptual foundations of the development of the modus category of graduality, which comprise the modus concept “graduality” itself, the conceptual basis of the category and its modus character, as well as specific features of the conceptual structure of the semantics of lexical units-members of the language category under analysis.
Comedy has long been analysed from a pragmatic perspective with the predictable conclusion that we laugh because one of the four Gricean maxims has been violated. However, the wording of Grice’s maxims is so loose and flexible that more or less any joke would violate one of his maxims and thus the ‘Cooperative Principle’. So, we are still left mediating the meta-pragmatic question of what it is that lies behind verbal incongruity that makes us actually laugh? This article analyses the notion of incongruity from a Peircean semiotic perspective and focuses exclusively on a selection of British comedy duo sketches whose humour is derived overwhelmingly from discursive, lexical and socio-phonetic incongruity. On the basis of classic British comedy due sketches at least, there is some mileage in perceiving incongruity as a semiotic misalignment or ‘indexical shock’ which subverts our basic social expectations by indexing non-presupposed contexts. We laugh because our verbal norms are not only challenged, but are turned upside down and torn apart. Moreover, we laugh because the social identities that the speech acts aim to index non-referentially often clash or conflict immediately with those of his or her interlocutor’s.
Aversive autobiographical memories play a key role in the development and maintenance of many mental disorders. Imagery rescripting is a well-established psychotherapeutic intervention aiming to create a more adaptive version of an aversive memory by modifying its interpretation. Sleep has been shown to support reconsolidation of updated neutral memories. Here, we investigated in healthy participants whether a 90-min nap compared to wake supports the adaptive reconsolidation of autobiographical memories. Forty-four university students received a single 50-min imagery rescripting session. Thereafter, half of the participants took a 90-min nap, whereas the other half stayed awake. Subjective (arousal ratings, reports of emotions and dysfunctional cognitions) and heart rate (HR) responses to individual memory scripts were measured before the intervention (pre), after the 90-min retention interval (post 1) and 7 days later (post 2). Results demonstrate a significant decrease in distress of aversive memories pre to post imagery rescripting. The nap group showed less distressing dysfunctional cognitions along with a lower HR in response to the negative memory script as compared to the wake group at post 1. These differences were no longer evident 1 week later (post 2). Central sleep spindle density during the nap was correlated with the reduction in HR in response to the negative memory script from pre to post 1. Our results provide first evidence for sleep benefitting adaptive reconsolidation of aversive autobiographical memories. Future research should expand this approach to clinical populations and investigate precise conditions under which sleep may benefit psychotherapeutic interventions utilizing reconsolidation mechanisms.
The article discusses the advantages of using axiological scales in the analysis of the level of values reflected in the Uzbek language proverbs. Axiolinguistics is a science that integrates axiology and linguistics and is interrelated with linguoculturology, psycholinguistics, sociology, and cognitology. Axiolinguistics has emerged as a result of highlighting the role of lexical units in the expression of axiological content. The article discusses the main goals, tasks and main issues of axioinguistics. Linguistic definition of evaluation and value, methods of evaluation are described. Scales are the methods of measurement and evaluation used in the exact and natural sciences. In recent years, as a result of the use of scales in the socio-humanitarian spheres, linguistic, psycholinguistic, axiolinguistic scales have emerged. The scale method evaluation level is also important in determining the norm of the relationship. The role of axiolinguistic scales in illuminating the content level reflected in the proverbs is illustrated by case studies. The results and conclusions are presented on the basis of the axiolinguistic scale. Recommendations for using this method are given.
Dependency parsing is a crucial step towards deep language understanding and, therefore, widely demanded by numerous Natural Language Processing applications. In particular, left-to-right and top-down transition-based algorithms that rely on Pointer Networks are among the most accurate approaches for performing dependency parsing. Additionally, it has been observed for the top-down algorithm that Pointer Networks’ sequential decoding can be improved by implementing a hierarchical variant, more adequate to model dependency structures. Considering all this, we develop a bottom-up oriented Hierarchical Pointer Network for the left-to-right parser and propose two novel transition-based alternatives: an approach that parses a sentence in right-to-left order and a variant that does so from the outside in. We empirically test the proposed neural architecture with the different algorithms on a wide variety of languages, outperforming the original approach in practically all of them and setting new state-of-the-art results on the English and Chinese Penn Treebanks for non-contextualized and BERT-based embeddings.
In their provocative article, Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa have captured how dominant notions of competence reinforce normative whiteness as universal and fail to account for processes of racialization in language learning. Building upon their goal of “shifting the locus of enunciation in ways that provide a glimpse into alternative worlds beyond colonial logics,” in this commmentary, we illustrate one such alternative in which language and languaging are anchored in Indigenous notions of relationality, the worldview that everything is interrelated, and by extension, interdependent. This view aligns with the deep connection that Indigenous communities make to their languages and the specific geographical, sociopolitical, and cultural contexts of their use. Relational frameworks thus counter the dispossession experienced by many Indigenous communities due to the colonial practice of separating languages from these contexts (see Davis, 2017, pp. 40–42). Similarly, by facilitating knowledge coproduction in ways that are locally specific and accountable, a relational approach serves to undo practices of teaching and assessing language learning in ways that uncritically adopt Eurocentric (“universal”) norms (McIvor, 2020; Mellow, 2000). We enter this discussion as scholar–practitioners based at a public university in the lands of the Cahuilla, Tongva, Serrano, and Luiseño peoples. Melissa Venegas is a white settler, PhD student, and former K–12 Spanish instructor. Her current research involves critical approaches to language education that examine language hierarchies and validate US varieties of Spanish. Wesley Y. Leonard is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and a linguist who serves as a Native American Studies faculty member. His experiences being told that his community's efforts to learn their “extinct” language from documentation would not succeed inspired his current work in language reclamation, a mode of language recovery that replaces colonial logics with Indigenous community needs, goals, and worldviews. Clearly, in its narrow conceptualization, linguistic competence is theoretically lacking. Its assumptions about language ignore the social contexts that are fundamental to language learning and use, and its focus on an ideal speaker–hearer as the unit of analysis misaligns with how languaging actually occurs. In contrast, an analytic that considers language users and learners as networks of relations points to different metrics and units of analysis––language ecologies rather than languages-as-objects and diverse communities rather than an abstract prototype. Below, we explore examples of how language learning can be framed through an approach anchored in relationality and the ensuing notion of relational accountability, the responsibility of being accountable to relationships such as those between people and nonhuman relations, institutions, and lands. While this principle applies for all language communities, we draw special attention to those that have experienced severe ruptures to core relationships due to colonial dispossession and cultural genocide. In these contexts, exercising relational accountability entails active interventions to restore the relationships that have been disrupted or severed. The initial goal may not be “proficiency,” but rather to strengthen cultural ties or relationships with Elders (Lukaniec & Palakurthy, 2022, p. 344). As Flores and Rosa have pointed out, narrow definitions of language, as well as dominant notions of linguistic competence, render racialized students as “deficient” in academic language because of their supposed reliance on home or community language patterns. In addition to erasing the legitimacy of current language users’ practices, we further note how these dominant frameworks have replicated colonial logics that inhibit language reclamation potential. For instance, Miami people at one point had shifted fully to English, thus becoming “incompetent” in relation to myaamiaataweenki (speaking Miami) with relationships anchored in language similarly damaged. Decolonial framings of “competence,” however, might instead reference a community's collective ability to use their language(s), including future use as a result of reclamation (Leonard, 2008). Relational accountability entails building capacity to realize this potential through appropriate interventions in language teaching, development, and assessment. This is exemplified in ANA ‘ŌLELO, a Hawaiian proficiency scale developed by and for Hawaiians to reflect community values and ways of being (Kahakalau, 2017). The tool was designed to not only measure linguistic proficiency but also to perpetuate the Native Hawaiian culture. For example, the scale considers the ability to perform protocol, an important aspect of Native Hawaiian culture. Moreover, as Flores and Rosa have described, normative notions of competence elevate some people to a fully human status while diminishing the humanity of racialized Others. We observe that this conceptualization also advances colonial violence by erasing the nonhuman relatives that have central roles in many Indigenous cultures. However, appropriate interventions can counteract these erasures. For example, Engman and Hermes (2021) described an ecological approach to language learning that recognizes land as a relative. Young Ojibwe learners participated in forest walks near what is now Hayward, Wisconsin, and the Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe Reservation. The participants engaged in collective meaning-making involving discussions of naming items, with the land as an interlocutor. Requests for names of items in Ojibwe went beyond lexical labeling, instead serving as invitations to consider broader relationships, for example, How did it get here? Who put it in this configuration? What is our relationship to the object? As another example, Corntassel and Hardbarger (2019) described land-based pedagogies with Cherokee youth and Elders in the territory of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. Participants took photographs of items meaningful to them that could exemplify Cherokee community sustainability and perpetuation of Cherokee lifeways (p. 96), which they then presented at a community symposium. Such an approach exemplifies relational accountability to the land, community, and intergenerational knowledge, and acknowledges learners’ experiences and expertise as vital to community well-being. As Opaskwayak Cree scholar Shawn Wilson concluded in his foundational Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods, knowledge production and sharing become accountable to Indigenous ways of being and knowing through a relational framework because “relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality” (Wilson, 2008, p. 7). The activities described above demonstrate language learning as a process anchored in relationality. People are learning language, but rather than this being a decontextualized goal assessed through normative notions of linguistic competence, it represents an outcome of cultivating relationships that allow communities to thrive.
With the development of deep learning, neural networks are widely used in various fields, and the improved model performance also introduces a considerable number of parameters and computations. Model quantisation is a technique that turns floating-point computing into low-specific-point computing, which can effectively reduce model computation strength, parameter size, and memory consumption but often bring a considerable loss of accuracy. This paper mainly addresses the problem where the distribution of parameters is too concentrated during quantisation aware training (QAT). In the QAT process, we use a piecewise function to statistics the parameter distributions and simulate the effect of quantisation noise in each round of training, based on the statistical results. Experimental results show that by quantising the Transformer network, we lose less precision and significantly reduce the storage cost of the model; compared with the full precision LSTM network, our model has higher accuracy under the condition of a similar storage cost. Meanwhile, compared with other quantisation methods on language modelling task, our approach is more accurate. We validated the effectiveness of our policy on the WikiText-103 and PENN Treebank datasets. The experiments show that our method extremely compresses the storage cost and maintains high model performance.
The problem and the aim. Modern linguodidactics pays special attention to identifying the role of vocabulary in learning a foreign language, determining strategies for learning foreign language vocabulary, finding methods for testing vocabulary, mastering the vocabulary of scientific discourse, using mnemonics in memorizing lexical norms. New training formats necessitate the use of information visualization technologies and digital means in the study of a foreign language. The purpose of the study is to identify and confirm effectiveness of using digital services of infographics in mnemonics to improve the quality of teaching foreign language vocabulary. Research methods. Digital tools for data visualization are used in the system of mnemonic operations (grouping, classification, structuring, systematization, analogy, association, repetition) and methods (rhyme, association, mnemonics, chain method, memory cards, mnemonic cards). Infographic services support semantisation of lexical material and its activation, explanation of rules, situational illustration, and foreign language communication. A special test is developed, it includes questions on English vocabulary and assignments based on the methodology of A.R. Luria. Auxiliary visualization methods are used: data design in the form of mind maps, tables, charts, graphs. The experiment involved 30 students of the training program Pedagogical education (Bachelor's programme) of Vyatka State University. WordArt is used as a digital service of infographics. Statistical processing of the results is performed using the nonparametric method - Wilcoxon's T-test. Results. Students learn digital infographic services, use them to study new lexical material, memorize and present concepts/terms, set expressions, and combine familiar lexical elements in a variety of contexts. Statistical assessment of the reliability of positive dynamics of students' skills to recognize words, understand lexical units, to construct new phrases was carried out Temp <Tcrit0.05 (45<107). In conclusion rules and conditions, implementation of which ensures effectiveness of using digital services of infographics in mnemonics to improve quality of teaching a foreign language, are summarized.
This article analyzes the role of phraseology as a field in linguistics, phraseological units formed by means of art terms in French and Uzbek languages and their lexical-semantic features on the basis of two incompatible language norms.
The field of psycholinguistics has recently questioned the primacy of word frequency (WF) in influencing word recognition and production, instead focusing on the importance of a word's contextual diversity (CD). WF is operationalised by counting the number of occurrences of a word in a corpus, while a word's CD is a count of the number of contexts that a word occurs in, with repetitions within a context being ignored. Numerous studies have converged on the conclusion that CD is a better predictor of word recognition latency and accuracy than frequency. These findings support a cognitive mechanism based on the principle of likely need over the principle of repetition in lexical organisation. In the current study, we trained the semantic distinctiveness model on communication patterns in social media platforms consisting of over 55-billion-word tokens and examined the ability of theoretically distinct models to explain word recognition latency and accuracy data from over 1 million participants from the Mandera et al. English Crowdsourding Project norms, consisting of approximately 59,000 words across six age bands ranging from ages 10 to 60 years. There was a clear quantitative trend across the age bands, where there is a shift from a social environment-based attention mechanism in the "younger" models, to a clear dominance for a discourse-based attention mechanism as models "aged." This pattern suggests that there is a dynamical interaction between the cognitive mechanisms of lexical organisation and environmental information that emerges across ageing.
The aim of this article is to take the first steps toward the compilation of a treebank of Old English compatible with the framework of Universal Dependencies (UD). Such a treebank will comprise morphological and syntactic annotation of Old English texts adequate for cross-linguistic comparison, diachronic analysis and natural language processing. The article, therefore, engages in four tasks: (i) identifying the Old English exponents of UD lexical categories; (ii) selecting the Old English exponents of UD morphological features; (iii) finding the areas of Old English morphology that require token indexing in the UD format; and (iv) checking on the relevance of the universal set of dependency relations. The data have been extracted from ParCorOEv2, an open access annotated parallel corpus Old English-English. The main conclusions are that the annotation format calls for two additional fields (gloss and morphological relatedness) and that enhanced dependencies are required in order to account for some syntactic phenomena.
Early life stress (ELS) and major depressive disorder (MDD) share neural network abnormalities. However, it is unclear how ELS and MDD may separately and/or jointly relate to brain networks, and whether neural differences exist between depressed individuals with vs without ELS. Moreover, prior work evaluated static versus dynamic network properties, a critical gap considering brain networks show changes in coordinated activity over time. Seventy-one unmedicated females with and without childhood sexual abuse (CSA) histories and/or MDD completed a resting state scan and a stress task in which cortisol and affective ratings were collected. Recurring functional network co-activation patterns (CAPs) were examined and time in CAP (number of times each CAP is expressed) and transition frequencies (transitioning between different CAPs) were computed. The effects of MDD and CSA on CAP metrics were examined and CAP metrics were correlated with depression and stress-related variables. Results showed that MDD, but not CSA, related to CAP metrics. Specifically, individuals with MDD (N = 35) relative to HCs (N = 36), spent more time in a posterior default mode (DMN)-frontoparietal network (FPN) CAP and transitioned more frequently between posterior DMN-FPN and prototypical DMN CAPs. Across groups, more time spent in a posterior DMN-FPN CAP and greater DMN-FPN and prototypical DMN CAP transition frequencies were linked to higher rumination. Imbalances between the DMN and the FPN appear central to MDD and might contribute to MDD-related cognitive dysfunction, including rumination. Unexpectedly, CSA did not modulate such dysfunctions, a finding that needs to be replicated by future studies with larger sample sizes.
The article studies the linguistic features of the poem "Ana v ugyl" ("Mother and Son"), which is a coeval of the poem "Kyyssai Yusuf" by Kul Gali (the 11 th century). Several little-known sources of this work have reached us. We have introduced them into scientific circulation. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that we have carried out a comparative analysis of the lexical composition of these works, studied their isogosses, and the features of local beliefs. Based on the identified internal relationship, the article proves that both works belong to Bulgar-Tatar literature. The discovered linguistic facts indicate the uniformity of the literary language norms of the Bulgar-Tatars from the Middle Volga region. A comparative study of the works has made it possible to reveal the features of the original literary-fictional koine of the Tatars' ancestors who lived in the Middle Ages.
In this work, we explore character-level neural syntactic parsing for Chinese with two typical syntactic formalisms: the constituent formalism and a dependency formalism based on a newly released character-level dependency treebank. Prior works in Chinese parsing have struggled with whether to de ne words when modeling character interactions. We choose to integrate full character-level syntactic dependency relationships using neural representations from character embeddings and richer linguistic syntactic information from human-annotated character-level Parts-Of-Speech and dependency labels. This has the potential to better understand the deeper structure of Chinese sentences and provides a better structural formalism for avoiding unnecessary structural ambiguities. Specifically, we first compare two different character-level syntax annotation styles: constituency and dependency. Then, we discuss two key problems for character-level parsing: (1) how to combine constituent and dependency syntactic structure in full character-level trees and (2) how to convert from character-level to word-level for both constituent and dependency trees. In addition, we also explore several other key parsing aspects, including di erent character-level dependency annotations and joint learning of Parts-Of-Speech and syntactic parsing. Finally, we evaluate our models on the Chinese Penn Treebank (CTB) and our published Shanghai Jiao Tong University Chinese Character Dependency Treebank (SCDT). The results show the e effectiveness of our model on both constituent and dependency parsing. We further provide empirical analysis and suggest several directions for future study.
The study aims to provide a comprehensive characteristic of lexical parameters of legal discourse, the communicative-pragmatic meaning of which is realised at the structural-semantic, content-thematic levels of the utterance. It is noted that legal discourse has peculiar lexico-semantic features due to its main purpose to regulate the communicants’ behaviour in situations of institutional communication established by law in accordance with the system of social role characteristics, prescriptions, instructions, requirements and standards of conduct. Scientific novelty lies in identifying the discursive-semantic patterns of institutional communication formation based on the lexico-semantic organisation of legal discourse. As a result, it has been found that the lexical continuum of legal discourse conforms to the stylistic norms of the modern Russian literary language. Lexical means, being verbal formulas of interpretation of the essence of legal communication, occupy a special place in legal discourse and specifically reflect its significant elements.
The purpose of this study is to describe and analyse the interference of the Kazakh and Russian languages at the lexical level as a result of the interaction of the two languages and to identify the special features of the use of the Russian language among Kazakhs. The material of the study is the results of an experiment conducted in a school with 29 pupils in Grade 9 with Kazakh as the language of instruction at the Nur-Sultan Lyceum School No. 48. The first part of the study consists in the fact that the subjects were offered words with which they had to form phrases from the proposed pairs. In the second part of the experiment, students were offered sentences in Kazakh that had to be translated into Russian. The study considered various views on the definition of the phenomenon of interference resulting from the interaction of language systems in the context of bilingualism, during linguistic contacts. Interference is expressed in deviations from the norm and the system of the studied language under the influence of the native. In addition, the causes of interference were described, which are explained not only by linguistic, but also by extralinguistic factors.
Public and private decision-making on health problems relies on scientific evidence. However, scientific knowledge includes uncertainty, as does knowledge about COVID-19. In an experimental study, we tested how the trustworthiness (on the three dimensions expertise, integrity, and benevolence) of a source of information (either a scientist or a politician), was affected when messages were either two-sided (including arguments pro and contra the effectiveness of mask-wearing) or one-sided (only pro arguments). Results showed that scientists were ascribed more expertise and integrity compared to politicians, and both sources were ascribed more expertise when they gave two-sided (instead of one-sided) information. Moreover, trustworthiness ratings on all three dimensions were affected by participants' prior topic attitudes and epistemic certainty beliefs. These findings underline that when a source provides two-sided information, this may increase people's willingness to trust that source. To use this strategy most effectively in health communication, more research should be done on how many and what types of counterarguments to include.
Stress is omnipresent in our everyday lives. It is therefore critical to identify potential stress-buffering behaviors that can help to prevent the negative effects of acute stress in daily life. Massages, a form of social touch, are an effective buffer against both the endocrinological and sympathetic stress response in women. However, for other forms of social touch, potential stress-buffering effects have not been investigated in detail. Furthermore, the possible stress-buffering effects of social touch on men have not been researched so far. The present study focused on embracing, one of the most common forms of social touch across many cultures. We used a short-term embrace between romantic partners as a social touch intervention prior to the induction of acute stress via the Socially Evaluated Cold Pressor Test. Women who embraced their partner prior to being stressed showed a reduced cortisol response compared to a control group in which no embrace occurred. No stress-buffering effect could be observed in men. No differences between the embrace and control group were observed regarding sympathetic nervous system activation measured via blood pressure or subjective affect ratings. These findings suggest that in women, short-term embraces prior to stressful social situations such as examinations or stressful interviews can reduce the cortisol response in that situation.
Aggression-related sexual fantasies (ASF) have been related to various forms of harmful sexual behavior in both sex offender and community samples. However, more research is needed to fully understand this relation, particularly whether ASF is associated with harmful sexual behavior beyond hostile sexism against women and a sexual preference for violence and sexual violence. In the present study, N = 428 participants (61.9% women) between 18 and 83 years of age (M = 28.17, SD = 9.7) reported their ASF and hostile sexism. They rated their sexual arousal by erotic, violent, and sexually violent pictures as a direct measure of sexual preference. Response latencies between stimulus presentation and arousal ratings were used as an indirect measure of sexual preference. ASF and the directly and indirectly assessed sexual preference for violent and sexually violent stimuli were positively correlated. They were unrelated to hostile sexism against women. ASF showed the strongest associations with self-reported sexually sadistic behavior and presumably non-consensual sexual sadism beyond these preferences and hostile sexism in the total group and separately among men and women. The findings indicate that ASF and sexual preference are not equivalent constructs and further underscore the potential relevance of ASF for harmful sexual behavior.
Spoken language contains overlapping patterns across different levels, from syllables to words to phrases. The discovery of these structures may be partially supported by statistical learning (SL), the unguided, automatic extraction of regularities from the environment through passive exposure. SL supports word learning in artificial language experiments, but few studies have examined whether it scales up to support natural language learning in adult second language learners. Here, adult English speakers (n = 70) listened to daily podcasts in either Italian or English for 2 weeks while going about their normal routines. To measure word knowledge, participants provided familiarity ratings of Italian words and nonwords both before and after the listening period. Critically, compared with English controls, Italian listeners significantly improved in their ability to discriminate Italian words and nonwords. These results suggest that unguided exposure to natural, foreign language speech supports the extraction of relevant word features and the development of nascent word forms. At a theoretical level, these findings indicate that SL may effectively scale up to support real-world language acquisition. These results also have important practical implications, suggesting that adult learners may be able to acquire relevant speech patterns and initial word forms simply by listening to the language. This form of learning can occur without explicit effort, formal instruction or focused study.
Introduction. At the moment the territory of the Russian Federation comprises 138 endangered languages, which determines the relevance of studying the influence of the state’s language policy on the development of the Karelian language. The purpose of the study is to analyze the way language contacts influenced Karelian. The novelty of the study lies in the consideration of linguistic interference in the historical context. Methodology and sources. The study is conducted using the publications in Karelian of the pre-Soviet and Soviet periods, as well as articles from modern electronic periodicals. The research material was broadened by interviewing several informants. The data was collected and analyzed using the method of continuous sampling, questioning, participant observation, and comparative analysis. The theoretical basis of the research is the social typology of languages and the typology of language situations. Results and discussion. Different historical periods ended in changing Karelian in different ways and making it adopt some features of Finnish, Vepsian and Russian. The texts of the pre-Soviet period show that lexical units of Russian origin denote everyday realities or religious concepts. The Soviet period texts demonstrate the maximum number of Russianbased lexical units, that are related to everyday life or Soviet ideology and realities. In the texts of the modern period, there is the least number of words of Russian origin, that are mostly borrowings that have long been a part of the language norm of Karelian. Conclusion. With the distinctive features relevant to the typology of language situations taken into account, the present language situation in the Republic of Karelia can be defined as multicomponent multilingual, being demographically out of equilibrium and communicatively unbalanced. In different historical periods Karelian was influenced, in varying degrees, by Russian; this is clearly reflected in the vocabulary. Nowadays professional and amateur activists striving to revitalize the Karelian language are oriented mainly towards its Baltic-Finnish basis.
How does social support bolster resilience? Here, we present a new dyadic paradigm to study causal mechanisms of acute and ecologically valid social support in the laboratory. The Dyadic Stress and Support Task (DSST) consists of a psychosocial stress phase and a recovery phase. During DSST stress, a pair of participants take turns to perform public speaking and mental arithmetic in front of a panel. Unable to see or touch each other, they witness each other's performance and feedback. During DSST recovery, the pair either interact freely with each other for 5 min (social support condition) or interact separately with an experimenter (non-support condition). To establish the validity of the DSST, we tested 21 pairs of long-term close friends in a pilot study. Primary outcome measures were ratings of affective state and bodily arousal (VAS scales 0-100). Secondary outcome measures were heart rate and salivary cortisol. DSST stress successfully induced subjective Stress Activation, increased Negative Affect and decreased Positive Affect. We also observed increased heart rate and salivary cortisol. After DSST recovery, Stress Activation and Negative Affect ratings were reduced in both groups. Positive Affect was completely restored to pre-stress baseline levels in the Social support group, while remaining significantly lower in the Non-support group. The DSST successfully induced stress and negative affect and captured stress recovery in both groups. Free-form interaction with the friend enhanced recovery of affective state, supporting the validity of spontaneous interaction between friends as a model of social support.
OBJECTIVES: Gender has been suggested to play a critical role in how facial expressions of pain are perceived by others. With the present study we aim to further investigate how gender might impact the decoding of facial expressions of pain, (i) by varying both the gender of the observer as well as the gender of the expressor and (ii) by considering two different aspects of the decoding process, namely intensity decoding and pain recognition. METHODS: In two online-studies, videos of facial expressions of pain as well as of anger and disgust displayed by male and female avatars were presented to male and female participants. In the first study, valence and arousal ratings were assessed (intensity decoding) and in the second study, participants provided intensity ratings for different affective states, that allowed for assessing intensity decoding as well as pain recognition. RESULTS: The gender of the avatar significantly affected the intensity decoding of facial expressions of pain, with higher ratings (arousal, valence, pain intensity) for female compared to male avatars. In contrast, the gender of the observer had no significant impact on intensity decoding. With regard to pain recognition (differentiating pain from anger and disgust), neither the gender of the avatar, nor the gender of the observer had any affect. CONCLUSIONS: Only the gender of the expressor seems to have a substantial impact on the decoding of facial expressions of pain, whereas the gender of the observer seems of less relevance. Reasons for the tendency to see more pain in female faces might be due to psychosocial factors (e.g., gender stereotypes) and require further research.
OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to examine implicit affect toward suicide (i.e., how good/bad suicide is perceived). Some people might be more likely to think about/choose suicide because they perceive it as a good option (to gain relief) relative to available alternatives. METHOD: Implicit affect toward suicide among adults (N = 72) and adolescents (N = 174) with and without suicidal thoughts was examined using first-person (FP) perspective suicide pictures in the affect misattribution procedure (AMP). RESULTS: Suicidal adults' implicit positive affect toward suicide was associated with STB variables, such as explicit valence (r = 0.34) and arousal (r = 0.44) ratings of suicide pictures, and implicit affect differentiated groups above and beyond explicit valence ratings. Contrary to our hypothesis, suicidal participants did not display higher implicit positive affect toward suicide than nonsuicidal participants. However, suicidal participants displayed consistent implicit affect toward different suicide pictures, whereas nonsuicidal participants evaluated some pictures as more pleasant than others (ORs = 1.92-2.27). CONCLUSIONS: Implicit affect toward suicide may relate to STB, but stimuli characteristics (e.g., color) likely influence the accuracy of assessment with the AMP and should be a focus of future research involving this and other implicit measures.
Automatically inferring drivers’ emotions during driver-pedestrian interactions to improve road safety remains a challenge for designing in-vehicle, empathic interfaces. To that end, we carried out a lab-based study using a combination of camera and physiological sensors. We collected participants’ (N=21) real-time, affective (emotion self-reports, heart rate, pupil diameter, skin conductance, and facial temperatures) responses towards non-verbal, pedestrian crossing videos from the Joint Attention for Autonomous Driving (JAAD) dataset. Our findings reveal that positive, non-verbal, pedestrian crossing actions in the videos elicit higher valence ratings from participants, while non-positive actions elicit higher arousal. Different pedestrian crossing actions in the videos also have a significant influence on participants’ physiological signals (heart rate, pupil diameter, skin conductance) and facial temperatures. Our findings provide a first step toward enabling in-car empathic interfaces that draw on behavioural and physiological sensing to in situ infer driver emotions during non-verbal pedestrian interactions.
Purpose: To identify whether exposing medical students to a multimodal curriculum of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) practices improves their understanding of CAM clinical applications. Background: A significant portion of the U.S. population uses CAM: 34% of adults and 12% of children. Integrative medicine combines the best of conventional and CAM practices. Despite the increased clinical acceptance of CAM, medical education has been lagging, leaving gaps in learners' knowledge. It is important for medical education to keep pace with these developments by educating students and expanding the view of interprofessional care. Methods: A total of 101 first-year medical students at the University of Connecticut participated in a multimodal CAM curriculum. This included (1) an hour lecture, (2) an online research assignment for a continuity patient, and (3) 2 of 4 modules: acupuncture, hypnotherapy, Reiki, or pet therapy. Pre- and post-tests were administered 1 week apart to assess familiarity with CAM practices and the perceived safety and efficacy of each modality. The familiarity was rated on a scale of 0 (not familiar) to 10 (very familiar). Paired Student's t-tests assessed changes from pre- to post-tests at significant levels (p < 0.01). Results: Overall, the mean percentage of students who were able to identify 1 of the top 8 CAM modalities increased from 38% to 49%. The average familiarity rating of CAM significantly increased from 4.7 pretest to 6.6 post-test (p < 0.01). The top 8 CAM modalities, as selected by students, included acupuncture, meditation, yoga, massage, Reiki, chiropractic, hypnosis, and pet therapy. Overall, the familiarity ratings increased for both safety and effectiveness with intermodule variability from pre- and post-test (p < 0.01). Larger increases in effectiveness familiarity were found than of safety familiarity (p < 0.01). Conclusions: This multimodal curriculum significantly improved medical students' familiarity with CAM modalities and the perceived safety and effectiveness of the modalities.
We present substructure distribution projection (SUBDP), a technique that projects a distribution over structures in one domain to another, by projecting substructure distributions separately. Models for the target domain can then be trained, using the projected distributions as soft silver labels. We evaluate SUBDP on zeroshot cross-lingual dependency parsing, taking dependency arcs as substructures: we project the predicted dependency arc distributions in the source language(s) to target language(s), and train a target language parser on the resulting distributions. Given an English treebank as the only source of human supervision, SUBDP achieves better unlabeled attachment score than all prior work on the Universal Dependencies v2.2 (Nivre et al., 2020) test set across eight diverse target languages, as well as the best labeled attachment score on six languages. In addition, SUBDP improves zeroshot cross-lingual dependency parsing with very few (e.g., 50) supervised bitext pairs, across a broader range of target languages.
Recent approaches to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) have profited from the enhanced contextualized word representations coming from contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs).This advancement is accompanied by a renewed interest in WSD applications in Humanities research, where the lack of suitable, specific WSD-annotated resources is a hurdle in developing ad-hoc WSD systems.Because they can exploit sentential context, LLMs are particularly suited for disambiguation tasks.Still, the application of LLMs is often limited to linear classifiers trained on top of the LLM architecture.In this paper, we follow recent developments in non-parametric learning and show how LLMs can be efficiently fine-tuned to achieve strong few-shot performance on WSD for historical languages (English and Dutch, date range: 1450-1950).We test our hypothesis using (i) a large, general evaluation set taken from large lexical databases, and (ii) a small real-world scenario involving an ad-hoc WSD task.Moreover, this paper marks the release of GysBERT, a LLM for historical Dutch.
Land Use / Land Cover (LULC) classification is considered one of the basic tasks that decision makers and map makers rely on to evaluate the infrastructure, using different types of satellite data, despite the large spectral difference or overlap in the spectra in the same land cover in addition to the problem of aberration and the degree of inclination of the images that may be negatively affect rating performance. The main objective of this study is to develop a working method for classifying the land cover using high-resolution satellite images using object based method. Maximum likelihood pixel based supervised as well as object approaches were examined on QuickBird satellite image in Karbala, Iraq. This study illustrated that use of textural data during the object image classification approach can considerably enhance land use classification performance. Moreover, the results showed higher overall accuracy (86.02%) in the o object based method than pixel based (79.06%) in urban extractions. The object based performed much more capabilities than pixel based.
Associative learning and memory mechanisms drive interoceptive signaling along the gut-brain axis, thus shaping affective-emotional reactions and behavior. Specifically, learning to predict potentially harmful, visceral pain is assumed to succeed within very few trials. However, the temporal dynamics of cerebellar and cerebral fMRI signal changes underlying early acquisition and extinction of learned fear signals and the concomitant evolvement of safety learning remain incompletely understood. 3 T fMRI data of healthy individuals from three studies were uniformly processed across the whole brain and the cerebellum. All studies employed differential delay conditioning (N = 94) with one visual cue (CS+) being repeatedly paired with visceral pain as unconditioned stimulus (US) while a second cue remained unpaired (CS-). During subsequent extinction (N = 51), all CS were presented without US. Behavioral results revealed increased CS+-aversiveness and CS--pleasantness after conditioning and diminished valence ratings for both CS following extinction. During early acquisition, the CS- induced linearly increasing neural activation in the insula, midcingulate cortex, hippocampus, precuneus as well as cerebral and cerebellar somatomotor regions. The comparison between acquisition and extinction phases yielded a CS--induced linear increase in the posterior cingulate cortex and precuneus during early acquisition, while there was no evidence for linear fMRI signal changes for the CS+ during acquisition and for both CS during extinction. Based on theoretical accounts of discrimination and temporal difference learning, these results suggest a gradual evolvement of learned safety cues that engage emotional arousal, memory, and cortical modulatory networks. As safety signals are presumably more difficult to learn and to discriminate from learned threat cues, the underlying temporal dynamics may reflect enhanced salience and prediction processing as well as increasing demands for attentional resources and the integration of multisensory information. Maladaptive responses to learned safety signals are a clinically relevant phenotype in multiple conditions, including chronic visceral pain, and can be exceptionally resistant to modification or extinction. Through sustained hypervigilance, safety seeking constitutes one key component in pain and stress-related avoidance behavior, calling for future studies targeting the mechanisms of safety learning and extinction to advance current cognitive-behavioral treatment approaches.
In order to achieve deep natural language understanding, syntactic constituent parsing is a vital step, highly demanded by many artificial intelligence systems to process both text and speech. One of the most recent proposals is the use of standard sequence-to-sequence models to perform constituent parsing as a machine translation task, instead of applying task-specific parsers. While they show a competitive performance, these text-to-parse transducers are still lagging behind classic techniques in terms of accuracy, coverage and speed. To close the gap, we here extend the framework of sequence-to-sequence models for constituent parsing, not only by providing a more powerful neural architecture for improving their performance, but also by enlarging their coverage to handle the most complex syntactic phenomena: discontinuous structures. To that end, we design several novel linearizations that can fully produce discontinuities and, for the first time, we test a sequence-to-sequence model on the main discontinuous benchmarks, obtaining competitive results on par with task-specific discontinuous constituent parsers and achieving state-of-the-art scores on the (discontinuous) English Penn Treebank.
This work presents two experiments with the goal of replicating the transferability of dependency parsers and POS taggers trained on closely related languages within the lowresource language family Tupan. The experiments include both zero-shot settings as well as multilingual models. Previous studies have found that even a comparably small treebank from a closely related language will improve sequence labelling considerably in such cases. Results from both POS tagging and dependency parsing confirm previous evidence that the closer the phylogenetic relation between two languages, the better the predictions for sequence labelling tasks get. In many cases, the results are improved if multiple languages from the same family are combined. This suggests that in addition to leveraging similarity between two related languages, the incorporation of multiple languages of the same family might lead to better results in transfer learning for NLP applications.
In this study it was investigated whether Catalan dominant bilinguals from Girona performed differently on a Spanish vocabulary test in comparison to Spanish monolinguals from Toledo. The test measured both lexical knowledge and lexical accessibility. The test was administered to two groups of bilinguals and monolinguals: one aged 5-6 and another aged 8-9. The monolinguals outperformed the bilinguals at both ages, but most of the Catalan dominant bilinguals fell within monolingual norm at age 8-9, despite the fact that at group level the differences were still observable.