Using Literary Texts to Teach Grammar in Foreign Language Classroom
Atmaca, Hasan; Günday, Rifat
2016-01-01
Today, it is discussed that the use of literary texts in foreign language classroom as a course material isn't obligatory; but necessary due to the close relationship between language and literature. Although literary texts are accepted as authentic documents and do not have any purpose for language teaching, they are indispensable sources to be…
Litman, Cindy; Marple, Stacy; Greenleaf, Cynthia; Charney-Sirott, Irisa; Bolz, Michael J.; Richardson, Lisa K.; Hall, Allison H.; George, MariAnne; Goldman, Susan R.
2017-01-01
This study presents a descriptive analysis of 71 videotaped lessons taught by 34 highly regarded secondary English language arts, history, and science teachers, collected to inform an intervention focused on evidence-based argumentation from multiple text sources. Studying the practices of highly regarded teachers is valuable for identifying…
The Sources of Foreign Language Speaking Anxiety of Iranian English Language Learners
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Firooz Sadighi
2017-10-01
Full Text Available Foreign language learning anxiety is one of the affective factors which influence language learning negatively. It has several sources and different types. The present study aimed at investigating the sources of foreign language speaking anxiety of Iranian EFL learners. To do so, 154 EFL learners participated in the study. They were required to fill out a foreign language anxiety questionnaire which was developed based on the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS by Horwitz, Horwitz, and Cope (1986. The results of the study indicated that “fear of making mistakes”, “fear of negative evaluation”, and “lack of vocabulary knowledge” were the main factors which caused anxiety among students. Some strategies are recommended for the students to use in order to cope with the anxiety-provoking factors.
Open source software and minority languages: a priceless opportunity
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Jordi Mas
2003-04-01
Full Text Available Open source software is a form of software that gives its users freedom. With the advent of the Internet, open source software has consolidated as a technically viable, financially sustainable alternative to proprietary software. Languages such as Breton, Galician, Gaelic and Catalan have seen very little development in the world of proprietary software because of the limitations imposed. In contrast, in the world of open source software these languages have been developed with notable success. Open source projects of the importance of the Mozilla browser, the GNOME environment and the GNU/Linux system have complete or partial translations in all these languages. Open source software presents an unprecedented opportunity for the development of minority languages, such as Catalan, in new technologies thanks to the freedom that they guarantee us.
An Exploration of Sources of Foreign Language Teacher Motivation in Iran
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Seyyed Mohammad Alavi
2011-11-01
Full Text Available This study aimed to investigate sources of motivation of English language teachers in Iranian public and private language schools. To this end, a Language Teacher Motivation Source (LTMS questionnaire was developed on the basis of the related literature. The LTMS examined four sources of motivation, i. e., extrinsic (economic, social, emotional, educational, intrinsic, altruistic, and subject matter motivation. Having been piloted and validated, the LTMS was administered to 200 male and female EFL teachers who had been classified in terms of their gender, age, marital status, academic degrees, job status, and their years of language teaching experiences. The results of parametric statistical analyses showed a hierarchy of language teacher sources of motivation that were not similar among different groups of language teachers in terms of their teaching experiences and level of education. This study suggests that authorities pay close attention to the sources of language teacher motivation to improve the quality of English language teaching and learning.
Text-based language identification for the South African languages
CSIR Research Space (South Africa)
Botha, G
2006-11-01
Full Text Available -crawling ap- proach described in [2]. That method employed an early language-identification system for au- tomatic selection of Web pages, and turned out to suffer from two limitations, namely wrongly identified web pages and web pages with mixed text (i...
The role of text in teaching foreign languages
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Tatyana A. Baranovskaya
2014-01-01
Full Text Available The research is devoted to a multi-level study of the essence and role of text creation comprehension in teaching a foreign language. Capturing motivational and logical mental structures along with recognising communicative and cognitive aspects of a person's identity in a text are key linguopsychological elements of studying text activities. The scientific value of the research is in specifying the operational approach to describing a concrete level of a person's consciousness, on which cognitive structures acquire language realisation in the process on communication. Existence of a person's concsiousness is considered on three levels of abstracrion within the conscious: sensory field, associative field, motivational field. The contents of a person's language consciousness can be described through its thesaurus and presented as a filter that sifts through incoming meaningful information expressed in the sign form. The process of first language acquisition by a child is closely related to the apprearance of the correlation between dynamic and static systems of sound production (syllable production and articulation. Tranfer to foreign language acquisition will then be connected only with changing the characted of the correlation in each specific case. Foreign language teaching is connected with the learners' using the language skills they already possess. Peculiarity of language consciousness is revealed both when comparing lexical and grammatical categories in several languages, in which the forms of the same category have different meanings, and when comparing a limited set of such linguistic meanings with an unlimited number of linguistic features and relations between the objects.
Sources of Foreign Language Student Teacher Anxiety: A Qualitative Inquiry
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Ali Merç
2011-04-01
Full Text Available This study aimed to Şnd out the sources of foreign language student teacher anxiety experienced by Turkish EFL student teachers throughout the teaching practicum using qualitative data collection tools. 150 student teachers completing their teaching practicum as part of their graduation requirement at Anadolu University Faculty of Education English Language Teaching Program participated in the study. The research tools were diaries kept by student teachers and semistructured interviews conducted with 30 of the participant student teachers. Constant Comparison Method was used to analyze the qualitative data. The analysis of the data revealed six main categories as the sources of foreign language student teacher anxiety: students and class profiles, classroom management, teaching procedures, being observed, mentors, and miscellaneous. Each source of foreign language student teacher anxiety is described and exempliŞed with extracts from student teachers’ diaries or interview records. The findings are discussed along the recent literature on foreign language student teacher anxiety. Suggestions for foreign language teacher education programs are also provided
LanguageNet: A Novel Framework for Processing Unstructured Text Information
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Qureshi, Pir Abdul Rasool; Memon, Nasrullah; Wiil, Uffe Kock
2011-01-01
In this paper we present LanguageNet—a novel framework for processing unstructured text information from human generated content. The state of the art information processing frameworks have some shortcomings: modeled in generalized form, trained on fixed (limited) data sets, and leaving...... the specialization necessary for information consolidation to the end users. The proposed framework is the first major attempt to address these shortcomings. LanguageNet provides extended support of graphical methods contributing added value to the capabilities of information processing. We discuss the benefits...... of the framework and compare it with the available state of the art. We also describe how the framework improves the information gathering process and contribute towards building systems with better performance in the domain of Open Source Intelligence....
Language Model Adaptation Using Machine-Translated Text for Resource-Deficient Languages
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Sadaoki Furui
2009-01-01
Full Text Available Text corpus size is an important issue when building a language model (LM. This is a particularly important issue for languages where little data is available. This paper introduces an LM adaptation technique to improve an LM built using a small amount of task-dependent text with the help of a machine-translated text corpus. Icelandic speech recognition experiments were performed using data, machine translated (MT from English to Icelandic on a word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence basis. LM interpolation using the baseline LM and an LM built from either word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence translated text reduced the word error rate significantly when manually obtained utterances used as a baseline were very sparse.
Language identification using excitation source features
Rao, K Sreenivasa
2015-01-01
This book discusses the contribution of excitation source information in discriminating language. The authors focus on the excitation source component of speech for enhancement of language identification (LID) performance. Language specific features are extracted using two different modes: (i) Implicit processing of linear prediction (LP) residual and (ii) Explicit parameterization of linear prediction residual. The book discusses how in implicit processing approach, excitation source features are derived from LP residual, Hilbert envelope (magnitude) of LP residual and Phase of LP residual; and in explicit parameterization approach, LP residual signal is processed in spectral domain to extract the relevant language specific features. The authors further extract source features from these modes, which are combined for enhancing the performance of LID systems. The proposed excitation source features are also investigated for LID in background noisy environments. Each chapter of this book provides the motivatio...
Lazar, Gillian; Heath, Shirley Brice
1996-01-01
Two educators discuss the role literature plays in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. One emphasizes that literary texts are a source for classroom activities that can motivate learners. The other points out that the English writings of ESL students about their travels and friends published in newsletters and journals generate…
A Typed Text Retrieval Query Language for XML Documents.
Colazzo, Dario; Sartiani, Carlo; Albano, Antonio; Manghi, Paolo; Ghelli, Giorgio; Lini, Luca; Paoli, Michele
2002-01-01
Discussion of XML focuses on a description of Tequyla-TX, a typed text retrieval query language for XML documents that can search on both content and structures. Highlights include motivations; numerous examples; word-based and char-based searches; tag-dependent full-text searches; text normalization; query algebra; data models and term language;…
MT Post-editing: A Text Repair Experience for the Foreign Language Class.
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Ana Niño
2007-04-01
Full Text Available Communication also means having to sort out the problems involved in learning a foreign language, especially with regards to production rather than reception. These learning strategies or skills can also be applied to translation teaching methodology, where students put in practice their risk taking, avoidance, reduction and/ or compensatory strategies in getting the message across. We acknowledge translation as a writing task constrained by the source text. In addition, the translation and the writing cycles have in common a generation stage and a revision stage where grammatical, lexical and stylistic correctness is assessed. Somewhere in the middle between translation and writing skills lies MT (Machine Translation post-editing that involves correcting the raw MT output with the aim of providing a quality text according to the intended purpose. Our research is intended to test the suitability of MT post-editing as an activity to promote error correction and, subsequently, to enhance written production in second and foreign language teaching.
Blom, E.; van Dijk, C.; Vasić, N.; van Witteloostuijn, M.; Avrutin, S.
The purpose of this study was to investigate texting and textese, which is the special register used for sending brief text messages, across children with typical development (TD) and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Using elicitation techniques, texting and spoken language messages
Blom, W.B.T.; van Dijk, Chantal; Vasic, Nada; van Witteloostuijn, Merel; Avrutin, S.
2017-01-01
The purpose of this study was to investigate texting and textese, which is the special register used for sending brief text messages, across children with typical development (TD) and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Using elicitation techniques, texting and spoken language messages
Text Manipulation Techniques and Foreign Language Composition.
Walker, Ronald W.
1982-01-01
Discusses an approach to teaching second language composition which emphasizes (1) careful analysis of model texts from a limited, but well-defined perspective and (2) the application of text manipulation techniques developed by the word processing industry to student compositions. (EKN)
Text-based language identification of multilingual names
CSIR Research Space (South Africa)
Giwa, O
2015-11-01
Full Text Available Text-based language identification (T-LID) of isolated words has been shown to be useful for various speech processing tasks, including pronunciation modelling and data categorisation. When the words to be categorised are proper names, the task...
Grammatical Templates: Improving Text Difficulty Evaluation for Language Learners
Wang, Shuhan; Andersen, Erik
2016-01-01
Language students are most engaged while reading texts at an appropriate difficulty level. However, existing methods of evaluating text difficulty focus mainly on vocabulary and do not prioritize grammatical features, hence they do not work well for language learners with limited knowledge of grammar. In this paper, we introduce grammatical templates, the expert-identified units of grammar that students learn from class, as an important feature of text difficulty evaluation. Experimental clas...
Undergraduates' Text Messaging Language and Literacy Skills
Grace, Abbie; Kemp, Nenagh; Martin, Frances Heritage; Parrila, Rauno
2014-01-01
Research investigating whether people's literacy skill is being affected by the use of text messaging language has produced largely positive results for children, but mixed results for adults. We asked 150 undergraduate university students in Western Canada and 86 in South Eastern Australia to supply naturalistic text messages and to complete…
Language Skills in Classical Chinese Text Comprehension
Lau, Kit-ling
2018-01-01
This study used both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the role of lower- and higher-level language skills in classical Chinese (CC) text comprehension. A CC word and sentence translation test, text comprehension test, and questionnaire were administered to 393 Secondary Four students; and 12 of these were randomly selected to…
Chang, Sandy
2013-01-01
As an initial step toward understanding which features of academic language make science-based expository text difficult for students with different English language proficiency (ELP) designations, this study investigated fifth-grade students' thoughts on text difficulty, their knowledge of the features of academic language, and the relationship between academic language and reading comprehension. Forty-five fifth-grade students participated in the study; 18 students were classified as Engli...
The Source of Language Variation among Chagga People in Kilimanjaro Region, Tanzania
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Godson Robert Mtallo
2015-07-01
Full Text Available This paper intends to find out the source of language variation among Chagga people. The study was guided by four specific objectives which were: to investigate the extent to which language variation exists among the Chagga, to examine the areas (aspects which mark language variation among the Chagga, to find out the source of language variation among the Chagga, and to determine whether Chagga varieties constitute different languages or varieties (dialects of the same language. In this study, three techniques were used to collect the primary data, which were sociolinguistic interview (free conversation, reading passage, and the wordlist. Results show that, despite the difficulties that Chagga people experience in communicating through their mother tongue, they understand each other. Their differences in speaking are based on some of the lexicon (vocabulary. Further, the study propounded the following as the reasons as to why Chagga people seem to differ in some vocabulary: geographical location, differences in origin, lack of common socialization, the existence of hostility among them as well as political unrest and the Mangi rule.
Tetiana Gulchuk
2018-01-01
The article is devoted to determining the peculiarities of the organization of future navigators ’text formation competence development during various forms of training on the basis of the analysis of scientific literature on language teaching methods. On the basis of analysis, generalization and systematization of scientific sources, we elucidated the forms of organization of language teaching (lectures, practical classes, seminars), which enable to improve the future navigators’ ability to ...
Authentic texts in teaching French as a foreign language
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Meta Lah
2010-12-01
Full Text Available The present paper is aimed at providing a ref lection on the use of authentic texts in French as a foreign language classroom. The author bases herself on an analysis of texts taken from four textbook sets (Le nouveau sans fronti`eres, Panorama, Campus and Rond point, which were or are still used in teaching French as a foreign language. Initially, a definition of authenticity and a survey of authentic material usage through history are provided. In the overview of the texts forming the corpus the texts are divided into authentic, adapted, apparently authentic and those for which no assumption can be made as to their authenticity. The authenticity analysis is also carried out by taking into account the analysis of/categorisation into text types (according to Adam. The author proceeds from two premises, i.e. firstly she foresees that authentic texts will be present in all text books analysed and secondly, considering the greater accessibility of materials, that their presence will be more pronounced in recent textbooks. However, none of the two hypo theses is confirmed, as authentic texts are found in the first three textbook sets, but not in the most recent one, while their presence is most pronounced in the oldest textbook set, i.e. in Le nouveau sans fronti`eres. The result of the analysis is thus somehow surprising given the overall accessibility of all kinds of authentic materials. In the author's opinion more authentic texts should be included into textbooks to thus enhance the purposeful ness of the foreign language classroom.
The production of coherent narrative texts by older language impaired children
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Sharon Tuch
1977-11-01
Full Text Available A group of 4 language-impaired children, 9 years old, and a group of 4 control children with no language problems were compared on an aspect of 'communicative competence' - their ability to produce coherent narrative texts (sequences of sentences which were semantically coherent and appropriate to the situational context. A test was devised by the writer, comprising stories presented to the children through a number of sensory modalities. The narrative texts elicited from the 2 groups were compared on a number of measures of semantic cohesion and measures of general semantic content (or appropriateness to the situational context. The performance of the language-impaired children appeared to be inferior to the control group on all the measures of semantic cohesion and general semantic content , supporting the hypothesis that the language-impaired group would perform inferiorly to the control group on an aspect of 'communicative competence'. The implications of the study's findings for the diagnosis and treatment of expressive language problems in the older child were discussed.
Factors that affect the accuracy of text-based language identification
CSIR Research Space (South Africa)
Botha, GR
2007-11-01
Full Text Available its excellent accuracy, another significant ad- vantage of the NB classifier is that new language doc- uments can simply be merged into an existing classifier by adding the n-gram statistics of these documents to the current language model...
Using Short Texts to Teach English as Second Language: An Integrated Approach
Kembo, Jane
2016-01-01
The teacher of English Language is often hard pressed to find interesting and authentic ways to present language to target second language speakers. While language can be taught and learned, part of it must be acquired and short texts provide powerful tools for doing so and reinforcing what has been taught/learned. This paper starts from research,…
Schwartz, Ana Isabel; Mendoza, Laura; Meyer, Bonnie
2017-01-01
The goal of the present study was to examine the efficacy of learning a text structure strategy (TSS) for improving reading comprehension and recall for second language (L2) learners, as well as to test for transfer of the strategy to the native language (L1). University L2 learners of English completed a five-session course on using the TSS to…
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
M.C. Padma
2008-06-01
Full Text Available In a multilingual country like India, a document may contain text words in more than one language. For a multilingual environment, multi lingual Optical Character Recognition (OCR system is needed to read the multilingual documents. So, it is necessary to identify different language regions of the document before feeding the document to the OCRs of individual language. The objective of this paper is to propose visual clues based procedure to identify Kannada, Hindi and English text portions of the Indian multilingual document.
Detecting causality from online psychiatric texts using inter-sentential language patterns
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Wu Jheng-Long
2012-07-01
Full Text Available Abstract Background Online psychiatric texts are natural language texts expressing depressive problems, published by Internet users via community-based web services such as web forums, message boards and blogs. Understanding the cause-effect relations embedded in these psychiatric texts can provide insight into the authors’ problems, thus increasing the effectiveness of online psychiatric services. Methods Previous studies have proposed the use of word pairs extracted from a set of sentence pairs to identify cause-effect relations between sentences. A word pair is made up of two words, with one coming from the cause text span and the other from the effect text span. Analysis of the relationship between these words can be used to capture individual word associations between cause and effect sentences. For instance, (broke up, life and (boyfriend, meaningless are two word pairs extracted from the sentence pair: “I broke up with my boyfriend. Life is now meaningless to me”. The major limitation of word pairs is that individual words in sentences usually cannot reflect the exact meaning of the cause and effect events, and thus may produce semantically incomplete word pairs, as the previous examples show. Therefore, this study proposes the use of inter-sentential language patterns such as ≪broke up, boyfriend>, Results Performance was evaluated on a corpus of texts collected from PsychPark (http://www.psychpark.org, a virtual psychiatric clinic maintained by a group of volunteer professionals from the Taiwan Association of Mental Health Informatics. Experimental results show that the use of inter-sentential language patterns outperformed the use of word pairs proposed in previous studies. Conclusions This study demonstrates the acquisition of inter-sentential language patterns for causality detection from online psychiatric texts. Such semantically more complete and precise features can improve causality detection performance.
Zhao, Xueyu; Solano-Flores, Guillermo; Qian, Ming
2018-01-01
This article addresses test translation review in international test comparisons. We investigated the applicability of the theory of test translation error--a theory of the multidimensionality and inevitability of test translation error--across source language-target language combinations in the translation of PISA (Programme of International…
A Study on the Aesthetic Value of Texts in Turkish Language Textbooks
Pilav, Salim
2016-01-01
One of the main objectives of education is to enable the individual to obtain an aesthetic perspective by using language. It is through such classes as Turkish Language and Literature that students not only explore skill-based aspects of Turkish language but also get acquainted with its artistic properties. Therefore, the texts used in these…
BILINGUAL MULTIMODAL SYSTEM FOR TEXT-TO-AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH AND SIGN LANGUAGE SYNTHESIS
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A. A. Karpov
2014-09-01
Full Text Available We present a conceptual model, architecture and software of a multimodal system for audio-visual speech and sign language synthesis by the input text. The main components of the developed multimodal synthesis system (signing avatar are: automatic text processor for input text analysis; simulation 3D model of human's head; computer text-to-speech synthesizer; a system for audio-visual speech synthesis; simulation 3D model of human’s hands and upper body; multimodal user interface integrating all the components for generation of audio, visual and signed speech. The proposed system performs automatic translation of input textual information into speech (audio information and gestures (video information, information fusion and its output in the form of multimedia information. A user can input any grammatically correct text in Russian or Czech languages to the system; it is analyzed by the text processor to detect sentences, words and characters. Then this textual information is converted into symbols of the sign language notation. We apply international «Hamburg Notation System» - HamNoSys, which describes the main differential features of each manual sign: hand shape, hand orientation, place and type of movement. On their basis the 3D signing avatar displays the elements of the sign language. The virtual 3D model of human’s head and upper body has been created using VRML virtual reality modeling language, and it is controlled by the software based on OpenGL graphical library. The developed multimodal synthesis system is a universal one since it is oriented for both regular users and disabled people (in particular, for the hard-of-hearing and visually impaired, and it serves for multimedia output (by audio and visual modalities of input textual information.
An Exploration of Sources of Foreign Language Teacher Motivation in Iran
Seyyed Mohammad Alavi; Zohreh Mehmandoust
2011-01-01
This study aimed to investigate sources of motivation of English language teachers in Iranian public and private language schools. To this end, a Language Teacher Motivation Source (LTMS) questionnaire was developed on the basis of the related literature. The LTMS examined four sources of motivation, i. e., extrinsic (economic, social, emotional, educational), intrinsic, altruistic, and subject matter motivation. Having been piloted and validated, the LTMS was administered to 200 male and fem...
Clinical records anonymisation and text extraction (CRATE): an open-source software system.
Cardinal, Rudolf N
2017-04-26
Electronic medical records contain information of value for research, but contain identifiable and often highly sensitive confidential information. Patient-identifiable information cannot in general be shared outside clinical care teams without explicit consent, but anonymisation/de-identification allows research uses of clinical data without explicit consent. This article presents CRATE (Clinical Records Anonymisation and Text Extraction), an open-source software system with separable functions: (1) it anonymises or de-identifies arbitrary relational databases, with sensitivity and precision similar to previous comparable systems; (2) it uses public secure cryptographic methods to map patient identifiers to research identifiers (pseudonyms); (3) it connects relational databases to external tools for natural language processing; (4) it provides a web front end for research and administrative functions; and (5) it supports a specific model through which patients may consent to be contacted about research. Creation and management of a research database from sensitive clinical records with secure pseudonym generation, full-text indexing, and a consent-to-contact process is possible and practical using entirely free and open-source software.
Effect of Telecollaboration on Translation of Culture-Bound Texts
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Vahid Rafieyan
2016-07-01
Full Text Available One of the most problematic perspectives of translation phenomenon is the cultural gap between the source language and the target language (Yang, 2010. This gap can be ideally filled through telecollaboration which provides internationally dispersed language learners in parallel language classes with cost-effective access to, and engagement with, peers who are expert speakers of the language under study (Belz, 2005. To investigate the effect of telecollaboration on the quality of translation of culture-bound texts, the current study was conducted on 64 Iranian undergraduate students of English translation at a university in Iran. Instruments used in the study consisted of three texts containing news excerpts from Voice of America (VOA. The study consisted of three phases: 1 assessing quality of translation of culture-bound texts, 2 random assignment of participants to two groups: one merely receiving cultural instruction while the other being linked to native English speakers through LinkedIn alongside receiving cultural instruction, and 3 assessing quality of translation of culture-bound texts immediately and two months following treatment. The results of mixed between-within subjects analysis of variance revealed the significant positive effect of telecollaboration on developing quality of translation of culture-bound texts and sustaining the attained knowledge. The pedagogical implications of the findings suggested incorporation of cultural components of source language society into translation courses and providing opportunities for translation students to be exposed to authentic and intensive source language culture through telecollaboration.
Balancing Linguistic and Social Needs: Evaluating Texts Using a Critical Language Awareness Approach
Case, Rod E.; Ndura, Elavie; Righettini, Marielena
2005-01-01
English as a second language (ESL) content-based texts are often evaluated for their presentation of sound second-language teaching practices. While such reviews are important and valuable, they ignore an examination of the race, class, and gender issues introduced in the texts. A critical perspective on textbook evaluation organized around the…
Exposure to audiovisual programs as sources of authentic language ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
Exposure to audiovisual programs as sources of authentic language input and second ... Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies ... The findings of the present research contribute more insights on the type and amount of ...
Language and Text-to-Speech Technologies for Highly Accessible Language & Culture Learning
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Anouk Gelan
2011-06-01
Full Text Available This contribution presents the results of the “Speech technology integrated learning modules for Intercultural Dialogue” project. The project objective was to increase the availability and quality of e-learning opportunities for less widely-used and less taught European languages using a user-friendly and highly accessible learning environment. The integration of new Text-to-Speech developments into web-based authoring software for tutorial CALL had a double goal: on the one hand increase the accessibility of e-learning packages, also for learners having difficulty reading (e.g. dyslexic learners or preferring auditory learning; on the other hand exploiting some didactic possibilities of this technology.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Nil Didem ŞİMŞEK
2015-07-01
Full Text Available Since primitive times, the need to communicate with each other has paved the way for the use different types of languages; and the question of language has become an unsolvable, complex issue. It is not possible to limit language with definitions. Language, as a social institution, differs from other languages with the cultural and social structure it has been shaped through; and forms its own lexicon. Aksan (1996:9 ; considers the lexicon of a language as “a whole made up of not only the words, but also the idioms, communicative expressions, formulaic expressions, proverbs, terms and various sets of expressions of that language.” As there are numerous lexical items in a language, there are numerous cult ural elements as well. Each unit among the lexicon provides an important communication between the speaker of that language and the cultural values to which that language belongs; and strengthens the relationship between them. Formulaic expressions, or in other words, communicative expressions are the most significant ones among these units that constitute the lexicon. Cultural transfer has an important role especially in teaching Turkish to foreigners. The functionality of these units is noteworthy in the transfer and the deliberate use of the cultural elements of that language. The aim of this study is to evaluate the texts in beginner level (A1 Turkish as a foreign language course books in terms of formulaic expressions (communicative expressions. The d ata sources for the study are the A1 level books of Lale and İstanbul series. Transferring the culture is quite important in teaching a language. In order to present the language along with the culture, formulaic expressions (communicative expressions sho uld be included frequently, particularly in the beginner level course books.
Language-agnostic processing of microblog data with text embeddings
Chrupala, Grzegorz
2014-01-01
A raw stream of posts from a microblogging platform such as Twitter contains text written in a large variety of languages and writing systems, in registers ranging from formal to internet slang. A significant amount has been expended in recent years to adapt standard NLP processing pipelines to be
The translation of biblical texts into South African Sign Language ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
The translation of biblical texts into South African Sign Language. ... Native signers were used as translators with the assistance of hearing specialists in the fields of religion and translation studies. ... AJOL African Journals Online. HOW TO ...
Vlas, Radu Eduard
2012-01-01
Open source projects do have requirements; they are, however, mostly informal, text descriptions found in requests, forums, and other correspondence. Understanding such requirements provides insight into the nature of open source projects. Unfortunately, manual analysis of natural language requirements is time-consuming, and for large projects,…
Zheng, Yanping
2009-01-01
In the thesis a coherent text is defined as a continuity of senses of the outcome of combining concepts and relations into a network composed of knowledge space centered around main topics. And the author maintains that in order to obtain the coherence of a target language text from a source text during the process of translation, a translator can…
Text-interpreter language for flexible generation of patient notes and instructions.
Forker, T S
1992-01-01
An interpreted computer language has been developed along with a windowed user interface and multi-printer-support formatter to allow preparation of documentation of patient visits, including progress notes, prescriptions, excuses for work/school, outpatient laboratory requisitions, and patient instructions. Input is by trackball or mouse with little or no keyboard skill required. For clinical problems with specific protocols, the clinician can be prompted with problem-specific items of history, exam, and lab data to be gathered and documented. The language implements a number of text-related commands as well as branching logic and arithmetic commands. In addition to generating text, it is simple to implement arithmetic calculations such as weight-specific drug dosages; multiple branching decision-support protocols for paramedical personnel (or physicians); and calculation of clinical scores (e.g., coma or trauma scores) while simultaneously documenting the status of each component of the score. ASCII text files produced by the interpreter are available for computerized quality audit. Interpreter instructions are contained in text files users can customize with any text editor.
Bahrani, Taher; Sim, Tam Shu
2012-01-01
In today's audiovisually driven world, various audiovisual programs can be incorporated as authentic sources of potential language input for second language acquisition. In line with this view, the present research aimed at discovering the effectiveness of exposure to news, cartoons, and films as three different types of authentic audiovisual…
REVIEW OF TURKISH SCIENTIFIC TEXTS ON TEACHING TURKISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Kamil İŞERİ
2017-04-01
Full Text Available The functions of the scientific texts under the informative text type are referring to the results of a research, reinterpreting certain research results, or reaching original results. When literature reviewed, it is observed that although the studies for creating scientific text have increased recently, it seems that the desired outcome is not achieved. In addition to teaching Turkish as a mother tongue, teaching it as a foreign language has also started to gain importance. For this reason, it is necessary to carry out such studies in order to increase the productivity in the field of teaching Turkish to foreigners. The aim of the study is to determine the orientations related to the rhetorical arrangement of the scientific texts on teaching of Turkish as a foreign language, which are included in the textbooks of the International Training and Education of Turkish Language Congresses as a full text and to evaluate these texts in terms of their specific functions. Findings and determinations revealed in the study are based on a corpus comprised of a total of 64 texts included in proceedings books, written in Turkish and related to teaching Turkish to foreigners. The study is structured by qualitative research method. The data were obtained by qualitative data collection techniques through document scanning and were examined within the framework of the scientific text criteria specified by Huber and Uzun (2001. Two out of 64 articles in the sample of the study revealed that none of the expected functional steps in the introduction, main and final sections were found. No work has been found that covers all of the functional steps in the introduction, main and final sections.
The language of poetic texts in contemporary Tuvan pop songs
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Oyumaa M. Saaya
2017-06-01
Full Text Available The article presents a linguistic analysis of lyrics of modern Tuvan pop songs. While studying them is important for understanding contemporary songwriting in Tuva, it is also necessary to discover what linguistic means, functional styles and vocabulary are used by modern authors of popular lyrics. The study can also help identify how contemporary global trends influence songwriting in means of linguistics. Three groups of songs can be defined in Tuvan pop music. The first of them comprises songs written by both professional poets and amateurs with good writing skills. Their texts have homogenous literary style and are intended for general audience (rather than specific groups of listeners. They do not feature any jargon or youth slang. The second group consists of “songs of the people” which are still popular and relevant, but not classified as folklore. This group also contains songs previously banned by censorship, and those written by ex-convicts. Their lyrics differ in style, and the vocabulary is also heterogenous: they can include slang and contain vernacular language. The third group includes songs following popular global and Russian trends, which triggered rapid evolution in Tuvan songwriting. There is significant number of authors or even creative unions, who write both lyric and music. They are stylistically uneven, contain a lot of neologisms, borrowed vocabulary, slang and jargon words and sometimes even macaronic (mixed language. The author provides a more in-depth analysis of lyrics belonging to the third group of songs. They can be divided into 6 thematic subgroups which greatly vary in lexical content and the use of tropes. The lyrics of contemporary Tuvan songs are quite close to the everyday language young people use. Active employment of jargon in the language of young and middle-aged people, especially in lyrics of modern songs, steadily decreases the literary norms of Tuvan language. The author emphasizes that
Jarman, Jay
2011-01-01
This dissertation focuses on developing and evaluating hybrid approaches for analyzing free-form text in the medical domain. This research draws on natural language processing (NLP) techniques that are used to parse and extract concepts based on a controlled vocabulary. Once important concepts are extracted, additional machine learning algorithms,…
Integrating source-language context into phrase-based statistical machine translation
Haque, R.; Kumar Naskar, S.; Bosch, A.P.J. van den; Way, A.
2011-01-01
The translation features typically used in Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PB-SMT) model dependencies between the source and target phrases, but not among the phrases in the source language themselves. A swathe of research has demonstrated that integrating source context modelling
Arabic text preprocessing for the natural language processing applications
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Awajan, A.
2007-01-01
A new approach for processing vowelized and unvowelized Arabic texts in order to prepare them for Natural Language Processing (NLP) purposes is described. The developed approach is rule-based and made up of four phases: text tokenization, word light stemming, word's morphological analysis and text annotation. The first phase preprocesses the input text in order to isolate the words and represent them in a formal way. The second phase applies a light stemmer in order to extract the stem of each word by eliminating the prefixes and suffixes. The third phase is a rule-based morphological analyzer that determines the root and the morphological pattern for each extracted stem. The last phase produces an annotated text where each word is tagged with its morphological attributes. The preprocessor presented in this paper is capable of dealing with vowelized and unvowelized words, and provides the input words along with relevant linguistics information needed by different applications. It is designed to be used with different NLP applications such as machine translation text summarization, text correction, information retrieval and automatic vowelization of Arabic Text. (author)
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Oscar Karnalim
2017-01-01
Full Text Available Even though there are various source code plagiarism detection approaches, only a few works which are focused on low-level representation for deducting similarity. Most of them are only focused on lexical token sequence extracted from source code. In our point of view, low-level representation is more beneficial than lexical token since its form is more compact than the source code itself. It only considers semantic-preserving instructions and ignores many source code delimiter tokens. This paper proposes a source code plagiarism detection which rely on low-level representation. For a case study, we focus our work on .NET programming languages with Common Intermediate Language as its low-level representation. In addition, we also incorporate Adaptive Local Alignment for detecting similarity. According to Lim et al, this algorithm outperforms code similarity state-of-the-art algorithm (i.e. Greedy String Tiling in term of effectiveness. According to our evaluation which involves various plagiarism attacks, our approach is more effective and efficient when compared with standard lexical-token approach.
LAIR: A Language for Automated Semantics-Aware Text Sanitization based on Frame Semantics
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Hedegaard, Steffen; Houen, Søren; Simonsen, Jakob Grue
2009-01-01
We present \\lair{}: A domain-specific language that enables users to specify actions to be taken upon meeting specific semantic frames in a text, in particular to rephrase and redact the textual content. While \\lair{} presupposes superficial knowledge of frames and frame semantics, it requires on...... with automated redaction of web pages for subjectively undesirable content; initial experiments suggest that using a small language based on semantic recognition of undesirable terms can be highly useful as a supplement to traditional methods of text sanitization.......We present \\lair{}: A domain-specific language that enables users to specify actions to be taken upon meeting specific semantic frames in a text, in particular to rephrase and redact the textual content. While \\lair{} presupposes superficial knowledge of frames and frame semantics, it requires only...... limited prior programming experience. It neither contain scripting or I/O primitives, nor does it contain general loop constructions and is not Turing-complete. We have implemented a \\lair{} compiler and integrated it in a pipeline for automated redaction of web pages. We detail our experience...
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Nomura, Saeko; Ishida, Saeko; Jensen, Mika Yasuoka
2002-01-01
”Open Source Software Development with Your Mother Language: Intercultural Collaboration Experiment 2002,” 10th International Conference on Human – Computer Interaction (HCII2003), June 2003, Crete, Greece.......”Open Source Software Development with Your Mother Language: Intercultural Collaboration Experiment 2002,” 10th International Conference on Human – Computer Interaction (HCII2003), June 2003, Crete, Greece....
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Shan Li
Full Text Available Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the western linguistic systems, and the laws that govern the lexical organization, structure and dynamics of the Chinese language remain not well understood. Here we study a database of Chinese and English language books. We report that three distinct scaling laws characterize words organization in the Chinese language. We find that these scaling laws have different exponents and crossover behaviors compared to English texts, indicating different words organization and dynamics of words in the process of text growth. We propose a stochastic feedback model of words organization and text growth, which successfully accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws with their corresponding scaling exponents and characteristic crossover regimes. Further, by varying key model parameters, we reproduce differences in the organization and scaling laws of words between the Chinese and English language. We also identify functional relationships between model parameters and the empirically observed scaling exponents, thus providing new insights into the words organization and growth dynamics in the Chinese and English language.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Sergio Bolaños Cuéllar
2007-12-01
Full Text Available The advance in cultural-oriented perspectives in Translation Studies has sometimes played down the text linguistic nature of translation. A pilot study in teaching translation was carried out to make students aware of the text linguistic character of translating and help them to improve their translation skills, particularly with an emphasis on self-awareness and self-correcting strategies. The theoretical background is provided by the Dynamic Translation Model (2004, 2005 proposed by the author, with relevant and important contributions taken from Genette's (1982 transtextuality phenomena (hypertext, hypotext, metatext, paratext, intertext and House and Kasper's (1981 pragmatic modality markers (downgraders, upgraders. The key conceptual role of equivalence as a defining feature of translation is also dealt with. The textual relationship between Source Language Text (SLT is deemed to be pivotal for performing translation and correction tasks in the classroom. Finally, results of the pilot study are discussed and some conclusions are drawn.El desarrollo de las teorías traductológicas orientadas hacia la cultura en ocasiones ha opacado la naturaleza textolingüística de la traducción. Se llevó a cabo un estudio piloto para la enseñanza de la traducción con el fin de recalcar entre los estudiantes el carácter textolingüístico de la labor de traducción y para ayudarles a mejorar sus habilidades de traducción, con especial énfasis en las estrategias de autoconciencia y autocorrección. El marco teórico proviene del Modelo Traductológico Dinámico (2004, 2005, propuesto por el autor, con destacados aportes tomados de los fenómenos de transtextualidad de Genette (1982 (hipertexto, hipotexto, metatexto, paratexto, intertexto y de los marcadores de modalidad pragmática de House y Kasper (1981 (atenuadores, intensificadores. También se aborda el papel conceptual fundamental de la equivalencia como rasgo determinante de la traducci
Interpreters' notes. On the choice of language
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Dam, Helle Vrønning
2004-01-01
This paper reports on a small-scale empirical study on note-taking in consecutive interpreting. As data, the study draws on the notes produced by four subjects while interpreting one Spanish source text consecutively into Danish, on the one hand, and one Danish source text into Spanish...... to particular scrutiny here. However, somewhat surprisingly, the results of the analyses indicate that the choice of language in note-taking is governed mainly by the status of the language in the interpreters' language combination, i.e. whether it is an A- or a B-language, and much less by its status......, on the other. The aim of the study is to explore what governs conference interpreters' choice of language for their notes. The categories traditionally used to discuss, describe and explain this choice are those of 'source language' and 'target language', and these categories are therefore subject...
Language and Identity in Multimodal Text: Case Study of Thailand’s Bank Pamphlet
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Korapat Pruekchaikul
2017-12-01
Full Text Available With the main objective of presenting a linguistic model for the analysis of identity construction in multimodal texts, particularly in advertising, this article attempts to integrate three theoretical frameworks, namely the types of discourse of the Socio-Discursive Interactionism, Greimas’ actantial roles and the symbolic processes of the Grammar of Visual Design proposed by Kress e van Leeuwen. The first two theories are used to analyze verbal language form whereas the third is exclusively for images in advertising. The data sample is a Thai bank pamphlet of Siam Commercial Bank, collected in Bangkok, Thailand, in June, 2015. According to the data analysis, the theoretical frameworks employed here proves that identity, the psychological product, exists in the human mind and can be indexed by language in interaction. Also, the analysis found that identity could be projected as multimodally as language manifestation, of which forms are not only verbal but also pictorial.
Task-based Language Teaching and Text Types in Teaching Writing Using Communicative Approach
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Riyana Sari Ni Nyoman
2018-01-01
Full Text Available One of the most important language competencies in teaching learning process is writing. The present study focused on investigating the effect of communicative approach with task-based language teaching and communicative approach on the students’ writing competency at SMP N 2 Kediri viewed from text types(i.e. descriptive, recount, and narrative. To analyze the data, the design of the experimental study was posttest-only comparison groups by involving 60 students that were selected as the sample of the study through cluster random design. The sample’s post tests were assessed by using analytical scoring rubric. The data were then analyzed by using One-way ANOVA and the post hoc test was done by computing Multiple Comparison using Tukey HSD Test. The result showed that there was significant difference of the effect of communicative approach with task-based language teaching and communicative approach on the students’ writing competency. These findings are expected to give contribution in teaching English, particularly writing.
Durkin, K.; Conti-Ramsden, G.; Walker, A. J.
2011-01-01
The present study examined text messaging in adolescence, in particular relationships among textism use, language and literacy skills. Forty-seven typically developing (TD) 17-year-olds and 47 adolescents of the same age with specific language impairment (SLI) participated. Participants completed standardised assessments of cognitive, language and…
Li, Shan; Lin, Ruokuang; Bian, Chunhua; Ma, Qianli D Y; Ivanov, Plamen Ch
2016-01-01
Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the western linguistic systems, and the laws that govern the lexical organization, structure and dynamics of the Chinese language remain not well understood. Here we study a database of Chinese and English language books. We report that three distinct scaling laws characterize words organization in the Chinese language. We find that these scaling laws have different exponents and crossover behaviors compared to English texts, indicating different words organization and dynamics of words in the process of text growth. We propose a stochastic feedback model of words organization and text growth, which successfully accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws with their corresponding scaling exponents and characteristic crossover regimes. Further, by varying key model parameters, we reproduce differences in the organization and scaling laws of words between the Chinese and English language. We also identify functional relationships between model parameters and the empirically observed scaling exponents, thus providing new insights into the words organization and growth dynamics in the Chinese and English language.
Morpheme matching based text tokenization for a scarce resourced language.
Rehman, Zobia; Anwar, Waqas; Bajwa, Usama Ijaz; Xuan, Wang; Chaoying, Zhou
2013-01-01
Text tokenization is a fundamental pre-processing step for almost all the information processing applications. This task is nontrivial for the scarce resourced languages such as Urdu, as there is inconsistent use of space between words. In this paper a morpheme matching based approach has been proposed for Urdu text tokenization, along with some other algorithms to solve the additional issues of boundary detection of compound words, affixation, reduplication, names and abbreviations. This study resulted into 97.28% precision, 93.71% recall, and 95.46% F1-measure; while tokenizing a corpus of 57000 words by using a morpheme list with 6400 entries.
Interpreters' notes. On the choice of language
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Dam, Helle Vrønning
2004-01-01
This paper reports on a small-scale empirical study on note-taking in consecutive interpreting. As data, the study draws on the notes produced by four subjects while interpreting one Spanish source text consecutively into Danish, on the one hand, and one Danish source text into Spanish, on the ot...... in the interpreting task, i.e. whether it functions as the source or the target language. Drawing on the concept of processing capacity and the Effort Model of consecutive, a tentative explanation of these findings is suggested......., on the other. The aim of the study is to explore what governs conference interpreters' choice of language for their notes. The categories traditionally used to discuss, describe and explain this choice are those of 'source language' and 'target language', and these categories are therefore subject...... to particular scrutiny here. However, somewhat surprisingly, the results of the analyses indicate that the choice of language in note-taking is governed mainly by the status of the language in the interpreters' language combination, i.e. whether it is an A- or a B-language, and much less by its status...
THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHING RUSSIAN LANGUAGE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
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Zulfiya SAHIN
2014-05-01
Full Text Available The purpose of this research is to explicate teaching of Russian as a foreign language throughout history: to identify the main achievements of the field, to determine methods and materials used in this area, to trace the developing process from the very begging till present days, when teaching Russian language as a foreign language became a separate specific discipline. To achieve the set purposes mentioned above the known nowadays studies on the field of teaching and learning Russian as a foreign language were investigated. Basing on obtained sources, the history of teaching Russian language as a foreign language was divided into two periods: before and after becoming separate discipline. In the article not only the main features, such as theories, methods, sources of each period were studied, but also history of teaching Russian language as a foreign language was evaluated as a unified process. Keywords: Teaching-Learning activities, Russian as a Foreign Language, Historical linguistic process
The first Malay language storytelling text-to-speech (TTS) corpus for ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
speech annotations are described in detail in accordance to baseline work. The stories were recorded in two speaking styles that are neutral and storytelling speaking style. The first. Malay language storytelling corpus is not only necessary for the development of a storytelling text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. It is also ...
Text mining and visualization case studies using open-source tools
Chisholm, Andrew
2016-01-01
Text Mining and Visualization: Case Studies Using Open-Source Tools provides an introduction to text mining using some of the most popular and powerful open-source tools: KNIME, RapidMiner, Weka, R, and Python. The contributors-all highly experienced with text mining and open-source software-explain how text data are gathered and processed from a wide variety of sources, including books, server access logs, websites, social media sites, and message boards. Each chapter presents a case study that you can follow as part of a step-by-step, reproducible example. You can also easily apply and extend the techniques to other problems. All the examples are available on a supplementary website. The book shows you how to exploit your text data, offering successful application examples and blueprints for you to tackle your text mining tasks and benefit from open and freely available tools. It gets you up to date on the latest and most powerful tools, the data mining process, and specific text mining activities.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Paul Kei Matsuda
2011-03-01
Full Text Available This paper focuses on reading as a central act of communication in the tutorial session. Writing center tutors without extensive experience reading writing by second language writers may have difficulty getting past the many differences in surface-level features, organization, and rhetorical moves. After exploring some of the sources of these differences in writing, the authors present strategies that writing tutors can use to work effectively with second language writers.
Fuchs, Lynn S; Gilbert, Jennifer K; Fuchs, Douglas; Seethaler, Pamela M; Martin, BrittanyLee N
2018-01-01
This study was designed to deepen insights on whether word-problem (WP) solving is a form of text comprehension (TC) and on the role of language in WPs. A sample of 325 second graders, representing high, average, and low reading and math performance, was assessed on (a) start-of-year TC, WP skill, language, nonlinguistic reasoning, working memory, and foundational skill (word identification, arithmetic) and (b) year-end WP solving, WP-language processing (understanding WP statements, without calculation demands), and calculations. Multivariate, multilevel path analysis, accounting for classroom and school effects, indicated that TC was a significant and comparably strong predictor of all outcomes. Start-of-year language was a significantly stronger predictor of both year-end WP outcomes than of calculations, whereas start-of-year arithmetic was a significantly stronger predictor of calculations than of either WP measure. Implications are discussed in terms of WP solving as a form of TC and a theoretically coordinated approach, focused on language, for addressing TC and WP-solving instruction.
Getting more out of biomedical documents with GATE's full lifecycle open source text analytics.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Hamish Cunningham
Full Text Available This software article describes the GATE family of open source text analysis tools and processes. GATE is one of the most widely used systems of its type with yearly download rates of tens of thousands and many active users in both academic and industrial contexts. In this paper we report three examples of GATE-based systems operating in the life sciences and in medicine. First, in genome-wide association studies which have contributed to discovery of a head and neck cancer mutation association. Second, medical records analysis which has significantly increased the statistical power of treatment/outcome models in the UK's largest psychiatric patient cohort. Third, richer constructs in drug-related searching. We also explore the ways in which the GATE family supports the various stages of the lifecycle present in our examples. We conclude that the deployment of text mining for document abstraction or rich search and navigation is best thought of as a process, and that with the right computational tools and data collection strategies this process can be made defined and repeatable. The GATE research programme is now 20 years old and has grown from its roots as a specialist development tool for text processing to become a rather comprehensive ecosystem, bringing together software developers, language engineers and research staff from diverse fields. GATE now has a strong claim to cover a uniquely wide range of the lifecycle of text analysis systems. It forms a focal point for the integration and reuse of advances that have been made by many people (the majority outside of the authors' own group who work in text processing for biomedicine and other areas. GATE is available online under GNU open source licences and runs on all major operating systems. Support is available from an active user and developer community and also on a commercial basis.
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Generation
Krahmer, Emiel; Theune, Mariet
Natural language generation (NLG) is a subfield of natural language processing (NLP) that is often characterized as the study of automatically converting non-linguistic representations (e.g., from databases or other knowledge sources) into coherent natural language text. In recent years the field
Fuchs, Lynn S.; Gilbert, Jennifer K.; Fuchs, Douglas; Seethaler, Pamela M.; Martin, BrittanyLee N.
2018-01-01
This study was designed to deepen insights on whether word-problem (WP) solving is a form of text comprehension (TC) and on the role of language in WPs. A sample of 325 second graders, representing high, average, and low reading and math performance, was assessed on (a) start-of-year TC, WP skill, language, nonlinguistic reasoning, working memory, and foundational skill (word identification, arithmetic) and (b) year-end WP solving, WP-language processing (understanding WP statements, without calculation demands), and calculations. Multivariate, multilevel path analysis, accounting for classroom and school effects, indicated that TC was a significant and comparably strong predictor of all outcomes. Start-of-year language was a significantly stronger predictor of both year-end WP outcomes than of calculations, whereas start-of-year arithmetic was a significantly stronger predictor of calculations than of either WP measure. Implications are discussed in terms of WP solving as a form of TC and a theoretically coordinated approach, focused on language, for addressing TC and WP-solving instruction. PMID:29643723
Combining Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Assess Literary Text Comprehension
Balyan, Renu; McCarthy, Kathryn S.; McNamara, Danielle S.
2017-01-01
This study examined how machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be leveraged to assess the interpretive behavior that is required for successful literary text comprehension. We compared the accuracy of seven different machine learning classification algorithms in predicting human ratings of student essays about…
INTERFERENCE IN THE SHORT TEXT OF BESAKIH TEMPLE
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Ni Made Kajeng Martha Puspita
2016-05-01
Full Text Available The aim of this study is to analyze the four types of interferences; syntax, semantics, copula, and redundant found in “Besakih Temple” short text. The data were collected through library research with the necessary note-taking and documentation. The method used in analyzing this study is qualitative method. The result showed that interferences found in the text are covering linguistic aspects. It is furthermore called the negative transfer due to the result of contact with another language. The most common source of errors is lack of knowledge of the speaker about the language being used.
Design of an On-Line Query Language for Full Text Patent Search.
Glantz, Richard S.
The design of an English-like query language and an interactive computer environment for searching the full text of the U.S. patent collection are discussed. Special attention is paid to achieving a transparent user interface, to providing extremely broad search capabilities (including nested substitution classes, Kleene star events, and domain…
Getting more out of biomedical documents with GATE's full lifecycle open source text analytics.
Cunningham, Hamish; Tablan, Valentin; Roberts, Angus; Bontcheva, Kalina
2013-01-01
This software article describes the GATE family of open source text analysis tools and processes. GATE is one of the most widely used systems of its type with yearly download rates of tens of thousands and many active users in both academic and industrial contexts. In this paper we report three examples of GATE-based systems operating in the life sciences and in medicine. First, in genome-wide association studies which have contributed to discovery of a head and neck cancer mutation association. Second, medical records analysis which has significantly increased the statistical power of treatment/outcome models in the UK's largest psychiatric patient cohort. Third, richer constructs in drug-related searching. We also explore the ways in which the GATE family supports the various stages of the lifecycle present in our examples. We conclude that the deployment of text mining for document abstraction or rich search and navigation is best thought of as a process, and that with the right computational tools and data collection strategies this process can be made defined and repeatable. The GATE research programme is now 20 years old and has grown from its roots as a specialist development tool for text processing to become a rather comprehensive ecosystem, bringing together software developers, language engineers and research staff from diverse fields. GATE now has a strong claim to cover a uniquely wide range of the lifecycle of text analysis systems. It forms a focal point for the integration and reuse of advances that have been made by many people (the majority outside of the authors' own group) who work in text processing for biomedicine and other areas. GATE is available online under GNU open source licences and runs on all major operating systems. Support is available from an active user and developer community and also on a commercial basis.
Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies - Vol 30 ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
Enablers and barriers to multilingualism in South African university classrooms · EMAIL FULL TEXT EMAIL FULL TEXT · DOWNLOAD ... Exposure to audiovisual programs as sources of authentic language input and second language acquisition in informal settings · EMAIL FULL TEXT EMAIL FULL TEXT · DOWNLOAD ...
Semantic markup of nouns and adjectives for the Electronic corpus of texts in Tuvan language
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Bajlak Ch. Oorzhak
2016-12-01
Full Text Available The article examines the progress of semantic markup of the Electronic corpus of texts in Tuvan language (ECTTL, which is another stage of adding Tuvan texts to the database and marking up the corpus. ECTTL is a collaborative project by researchers from Tuvan State University (Research and Education Center of Turkic Studies and Department of Information Technologies. Semantic markup of Tuvan lexis will come as a search engine and reference system which will help users find text snippets containing words with desired meanings in ECTTL. The first stage of this process is setting up databases of basic lexemes of Tuvan language. All meaningful lexemes were classified into the following semantic groups: humans, animals, objects, natural objects and phenomena, and abstract concepts. All Tuvan object nouns, as well as both descriptive and relative adjectives, were assigned to one of these lexico-semantic classes. Each class, sub-class and descriptor is tagged in Tuvan, Russian and English; these tags, in turn, will help automatize searching. The databases of meaningful lexemes of Tuvan language will also outline their lexical combinations. The automatized system will contain information on semantic combinations of adjectives with nouns, adverbs with verbs, nouns with verbs, as well as on the combinations which are semantically incompatible.
Text to Speech Berbasis Natural Language pada Aplikasi Pembelajaran Tenses Bahasa Inggris
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Amak Yunus
2014-09-01
Full Text Available Bahasa adalah sebuah cara berkomunikasi secara sistematis dengan menggunakan suara atau simbol-simbol yang memiliki arti, yang diucapkan melalui mulut. Bahasa juga ditulis dengan mengikuti kaidah yang berlaku. Salah satu bahasa yang banyak digunakan di belahan dunia adalah Bahasa Inggris. Namun ada beberapa kendala apabila kita belajar kepada seorang guru atau instruktur. Waktu yang diberikan seorang guru, terbatas pada jam sekolah atau les saja. Bila siswa pulang sekolah atau les, maka yang bersangkutan harus belajar bahasa Inggris secara mandiri. Dari permasalahan di atas, muncul sebuah ide tentang bagaimana membuat sebuah penelitian yang berkaitan dengan pembuatan aplikasi yang mampu memberikan pengetahuan kepada siswa tentang bagaimana belajar bahasa Inggris secara mandiri baik dari perubahan kalimat postif menjadi kalimat negatif dan kalimat tanya. Disamping itu, aplikasi ini juga mampu memberikan pengetahuan tentang bagaimana mengucapkan kalimat dalam bahasa Inggris. Pada intinya kontribusi yang dapat diperoleh dari hasil penelitian ini adalah pihak terkait dari tingkat SMP sampai dengan SMU/SMK, dapat menggunakan aplikasi text to speech berbasis natural language processing untuk mempelajari tenses pada bahasa Inggris. Aplikasi ini dapat memperdengarkan kalimat-kalimat pada bahasa inggris dan dapat menyusun kalimat tanya dan kalimat negatif berdasarkan kalimat positifnya dalam beberapa tenses bahasa Inggris. Kata Kunci : Natural language processing, Text to speech
Critical Text Analysis: Linking Language and Cultural Studies
Wharton, Sue
2011-01-01
Many UK universities offer degree programmes in English Language specifically for non-native speakers of English. Such programmes typically include not only language development but also development in various areas of content knowledge. A challenge that arises is to design courses in different areas that mutually support each other, thus…
Rinnert, Carol; Kobauashi, Hiroe; Katayama, Akemi
2015-01-01
This study takes a dynamic view of transfer as reusing and reshaping previous knowledge in new writing contexts to investigate how novice Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) writers draw on knowledge across languages to construct L1 and L2 texts. We analyzed L1 English and L2 Japanese argumentation essays by the same JFL writers (N = 19) and L1…
Speech to Text Translation for Malay Language
Al-khulaidi, Rami Ali; Akmeliawati, Rini
2017-11-01
The speech recognition system is a front end and a back-end process that receives an audio signal uttered by a speaker and converts it into a text transcription. The speech system can be used in several fields including: therapeutic technology, education, social robotics and computer entertainments. In most cases in control tasks, which is the purpose of proposing our system, wherein the speed of performance and response concern as the system should integrate with other controlling platforms such as in voiced controlled robots. Therefore, the need for flexible platforms, that can be easily edited to jibe with functionality of the surroundings, came to the scene; unlike other software programs that require recording audios and multiple training for every entry such as MATLAB and Phoenix. In this paper, a speech recognition system for Malay language is implemented using Microsoft Visual Studio C#. 90 (ninety) Malay phrases were tested by 10 (ten) speakers from both genders in different contexts. The result shows that the overall accuracy (calculated from Confusion Matrix) is satisfactory as it is 92.69%.
Technical Text Comprehension Difficulties in the Usage of Reflexive Verbs in the French Language
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Lina Dubikaltytė-Raugalienė
2011-04-01
Full Text Available The author researches the problems of textual competence and especially the reflexive constructions in the texts of French speciality. It was established that there exists some difference in the usage of reflective verbs in the French and the Lithuanian language especially in the field of passive voice and a wider semantics of modal and aspect verbs and that raises not a fen problems of effective text reading problems.
Kim, Young-Suk Grace
2016-01-01
We investigated component language and cognitive skills of oral language comprehension of narrative texts (i.e., listening comprehension). Using the construction--integration model of text comprehension as an overarching theoretical framework, we examined direct and mediated relations of foundational cognitive skills (working memory and…
Students' Source Misuse in Language Classrooms: Sharing Experiences
Fazel, Ismaeil; Kowkabi, Nasrin
2013-01-01
In this article we first provide a brief discussion of what is generally referred to as "student plagiarism," which we prefer to call "source misuse" or "inappropriate textual borrowing," and then provide some of the factors that may contribute to this problem in language classes. Moreover, we provide our views and…
English Language Learners' Strategies for Reading Computer-Based Texts at Home and in School
Park, Ho-Ryong; Kim, Deoksoon
2016-01-01
This study investigated four elementary-level English language learners' (ELLs') use of strategies for reading computer-based texts at home and in school. The ELLs in this study were in the fourth and fifth grades in a public elementary school. We identify the ELLs' strategies for reading computer-based texts in home and school environments. We…
From Poule de Luxe to Geisha: Source Languages behind the Present-Day English Synonyms of Prostitute
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Bożena Duda
2014-11-01
Full Text Available This paper aims at drawing a picture, as complete as possible, of an anthropocentric reality hidden in the synonyms of prostitute which have been incorporated into the English lexico-semantic system from other languages since the beginning of the 19th century. The body of Present-day English synonyms of prostitute to be analysed includes horizontal, geisha, shawl and poule de luxe. Apart from providing the source languages from which English borrowed the afore-mentioned synonyms of prostitute, an attempt will be made at discovering the plausible cultural and sociological justification for the lexical borrowings to have taken place. In order to make the onomasiological picture of the sense ‘prostitute’ as complete as it can be within the limits of this paper, a mention will be made of the lexical heritage within the range of the synonyms of prostitute which were incorporated into the English language in the course of Middle English, Early Modern English and Late Modern English.
Bikol Dictionary. PALI Language Texts: Philippines.
Mintz, Malcolm W.
The Bikol language of the Philippines, spoken in the southernmost peninsula of Luzon Island and extending into the island provinces of Catanduanes and Masbate, is presented in this bilingual dictionary. An introduction explains the Bikol alphabet, orthographic representation (including policies adopted in writing Spanish and English loan words),…
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Rila Hilma
2011-05-01
Full Text Available Translation is basically change of form. The form from which the translation is made will be called the source language and the form into which it is to be changed will be called the receptor language. Translation consists of transferring the meaning of the source language into the receptor language. Translating is not an easy job to do because many things to be considered to do this activity because translation means determining the meaning of a text, then reconstructing this same meaning using the appropriate structure and form in the receptor language. Translation is basically divided by two types of translation, one is literal and the other is idiomatic. Literal translation is really strict to the structure and form then often can not well express the true meaning of source language. Idiomatic translation makes every effort to communicate the meaning of the source language text in the natural forms of the receptor language. Then the most popular translation machine, Google Translate, in this study shows the results of translation which remain odd, unnatural, and nonsensical because the unsuccessful of message delivery, which is notably the typically error of literal translation.
HTEL: a HyperText Expression Language
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Steensgaard-Madsen, Jørgen
1999-01-01
been submitted.A special tool has been used to build the HTEL-interpreter, as an example belonging a family of interpreters for domain specific languages. Members of that family have characteristics that are closely related to structural patterns found in the mark-ups of HTML. HTEL should also be seen...
Application of LSP texts in translator training
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Larisa Ilynska
2017-06-01
Full Text Available The paper presents discussion of the results of extensive empirical research into efficient methods of educating and training translators of LSP (language for special purposes texts. The methodology is based on using popular LSP texts in the respective fields as one of the main media for translator training. The aim of the paper is to investigate the efficiency of this methodology in developing thematic, linguistic and cultural competences of the students, following Bloom’s revised taxonomy and European Master in Translation Network (EMT translator training competences. The methodology has been tested on the students of a professional Master study programme called Technical Translation implemented by the Institute of Applied Linguistics, Riga Technical University, Latvia. The group of students included representatives of different nationalities, translating from English into Latvian, Russian and French. Analysis of popular LSP texts provides an opportunity to structure student background knowledge and expand it to account for linguistic innovation. Application of popular LSP texts instead of purely technical or scientific texts characterised by neutral style and rigid genre conventions provides an opportunity for student translators to develop advanced text processing and decoding skills, to develop awareness of expressive resources of the source and target languages and to develop understanding of socio-pragmatic language use.
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Артур Нарманович Мамедов
2013-12-01
Full Text Available Informative capacity of participial construction of source and target languages contributes to a more complex and multi aspect image of an expensive car. Dangling participles and attributive clauses placed after the determined word are being used in translation of extended adjectives with participles I and II. These grammatical transformations connected with reconstruction of semantic structure remain logically rational argumentation of an advertising text of the source language.
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Sibel Arıoğul
2007-04-01
Full Text Available Teachers’ practical knowledge is considered as teachers’ general knowledge, beliefsand thinking (Borg, 2003 which can be traced in teachers’ practices (Connelly & Clandinin,1988 and shaped by various background sources (Borg, 2003; Grossman, 1990; Meijer,Verloop, and Beijard, 1999. This paper initially discusses how language teachers areinfluenced by three background sources: teachers’ prior language learning experiences, priorteaching experience, and professional coursework in pre- and in-service education. Bydrawing its data from the author’s longitidunal study, it also presents the findings of a crosscasetheme emerged from the investigation of three English as a foreign language (EFLteachers’ prior language learning experiences. The paper also discusses how the participationin studies on teachers’ knowledge raises teachers’ own awareness while it informs theresearch.
Text mining a self-report back-translation.
Blanch, Angel; Aluja, Anton
2016-06-01
There are several recommendations about the routine to undertake when back translating self-report instruments in cross-cultural research. However, text mining methods have been generally ignored within this field. This work describes a text mining innovative application useful to adapt a personality questionnaire to 12 different languages. The method is divided in 3 different stages, a descriptive analysis of the available back-translated instrument versions, a dissimilarity assessment between the source language instrument and the 12 back-translations, and an item assessment of item meaning equivalence. The suggested method contributes to improve the back-translation process of self-report instruments for cross-cultural research in 2 significant intertwined ways. First, it defines a systematic approach to the back translation issue, allowing for a more orderly and informed evaluation concerning the equivalence of different versions of the same instrument in different languages. Second, it provides more accurate instrument back-translations, which has direct implications for the reliability and validity of the instrument's test scores when used in different cultures/languages. In addition, this procedure can be extended to the back-translation of self-reports measuring psychological constructs in clinical assessment. Future research works could refine the suggested methodology and use additional available text mining tools. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).
The Influence of Texting Language on Grammar and Executive Functions in Primary School Children.
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Chantal N van Dijk
Full Text Available When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever. Previous studies have shown that textese has a positive effect on children's literacy abilities. In addition, it is possible that children's grammar system is affected by textese as well, as grammar rules are often transgressed in this register. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to investigate whether the use of textese influences children's grammar performance, and whether this effect is specific to grammar or language in general. Additionally, studies have not yet investigated the influence of textese on children's cognitive abilities. Consequently, the secondary aim of this study was to find out whether textese affects children's executive functions. To investigate this, 55 children between 10 and 13 years old were tested on a receptive vocabulary and grammar performance (sentence repetition task and various tasks measuring executive functioning. In addition, text messages were elicited and the number of omissions and textisms in children's messages were calculated. Regression analyses showed that omissions were a significant predictor of children's grammar performance after various other variables were controlled for: the more words children omitted in their text messages, the better their performance on the grammar task. Although textisms correlated (marginally significantly with vocabulary, grammar and selective attention scores and omissions marginally significantly with vocabulary scores, no other significant effects were obtained for measures of textese in the regression analyses: neither for the language outcomes, nor for the executive function tasks. Hence, our results show that textese is positively related to children's grammar performance. On the other hand
On Language Characteristics and Translation Skills of Advertising Text
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)
陈迎亚
2012-01-01
Under the situation of economic globalization today, the internationalization of advertising is becoming more and more obvious. All enterprises in all countries are meeting the same international, global problem, the problem of advertising translation. When dealing with advertising translation, we should take full account of language habits and cultural background of target customers. Therefore, it turns out to be important that we should be familiar with the language characteristics and translation skills of English advertisements. In this paper, I will introduce the language characteristics of English advertisements from three aspects of words, syntax and rhetorical devices, and introduce skills of advertising translation.
ArdenML: The Arden Syntax Markup Language (or Arden Syntax: It's Not Just Text Any More!)
Sailors, R. Matthew
2001-01-01
It is no longer necessary to think of Arden Syntax as simply a text-based knowledge base format. The development of ArdenML (Arden Syntax Markup Language), an XML-based markup language allows structured access to most of the maintenance and library categories without the need to write or buy a compiler may lead to the development of simple commercial and freeware tools for processing Arden Syntax Medical Logic Modules (MLMs)
Providing Language Instructor with Artificial Intelligence Assistant
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K. Pietroszek
2007-12-01
Full Text Available Abstract—This paper presents the preliminary results ofdeveloping HAL for CALL, an artificial intelligenceassistant for language instructor. The assistant consists of achatbot, an avatar (a three-dimensional visualization of thechatbot, a voice (text-to-speech engine interface andinterfaces to external sources of language knowledge. Sometechniques used in adapting freely available chatbot for theneed of a language learning system are presented.Integration of HAL with Second Life virtual world isproposed. We will discuss technical challenges and possiblefuture work directions.
Arfé, Barbara; Dockrell, Julie E.; De Bernardi, Bianca
2016-01-01
Spelling skills have been identified as one of the major barriers to written text production in young English writers. By contrast oral language skills and text generation have been found to be less influential in the texts produced by beginning writers. To date, our understanding of the role of spelling skills in transparent orthographies is…
Huh, Sun
2013-01-01
ScienceCentral, a free or open access, full-text archive of scientific journal literature at the Korean Federation of Science and Technology Societies, was under test in September 2013. Since it is a Journal Article Tag Suite-based full text database, extensible markup language files of all languages can be presented, according to Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit encoding. It is comparable to PubMed Central: however, there are two distinct differences. First, its scope comprises all science fields; second, it accepts all language journals. Launching ScienceCentral is the first step for free access or open access academic scientific journals of all languages to leap to the world, including scientific journals from Croatia.
The Influence of Texting Language on Grammar and Executive Functions in Primary School Children
van Dijk, C.N.; van Witteloostuijn, M.; Vasić, N.; Avrutin, S.; Blom, E.
2016-01-01
When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever). Previous studies have shown
Raghavan, Ramesh; Camarata, Stephen; White, Karl; Barbaresi, William; Parish, Susan; Krahn, Gloria
2018-05-17
The aim of the study was to provide an overview of population science as applied to speech and language disorders, illustrate data sources, and advance a research agenda on the epidemiology of these conditions. Computer-aided database searches were performed to identify key national surveys and other sources of data necessary to establish the incidence, prevalence, and course and outcome of speech and language disorders. This article also summarizes a research agenda that could enhance our understanding of the epidemiology of these disorders. Although the data yielded estimates of prevalence and incidence for speech and language disorders, existing sources of data are inadequate to establish reliable rates of incidence, prevalence, and outcomes for speech and language disorders at the population level. Greater support for inclusion of speech and language disorder-relevant questions is necessary in national health surveys to build the population science in the field.
Hiebert, Elfrieda H.
2011-01-01
A focus of the Common Core State Standards/English Language Arts (CCSS/ELA) is that students become increasingly more capable with complex text over their school careers. This focus has redirected attention to the measurement of text complexity. Although CCSS/ELA suggests multiple criteria for this task, the standards offer a single measure of…
Ahmad, Ismail Sheikh; Al-Shboul, Murad M.; Nordin, Mohamad Sahari; Rahman, Zainurin Abdul; Burhan, Mohd; Madarsha, Kamal Basha
2013-01-01
The last decade has witnessed an increasing research trend on foreign language reading anxiety as a skill related to but distinct from foreign language anxiety. However, sources of foreign language reading anxiety have rarely been investigated. Thus, the current study responds to the study by (Saito, Horwitz, & Garza, 1999) and extends the…
ADAPTING HYBRID MACHINE TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES FOR CROSS-LANGUAGE TEXT RETRIEVAL SYSTEM
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P. ISWARYA
2017-03-01
Full Text Available This research work aims in developing Tamil to English Cross - language text retrieval system using hybrid machine translation approach. The hybrid machine translation system is a combination of rule based and statistical based approaches. In an existing word by word translation system there are lot of issues and some of them are ambiguity, Out-of-Vocabulary words, word inflections, and improper sentence structure. To handle these issues, proposed architecture is designed in such a way that, it contains Improved Part-of-Speech tagger, machine learning based morphological analyser, collocation based word sense disambiguation procedure, semantic dictionary, and tense markers with gerund ending rules, and two pass transliteration algorithm. From the experimental results it is clear that the proposed Tamil Query based translation system achieves significantly better translation quality over existing system, and reaches 95.88% of monolingual performance.
THE ‘UNFORGETTABLE’ EXPERIENCE OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE ANXIETY
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Morana Drakulić
2015-09-01
Full Text Available Foreign language anxiety (FLA has long been recognized as a factor that hinders the process of foreign language learning at all levels. Among numerous FLA sources identified in the literature, language classroom seems to be of particular interest and significance, especially in the formal language learning context, where the course and the teacher are often the only representatives of language. The main purpose of the study is to determine the presence and potential sources of foreign language anxiety among first year university students and to explore how high anxiety levels shape and affect students’ foreign language learning experience. In the study both the questionnaire and the interviews were used as the data collection methods. Thematic analysis of the interviews and descriptive statistics suggest that most anxiety-provoking situations stem from the language classroom itself.
Language Adaptation for Extending Post-Editing Estimates for Closely Related Languages
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Rios Miguel
2016-10-01
Full Text Available This paper presents an open-source toolkit for predicting human post-editing efforts for closely related languages. At the moment, training resources for the Quality Estimation task are available for very few language directions and domains. Available resources can be expanded on the assumption that MT errors and the amount of post-editing required to correct them are comparable across related languages, even if the feature frequencies differ. In this paper we report a toolkit for achieving language adaptation, which is based on learning new feature representation using transfer learning methods. In particular, we report performance of a method based on Self-Taught Learning which adapts the English-Spanish pair to produce Quality Estimation models for translation from English into Portuguese, Italian and other Romance languages using the publicly available Autodesk dataset.
COMPARISON OF PYTHON (AN OPEN SOURCE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE) WITH OTHER PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
Sushil Kumar*1 & Richa Aggarwal2
2018-01-01
Language is a communication tool through which we can communicate with each other like Hindi, English etc any other language. So if we want to communicate with computer, we need computer programming languages. So in computer we have two types of languages, one is low level language which is easily understood by computer but difficult to learn. Second is high level language which is same like English language, not understood by computer but easy to learn. Python is a high level language. This...
PROFILING THE VOCABULARY OF NEWS TEXTS AS CAPACITY BUILDING FOR LANGUAGE TEACHERS
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Gusti Astika
2015-01-01
Full Text Available Abstract: The importance of vocabulary in reading has been discussed extensively in the literature. Researchers claim that vocabulary is essential and has a central role in comprehension. Development in ICT and easy access to information from the internet necessitate language teachers to have relevant knowledge and skills to utilize pedagogical tools to use authentic online materials for learning purposes. One of such a tool is the Vocabulary Profiler that can be used to categorize lexical words in a text into different frequency levels: high, low, and academic word list. This paper discusses how to use the Vocabulary Profiler to classify words in a text into the different categories. The utilization of this tool can significantly alleviate the workload of teachers in selecting vocabulary in reading text which is conventionally based on teachers’ intuition and perception. The sample text in this paper was selected from VOA website which may not be found in the textbooks currently used at schools. The paper ends with some implication for teaching about vocabulary selection.
An Analysis on Reading Texts in Teaching Turkish to Foreigners
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Adem İŞCAN
2017-09-01
Full Text Available Being one of the four basic language skills, reading has a great importance in teaching Turkish to foreigners. It is required to develop reading skills to develop vocabulary. There have been some problems in teaching Turkish as second language. These problems are generally related to difference in alphabet, inadequacy of the sources used in teaching Turkish, methods and techniques used and the texts used. The basic sources used in teaching Turkish to foreigners are texts. This study aims at determination of the opinions of students in Gaziosmanpaşa University and Ondokuz Mayıs University Turkish Education and Application Center (TOMER concerning Turkish reading texts. General browsing method was used in the study. The questionnaire comprising of 24 items was applied to 25 students in beginner level and 7 students in advanced level. With this study, it is foreseen to arrange the texts being the key stone according to the wishes of and in compliance with the levels of students; giving importance to pre-reading, reading and post-reading activities and including questions with short-answer about the text as well as questions to develop high level skills.
The effect of written text on comprehension of spoken English as a foreign language.
Diao, Yali; Chandler, Paul; Sweller, John
2007-01-01
Based on cognitive load theory, this study investigated the effect of simultaneous written presentations on comprehension of spoken English as a foreign language. Learners' language comprehension was compared while they used 3 instructional formats: listening with auditory materials only, listening with a full, written script, and listening with simultaneous subtitled text. Listening with the presence of a script and subtitles led to better understanding of the scripted and subtitled passage but poorer performance on a subsequent auditory passage than listening with the auditory materials only. These findings indicated that where the intention was learning to listen, the use of a full script or subtitles had detrimental effects on the construction and automation of listening comprehension schemas.
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Saeideh Ahangari
2008-05-01
Full Text Available This paper explores the ways in which the transfer of assumptions from first language (L1 writing can help the process of writing in second language (L2. In learning second language writing skills, learners have two primary sources from which they construct a second language system: knowledge and skills from first language and input from second language. To investigate the relative impact of first language literacy skills on second language writing ability, 60 EFL students from Tabriz Islamic Azad University were chosen as participants of this study, based on their language proficiency scores. The subjects were given two topics to write about: the experimental group subjects were asked to write in Persian and then translate their writing into English. The control group wrote in English. The results obtained in this study indicate that the content and vocabulary components of the compositions were mostly affected by the use of first language.
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Belgin Aydin
2012-01-01
Full Text Available This paper is concerned with the modifications implemented in a second year foreign language (FL reading program with respect to the problems students experience while reading in FL. This research draws on the sources of FL reading anxiety identified in the first year reading program with a motivation to re-design the second year program to help the students perceive reading positively free from the anxiety. This paper reports on the responses of students to the modifications implemented in the second year reading program
The Influence of Texting Language on Grammar and Executive Functions in Primary School Children.
van Dijk, Chantal N; van Witteloostuijn, Merel; Vasić, Nada; Avrutin, Sergey; Blom, Elma
2016-01-01
When sending text messages on their mobile phone to friends, children often use a special type of register, which is called textese. This register allows the omission of words and the use of textisms: instances of non-standard written language such as 4ever (forever). Previous studies have shown that textese has a positive effect on children's literacy abilities. In addition, it is possible that children's grammar system is affected by textese as well, as grammar rules are often transgressed in this register. Therefore, the main aim of this study was to investigate whether the use of textese influences children's grammar performance, and whether this effect is specific to grammar or language in general. Additionally, studies have not yet investigated the influence of textese on children's cognitive abilities. Consequently, the secondary aim of this study was to find out whether textese affects children's executive functions. To investigate this, 55 children between 10 and 13 years old were tested on a receptive vocabulary and grammar performance (sentence repetition) task and various tasks measuring executive functioning. In addition, text messages were elicited and the number of omissions and textisms in children's messages were calculated. Regression analyses showed that omissions were a significant predictor of children's grammar performance after various other variables were controlled for: the more words children omitted in their text messages, the better their performance on the grammar task. Although textisms correlated (marginally) significantly with vocabulary, grammar and selective attention scores and omissions marginally significantly with vocabulary scores, no other significant effects were obtained for measures of textese in the regression analyses: neither for the language outcomes, nor for the executive function tasks. Hence, our results show that textese is positively related to children's grammar performance. On the other hand, use of textese does
Sourcing in Professional Education: Do Text Factors Make Any Difference?
Bråten, Ivar; Strømsø, Helge I.; Andreassen, Rune
2016-01-01
The present study investigated the extent to which the text factors of source salience and emphasis on risk might influence readers' attention to and use of source information when reading single documents to make behavioral decisions on controversial health-related issues. Participants (n = 259), who were attending different bachelor-level…
African Journals Online (AJOL)
with literary texts written in indigenous South African languages. The project ... Homi Bhabha uses the words of Salman Rushdie to underline the fact that new .... I could not conceptualise an African-language-to-African-language dictionary. An.
Zero-Shot Style Transfer in Text Using Recurrent Neural Networks
Carlson, Keith; Riddell, Allen; Rockmore, Daniel
2017-01-01
Zero-shot translation is the task of translating between a language pair where no aligned data for the pair is provided during training. In this work we employ a model that creates paraphrases which are written in the style of another existing text. Since we provide the model with no paired examples from the source style to the target style during training, we call this task zero-shot style transfer. Herein, we identify a high-quality source of aligned, stylistically distinct text in Bible ve...
Çepni, Sevcan Bayraktar; Demirel, Elif Tokdemir
2016-01-01
This study aimed to find out the impact of "text mining and imitating" strategies on lexical richness, lexical diversity and general success of students in their compositions in second language writing. The participants were 98 students studying their first year in Karadeniz Technical University in English Language and Literature…
Providing Language Instructor with Artificial Intelligence Assistant
K. Pietroszek
2007-01-01
Abstract—This paper presents the preliminary results ofdeveloping HAL for CALL, an artificial intelligenceassistant for language instructor. The assistant consists of achatbot, an avatar (a three-dimensional visualization of thechatbot), a voice (text-to-speech engine interface) andinterfaces to external sources of language knowledge. Sometechniques used in adapting freely available chatbot for theneed of a language learning system are presented.Integration of HAL with Second Life virtual wor...
Using Interconnected Texts to Highlight Culture in the Foreign Language Classroom
Smith, Maya
2013-01-01
SLA research on foreign language pedagogy has long demonstrated that culture is essential to language learning. However, presenting culture in the language classroom poses certain problems. For learners, there is a tendency to stereotype others and to rely excessively on the teacher. For teachers, there is a tendency to transmit isolated facts…
Use of Francophone Tales in Developing Language Competences
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Nataša Žugelj
2015-12-01
Full Text Available Traditional folktales as an authentic document belong to a literary genre which can be of great use in enhancing foreign language learning. When accompanied by diverse and fun activities, they can con- vert a foreign language learning into a very positive experience for different age groups. Folktales with language exercises for developing different language skills can be a great source for language analysis, vocabulary building and better expression in a foreign language. Its restricted length and its identifiable content make folktales user-friendly for teaching.
KAÇMAZ, Ercan; AKSU ATAÇ, Bengü
2017-01-01
In many universities in Turkey, Literature and Language Teaching isincluded in the curriculum. Since literature is authentic, any piece ofliterature (poems, plays, short stories, and novels) could be used in suchclasses and turned into a source of teaching material. This paper aims todetermine what the ELT teacher candidates consider useful, attainable andrelevant for their students and whether they will use plays by drama activitiesin their classes or not. An action research has been carried...
Patterson, Nancy; Weaver, Joanna; Fletcher, Jamie; Connor, Bryce; Thomas, Angela; Ross, Cindy
2018-01-01
The value of preparing students for college, careers, and civic life is a shared outcome of social studies and language arts teachers. This study explores how developing content and civic literacy to these ends can be fortified through language arts and social studies teacher collaboration in source-based planning and teaching. Although numerous…
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Mireia Ortega
2008-06-01
Full Text Available Most research in third language acquisition has focused on the effects that factors such as language distance, second language (L2 status, proficiency or recency have on the choice of the source language (L1 in cross-linguistic influence (CLI. This paper presents a study of these factors, and of the influence that the L1 (Spanish has on L2 (English and L3 (Catalan oral production. Lexical and syntactic transfer are analysed in the production of Catalan and English of two multilingual speakers with similar knowledge of non-native languages. They were interviewed twice in an informal environment. The results show that the L1 is the main source of transfer, both in L2 and L3 production, but its influence decreases as proficiency in the target language increases. Language distance also plays an important role in CLI, especially if proficiency in the source language is high and if there has been recent exposure to it. The findings also suggest that while syntactic transfer is exclusively L1-based, lexical transfer can occur from a non-native language.
Qualitative Features of Written Summary Texts Produced by Teachers
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Hülya YAZICI OKUYAN
2011-12-01
Full Text Available This research aimed to find an answer to the question: "Do summary texts produced by teachers have the characteristics that a summary text is supposed to have?” Descriptive method was used in the research. The study group consisted of 55 teachers who work as Turkish Language and Literature teachers at central primary and secondary schools in Burdur. During the research, the essay “Kitap Az Yaşamayı Önler” by Çetin Altan was used as the source text and the summary texts produced by teachers were evaluated using a criteria-based and gradual analysis instrument. At the end of the study, it was determined that the teachers only managed to reach the sufficient level in terms of reconstructing the summary texts through authentic sentences and reflecting the main idea of the source text in the summary texts. However, according to the research results regarding the teachers’ competence in creating a new title for the summary texts, including the source text’s all supporting ideas and important information in the summary texts and providing the summary texts with the capacity of reflecting the source text, it has been observed that the teachers lack the required knowledge and skill
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Надежда Алексеевна Дудик
2014-12-01
Full Text Available The most fundamental problem involved in the theory and practice of translation from one language into another consists in achieving adequacy between the source language (SL and the target language (TL. Adequacy can be reached by means of employing the communication strategy, i.e. by discussing the dialogue nature of the text in particular; by analyzing realia in translation in terms of the text as a whole, rather than as isolated units in the system of language; and by looking at how the semantic category of intensity influences the translatability of the Russian fiction text into English. The research has shown that the aspects examined are typical of Russian-English translation in general rather than of a single text.
Sharma, Vivekanand; Law, Wayne; Balick, Michael J; Sarkar, Indra Neil
2017-01-01
The growing amount of data describing historical medicinal uses of plants from digitization efforts provides the opportunity to develop systematic approaches for identifying potential plant-based therapies. However, the task of cataloguing plant use information from natural language text is a challenging task for ethnobotanists. To date, there have been only limited adoption of informatics approaches used for supporting the identification of ethnobotanical information associated with medicinal uses. This study explored the feasibility of using biomedical terminologies and natural language processing approaches for extracting relevant plant-associated therapeutic use information from historical biodiversity literature collection available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The results from this preliminary study suggest that there is potential utility of informatics methods to identify medicinal plant knowledge from digitized resources as well as highlight opportunities for improvement.
Letter Frequency Analysis of Lithuanian and Other Languages Using the Latin Alphabet
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Gintautas Grigas
2015-12-01
Full Text Available It is important to evaluate specificities of alphabets, particularly the letter frequencies while designing keyboards, analyzing texts, designing games based on alphabets, and doing some text mining. In order to adequately compare lettter frequences of Lithuanian language to other languages in the Internet space, Wikipedia source was selected which content is common to different languages. The method of letter frequency jumps is used. The main attention is paid to the analysis of letter frequencies at the boundary between native letters and foreign letters used in Lithuanian and other languages.
LITURGICAL TEXT IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE. PROBLEM STATEMENT
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Avetis Serezhaevich Seropyan
2012-11-01
Full Text Available The article analyses artistic expressions of liturgical language in the literary text and its interaction of the Holy Tradition. Many Russian authors knew the liturgical text well. Studying it reveals the crucial meaning of the Gospel and liturgical texts (as part of the Holy Tradition for Russian literature. Authors saw the essence of every phenomenon in the word for it, and the nature of God in His name. Some ideas and sayings of the authors and their characters find their sources in liturgical texts. The article focuses on liturgical sources of some characters' commemorations and invocations, as well as poetical topics of the symbolists, Dostoevsky's famous dictum on beauty which will save the world (The Idiot, etc. De-cyphering this liturgical code will help us learn and comprehend the hidden endless meaning of a literary text. The specific feature of Russian literature is its pursuit of the spiritual liturgical exploration of the world, an exploration when truth takes shape and thus becomes real in both literary text and history.
How language production shapes language form and comprehension
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Maryellen C MacDonald
2013-04-01
Full Text Available Language production processes can provide insight into how language comprehension works and language typology—why languages tend to have certain characteristics more often than others. Drawing on work in memory retrieval, motor planning, and serial order in action planning, the Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC account links work in the fields of language production, typology, and comprehension: 1 faced with substantial computational burdens of planning and producing utterances, language producers implicitly follow three biases in utterance planning that promote word order choices that reduce these burdens, thereby improving production fluency. 2 These choices, repeated over many utterances and individuals, shape the distributions of utterance forms in language. The claim that language form stems in large degree from producers’ attempts to mitigate utterance planning difficulty is contrasted with alternative accounts in which form is driven by language use more broadly, language acquisition processes, or producers’ attempts to create language forms that are easily understood by comprehenders. 3 Language perceivers implicitly learn the statistical regularities in their linguistic input, and they use this prior experience to guide comprehension of subsequent language. In particular, they learn to predict the sequential structure of linguistic signals, based on the statistics of previously-encountered input. Thus key aspects of comprehension behavior are tied to lexico-syntactic statistics in the language, which in turn derive from utterance planning biases promoting production of comparatively easy utterance forms over more difficult ones. This approach contrasts with classic theories in which comprehension behaviors are attributed to innate design features of the language comprehension system and associated working memory. The PDC instead links basic features of comprehension to a different source: production processes that shape
Kim, Young-Suk Grace
2016-01-01
We investigated component language and cognitive skills of oral language comprehension of narrative texts (i.e., listening comprehension). Using the construction-integration model of text comprehension as an overarching theoretical framework, we examined direct and mediated relations of foundational cognitive skills (working memory and attention), foundational language skills (vocabulary and grammatical knowledge), and higher-order cognitive skills (inference, theory of mind, and comprehension monitoring) to listening comprehension. A total of 201 first grade children in South Korea participated in the study. Structural equation modeling results showed that listening comprehension is directly predicted by working memory, grammatical knowledge, inference, and theory of mind and is indirectly predicted by attention, vocabulary, and comprehension monitoring. The total effects were .46 for working memory, .07 for attention, .30 for vocabulary, .49 for grammatical knowledge, .31 for inference, .52 for theory of mind, and .18 for comprehension monitoring. These results suggest that multiple language and cognitive skills make contributions to listening comprehension, and their contributions are both direct and indirect. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
UNLization of Punjabi text for natural language processing ...
Indian Academy of Sciences (India)
Vaibhav Agarwal
2018-05-26
May 26, 2018 ... resent, and store information in a natural-language-inde- pendent format [8]. UNL is .... account semantic information available in words of the problem ...... Sentiment Analysis (SA) plays a vital role in decision making process.
Multilingual access to full text databases; Acces multilingue aux bases de donnees en texte integral
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Fluhr, C; Radwan, K [Institut National des Sciences et Techniques Nucleaires (INSTN), Centre d` Etudes de Saclay, 91 - Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
1990-05-01
Many full text databases are available in only one language, or more, they may contain documents in different languages. Even if the user is able to understand the language of the documents in the database, it could be easier for him to express his need in his own language. For the case of databases containing documents in different languages, it is more simple to formulate the query in one language only and to retrieve documents in different languages. This paper present the developments and the first experiments of multilingual search, applied to french-english pair, for text data in nuclear field, based on the system SPIRIT. After reminding the general problems of full text databases search by queries formulated in natural language, we present the methods used to reformulate the queries and show how they can be expanded for multilingual search. The first results on data in nuclear field are presented (AFCEN norms and INIS abstracts). 4 refs.
Kushalnagar, Poorna; Smith, Scott; Hopper, Melinda; Ryan, Claire; Rinkevich, Micah; Kushalnagar, Raja
2018-02-01
People with relatively limited English language proficiency find the Internet's cancer and health information difficult to access and understand. The presence of unfamiliar words and complex grammar make this particularly difficult for Deaf people. Unfortunately, current technology does not support low-cost, accurate translations of online materials into American Sign Language. However, current technology is relatively more advanced in allowing text simplification, while retaining content. This research team developed a two-step approach for simplifying cancer and other health text. They then tested the approach, using a crossover design with a sample of 36 deaf and 38 hearing college students. Results indicated that hearing college students did well on both the original and simplified text versions. Deaf college students' comprehension, in contrast, significantly benefitted from the simplified text. This two-step translation process offers a strategy that may improve the accessibility of Internet information for Deaf, as well as other low-literacy individuals.
Text-based plagiarism in scientific publishing: issues, developments and education.
Li, Yongyan
2013-09-01
Text-based plagiarism, or copying language from sources, has recently become an issue of growing concern in scientific publishing. Use of CrossCheck (a computational text-matching tool) by journals has sometimes exposed an unexpected amount of textual similarity between submissions and databases of scholarly literature. In this paper I provide an overview of the relevant literature, to examine how journal gatekeepers perceive textual appropriation, and how automated plagiarism-screening tools have been developed to detect text matching, with the technique now available for self-check of manuscripts before submission; I also discuss issues around English as an additional language (EAL) authors and in particular EAL novices being the typical offenders of textual borrowing. The final section of the paper proposes a few educational directions to take in tackling text-based plagiarism, highlighting the roles of the publishing industry, senior authors and English for academic purposes professionals.
Natural Language Processing Based Instrument for Classification of Free Text Medical Records
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Manana Khachidze
2016-01-01
Full Text Available According to the Ministry of Labor, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia a new health management system has to be introduced in the nearest future. In this context arises the problem of structuring and classifying documents containing all the history of medical services provided. The present work introduces the instrument for classification of medical records based on the Georgian language. It is the first attempt of such classification of the Georgian language based medical records. On the whole 24.855 examination records have been studied. The documents were classified into three main groups (ultrasonography, endoscopy, and X-ray and 13 subgroups using two well-known methods: Support Vector Machine (SVM and K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN. The results obtained demonstrated that both machine learning methods performed successfully, with a little supremacy of SVM. In the process of classification a “shrink” method, based on features selection, was introduced and applied. At the first stage of classification the results of the “shrink” case were better; however, on the second stage of classification into subclasses 23% of all documents could not be linked to only one definite individual subclass (liver or binary system due to common features characterizing these subclasses. The overall results of the study were successful.
Ranney, Megan L; Choo, Esther K; Cunningham, Rebecca M; Spirito, Anthony; Thorsen, Margaret; Mello, Michael J; Morrow, Kathleen
2014-07-01
To elucidate key elements surrounding acceptability/feasibility, language, and structure of a text message-based preventive intervention for high-risk adolescent females. We recruited high-risk 13- to 17-year-old females screening positive for past-year peer violence and depressive symptoms, during emergency department visits for any chief complaint. Participants completed semistructured interviews exploring preferences around text message preventive interventions. Interviews were conducted by trained interviewers, audio-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. A coding structure was iteratively developed using thematic and content analysis. Each transcript was double coded. NVivo 10 was used to facilitate analysis. Saturation was reached after 20 interviews (mean age 15.4; 55% white; 40% Hispanic; 85% with cell phone access). (1) Acceptability/feasibility themes: A text-message intervention was felt to support and enhance existing coping strategies. Participants had a few concerns about privacy and cost. Peer endorsement may increase uptake. (2) Language themes: Messages should be simple and positive. Tone should be conversational but not slang filled. (3) Structural themes: Messages may be automated but must be individually tailored on a daily basis. Both predetermined (automatic) and as-needed messages are requested. Dose and timing of content should be varied according to participants' needs. Multimedia may be helpful but is not necessary. High-risk adolescent females seeking emergency department care are enthusiastic about a text message-based preventive intervention. Incorporating thematic results on language and structure can inform development of future text messaging interventions for adolescent girls. Concerns about cost and privacy may be able to be addressed through the process of recruitment and introduction to the intervention. Copyright © 2014 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Smaragda PAPADOPOULOU
2016-01-01
Full Text Available In our study we examine teaching mother tongue through faire and folk tales from the perspectives of recognizing clichés in fairy tales and myths, idiomatic phrases which work as morals, proverbs and very specific phrases of traditional tales’. We suggest that formulaic language can be involved in children’s language games at school and become a methodological tool for innovative approaches in Language and Teaching especially at the primary education. We search the sources from Greek traditional tales that could serve as teaching material for this option of teaching formulaic language in mother tongue. Cultural and geographical implications of the examples applied are noted as a suggestion for further discussion.
Extracting and connecting chemical structures from text sources using chemicalize.org.
Southan, Christopher; Stracz, Andras
2013-04-23
Exploring bioactive chemistry requires navigating between structures and data from a variety of text-based sources. While PubChem currently includes approximately 16 million document-extracted structures (15 million from patents) the extent of public inter-document and document-to-database links is still well below any estimated total, especially for journal articles. A major expansion in access to text-entombed chemistry is enabled by chemicalize.org. This on-line resource can process IUPAC names, SMILES, InChI strings, CAS numbers and drug names from pasted text, PDFs or URLs to generate structures, calculate properties and launch searches. Here, we explore its utility for answering questions related to chemical structures in documents and where these overlap with database records. These aspects are illustrated using a common theme of Dipeptidyl Peptidase 4 (DPPIV) inhibitors. Full-text open URL sources facilitated the download of over 1400 structures from a DPPIV patent and the alignment of specific examples with IC50 data. Uploading the SMILES to PubChem revealed extensive linking to patents and papers, including prior submissions from chemicalize.org as submitting source. A DPPIV medicinal chemistry paper was completely extracted and structures were aligned to the activity results table, as well as linked to other documents via PubChem. In both cases, key structures with data were partitioned from common chemistry by dividing them into individual new PDFs for conversion. Over 500 structures were also extracted from a batch of PubMed abstracts related to DPPIV inhibition. The drug structures could be stepped through each text occurrence and included some converted MeSH-only IUPAC names not linked in PubChem. Performing set intersections proved effective for detecting compounds-in-common between documents and merged extractions. This work demonstrates the utility of chemicalize.org for the exploration of chemical structure connectivity between documents and
Multilingual access to full text databases
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Fluhr, C.; Radwan, K.
1990-05-01
Many full text databases are available in only one language, or more, they may contain documents in different languages. Even if the user is able to understand the language of the documents in the database, it could be easier for him to express his need in his own language. For the case of databases containing documents in different languages, it is more simple to formulate the query in one language only and to retrieve documents in different languages. This paper present the developments and the first experiments of multilingual search, applied to french-english pair, for text data in nuclear field, based on the system SPIRIT. After reminding the general problems of full text databases search by queries formulated in natural language, we present the methods used to reformulate the queries and show how they can be expanded for multilingual search. The first results on data in nuclear field are presented (AFCEN norms and INIS abstracts). 4 refs
Does Causality Matter More Now? Increase in the Proportion of Causal Language in English Texts.
Iliev, Rumen; Axelrod, Robert
2016-05-01
The vast majority of the work on culture and cognition has focused on cross-cultural comparisons, largely ignoring the dynamic aspects of culture. In this article, we provide a diachronic analysis of causal cognition over time. We hypothesized that the increased role of education, science, and technology in Western societies should be accompanied by greater attention to causal connections. To test this hypothesis, we compared word frequencies in English texts from different time periods and found an increase in the use of causal language of about 40% over the past two centuries. The observed increase was not attributable to general language effects or to changing semantics of causal words. We also found that there was a consistent difference between the 19th and the 20th centuries, and that the increase happened mainly in the 20th century. © The Author(s) 2016.
Predicting and Manipulating the Difficulty of Text-Completion Exercises for Language Learning
Beinborn, Lisa Marina
2016-01-01
The increasing levels of international communication in all aspects of life lead to a growing demand of language skills. Traditional language courses compete nowadays with a wide range of online offerings that promise higher flexibility. However, most platforms provide rather static educational content and do not yet incorporate the recent progress in educational natural language processing. In the last years, many researchers developed new methods for automatic exercise generation, but ...
The motivational properties of emotions in Foreign Language Learning*
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Mariza Mendez López
2011-10-01
Full Text Available Although the process of learning a foreign language is replete with emotions, these have not been sufficiently studied in the field of EnglishLanguage Teaching. The aim of this article is to report the motivational impact of the emotions experienced by second year students of anEnglish Language Teaching programme in a South East Mexican University. Students were asked to keep an emotional journal for twelve weeksduring their third term in order to map their emotions and their sources during instructed language learning. The results show that the emotionsexperienced most by students are: fear, happiness, worry, calm, sadness and excitement. Although there is a range of sources for emotionalreactions, the five main sources of students’ emotions are: their insecurity about their speaking ability, the teachers’ attitudes, comparisonswith peers, the classroom atmosphere, and the type of learning activities.The two main aspects identified as impacting on students’ motivationare: the teachers’ attitudes, and the classroom climate.
Querying and Serving N-gram Language Models with Python
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
2009-06-01
Full Text Available Statistical n-gram language modeling is a very important technique in Natural Language Processing (NLP and Computational Linguistics used to assess the fluency of an utterance in any given language. It is widely employed in several important NLP applications such as Machine Translation and Automatic Speech Recognition. However, the most commonly used toolkit (SRILM to build such language models on a large scale is written entirely in C++ which presents a challenge to an NLP developer or researcher whose primary language of choice is Python. This article first provides a gentle introduction to statistical language modeling. It then describes how to build a native and efficient Python interface (using SWIG to the SRILM toolkit such that language models can be queried and used directly in Python code. Finally, it also demonstrates an effective use case of this interface by showing how to leverage it to build a Python language model server. Such a server can prove to be extremely useful when the language model needs to be queried by multiple clients over a network: the language model must only be loaded into memory once by the server and can then satisfy multiple requests. This article includes only those listings of source code that are most salient. To conserve space, some are only presented in excerpted form. The complete set of full source code listings may be found in Volume 1 of The Python Papers Source Codes Journal.
Conversion of HSPF Legacy Model to a Platform-Independent, Open-Source Language
Heaphy, R. T.; Burke, M. P.; Love, J. T.
2015-12-01
Since its initial development over 30 years ago, the Hydrologic Simulation Program - FORTAN (HSPF) model has been used worldwide to support water quality planning and management. In the United States, HSPF receives widespread endorsement as a regulatory tool at all levels of government and is a core component of the EPA's Better Assessment Science Integrating Point and Nonpoint Sources (BASINS) system, which was developed to support nationwide Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) analysis. However, the model's legacy code and data management systems have limitations in their ability to integrate with modern software, hardware, and leverage parallel computing, which have left voids in optimization, pre-, and post-processing tools. Advances in technology and our scientific understanding of environmental processes that have occurred over the last 30 years mandate that upgrades be made to HSPF to allow it to evolve and continue to be a premiere tool for water resource planners. This work aims to mitigate the challenges currently facing HSPF through two primary tasks: (1) convert code to a modern widely accepted, open-source, high-performance computing (hpc) code; and (2) convert model input and output files to modern widely accepted, open-source, data model, library, and binary file format. Python was chosen as the new language for the code conversion. It is an interpreted, object-oriented, hpc code with dynamic semantics that has become one of the most popular open-source languages. While python code execution can be slow compared to compiled, statically typed programming languages, such as C and FORTRAN, the integration of Numba (a just-in-time specializing compiler) has allowed this challenge to be overcome. For the legacy model data management conversion, HDF5 was chosen to store the model input and output. The code conversion for HSPF's hydrologic and hydraulic modules has been completed. The converted code has been tested against HSPF's suite of "test" runs and shown
GNU Data Language (GDL) - a free and open-source implementation of IDL
Arabas, Sylwester; Schellens, Marc; Coulais, Alain; Gales, Joel; Messmer, Peter
2010-05-01
GNU Data Language (GDL) is developed with the aim of providing an open-source drop-in replacement for the ITTVIS's Interactive Data Language (IDL). It is free software developed by an international team of volunteers led by Marc Schellens - the project's founder (a list of contributors is available on the project's website). The development is hosted on SourceForge where GDL continuously ranks in the 99th percentile of most active projects. GDL with its library routines is designed as a tool for numerical data analysis and visualisation. As its proprietary counterparts (IDL and PV-WAVE), GDL is used particularly in geosciences and astronomy. GDL is dynamically-typed, vectorized and has object-oriented programming capabilities. The library routines handle numerical calculations, data visualisation, signal/image processing, interaction with host OS and data input/output. GDL supports several data formats such as netCDF, HDF4, HDF5, GRIB, PNG, TIFF, DICOM, etc. Graphical output is handled by X11, PostScript, SVG or z-buffer terminals, the last one allowing output to be saved in a variety of raster graphics formats. GDL is an incremental compiler with integrated debugging facilities. It is written in C++ using the ANTLR language-recognition framework. Most of the library routines are implemented as interfaces to open-source packages such as GNU Scientific Library, PLPlot, FFTW, ImageMagick, and others. GDL features a Python bridge (Python code can be called from GDL; GDL can be compiled as a Python module). Extensions to GDL can be written in C++, GDL, and Python. A number of open software libraries written in IDL, such as the NASA Astronomy Library, MPFIT, CMSVLIB and TeXtoIDL are fully or partially functional under GDL. Packaged versions of GDL are available for several Linux distributions and Mac OS X. The source code compiles on some other UNIX systems, including BSD and OpenSolaris. The presentation will cover the current status of the project, the key
The Language Demands of Science Reading in Middle School
Fang, Zhihui
2006-04-01
The language used to construct knowledge, beliefs, and worldviews in school science is distinct from the social language that students use in their everyday ordinary life. This difference is a major source of reading difficulty for many students, especially struggling readers and English-language learners. This article identifies some of the linguistic challenges involved in reading middle-school science texts and suggests several teaching strategies to help students cope with these challenges. It is argued that explicit attention to the unique language of school science should be an integral part of science literacy pedagogy.
AN ANALYSIS OF ACEHNESE EFL STUDENTS’ GRAMMATICAL ERRORS IN WRITING RECOUNT TEXTS
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Qudwatin Nisak M. Isa
2017-11-01
Full Text Available This study aims at finding empirical evidence of the most common types of grammatical errors and sources of errors in recount texts written by the first-year students of SMAS Babul Maghfirah, Aceh Besar. The subject of the study was a collection of students’ personal writing documents of recount texts about their lives experience. The students’ recount texts were analyzed by referring to Betty S. Azar classification and Richard’s theory on sources of errors. The findings showed that the total number of error is 436. Two frequent types of grammatical errors were Verb Tense and Word Choice. The major sources of error were Intralingual Error, Interference Error and Developmental Error respectively. Furthermore, the findings suggest that it is necessary for EFL teachers to apply appropriate techniques and strategies in teaching recount texts, which focus on past tense and language features of the text in order to reduce the possible errors to be made by the students.
Barasa, Sandra Nekesa
2010-01-01
This book examines the use of language in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) genres in Kenya. It focuses on Short Messaging Service (SMS), Email, Instant Messages (IM) and Social Network Sites (SNS) genres. It presents an overview of the use and characteristics of Kenyan languages in CMC texts
He, Qiwei; Veldkamp, Bernard P.; Glas, Cornelis A.W.; de Vries, Theo
2017-01-01
Patients’ narratives about traumatic experiences and symptoms are useful in clinical screening and diagnostic procedures. In this study, we presented an automated assessment system to screen patients for posttraumatic stress disorder via a natural language processing and text-mining approach. Four
von der Mühlen, Sarah; Richter, Tobias; Schmid, Sebastian; Schmidt, Elisabeth Marie; Berthold, Kirsten
2016-01-01
Multiple text comprehension can greatly benefit from paying attention to sources and from using this information for evaluating text information. Previous research based on texts from the domain of history suggests that source-related strategies are acquired as part of the discipline expertise as opposed to the spontaneous use of these strategies…
The Text Retrieval Conferences (TRECs)
1998-10-01
per- form a monolingual run in the target language to act as a baseline. Thirteen groups participated in the TREC-6 CLIR track. Three major...language; the use of machine-readable bilingual dictionaries or other existing linguistic re- sources; and the use of corpus resources to train or...formance for each method. In general, the best cross- language performance was between 50%-75% as ef- fective as a quality monolingual run. The TREC-7
The Language Family Relation of Local Languages in Gorontalo Province (A Lexicostatistic Study
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Asna Ntelu
2017-11-01
Full Text Available This study aims to find out the relation of language family and glottochronology of Gorontalo language and Atinggola language in Gorontalo Province. The research employed a comparative method, and the research instrument used a list of 200 basic Morris Swadesh vocabularies. The data source was from documents or gloss translation of 200 basic vocabularies and interview of two informants (speakers of Gorontalo and Atinggola languages. Data analysis was done by using the lexicostatistic technique. The following indicators were used to determine the word family: (a identical pairs, (b the word pairs have phonemic correspondences, (c phonetic similarities, and (d a different phoneme. The results of data analysis reveal that there are 109 or 55.05% word pairs of the word family out of 200 basic vocabularies of Swadesh. The results of this study also show that the glottochronology of Gorontalo language and Atinggola language are (a Gorontalo and Atinggola languages are one single language at 1.377 + 122 years ago, (b Gorontalo and Atinggola languages are one single language at 1,449 - 1,255 years ago. This study concludes that (a the relation of the kinship of these two languages is in the family group, (b glottochronology (separation time between Gorontalo language and Atinggola language is between 1.4 to 1.2 thousand years ago or in the 12th – 14th century. Keywords: relation, kinship level, local language, Gorontalo Province, lexicostatistics study
Evaluating Open-Source Full-Text Search Engines for Matching ICD-10 Codes.
Jurcău, Daniel-Alexandru; Stoicu-Tivadar, Vasile
2016-01-01
This research presents the results of evaluating multiple free, open-source engines on matching ICD-10 diagnostic codes via full-text searches. The study investigates what it takes to get an accurate match when searching for a specific diagnostic code. For each code the evaluation starts by extracting the words that make up its text and continues with building full-text search queries from the combinations of these words. The queries are then run against all the ICD-10 codes until a match indicates the code in question as a match with the highest relative score. This method identifies the minimum number of words that must be provided in order for the search engines choose the desired entry. The engines analyzed include a popular Java-based full-text search engine, a lightweight engine written in JavaScript which can even execute on the user's browser, and two popular open-source relational database management systems.
The Effect of Bilingualism on Communication Efficiency in Text Messages (SMS)
Carrier, L. Mark; Benitez, Sandra Y.
2010-01-01
The widespread use of cell phones has led to the proliferation of messages sent using the Short Messaging Service (SMS). The 160-character limit on text messages encourages the use of shortenings and other shortcuts in language use. When bilingual speakers use SMS, their access to multiple sources of vocabulary, sentence structure, and other…
Reading Parallel Texts in the Target Language: A Way to Improve Literary Translation Quality
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Nazanin Shadman
2013-10-01
Full Text Available The present study was an attempt to investigate the effect of reading Persian literary texts on the quality of literary translations. To this end, 52 students majoring in English translation were randomly assigned to two groups. A Comprehensive English Language Test (CELT was administered to check the homogeneity of the participants. The treatment for the experimental group consisted of reading 60 Persian short stories and poems. In the meantime, the control group went through their ordinary course curriculum. Both groups were asked to translate extracts of two short stories. The translations were then rated. Through statistical analysis, it was revealed that reading Persian literary works, indeed, improves the quality of literary translations. Therefore, to promote a more fruitful instruction on literary translation, it is suggested that translation teachers attempt to consider reading Persian literary works as part of the curriculum and ask students to read Persian texts to the extent possible, so that more qualified translations would be rendered in the area of literature.
Literature: A Natural Source for Teaching English in ESL/ EFL Classrooms
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Muhammed Ali Chalikendy
2015-11-01
Full Text Available This paper explores the ways in which literature function as a source and as a meaningful context for teaching and learning English as a second language or foreign language. It claims that literature is an authentic, stimulating and appealing material to the learners. Therefore, it encourages interaction, promotes language development and motivates learners in the process of learning. Traditionally it is taught as an academic subject without considering its potential in ESL/EFL classrooms. The paper argues that literature can be used as an effective source for teaching English language and the target culture; furthermore, it is used as a natural context for integrating language skills and systems. This paper demonstrates how a poem is used as a natural source or a material for developing English language and integrating the four language skills, grammar and vocabulary through communicative tasks and activities.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Sharmini A.
2018-01-01
Full Text Available Translating figurative language involves more than just replacing the figurative language with its equivalent in the target language. Therefore, it is not surprising for the translation of figurative language to have its own set of challenges. Problems the translator faces in translating the Malay Figurative Language into English include complexities in understanding, interpreting and recreating the Figurative language that are unique in the Source Language (SL culture; which have to be explained and described in Target Language (TL where such practices and customs are non - existent. Secondly, the Source Text (ST figurative language may appear in a variety of types and have a distinct denotative and connotative meaning and reference; most often, it is difficult to find an equivalent which totally matches the original meaning or concept. This particular paper analyses the translation of figurative language extracted from UniMAP's Vice Chancellor Keynote Speech in 2015. Findings reveal that the three categories of figurative language identified were namely idioms, metaphors and similes. Translation strategies used are either not translated, paraphrased or translated with a similar meaning but in different form.
The Words Children Hear: Picture Books and the Statistics for Language Learning.
Montag, Jessica L; Jones, Michael N; Smith, Linda B
2015-09-01
Young children learn language from the speech they hear. Previous work suggests that greater statistical diversity of words and of linguistic contexts is associated with better language outcomes. One potential source of lexical diversity is the text of picture books that caregivers read aloud to children. Many parents begin reading to their children shortly after birth, so this is potentially an important source of linguistic input for many children. We constructed a corpus of 100 children's picture books and compared word type and token counts in that sample and a matched sample of child-directed speech. Overall, the picture books contained more unique word types than the child-directed speech. Further, individual picture books generally contained more unique word types than length-matched, child-directed conversations. The text of picture books may be an important source of vocabulary for young children, and these findings suggest a mechanism that underlies the language benefits associated with reading to children. © The Author(s) 2015.
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Lauridsen, Karen M.
2008-01-01
Like any other text, instructive texts function within a given cultural and situational setting and may only be available in one language. However, the end users may not be familiar with that language and therefore unable to read and understand the instructions. This article therefore argues...... that instructive texts should always be available in a language that is understood by the end users, and that a corporate communication policy which includes a language policy should ensure that this is in fact the case for all instructive texts....
Neurology of foreign language aptitude
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Adriana Biedroń
2015-01-01
Full Text Available This state-of-the art paper focuses on the poorly explored issue of foreign language aptitude, attempting to present the latest developments in this field and reconceptualizations of the construct from the perspective of neuroscience. In accordance with this goal, it first discusses general directions in neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude, starting with the earliest attempts to define the neurological substrate for talent, sources of difficulties in the neurolinguistic research on foreign language aptitude and modern research methods. This is followed by the discussion of the research on the phonology of foreign language aptitude with emphasis on functional and structural studies as well as their consequences for the knowledge of the concept. The subsequent section presents the studies which focus on lexical and morphosyntactic aspects of foreign language aptitude. The paper ends with a discussion of the limitations of contemporary research, the future directions of such research and selec ed methodological issues.
Leow, Ronald P.
1997-01-01
Investigated the effects of written input enhancement and text length on college students' second-language comprehension and intake. First-year Spanish students were exposed to one of four conditions with enhanced and non-enhanced short and long text. Exposing students to short authentic reading materials facilitated reading comprehension but not…
Endogenous sources of variation in language acquisition.
Han, Chung-Hye; Musolino, Julien; Lidz, Jeffrey
2016-01-26
A fundamental question in the study of human language acquisition centers around apportioning explanatory force between the experience of the learner and the core knowledge that allows learners to represent that experience. We provide a previously unidentified kind of data identifying children's contribution to language acquisition. We identify one aspect of grammar that varies unpredictably across a population of speakers of what is ostensibly a single language. We further demonstrate that the grammatical knowledge of parents and their children is independent. The combination of unpredictable variation and parent-child independence suggests that the relevant structural feature is supplied by each learner independent of experience with the language. This structural feature is abstract because it controls variation in more than one construction. The particular case we examine is the position of the verb in the clause structure of Korean. Because Korean is a head-final language, evidence for the syntactic position of the verb is both rare and indirect. We show that (i) Korean speakers exhibit substantial variability regarding this aspect of the grammar, (ii) this variability is attested between speakers but not within a speaker, (iii) this variability controls interpretation in two surface constructions, and (iv) it is independent in parents and children. According to our findings, when the exposure language is compatible with multiple grammars, learners acquire a single systematic grammar. Our observation that children and their parents vary independently suggests that the choice of grammar is driven in part by a process operating internal to individual learners.
Comprehension of scientific texts in English as a foreign language: the role of cohesion
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Neemias Silva de Souza Filho
2012-12-01
Full Text Available The reading of scientific texts is a challenge for students of all academic fields and levels. Whether it is a textbook in elementary education or a scientific paper in higher education, students are faced with a type of text which requires the reader's ability to generate inferences and the ability to fill informational gaps (BEST et al., 2005. This notion is in line with empirical evidence obtained by previous studies (e.g. OZURU et al., 2009. All of these works, however, were performed with native English speakers. In this sense, adopting the model of reading comprehension proposed by Kintsch (1998, we aimed to investigate if the results obtained by the previous studies, carried out with native speakers of English are also valid in a context of English as a foreign language. In addition, we pursue a methodological question, investigating whether the evaluation of reading comprehension through objective and subjective questions leads to convergent or divergent results. To investigate these questions, we analyze subjects’ answers to an objective questionnaire and in the production of a written summary. The results show that high-cohesion texts generate better results and point to possible research avenues.
Developing Pre-Service English Language Teachers' Comprehension of Texts with Humorous Elements
Yangin Ersanli, Ceylan; Çakir, Abdulvahit
2017-01-01
Humour is a universal phenomenon and has been studied in many fields of research such as literature, linguistics, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Humour is often expressed through language and it is little wonder that failure to understand humorous language causes breakdowns in communication. What is humorous might be culturally defined, and…
Is Word-Problem Solving a Form of Text Comprehension?
Fuchs, Lynn S.; Fuchs, Douglas; Compton, Donald L.; Hamlett, Carol L.; Wang, Amber Y.
2015-01-01
This study’s hypotheses were that (a) word-problem (WP) solving is a form of text comprehension that involves language comprehension processes, working memory, and reasoning, but (b) WP solving differs from other forms of text comprehension by requiring WP-specific language comprehension as well as general language comprehension. At the start of the 2nd grade, children (n = 206; on average, 7 years, 6 months) were assessed on general language comprehension, working memory, nonlinguistic reasoning, processing speed (a control variable), and foundational skill (arithmetic for WPs; word reading for text comprehension). In spring, they were assessed on WP-specific language comprehension, WPs, and text comprehension. Path analytic mediation analysis indicated that effects of general language comprehension on text comprehension were entirely direct, whereas effects of general language comprehension on WPs were partially mediated by WP-specific language. By contrast, effects of working memory and reasoning operated in parallel ways for both outcomes. PMID:25866461
Language policy, translation and language development in Zimbabwe
African Journals Online (AJOL)
The language policy is usually inferred from the language practices that characterise various spheres of life. This article attempts to show how the language policy, which primarily influences text production in the country, has nurtured translation practice. The dominating role of English sees many texts, particularly technical ...
The words children hear: Picture books and the statistics for language learning
Montag, Jessica L.; Jones, Michael N.; Smith, Linda B.
2015-01-01
Young children learn language from the speech they hear. Previous work suggests that the statistical diversity of words and of linguistic contexts is associated with better language outcomes. One potential source of lexical diversity is the text of picture books that caregivers read aloud to children. Many parents begin reading to their children shortly after birth, so this is potentially an important source of linguistic input for many children. We constructed a corpus of 100 children’s pict...
Cluo: Web-Scale Text Mining System For Open Source Intelligence Purposes
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Przemyslaw Maciolek
2013-01-01
Full Text Available The amount of textual information published on the Internet is considered tobe in billions of web pages, blog posts, comments, social media updates andothers. Analyzing such quantities of data requires high level of distribution –both data and computing. This is especially true in case of complex algorithms,often used in text mining tasks.The paper presents a prototype implementation of CLUO – an Open SourceIntelligence (OSINT system, which extracts and analyzes significant quantitiesof openly available information.
Pylinguistics: an open source library for readability assessment of texts written in Portuguese
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Castilhos, S.
2016-12-01
Full Text Available Readability assessment is an important task in automatic text simplification that aims identify the text complexity by computing a set of metrics. In this paper, we present the development and assessment of an open source library called Pylinguistics to readability assessment of texts written in Portuguese. Additionally, to illustrate the possibilities of our tool, this work also presents an empirical analysis of readability of Brazilian scientific news dissemination.
PSYCHOLOGY OF CHILDREN’S COGNITIVE TOWARD LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
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Cucu Ardiah Ningrum
2017-05-01
Full Text Available This paper aims to explain how the Cognitive Psychology supports the language development on children. The supporting data was taken from some related books and journals. The data collection is conducted through the proper source collection used for obtaining various information related to the topic. Then the information obtained from many sources was analyzed. The result of the analyses shows that the language acquisition process begins even since infancy period. In this process, the cognitive psychology supported it. In the process of acquiring the language, the children will pass through four steps of Cognitive process namely, sensorimotor stage, pre-operational stage, concrete operation stage, and formal operation stage. The entire stages are related to human’s age. In addition there are some assumptions of children’s cognitive development which are children’s schemas, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.
Are translations longer than source texts? A corpus-based study of explicitation
Frankenberg-Garcia, A
2009-01-01
Explicitation is the process of rendering information which is only implicit in the source text explicit in the target text, and is believed to be one of the universals of translation (Blum-Kulka 1986, Olohan and Baker 2000, Øverås 1998, Séguinot 1988, Vanderauwera 1985). The present study uses corpus technology to attempt to shed some light on the complex relationship between translation, text length and explicitation. An awareness of what makes translations longer (or shorter) and more expl...
Sources, Developments and Directions of Task-Based Language Teaching
Bygate, Martin
2016-01-01
This paper provides an outline of the origins, the current shape and the potential directions of task-based language teaching (TBLT) as an approach to language pedagogy. It first offers a brief description of TBLT and considers its origins within language teaching methodology and second language acquisition. It then summarises the current position…
Jeong, Hyeonjeong; Sugiura, Motoaki; Sassa, Yuko; Wakusawa, Keisuke; Horie, Kaoru; Sato, Shigeru; Kawashima, Ryuta
2010-04-01
Second language (L2) acquisition necessitates learning and retrieving new words in different modes. In this study, we attempted to investigate the cortical representation of an L2 vocabulary acquired in different learning modes and in cross-modal transfer between learning and retrieval. Healthy participants learned new L2 words either by written translations (text-based learning) or in real-life situations (situation-based learning). Brain activity was then measured during subsequent retrieval of these words. The right supramarginal gyrus and left middle frontal gyrus were involved in situation-based learning and text-based learning, respectively, whereas the left inferior frontal gyrus was activated when learners used L2 knowledge in a mode different from the learning mode. Our findings indicate that the brain regions that mediate L2 memory differ according to how L2 words are learned and used. Copyright 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Computing Pathways in Bio-Models Derived from Bio-Science Text Sources
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Andreasen, Troels; Bulskov, Henrik; Nilsson, Jørgen Fischer
2015-01-01
This paper outlines a system, OntoScape, serving to accomplish complex inference tasks on knowledge bases and bio-models derived from life-science text corpora. The system applies so-called natural logic, a form of logic which is readable for humans. This logic affords ontological representations...... of complex terms appearing in the text sources. Along with logical propositions, the system applies a semantic graph representation facilitating calculation of bio-pathways. More generally, the system aords means of query answering appealing to general and domain specic inference rules....
Implementation of inter-unit analysis for C and C++ languages in a source-based static code analyzer
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A. V. Sidorin
2015-01-01
Full Text Available The proliferation of automated testing capabilities arises a need for thorough testing of large software systems, including system inter-component interfaces. The objective of this research is to build a method for inter-procedural inter-unit analysis, which allows us to analyse large and complex software systems including multi-architecture projects (like Android OS as well as to support complex assembly systems of projects. Since the selected Clang Static Analyzer uses source code directly as input data, we need to develop a special technique to enable inter-unit analysis for such analyzer. This problem is of special nature because of C and C++ language features that assume and encourage the separate compilation of project files. We describe the build and analysis system that was implemented around Clang Static Analyzer to enable inter-unit analysis and consider problems related to support of complex projects. We also consider the task of merging abstract source trees of translation units and its related problems such as handling conflicting definitions, complex build systems and complex projects support, including support for multi-architecture projects, with examples. We consider both issues related to language design and human-related mistakes (that may be intentional. We describe some heuristics that were used for this work to make the merging process faster. The developed system was tested using Android OS as the input to show it is applicable even for such complicated projects. This system does not depend on the inter-procedural analysis method and allows the arbitrary change of its algorithm.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Lauro Gomes
2016-12-01
Full Text Available This paper aims to present an evaluation proposal of the performance in reading and writing dissertative-argumentative texts, based on principles and concepts from the theory of Argumentation in Language – created by Jean-Claude Anscombre and Oswald Ducrot, especially the version of the Theory of the Semantic Blocks and the works inspired by it. The goal is to create criteria which are capable of being less intuitive in judging the performance in reading and wrinting dissertative-argumentative texts. The analysis of the corpora – the Enem 2011’s composition proposal and 50 (fifty texts written by the students – and the test of the criteria of reading and writing evaluation in this work revealed practice funcionality and efficiency of criteria. The results allow these criteria to be applied in any evaluation processes of dissertative-argumenative texts. Finally, this paper offers theoretical and methodological subisdies which can help teachers and professors to qualify their teaching of reading and writing and the evaluation of student’s texts.
Verspoor, Karin; Cohen, Kevin Bretonnel; Lanfranchi, Arrick; Warner, Colin; Johnson, Helen L; Roeder, Christophe; Choi, Jinho D; Funk, Christopher; Malenkiy, Yuriy; Eckert, Miriam; Xue, Nianwen; Baumgartner, William A; Bada, Michael; Palmer, Martha; Hunter, Lawrence E
2012-08-17
We introduce the linguistic annotation of a corpus of 97 full-text biomedical publications, known as the Colorado Richly Annotated Full Text (CRAFT) corpus. We further assess the performance of existing tools for performing sentence splitting, tokenization, syntactic parsing, and named entity recognition on this corpus. Many biomedical natural language processing systems demonstrated large differences between their previously published results and their performance on the CRAFT corpus when tested with the publicly available models or rule sets. Trainable systems differed widely with respect to their ability to build high-performing models based on this data. The finding that some systems were able to train high-performing models based on this corpus is additional evidence, beyond high inter-annotator agreement, that the quality of the CRAFT corpus is high. The overall poor performance of various systems indicates that considerable work needs to be done to enable natural language processing systems to work well when the input is full-text journal articles. The CRAFT corpus provides a valuable resource to the biomedical natural language processing community for evaluation and training of new models for biomedical full text publications.
Writing in first and second language: empirical studies on text quality and writing processes
Tillema, M.
2012-01-01
This thesis is about writing proficiency among students of secondary education. Due to globalization, the ability to express oneself in a language other than the first language (L1) is increasingly becoming a condition for educational success. In The Netherlands, this ‘other’ or second language (L2)
Text analysis with R for students of literature
Jockers, Matthew L
2014-01-01
Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature is written with students and scholars of literature in mind but will be applicable to other humanists and social scientists wishing to extend their methodological tool kit to include quantitative and computational approaches to the study of text. Computation provides access to information in text that we simply cannot gather using traditional qualitative methods of close reading and human synthesis. Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature provides a practical introduction to computational text analysis using the open source programming language R. R is extremely popular throughout the sciences and because of its accessibility, R is now used increasingly in other research areas. Readers begin working with text right away and each chapter works through a new technique or process such that readers gain a broad exposure to core R procedures and a basic understanding of the possibilities of computational text analysis at both the micro and macro scale. Each c...
The Effects of Foreign Language Motivation in Second Language Acquisition
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)
WU Miao-ru
2013-01-01
Foreign language motivation is regarded as one source of individual differences in second language acquisition. Learn-ing motivation is a dynamic mechanism which gives rise to learning activities. Learners ’motivation is a decisive factor for the suc-cess of second language acquisition.
Arcon, Nina; Klein, Perry D.; Dombroski, Jill D.
2017-01-01
Previous research has shown that both dictation and speech-to-text (STT) software can increase the quality of writing for native English speakers. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of these modalities on the written composition and cognitive load of elementary school English language learners (ELLs). In a within-subjects…
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Urška Sešek
2009-12-01
Full Text Available Different approaches to foreign language teaching can entail very different approaches to the use of the target language in the classroom. The currently prevailing opinion is that the teacher should not primarily use the learners' mother tongue but the target language, as far as that is possible and meaningful. This is important even though today's learners of mainstream-taught foreign languages in Slovenia are much more exposed to their target language outside of school than they were even 10 years ago. The teacher's use of the target language namely represents not only a source of input and a model of its active usage but is also a means of establishing authority and a tool for execution of classroom activities. In order to successfully carry out all of her/his increasingly demanding professional tasks, the teacher should maintain and develop their target language competences in terms of accuracy, appropriateness and modification strategies to adapt to learner needs. It is also very useful to look at the teacher's target language use from a functional perspective to become aware of how different types of utterances / speech acts / language forms can contribute to achieving different educational goals.
Test Anxiety among Foreign Language Learners: A Review of Literature
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Selami Aydın
2009-04-01
Full Text Available The findings obtained from previous research indicate that test anxiety has significant effects on the foreign language learning process. Thus, this paper aims to present a synthesis of research results on the sources and effects of test anxiety among foreign language learners. The results of the studies reviewed in the paper were mainly categorized under two sub-sections: the sources and effects of test anxiety. It is expected that the study will not only contribute to the limited research on the subject in Turkey, but also help increase the awareness among target groups such as learners, teacher and examiners.
Reflections on dictionaries designed to assist users with text ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
After a discussion of a selected part of the existing theoretical literature, the concept of foreign-language text production is analysed within the framework of the broader concept of the foreign-language learning process. Two main types of foreign-language text production are discussed, i.e. text production with and without an ...
Riggs, Ken Roger
2002-01-01
Discusses problems with marking free text, text that is either natural language or semigrammatical but unstructured, that prevent well-formed XML from marking text for readily available meaning. Proposes a solution to mark meaning in free text that is consistent with the intended simplicity of XML versus SGML. (Author/LRW)
Stemming Malay Text and Its Application in Automatic Text Categorization
Yasukawa, Michiko; Lim, Hui Tian; Yokoo, Hidetoshi
In Malay language, there are no conjugations and declensions and affixes have important grammatical functions. In Malay, the same word may function as a noun, an adjective, an adverb, or, a verb, depending on its position in the sentence. Although extensively simple root words are used in informal conversations, it is essential to use the precise words in formal speech or written texts. In Malay, to make sentences clear, derivative words are used. Derivation is achieved mainly by the use of affixes. There are approximately a hundred possible derivative forms of a root word in written language of the educated Malay. Therefore, the composition of Malay words may be complicated. Although there are several types of stemming algorithms available for text processing in English and some other languages, they cannot be used to overcome the difficulties in Malay word stemming. Stemming is the process of reducing various words to their root forms in order to improve the effectiveness of text processing in information systems. It is essential to avoid both over-stemming and under-stemming errors. We have developed a new Malay stemmer (stemming algorithm) for removing inflectional and derivational affixes. Our stemmer uses a set of affix rules and two types of dictionaries: a root-word dictionary and a derivative-word dictionary. The use of set of rules is aimed at reducing the occurrence of under-stemming errors, while that of the dictionaries is believed to reduce the occurrence of over-stemming errors. We performed an experiment to evaluate the application of our stemmer in text mining software. For the experiment, text data used were actual web pages collected from the World Wide Web to demonstrate the effectiveness of our Malay stemming algorithm. The experimental results showed that our stemmer can effectively increase the precision of the extracted Boolean expressions for text categorization.
Python 3 text processing with NLTK 3 cookbook
Perkins, Jacob
2014-01-01
This book is intended for Python programmers interested in learning how to do natural language processing. Maybe you've learned the limits of regular expressions the hard way, or you've realized that human language cannot be deterministically parsed like a computer language. Perhaps you have more text than you know what to do with, and need automated ways to analyze and structure that text. This Cookbook will show you how to train and use statistical language models to process text in ways that are practically impossible with standard programming tools. A basic knowledge of Python and the basi
One Film, or Many?: The Multiple Texts of the Colonial Korean Film "Volunteer"
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Jaekil Seo
2012-12-01
Full Text Available Until recently, studies on films from colonial Korea in the Japanese empire had to rely primarily on secondary texts, such as memoirs, journal and newspaper articles, and film reviews. The recent discovery of original film texts from archives in Japan, China, Russia, and elsewhere and their availability on DVD format, prompted an important turning point in the scholarship. However, juxtaposing these newly released DVD versions with other archival sources exposes significant differences among the existing versions of texts. For instance, a newly discovered script reveals that important segments are missing in the recently released DVD version of the propaganda film "Volunteer." There also exist important discrepancies in the dialogue among the original film script, the actual film version, the synopsis, and the Japanese subtitles. Some of the Korean-language dialogue, which might be interpreted as exhibiting some ambivalence toward Japanese imperial policies, was completely silenced through strategic omissions in the Japanese-language subtitles targeting Japanese audiences. Some Japanese-language translations of the script also exhibit drastic changes from the original Korean-language dialogue. Piecing together such fragmented and fraught linguistic dissonance found in the colonial archives, we can conjecture that viewers from the colony and the metropole of "Volunteer" may have consumed very different versions of the film. This article aims to examine the significance of such dissonance, which has only recently become audible in so-called films of transcolonial coproduction.
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Bakker, Peter
2015-01-01
this is a reprint of a 2012 article: A new old text in Romani: Lord's Prayer, 1622. International Journal of Romani Language and Culture 2 (2011): 193-212.......this is a reprint of a 2012 article: A new old text in Romani: Lord's Prayer, 1622. International Journal of Romani Language and Culture 2 (2011): 193-212....
THE USE OF 2ND LIFE IN LANGUAGE TEACHING
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Saziye YAMAN
2011-08-01
Full Text Available Approaches and methods are often based on the assumptions that the process of language learning is complex in nature, non linear, and active. Learners are getting more in need of communication with a second/foreign language both inside and outside the classroom while instructions are witnessing a major paradigm shift within language teaching in our century. Virtual worlds have the potential to dramatically change the traditional nature of language teaching through 3D spaces, information and communication technologies, etc… Second Life (SL Virtual World, as supplementing language instruction, has begun to shape both teachers and learners’ interaction with language. Learners are facilitated with 3D spaces in their own reality and environment, allowing them to interpret and apply a variety of experiences and tasks. SL offers rich sources and dimensions, facilitating the changing nature of learning experience.
A Large-Scale Analysis of Variance in Written Language.
Johns, Brendan T; Jamieson, Randall K
2018-01-22
The collection of very large text sources has revolutionized the study of natural language, leading to the development of several models of language learning and distributional semantics that extract sophisticated semantic representations of words based on the statistical redundancies contained within natural language (e.g., Griffiths, Steyvers, & Tenenbaum, ; Jones & Mewhort, ; Landauer & Dumais, ; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, ). The models treat knowledge as an interaction of processing mechanisms and the structure of language experience. But language experience is often treated agnostically. We report a distributional semantic analysis that shows written language in fiction books varies appreciably between books from the different genres, books from the same genre, and even books written by the same author. Given that current theories assume that word knowledge reflects an interaction between processing mechanisms and the language environment, the analysis shows the need for the field to engage in a more deliberate consideration and curation of the corpora used in computational studies of natural language processing. Copyright © 2018 Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
Potential Ambiguity Translation Performances within Legal Language Institutional Nomenclature
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Oţăt Diana
2015-12-01
Full Text Available Motivated by a paradoxical corollary of ambiguities in legal documents and especially in contract texts, the current paper underpins a dichotomy approach to unintended ambiguities aiming to establish a referential framework for the occurrence rate of translation ambiguities within the legal language nomenclature. The research focus is on a twofold situation since ambiguities may. on the one hand, arise dining the translation process, generated by the translator’s lack of competence, i.e. inadequate use of English regarding the special nature of legal language, or. on the other hand, they may be simply transferred from the source language into the target language without even noticing the potential ambiguous situation, i.e. culture-bound ambiguities. Hence, the paper proposes a contrastive analysis in order to localize the occurrence of lexical, structural, and socio-cultural ambiguities triggered by the use of the term performance and its Romanian equivalents in a number of sales contracts.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Anastasiya Yuryevna Vekolova
2015-12-01
Full Text Available The article presents the results of the historical research in historical aspect on word-formation based on «Materials for the dictionary of the old Russian language in the written records» by I.I. Sreznevskiy that is characterized as the most important source of lexicographical material for the diachronic research. The dictionary is the only completed lexicographical source that reflects the language in the XI-XVII cent. It includes samples of the old Slavic and the old Russian written monuments, thus demonstrating lexis from the variety of sources. Its entries represent data on lexical, in particular word building system of the Old Russian language. The significance of the «Materials for the dictionary of the old Russian language in the written records» by I.I. Sreznevskiy for the diachronic research of the substantive wordformation is proved with the system of the old Russian substantive derivatives with evaluative suffixes that was allocated in the research. Productive modification formants are revealed, their morphological characteristics are considered. Special attention is concentrated on the analysis of the suffixal frequency. On the basis of the dictionary data connotation of affixes is characterized, options of suffixes are given. It is noted that these morphemes have a positive or negative assessment. The compiler of this dictionary pays attention to the connotation. The suggested indication of the word allows defining the boundaries of suffixes. Examples of the derivatives with evaluative affixes in context are given. It is emphasized that the presence of the usage helps to systematic comprehension of the material.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Meyer Julien
2004-01-01
Full Text Available Whistled languages are a valuable heritage of human culture. This paper gives a first survey about a new multidisciplinary approach to these languages. Previous studies on whistled equivalents of languages have already documented that they can provide significant information about the role of rhythm and melody in language. To substantiate this, most whistles are represented by modulations of frequency, centered around 2000 Hz (±1000 Hz and often reach a loudness of about 130 dB (measured at 1m from the source. Their transmission range can reach up to 10 km (as verified in La Gomera, Canary Island, and the messages can remain understandable, even if the signal is deteriorated. In some cultures the use of whistled language is associated with some "talking musical instruments" (e.g. flutes, guitars, harps, gongs, drums, khens. Finally, whistles as a means of conveying information have some analogues in the animal kingdom (e.g. some birds, cetaceans, primates, providing opportunities to compare the acoustic characteristics of the respective signals. With such properties as a reference, the project reported here has two major tasks: to further elucidate the many facets of whistled language and, above all, help to immediately stop the process of its gradual disappearance.
Falling into language life: a montage of pre-faces in search of a text-ual body.
Schenk, Ronald
2016-11-01
Clinical work, as all of consciousness, is steeped in and emerges out of language. Language is the medium of our knowing, and knowing the medium of our relating. Language has us; words dream us. For the mythical Navajo as for John of the New Testament, in the Beginning was the Word. Before any kind of distinction of thought, feeling, sensation or intuition comes language - language, not as 'just words', but as image. Words are images, and images as encompassing worlds present themselves as and through language. As a determinant of identity, language undermines all cues as to individual subjectivity, Yahweh's 'I am here' rendering time and place relative, and subjectivity co-constituted. This paper is a meditation on language for clinicians in the form that language presents itself, as a meandering flow of consciousness with associations and signposts leading onward. © 2016, The Society of Analytical Psychology.
Using sources in English - writing about them in Danish
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Klitgård, Ida
2015-01-01
This study investigates the scope of a kind of translation literacy involved in the interlingual translation, summarising and paraphrasing which take place when Danish university students write project reports in their native language about academic texts in English. The resulting changes in re......-contexutalisation and the changes in the representation of various levels of voices in both source and target texts have serious implications for the reader's comprehension of the content as well as for the language and style of the students' writing....
LingoBee: Engaging Mobile Language Learners through Crowd-Sourcing
Petersen, Sobah Abbas; Procter-Legg, Emma; Cacchione, Annamaria
2014-01-01
This paper describes three case studies, where language learners were invited to use "LingoBee" as a means of supporting their language learning. LingoBee is a mobile app that provides user-generated language content in a cloud-based shared repository. Assuming that today's students are mobile savvy and "Digital Natives" able…
Word-length algorithm for language identification of under-resourced languages
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Ali Selamat
2016-10-01
Full Text Available Language identification is widely used in machine learning, text mining, information retrieval, and speech processing. Available techniques for solving the problem of language identification do require large amount of training text that are not available for under-resourced languages which form the bulk of the World’s languages. The primary objective of this study is to propose a lexicon based algorithm which is able to perform language identification using minimal training data. Because language identification is often the first step in many natural language processing tasks, it is necessary to explore techniques that will perform language identification in the shortest possible time. Hence, the second objective of this research is to study the effect of the proposed algorithm on the run-time performance of language identification. Precision, recall, and F1 measures were used to determine the effectiveness of the proposed word length algorithm using datasets drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Act in 15 languages. The experimental results show good accuracy on language identification at the document level and at the sentence level based on the available dataset. The improved algorithm also showed significant improvement in run time performance compared with the spelling checker approach.
Execution Model of Three Parallel Languages: OpenMP, UPC and CAF
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Ami Marowka
2005-01-01
Full Text Available The aim of this paper is to present a qualitative evaluation of three state-of-the-art parallel languages: OpenMP, Unified Parallel C (UPC and Co-Array Fortran (CAF. OpenMP and UPC are explicit parallel programming languages based on the ANSI standard. CAF is an implicit programming language. On the one hand, OpenMP designs for shared-memory architectures and extends the base-language by using compiler directives that annotate the original source-code. On the other hand, UPC and CAF designs for distribute-shared memory architectures and extends the base-language by new parallel constructs. We deconstruct each language into its basic components, show examples, make a detailed analysis, compare them, and finally draw some conclusions.
Genuardi, Michael T.
1993-01-01
One strategy for machine-aided indexing (MAI) is to provide a concept-level analysis of the textual elements of documents or document abstracts. In such systems, natural-language phrases are analyzed in order to identify and classify concepts related to a particular subject domain. The overall performance of these MAI systems is largely dependent on the quality and comprehensiveness of their knowledge bases. These knowledge bases function to (1) define the relations between a controlled indexing vocabulary and natural language expressions; (2) provide a simple mechanism for disambiguation and the determination of relevancy; and (3) allow the extension of concept-hierarchical structure to all elements of the knowledge file. After a brief description of the NASA Machine-Aided Indexing system, concerns related to the development and maintenance of MAI knowledge bases are discussed. Particular emphasis is given to statistically-based text analysis tools designed to aid the knowledge base developer. One such tool, the Knowledge Base Building (KBB) program, presents the domain expert with a well-filtered list of synonyms and conceptually-related phrases for each thesaurus concept. Another tool, the Knowledge Base Maintenance (KBM) program, functions to identify areas of the knowledge base affected by changes in the conceptual domain (for example, the addition of a new thesaurus term). An alternate use of the KBM as an aid in thesaurus construction is also discussed.
Concrete poetry in three languages
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Aleksandra Kremer
2013-01-01
Full Text Available This paper analyzes different paths of the development of both the movement and the notion of concrete poetry in three linguistic regions. The German-language konkrete Dichtung turns out to usually denote the original, historical shape of the movement, which was partly created in German- speaking countries and which has been treated as a literary phenomenon. The Englishlanguage term concrete poetry is a much broader category which also encompasses visual poetry and avant-garde texts that are distant from the sources of concretism in its early form. The Polish understanding of ‘poezja konkretna’ [concrete poetry] was influenced by both German- and English- language books and by the movement’s regional version, which appeared in Poland as late as in the 1970s. The selected linguistic areas allowed the author to show three basic ways of thinking about concretism, i.e. about its initial, international, and regional versions.
Collaborative Work and Language Learners' Identities When Editing Academic Texts
Caviedes, Lorena; Meza, Angélica; Rodriguez, Ingrid
2016-01-01
This paper presents a qualitative case study that involved three groups of English as a foreign language pre-service teachers at a Colombian private university. Each group attended tutoring sessions during an academic semester. Along these sessions, students were asked to work collaboratively in the editing process of some chapters of their thesis…
The Usefulness of Translation in Foreign Language Learning: Students’ Attitudes
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Ana B. Fernández-Guerra
2014-03-01
Full Text Available Several scholars have argued that translation is not a useful tool when acquiring a second or foreign language; since it provides a simplistic one-to-one relationship between the native and the foreign language, it can cause interference between them, and it is an artificial exercise that has nothing to do in a communicative approach to language teaching. Recent studies, however, show that, far from being useless, translation can be a great aid to foreign language learning. The aim of the present paper is twofold: (1 to summarize and assess the arguments that encourage the use of translation in the foreign language classroom, supporting the integration of several forms of translating; and (2 to present the results of a survey that focused on students’ perceptions and responses towards translation tasks and their effectiveness in foreign language acquisition. Results show that students’ attitudes were surprisingly positive for several reasons: translation is one of their preferred language learning tasks, it is motivating, it facilitates a deeper understanding of the form and content of the source language text, it increases learners’ awareness of the differences between both linguistic systems, it allows them to re-express their thoughts faster and easier, and it helps them acquire linguistic and cultural knowledge.
Production Logistics Simulation Supported by Process Description Languages
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Bohács Gábor
2016-03-01
Full Text Available The process description languages are used in the business may be useful in the optimization of logistics processes too. The process description languages would be the obvious solution for process control, to handle the main sources of faults and to give a correct list of what to do during the logistics process. Related to this, firstly, the paper presents the main features of the frequent process description languages. The following section describes the currently most used process modelling languages, in the areas of production and construction logistics. In addition, the paper gives some examples of logistics simulation, as another very important field of logistics system modelling. The main edification of the paper, the logistics simulation supported by process description languages. The paper gives a comparison of a Petri net formal representation and a Simul8 model, through a construction logistics model, as the major contribution of the research.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN MODERN LANGUAGE EDUCATION
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N. Y. Gutareva
2014-09-01
Full Text Available This article develops the sources of occurrence and the purposes of application of information technologies in teaching of foreign languages from the point of view of linguistics, methods of teaching foreign languages and psychology. The main features of them have been determined in works of native and foreign scientists from the point of view of the basic didactic principles and new standards of selection for working with computer programs are pointed out. In work the author focuses the main attention to modern technologies that in language education in teaching are especially important and demanded as answer the purpose and problems of teaching in foreign languages are equitable to interests of students but they should be safe.Purpose: to determine advantages of using interactive means in teaching foreign languages.Methodology: studying and analysis of psychological, pedagogical and methodological literature on the theme of investigation.Results: the analysis of the purpose and kinds of interactive means has shown importance of its application in practice.Practical implications: it is possible for us to use the results of this work in courses of theory of methodology of teaching foreign languages.
Memory for Textual Conflicts Predicts Sourcing When Adolescents Read Multiple Expository Texts
Stang Lund, Elisabeth; Bråten, Ivar; Brante, Eva W.; Strømsø, Helge I.
2017-01-01
This study investigated whether memory for conflicting information predicted mental representation of source-content links (i.e., who said what) in a sample of 86 Norwegian adolescent readers. Participants read four texts presenting conflicting claims about sun exposure and health. With differences in gender, prior knowledge, and interest…
Do Foreign Language Learners Need Failures?
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Joanna Kic-Drgas
2016-06-01
Full Text Available A lack of motivation, incomprehensible content and a high workload are only some of the causes leading to students’ failures in the learning process. Dealing with failures seems to have become a new core competence in the current world, which is why the definition and implementation of an appropriate strategy is essential for prospective learning results. The focus of the contribution is on the meaning of failure and sources of potential student failures in the foreign language learning at the university level. The results presented in the paper base on the survey conducted with English language students at Koszalin University of Technology. Students were asked to identify the field causing learning failures. The described survey delivers information about the sources of failures from learner’s point of view, which can be an incentive to develop and implement strategies to cope with failures in the ESP class.
Writing through Two Languages: First Language Expertise in a Language Minority Classroom
Kibler, Amanda
2010-01-01
Language minority students' writing is often measured solely in terms of its distance from native speaker norms, yet doing so may ignore the process through which these texts are realized and the role that the first language plays in their creation. This study analyzes oral interactions among adolescent second language writers during an extended…
The symbol coding language for the BUTs processor of in-core reactor control systems
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Vorob'ev, D.M.; Golovanov, M.N.; Levin, G.L.; Parfenova, T.K.; Filatov, V.P.
1978-01-01
A symbolic coding language is described; it has been developed for automation of making up programs for in-core control systems. The systems use the ideology of the CAMAC-VECTOR system and include the BUTs-20 processor. The symbolic coding language has been developed as a programming language of the ASSEMBLER type. Operators of instructions and pseudo-instructions, the rules of reading in the text of the source program, and operator record formats are considered
Text mining from ontology learning to automated text processing applications
Biemann, Chris
2014-01-01
This book comprises a set of articles that specify the methodology of text mining, describe the creation of lexical resources in the framework of text mining and use text mining for various tasks in natural language processing (NLP). The analysis of large amounts of textual data is a prerequisite to build lexical resources such as dictionaries and ontologies and also has direct applications in automated text processing in fields such as history, healthcare and mobile applications, just to name a few. This volume gives an update in terms of the recent gains in text mining methods and reflects
Two approaches to gathering text corpora from the WorldWideWeb
CSIR Research Space (South Africa)
Botha, G
2005-11-01
Full Text Available Many applications of pattern recognition to natural language processing require large text corpora in a specified language. For many of the languages of the world, such corpora are not readily available, but significant quantities of text...
Politeness Phenomena as a Source of Pragmatic Failure in English as a Second Language
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Aridah Aridah
2001-01-01
Full Text Available Abstract: Language should be learned in the cultural context of its speakÂers. This is because the speakers bring an intention in performing a linguistic act. Failure in understanding the intention of the speakers will lead to failure in responding to the intended message and, thus, failure in using the language. The study of how language is used in a particular context or situation is the focus of pragmatics. An important pragmatic issue concerns with politeness, i.e. showing awareness of another person's public self-image. This article highlights the politeness pheÂnomena and the degree of success in learning English. The issues disÂcussed include the definition of politeness, strategies of politeness, poÂliteness in the Oriental cultures, politeness in the context of Indonesian cultures, and the implication of politeness phenomena in the teaching of English.
First Language Acquisition and Teaching
Cruz-Ferreira, Madalena
2011-01-01
"First language acquisition" commonly means the acquisition of a single language in childhood, regardless of the number of languages in a child's natural environment. Language acquisition is variously viewed as predetermined, wondrous, a source of concern, and as developing through formal processes. "First language teaching" concerns schooling in…
Is Word-Problem Solving a Form of Text Comprehension?
Fuchs, Lynn S.; Fuchs, Douglas; Compton, Donald L.; Hamlett, Carol L.; Wang, Amber Y.
2015-01-01
This study's hypotheses were that (a) word-problem (WP) solving is a form of text comprehension that involves language comprehension processes, working memory, and reasoning, but (b) WP solving differs from other forms of text comprehension by requiring WP-specific language comprehension as well as general language comprehension. At the start of…
From system requirements to source code: transitions in UML and RUP
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Stanisław Wrycza
2011-06-01
Full Text Available There are many manuals explaining language specification among UML-related books. Only some of books mentioned concentrate on practical aspects of using the UML language in effective way using CASE tools and RUP. The current paper presents transitions from system requirements specification to structural source code, useful while developing an information system.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Belgin Aydın
2012-01-01
Full Text Available This paper is concerned with the modifications implemented in a second year foreign language (FL reading program with respect to the problems students experience while reading in FL. This research draws on the sources of FL reading anxiety identified in the first year reading program with a motivation to re-design the second year program to help the students perceive reading positively free from the anxiety. This paper reports on the responses of students to the modifications implemented in the second year reading program. The participants of the study were 50 FL students who were in their second year at a state university in Turkey. All participants had already taken the first year reading course and were enrolled in the second year reading course. It was based on two qualitative research instruments. The first instrument was a semi-structured questionnaire administered to all participants. The second one was a semi-structured interview conducted with half of the participants to obtain more in depth information concerning the modifications that had been introduced. Both instruments revealed that students responded positively to the modifications introduced. The results of the study put forward that obtaining students’ opinions, giving them responsibility and involving them in decision making processes enhance their motivation, confidence and analytical skills while reading in a foreign language.
Bui, Duy Duc An; Del Fiol, Guilherme; Hurdle, John F; Jonnalagadda, Siddhartha
2016-12-01
Extracting data from publication reports is a standard process in systematic review (SR) development. However, the data extraction process still relies too much on manual effort which is slow, costly, and subject to human error. In this study, we developed a text summarization system aimed at enhancing productivity and reducing errors in the traditional data extraction process. We developed a computer system that used machine learning and natural language processing approaches to automatically generate summaries of full-text scientific publications. The summaries at the sentence and fragment levels were evaluated in finding common clinical SR data elements such as sample size, group size, and PICO values. We compared the computer-generated summaries with human written summaries (title and abstract) in terms of the presence of necessary information for the data extraction as presented in the Cochrane review's study characteristics tables. At the sentence level, the computer-generated summaries covered more information than humans do for systematic reviews (recall 91.2% vs. 83.8%, p<0.001). They also had a better density of relevant sentences (precision 59% vs. 39%, p<0.001). At the fragment level, the ensemble approach combining rule-based, concept mapping, and dictionary-based methods performed better than individual methods alone, achieving an 84.7% F-measure. Computer-generated summaries are potential alternative information sources for data extraction in systematic review development. Machine learning and natural language processing are promising approaches to the development of such an extractive summarization system. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Language Anxiety and Achievement.
Horwitz, Elaine K.
2001-01-01
Considers the literature on language learning anxiety in an effort to clarify the relationship between anxiety and second language learning. Suggests that anxiety is indeed a cause of poor language learning in some individuals and discusses possible sources of this anxiety. (Author/VWL)
Ontology Assisted Formal Specification Extraction from Text
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Andreea Mihis
2010-12-01
Full Text Available In the field of knowledge processing, the ontologies are the most important mean. They make possible for the computer to understand better the natural language and to make judgments. In this paper, a method which use ontologies in the semi-automatic extraction of formal specifications from a natural language text is proposed.
CROATIAN ADULT SPOKEN LANGUAGE CORPUS (HrAL
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Jelena Kuvač Kraljević
2016-01-01
Full Text Available Interest in spoken-language corpora has increased over the past two decades leading to the development of new corpora and the discovery of new facets of spoken language. These types of corpora represent the most comprehensive data source about the language of ordinary speakers. Such corpora are based on spontaneous, unscripted speech defined by a variety of styles, registers and dialects. The aim of this paper is to present the Croatian Adult Spoken Language Corpus (HrAL, its structure and its possible applications in different linguistic subfields. HrAL was built by sampling spontaneous conversations among 617 speakers from all Croatian counties, and it comprises more than 250,000 tokens and more than 100,000 types. Data were collected during three time slots: from 2010 to 2012, from 2014 to 2015 and during 2016. HrAL is today available within TalkBank, a large database of spoken-language corpora covering different languages (https://talkbank.org, in the Conversational Analyses corpora within the subsection titled Conversational Banks. Data were transcribed, coded and segmented using the transcription format Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT and the Computerised Language Analysis (CLAN suite of programmes within the TalkBank toolkit. Speech streams were segmented into communication units (C-units based on syntactic criteria. Most transcripts were linked to their source audios. The TalkBank is public free, i.e. all data stored in it can be shared by the wider community in accordance with the basic rules of the TalkBank. HrAL provides information about spoken grammar and lexicon, discourse skills, error production and productivity in general. It may be useful for sociolinguistic research and studies of synchronic language changes in Croatian.
Preserved Network Metrics across Translated Texts
Cabatbat, Josephine Jill T.; Monsanto, Jica P.; Tapang, Giovanni A.
2014-09-01
Co-occurrence language networks based on Bible translations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) translations in different languages were constructed and compared with random text networks. Among the considered network metrics, the network size, N, the normalized betweenness centrality (BC), and the average k-nearest neighbors, knn, were found to be the most preserved across translations. Moreover, similar frequency distributions of co-occurring network motifs were observed for translated texts networks.
Gender affects body language reading
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Arseny A Sokolov
2011-02-01
Full Text Available Body motion is a rich source of information for social cognition. However, gender effects in body language reading are largely unknown. Here we investigated whether, and, if so, how recognition of emotional expressions revealed by body motion is gender dependent. To this end, females and males were presented with point-light displays portraying knocking at a door performed with different emotional expressions. The findings show that gender affects accuracy rather than speed of body language reading. This effect, however, is modulated by emotional content of actions: males surpass in recognition accuracy of happy actions, whereas females tend to excel in recognition of hostile angry knocking. Advantage of women in recognition accuracy of neutral actions suggests that females are better tuned to the lack of emotional content in body actions. The study provides novel insights into understanding of gender effects in body language reading, and helps to shed light on gender vulnerability to neuropsychiatric impairments in visual social cognition.
Modeling the Process of Summary Writing of Chinese Learners of English as a Foreign Language
Li, Jiuliang
2016-01-01
In language learning contexts, writing tasks that involve reading of source texts are often used to elicit more authentic integrative language use. Thus, interests in researching these read-to-write tasks in general and as assessment tasks keep growing. This study examined and modeled the process of summary writing as a read-to-write integrated…
Where do borders lie in translated literature? The case of the changing English-language market
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Richard Michael Mansell
2017-09-01
Full Text Available Anecdotal accounts suggest that one reason for the perceived resistance to translated literature in English-language markets is that commissioning editors are averse to considering texts that they cannot read. In an attempt to overcome this barrier, English translations are increasingly commissioned by publishers of source texts and agents of source authors and used to stimulate interest in a book (not just in English-language markets, a phenomenon this article terms ‘source-commissioned translations’. This article considers how this phenomenon indicates a shift in the borders between literatures, how it disrupts accepted commercial practices, and the consequences of this for the industry and the role of English in the global book trade. In particular, it considers consequences for the quality of translations, questions regarding copyright, and the uncertain position for the translator when, at the time of translating, a contract is not in place between the translator and the publisher of the translation.
Attitudes toward text recycling in academic writing across disciplines.
Hall, Susanne; Moskovitz, Cary; Pemberton, Michael A
2018-01-01
Text recycling, the reuse of material from one's own previously published writing in a new text without attribution, is a common academic writing practice that is not yet well understood. While some studies of text recycling in academic writing have been published, no previous study has focused on scholars' attitudes toward text recycling. This article presents results from a survey of over 300 journal editors and editorial board members from 86 top English-language journals in 16 different academic fields regarding text recycling in scholarly articles. Responses indicate that a large majority of academic gatekeepers believe text recycling is allowable in some circumstances; however, there is a lack of clear consensus about when text recycling is or is not appropriate. Opinions varied according to the source of the recycled material, its structural location and rhetorical purpose, and conditions of authorship conditions-as well as by the level of experience as a journal editor. Our study suggests the need for further research on text recycling utilizing focus groups and interviews.
Short message service (SMS) language and written language skills ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
SMS language is English language slang, used as a means of mobile phone text messaging. This practice may impact on the written language skills of learners at school. The main aim of this study was to determine the perspectives of Grade 8 and 9 English (as Home Language) educators in Gauteng regarding the ...
DKIE: Open Source Information Extraction for Danish
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Derczynski, Leon; Field, Camilla Vilhelmsen; Bøgh, Kenneth Sejdenfaden
2014-01-01
Danish is a major Scandinavian language spoken daily by around six million people. However, it lacks a unified, open set of NLP tools. This demonstration will introduce DKIE, an extensible open-source toolkit for processing Danish text. We implement an information extraction architecture for Danish...
Evaluating the Usability of a Controlled Language Authoring Assistant
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Miyata Rei
2017-06-01
Full Text Available This paper presents experimental results of a usability evaluation of a controlled language (CL authoring assistant designed to help non-professional writers create machine translatable source texts. As the author drafts the text, the system detects CL rule violations and proscribed terms. It also incorporates several support functions to facilitate rephrasing of the source. In order to assess the usability of the system, we conducted a rewriting experiment, in which we compared two groups of participants, one with the aid of the system and the other without it. The results revealed that our system helped reduce the number of CL violations by about 9% and the time to correct violations by more than 30%. The CL-applied source text resulted in higher fluency and adequacy of MT outputs. Questionnaire and interview results also implied the improved satisfaction with the task completion of those participants who used the system.
Research on the Importance of Language Culture for Transport Experts
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Angelika Petrėtienė
2014-06-01
Full Text Available The article analyses the importance of language culture for transport experts. The analysis has been conducted on a questionnaire basis. Pursuant to the questionnaire, the obtained data were aimed at establishing if the use of a correct language might increase employment possibilities, if service suppliers talking correctly were stronger preferred, what sources designated for language culture were used in order to revise the accuracy of the employed terminol- ogy (or word, etc. The questionnaire also presents terms more relevant to transport staff and investigates the frequency of the used terminology both correct and incorrect. The researched data have been systemized and presented in the form of charts.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Buket ALTINBÜKEN KARSLI
2016-04-01
Full Text Available The aim of this work is to reveal how travel journals can be useful in foreign language education classes. The travel journals (carnets de voyage, Fr. form a genre of literature containing textual and visual signs, in which the work is comprised of notes and illustrations by a traveller writer. The practice of using linguistic and visual signs in combination offers big help in understanding and expression for foreign language learners in almost all skill levels. The aim of contemporary approaches in foreign language education, besides providing linguistic competency, is also about offering familiarity with the culture surrounding that language. The perception of differences between the source and target cultures is also part of foreign language education. The travel journals provide a view of the city from the traveller’s perspective. As depicted in The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, the language education has to be given inside a cultural context. The base for the teaching activity is to introduce the student both to the language and to the relevant culture. In the classical method, this base is established through course books. In the meantime, the best way to know the “other” may be to look at one’s own self through the eyes of the “other”. In this sense, travel literature texts are highly relevant sources for language education classes. Groups having various language skills can easily perceive or write texts thanks to their familiarity with subjects, people and places. The students are suggested to make comprehension, conversation and writing exercises using these sources. In sense of text genres, travel journals offer a variety of examples in descriptive and narrative techniques. By using them, it is possible to work on topics such as perspective strategies, the use of five senses in descriptions, the grammatical structures forming objective and subjective discourse, and the types of narrator. The
Meaning and direction in foreign language teaching
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Luis Carlos Estrada Naranjo
2005-02-01
Full Text Available This document explores the possibility to link to foreign lan - guage teaching practice in the classroom, two streams of theo - retical elements set by late research on neurosciences about the cognitive processes underling learning, and the elements from sociolinguistics dealing with languages in contact. The objective of the paper is to consider those elements as an en - riching source for didactics and as an alternative to practice based on recipe -like activities well designed to different settings. Reflective teaching is presented though, as the empirical tool to make language education a real part of praxeology, in which effective teaching is connected to meaningful and contextualized didactics.
AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD THE STATE LANGUAGE POLICY
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Skachkova Irina Ivanovna
2013-03-01
Full Text Available The article is a continuation of studies of the theoretical aspects of language policy in a multinational state in the U.S. example. The study of language policy in highly developed countries can make a considerable contribution to solving language and national problems of the states that have begun democratic transformation not long ago. Now, some politicians and scientists again raise the question of the recognition of English official, despite the fact that English is the official language, de facto and this status is not threatened. Therefore, using the statistical method, and the analysis of the collected data and documentary sources, the author examines the classification of statements of U.S. researchers on the need of the state language policy in the U.S., the history of debates and legal disputes over the language policy of the state language, different points of view as to why the founding fathers did not secure the official status of English in the constitution. The author also discusses the differences between assimilation and multicultural model of the state. In conclusion, the author says that minority groups are now realizing the value of their languages and making great efforts to save them. Status of the English language is currently not threatened, so the desire of many scientists and politicians to legalize the official status of the English language is most likely due to the approval of the English language as a national symbol.
LingoBee--Crowd-Sourced Mobile Language Learning in the Cloud
Petersen, Sobah Abbas; Procter-Legg, Emma; Cacchione, Annamaria
2013-01-01
This paper describes three case studies, where language learners were invited to use "LingoBee" as a means of supporting their language learning. LingoBee is a mobile app that provides user-generated language content in a cloud-based shared repository. Assuming that today's students are mobile savvy and "Digital Natives" able…
Liontou, Trisevgeni
2014-01-01
This book delineates a range of linguistic features that characterise the reading texts used at the B2 (Independent User) and C1 (Proficient User) levels of the Greek State Certificate of English Language Proficiency exams in order to help define text difficulty per level of competence. In addition, it examines whether specific reader variables influence test takers' perceptions of reading comprehension difficulty. The end product is a Text Classification Profile per level of competence and a formula for automatically estimating text difficulty and assigning levels to texts consistently and re
Short Message Service (SMS) Language and Written Language Skills: Educators' Perspectives
Geertsema, Salomé; Hyman, Charene; van Deventer, Chantelle
2011-01-01
SMS language is English language slang, used as a means of mobile phone text messaging. This practice may impact on the written language skills of learners at school. The main aim of this study was to determine the perspectives of Grade 8 and 9 English (as Home Language) educators in Gauteng regarding the possible influence of SMS language on…
Resource Lean and Portable Automatic Text Summarization
Hassel, Martin
2007-01-01
Today, with digitally stored information available in abundance, even for many minor languages, this information must by some means be filtered and extracted in order to avoid drowning in it. Automatic summarization is one such technique, where a computer summarizes a longer text to a shorter non-rendundant form. Apart from the major languages of the world there are a lot of languages for which large bodies of data aimed at language technology research to a high degree are lacking. There migh...
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Andrea Bulgarelli
2016-06-01
Full Text Available We present a novel open-source 3D-printable dexterous anthropomorphic robotic hand specifically designed to reproduce Sign Languages’ hand poses for deaf and deaf-blind users. We improved the InMoov hand, enhancing dexterity by adding abduction/adduction degrees of freedom of three fingers (thumb, index and middle fingers and a three-degrees-of-freedom parallel spherical joint wrist. A systematic kinematic analysis is provided. The proposed robotic hand is validated in the framework of the PARLOMA project. PARLOMA aims at developing a telecommunication system for deaf-blind people, enabling remote transmission of signs from tactile Sign Languages. Both hardware and software are provided online to promote further improvements from the community.
Document Categorization with Modified Statistical Language Models for Agglutinative Languages
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Tantug
2010-11-01
Full Text Available In this paper, we investigate the document categorization task with statistical language models. Our study mainly focuses on categorization of documents in agglutinative languages. Due to the productive morphology of agglutinative languages, the number of word forms encountered in naturally occurring text is very large. From the language modeling perspective, a large vocabulary results in serious data sparseness problems. In order to cope with this drawback, previous studies in various application areas suggest modified language models based on different morphological units. It is reported that performance improvements can be achieved with these modified language models. In our document categorization experiments, we use standard word form based language models as well as other modified language models based on root words, root words and part-of-speech information, truncated word forms and character sequences. Additionally, to find an optimum parameter set, multiple tests are carried out with different language model orders and smoothing methods. Similar to previous studies on other tasks, our experimental results on categorization of Turkish documents reveal that applying linguistic preprocessing steps for language modeling provides improvements over standard language models to some extent. However, it is also observed that similar level of performance improvements can also be acquired by simpler character level or truncated word form models which are language independent.
Information and Language for Effective Communication
Pitoy, Sammy P.
2012-01-01
Information and Language for Effective Communication (ILEC) is a language teaching approach emphasizing learners' extensive exposure in different language communicative sources. In ILEC, the language learners will first receive instructions of ILEC principles and application. Afterwards, they will receive autonomous, direct, purposeful, and…
Broer van Arragon, Kathleen
2003-01-01
The focus of this study will be on the intersection of the following domains: Second Language Acquisition research on cohesion and coherence, discourse acquisition of young children, the effect of text form-focused instruction on student non-fiction writing and the impact of schema theory on student decision-making during the writing process.
Clean translation of an imperative reversible programming language
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Axelsen, Holger Bock
2011-01-01
We describe the translation techniques used for the code generation in a compiler from the high-level reversible imperative programming language Janus to the low-level reversible assembly language PISA. Our translation is both semantics preserving (correct), in that target programs compute exactly...... the same functions as their source programs (cleanly, with no extraneous garbage output), and efficient, in that target programs conserve the complexities of source programs. In particular, target programs only require a constant amount of temporary garbage space. The given translation methods are generic......, and should be applicable to any (imperative) reversible source language described with reversible flowcharts and reversible updates. To our knowledge, this is the first compiler between reversible languages where the source and target languages were independently developed; the first exhibiting both...
Language and Cognitive Predictors of Text Comprehension: Evidence from Multivariate Analysis
Kim, Young-Suk
2015-01-01
Using data from children in South Korea (N = 145, M[subscript age] = 6.08), it was determined how low-level language and cognitive skills (vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, and working memory) and high-level cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and theory of mind [ToM]) are related to listening comprehension and whether listening…
Baum, Neil
2016-01-01
The Internet has contributed new words and slang to our daily vernacular. A few terms, such as tweeting, texting, sexting, blogging, and googling, have become common in most vocabularies and in many languages, and are now included in the dictionary. A new buzzword making the rounds in industry is crowd sourcing, which involves outsourcing an activity, task, or problem by sending it to people or groups outside a business or a practice. Crowd sourcing allows doctors and practices to tap the wisdom of many instead of relying only on the few members of their close-knit group. This article defines "crowd sourcing," offers examples, and explains how to get started with this approach that can increase your ability to finish a task or solve problems that you don't have the time or expertise to accomplish.
Littell, Joseph Fletcher, Ed.
This textbook, book 6 of "The Language of Man" series, covers semantics, the language of politics, language and race, the language of advertising, and the origins and growth of the English language. The material analyzed comes from many sources (advertisements, newspaper articles, poems, parodies) and attempts to demonstrate the effect of the…
Localization of the native Chinese speakers language cortex by magnetic source imaging
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Sun Jilin; Wu Jie; Li Sumin; Wu Jing; Zhao Huadong; Wu Yujin; Liu Lianxiang
2003-01-01
Objective: To localize the language cortex associated with Chinese word processing by magnetic source imaging (MSI). Methods: Eight right handed and one left handed healthy native Chinese speakers, including 5 men and 4 women, aged from 14 to 32 years, were examined by magnetoencephalography (MEG) and 1.5 T MR unit. All subjects were given 50 times pure tone stimuli (intensity was 80 dB sound pressure level), then 150 pairs of Chinese words (the meaning of the words was related or not related) auditory stimuli (intensity was 80 dB sound pressure level), and then 50 times pure tone stimuli at last (intensity was 80 dB sound pressure level). Evoked response fields (ERFs) time locked to the pure tone and Chinese words were recorded in a magnetically shielded room using a whole-head neuromagnetometer (Model Vectorview 306, made by 4-D Neuroimaging company, Finland) in real-time. The acquired data were averaged by the acquisition computer according to the response to the pure tone, related pairs of words and not related pairs of words. The data obtained by the MEG could be superimposed on MRI. Results: There were two obvious higher magnetic waves named M50 and M100 (two peaks occurred about 50 ms and 100 ms after giving the subjects binaurally stimuli). M50 and M100 in all subjects were localized in the bilateral transverse temporal gyri. The responses to the pairs of Chinese words (the meaning of the words was related or not related) were similar in the same hemisphere of the same subjects. There was a higher peak during 300-600 ms in the right hemisphere in the left handed subject, but there was no peak during 300-600 ms in his left hemisphere. It indicated that the language dominant hemisphere localized in the right hemisphere. Superimposing the MEG data on MRI, the language area was localized in the Wernicke's areas. There were two 300-600 ms response peaks in the bilateral hemispheres (the amplitude of the 300-600 ms response peaks in the bilateral hemisphere was
Short message service (SMS language and written language skills: educators' perspectives
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Salomé Geertsema
2011-01-01
Full Text Available SMS language is English language slang, used as a means of mobile phone text messaging. This practice may impact on the written language skills of learners at school. The main aim of this study was to determine the perspectives of Grade 8 and 9 English (as Home Language educators in Gauteng regarding the possible influence of SMS language on certain aspects of learners' written language skills. If an influence was perceived by the educators, their perceptions regarding the degree and nature of the influence were also explored. A quantitative research design, utilising a questionnaire, was employed. The sample of participants comprised 22 educators employed at independent secondaryschools within Gauteng, South Africa. The results indicated that the majority of educators viewed SMS language as having a negative influence on the written language skills of Grade 8 and 9 learners. The influence was perceived as occurring in the learners' spelling, punctuation, and sentence length. A further finding was that the majority of educators address the negative influences of SMS language when encountered in written tasks.
Scholarship and Language Revival: Language Ideologies in Corpus Development for Revived Manx
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Lewin Christopher
2017-08-01
Full Text Available In this article the role of different ideological viewpoints concerning corpus development within the Manx revival movement in the second half of the twentieth century is explored. In particular, the work of two prominent figures is examined: the Celtic scholar Robert L. Thomson, who published extensively especially on Manx language and literature, and also contributed to the revival, particularly as editor of several pedagogical resources and as a member of the translation committee Coonceil ny Gaelgey, and Douglas Fargher, a tireless activist and compiler of an English-Manx Dictionary (1979. Broadly speaking, Thomson was of a more preservationist bent, cautious in adapting the native resources of the language and wary of straying too far from attested usage of the traditional language, while Fargher was more radical and open especially to borrowing from Irish and Scottish sources. Both were concerned, in somewhat different ways, to remove perceived impurities or corruptions from the language, and were influenced by the assumptions of existing scholarship. A close reading of the work of these scholar-activists sheds light on the tensions within the revival movement regarding its response to the trauma of language death and the questions of legitimacy and authenticity in the revived variety. Particular space is devoted to an analysis of the preface of Fargher’s dictionary, as well as certain features of the body of the work itself, since this volume is probably the most widely consulted guide to the use of the language today. Finally, it is argued that the Manx language movement today would benefit from a reassessment and discussion of the ideological currents of the past and present, and a judicious evaluation of both the strengths and weaknesses of existing reference works.
AMERICAN ATTITUDES TOWARD THE STATE LANGUAGE POLICY
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Ирина Ивановна Скачкова
2013-04-01
Full Text Available The article is a continuation of studies of the theoretical aspects of language policy in a multinational state in theU.S.example. The study of language policy in highly developed countries can make a considerable contribution to solving language and national problems of the states that have begun democratic transformation not long ago. Now, some politicians and scientists again raise the question of the recognition of English official, despite the fact that English is the official language, de facto and this status is not threatened. Therefore, using the statistical method, and the analysis of the collected data and documentary sources, the author examines the classification of statements of U.S. researchers on the need of the state language policy in the U.S., the history of debates and legal disputes over the language policy of the state language, different points of view as to why the founding fathers did not secure the official status of English in the constitution. The author also discusses the differences between assimilation and multicultural model of the state. In conclusion, the author says that minority groups are now realizing the value of their languages and making great efforts to save them. Status of the English language is currently not threatened, so the desire of many scientists and politicians to legalize the official status of the English language is most likely due to the approval of the English language as a national symbol.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12731/2218-7405-2013-3-25
PASTE: patient-centered SMS text tagging in a medication management system.
Stenner, Shane P; Johnson, Kevin B; Denny, Joshua C
2012-01-01
To evaluate the performance of a system that extracts medication information and administration-related actions from patient short message service (SMS) messages. Mobile technologies provide a platform for electronic patient-centered medication management. MyMediHealth (MMH) is a medication management system that includes a medication scheduler, a medication administration record, and a reminder engine that sends text messages to cell phones. The object of this work was to extend MMH to allow two-way interaction using mobile phone-based SMS technology. Unprompted text-message communication with patients using natural language could engage patients in their healthcare, but presents unique natural language processing challenges. The authors developed a new functional component of MMH, the Patient-centered Automated SMS Tagging Engine (PASTE). The PASTE web service uses natural language processing methods, custom lexicons, and existing knowledge sources to extract and tag medication information from patient text messages. A pilot evaluation of PASTE was completed using 130 medication messages anonymously submitted by 16 volunteers via a website. System output was compared with manually tagged messages. Verified medication names, medication terms, and action terms reached high F-measures of 91.3%, 94.7%, and 90.4%, respectively. The overall medication name F-measure was 79.8%, and the medication action term F-measure was 90%. Other studies have demonstrated systems that successfully extract medication information from clinical documents using semantic tagging, regular expression-based approaches, or a combination of both approaches. This evaluation demonstrates the feasibility of extracting medication information from patient-generated medication messages.
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Noeris Meristiani
2011-07-01
Full Text Available ABSTRACT: The goal of English Language Teaching is communicative competence. To reach this goal students should be supplied with good model texts. These texts should consider the appropriacy of language use. By analyzing the context of situation which is focused on tenor the meanings constructed to build the relationships among the interactants in spoken texts can be unfolded. This study aims at investigating the interpersonal relations (tenor of the interactants in the conversation texts as well as the appropriacy of their realization in the given contexts. The study was conducted under discourse analysis by applying a descriptive qualitative method. There were eight conversation texts which function as examples in five chapters of a textbook. The data were analyzed by using lexicogrammatical analysis, described, and interpreted contextually. Then, the realization of the tenor of the texts was further analyzed in terms of appropriacy to suggest improvement. The results of the study show that the tenor indicates relationships between friend-friend, student-student, questioners-respondents, mother-son, and teacher-student; the power is equal and unequal; the social distances show frequent contact, relatively frequent contact, relatively low contact, high and low affective involvement, using informal, relatively informal, relatively formal, and formal language. There are also some indications of inappropriacy of tenor realization in all texts. It should be improved in the use of degree of formality, the realization of societal roles, status, and affective involvement. Keywords: context of situation, tenor, appropriacy.
Lessons in the Korean Language and Culture for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
Kim, Chang Whan
This language text is designed to introduce the Korean language and culture to Peace Corps trainees and volunteers who will be teachers of English as a second language to Korean students. The disciplines of language training, cross-cultural training, and TESL are combined in a single volume into one integrated curriculum. The text contains 100…
Detecting inpatient falls by using natural language processing of electronic medical records
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Toyabe Shin-ichi
2012-12-01
Full Text Available Abstract Background Incident reporting is the most common method for detecting adverse events in a hospital. However, under-reporting or non-reporting and delay in submission of reports are problems that prevent early detection of serious adverse events. The aim of this study was to determine whether it is possible to promptly detect serious injuries after inpatient falls by using a natural language processing method and to determine which data source is the most suitable for this purpose. Methods We tried to detect adverse events from narrative text data of electronic medical records by using a natural language processing method. We made syntactic category decision rules to detect inpatient falls from text data in electronic medical records. We compared how often the true fall events were recorded in various sources of data including progress notes, discharge summaries, image order entries and incident reports. We applied the rules to these data sources and compared F-measures to detect falls between these data sources with reference to the results of a manual chart review. The lag time between event occurrence and data submission and the degree of injury were compared. Results We made 170 syntactic rules to detect inpatient falls by using a natural language processing method. Information on true fall events was most frequently recorded in progress notes (100%, incident reports (65.0% and image order entries (12.5%. However, F-measure to detect falls using the rules was poor when using progress notes (0.12 and discharge summaries (0.24 compared with that when using incident reports (1.00 and image order entries (0.91. Since the results suggested that incident reports and image order entries were possible data sources for prompt detection of serious falls, we focused on a comparison of falls found by incident reports and image order entries. Injury caused by falls found by image order entries was significantly more severe than falls detected by
Learning Word Subsumption Projections for the Russian Language
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Ustalov Dmitry
2016-01-01
Full Text Available The semantic relations of hypernymy and hyponymy are widely used in various natural language processing tasks for modelling the subsumptions in common sense reasoning. Since the popularisation of the distributional semantics, a significant attention is paid to applying word embeddings for inducing the relations between words. In this paper, we show our preliminary results on adopting the projection learning technique for computing hypernyms from hyponyms using word embeddings. We also conduct a series of experiments on the Russian language and release the open source software for learning hyponym-hypernym projections using both CPUs and GPUs, implemented with the TensorFlow machine learning framework.
Languages contact and geopolitics of Romance languages
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Louis-Jean Calvet
2017-01-01
Full Text Available In this article, we first conceive the contact between languages from different configurations to, secondly, analyze the geopolitics of the Romance languages, represented by the three great linguistic groups, that is, the French-speaking, Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking groups.---Original in French.
Krchňáková, Leontina
2015-01-01
This work is devoted to the Russian language advertising, which examines in an independent system. It aims are analyzing the text of Russian advertising in terms of its information and formal structure. It focuses on a specific aesthetic qualities of language, which the text uses. Work is further focused on the categorization of neologisms and neologisation of the Russian advertising. Next focus is on loanwords from the English language. Used research methods are descriptive and comparative. ...
The Language Family Relation of Local Languages in Gorontalo Province (A Lexicostatistic Study)
Asna Ntelu; Dakia N Djou
2017-01-01
This study aims to find out the relation of language family and glottochronology of Gorontalo language and Atinggola language in Gorontalo Province. The research employed a comparative method, and the research instrument used a list of 200 basic Morris Swadesh vocabularies. The data source was from documents or gloss translation of 200 basic vocabularies and interview of two informants (speakers) of Gorontalo and Atinggola languages. Data analysis was done by using the lexicostatistic techniq...
Language Planning and Planned Languages: How Can Planned Languages Inform Language Planning?
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Humphrey Tonkin
2015-04-01
Full Text Available The field of language planning (LP has largely ignored planned languages. Of classic descriptions of LP processes, only Tauli (preceded by Wüster suggests that planned languages (what Wüster calls Plansprache might bear on LP theory and practice. If LP aims "to modify the linguistic behaviour of some community for some reason," as Kaplan and Baldauf put it, creating a language de novo is little different. Language policy and planning are increasingly seen as more local and less official, and occasionally more international and cosmopolitan. Zamenhof's work on Esperanto provides extensive material, little studied, documenting the formation of the language and linking it particularly to issues of supranational LP. Defining LP decision-making, Kaplan & Baldauf begin with context and target population. Zamenhof's Esperanto came shortly before Ben-Yehuda's revived Hebrew. His target community was (mostly the world's educated elite; Ben-Yehuda's was worldwide Jewry. Both planners were driven not by linguistic interest but by sociopolitical ideology rooted in reaction to anti-Semitism and imbued with the idea of progress. Their territories had no boundaries, but were not imaginary. Function mattered as much as form (Haugen's terms, status as much as corpus. For Zamenhof, status planning involved emphasis on Esperanto's ownership by its community - a collective planning process embracing all speakers (cf. Hebrew. Corpus planning included a standardized European semantics, lexical selectivity based not simply on standardization but on representation, and the development of written, and literary, style. Esperanto was successful as linguistic system and community language, less as generally accepted lingua franca. Its terminology development and language cultivation offers a model for language revival, but Zamenhof's somewhat limited analysis of language economy left him unprepared to deal with language as power.
Arabic Language as a source of Diplomatic Relations between ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
The idea of sending massages from one person to another is a tradition that is as old as man in history. With the development of the art of writing, Arabic language played and still plays an important role in communication as a medium of expression. In most of the West African empires, Arabic served as the official language ...
RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE AND LEARNING: IMPLICATIONS FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING
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Eva Alcón
2004-06-01
Full Text Available Taking into account severa1 limitations of communicative language teaching (CLT, this paper calls for the need to consider research on language use and learning through communication as a basis for language teaching. It will be argued that a reflective approach towards language teaching and learning might be generated, which is explained in terms of the need to develop a context-sensitive pedagogy and in terms of teachers' and learners' development.
Newspaper archives + text mining = rich sources of historical geo-spatial data
Yzaguirre, A.; Smit, M.; Warren, R.
2016-04-01
Newspaper archives are rich sources of cultural, social, and historical information. These archives, even when digitized, are typically unstructured and organized by date rather than by subject or location, and require substantial manual effort to analyze. The effort of journalists to be accurate and precise means that there is often rich geo-spatial data embedded in the text, alongside text describing events that editors considered to be of sufficient importance to the region or the world to merit column inches. A regional newspaper can add over 100,000 articles to its database each year, and extracting information from this data for even a single country would pose a substantial Big Data challenge. In this paper, we describe a pilot study on the construction of a database of historical flood events (location(s), date, cause, magnitude) to be used in flood assessment projects, for example to calibrate models, estimate frequency, establish high water marks, or plan for future events in contexts ranging from urban planning to climate change adaptation. We then present a vision for extracting and using the rich geospatial data available in unstructured text archives, and suggest future avenues of research.
Text mining by Tsallis entropy
Jamaati, Maryam; Mehri, Ali
2018-01-01
Long-range correlations between the elements of natural languages enable them to convey very complex information. Complex structure of human language, as a manifestation of natural languages, motivates us to apply nonextensive statistical mechanics in text mining. Tsallis entropy appropriately ranks the terms' relevance to document subject, taking advantage of their spatial correlation length. We apply this statistical concept as a new powerful word ranking metric in order to extract keywords of a single document. We carry out an experimental evaluation, which shows capability of the presented method in keyword extraction. We find that, Tsallis entropy has reliable word ranking performance, at the same level of the best previous ranking methods.
Quijada, Carlos Alonso
1977-01-01
Learned academies deplore the deterioration of Castillian Spanish due to foreign contamination. They ignore the real source of the problem within Spain itself where everyone speaks the language badly except those in the remote towns and a few intellectuals. A ray of hope comes from the Americans. (Text is in Spanish.) (AMH)
Ward, Jeremy
2001-01-01
Examines chemical engineering students' attitudes to text and other parts of English language textbooks. A questionnaire was administered to a group of undergraduates. Results reveal one way students get around the problem of textbook reading. (Author/VWL)
The relative importance of language in guiding social preferences through development
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Rana Esseily
2016-10-01
Full Text Available In this paper, we review evidence from infants, toddlers and preschoolers to tackle the ques-tion of how individuals orient preferences and actions towards social partners and how these preferences change over development. We aim at emphasizing the importance of language in guiding categorization relatively to other cues such as age, race and gender. We discuss the importance of language as part of a communication system that orients infants and older chil-dren’s attention towards relevant information in their environment and towards affiliated so-cial partners who are potential sources of knowledge. We argue that other cues (visually per-ceptible features are less reliable in informing individuals whether others share a common knowledge and whether they can be source of information.
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Montse Corrius Gimbert
2005-01-01
Full Text Available If the process of translating is not at all simple, the process of translating an audiovisual text is still more complex. Apart rom technical problems such as lip synchronisation, there are other factors to be considered such as the use of the language and textual structures deemed appropriate to the channel of communication. Bearing in mind that most of the films we are continually seeing on our screens were and are produced in the United States, there is an increasing need to translate them into the different languages of the world. But sometimes the source audiovisual text contains more than one language, and, thus, a new problem arises: the ranslators face additional difficulties in translating this “third language” (language or dialect into the corresponding target culture. There are many films containing two languages in the original version but in this paper we will focus mainly on three films: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969, Raid on Rommel (1999 and Blade Runner (1982. This paper aims at briefly illustrating different solutions which may be applied when we come across a “third language”.
Beyond mechanistic interaction: Value-based constraints on meaning in language
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Joanna eRączaszek-Leonardi
2015-10-01
Full Text Available According to situated, embodied, distributed approaches to cognition, language is a crucial means for structuring social interactions. Recent approaches that emphasize the coordinative function of language treat language as a system of replicable constraints that work both on individuals and on interactions. In this paper we argue that the integration of replicable constraints approach to language with the ecological view on values allows for a deeper insight into processes of meaning creation in interaction. Such synthesis of these frameworks draws attention to important sources of structuring interactions beyond the sheer efficiency of a collective system in its current task situation. Most importantly the workings of linguistic constraints will be shown as embedded in more general fields of values, which are realized on multiple time-scales. Since the ontogenetic timescale offers a convenient window into a process of the emergence of linguistic constraints, we present illustrations of concrete mechanisms through which values may become embodied in language use in development.
Stability in Chinese and Malay heritage languages as a source of divergence
Aalberse, S.; Moro, F.; Braunmüller, K.; Höder, S.; Kühl, K.
2014-01-01
This article discusses Malay and Chinese heritage languages as spoken in the Netherlands. Heritage speakers are dominant in another language and use their heritage language less. Moreover, they have qualitatively and quantitatively different input from monolinguals. Heritage languages are often
Stability in Chinese and Malay heritage languages as a source of divergence
Aalberse, S.; Moro, F.R.; Braunmüller, K.; Höder, S.; Kühl, K.
2015-01-01
This article discusses Malay and Chinese heritage languages as spoken in the Netherlands. Heritage speakers are dominant in another language and use their heritage language less. Moreover, they have qualitatively and quantitatively different input from monolinguals. Heritage languages are often
Language learning strategy research and modern foreign language teaching and learning in England
Grenfell, Michael
2005-01-01
This paper addresses language learner strategy research. It arises from two sources: firstly, an individual background in research and writing about Language Learning Strategy research in the context of Modern Foreign Language Learning and Teaching in the UK over the past decades; secondly, a newly constituted British based interest group dedicated to this area of applied linguistics - UK Project on Language Learner Strategies (UKPOLLS). The aim of this SIG paper is to introduce and present t...
The Sindhi Hindus of London − Language Maintenance or Language Shift?
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Maya Khemlani David
2001-09-01
Full Text Available The linguistic situation of the Sindhi language in London is examined with a view to determining whether the community is maintaining the use of its ethnic language. The Sindhi Hindus of London are a language community, which have never been researched. The language choice of the community in different domains and for a range of language functions is discussed. Both external and internal factors of language shift have weakened the linguistic and communicative competence of Sindhi speakers in the language contact situation of the United Kingdom.
Text Readability and Intuitive Simplification: A Comparison of Readability Formulas
Crossley, Scott A.; Allen, David B.; McNamara, Danielle S.
2011-01-01
Texts are routinely simplified for language learners with authors relying on a variety of approaches and materials to assist them in making the texts more comprehensible. Readability measures are one such tool that authors can use when evaluating text comprehensibility. This study compares the Coh-Metrix Second Language (L2) Reading Index, a…
Early Career Researchers Demand Full-text and Rely on Google to Find Scholarly Sources
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Richard Hayman
2017-12-01
Full Text Available A Review of: Nicholas, D., Boukacem-Zeghmouri, C., Rodríguez-Bravo, B., Xu, J., Watkinson, A., Abrizah, A., Herman, E., & Świgoń, M. (2017. Where and how early career researchers find scholarly information. Learned Publishing, 30(1, 19-29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/leap.1087 Abstract Objective – To examine the attitudes and information behaviours of early career researchers (ECRs when locating scholarly information. Design – Qualitative longitudinal study. Setting – Research participants from the United Kingdom, United States of America, China, France, Malaysia, Poland, and Spain. Subjects – A total 116 participants from various disciplines, aged 35 and younger, who were holding or had previously held a research position, but not in a tenured position. All participants held a doctorate or were in the process of earning one. Methods – Using structured interviews of 60-90 minutes, researchers asked 60 questions of each participant via face-to-face, Skype, or telephone interviews. The interview format and questions were formed via focus groups. Main Results – As part of a longitudinal project, results reported are limited to the first year of the study, and focused on three primary questions identified by the authors: where do ECRs find scholarly information, whether they use their smartphones to locate and read scholarly information, and what social media do they use to find scholarly information. Researchers describe how ECRs themselves interpreted the phrase scholarly information to primarily mean journal articles, while the researchers themselves had a much expanded definition to include professional and “scholarly contacts, ideas, and data” (p. 22. This research shows that Google and Google Scholar are widely used by ECRs for locating scholarly information regardless of discipline, language, or geography. Their analysis by country points to currency and the combined breadth-and-depth search experience that Google provides as
STYLISTIC FEATURES OF ADVERTISING TEXTS OF INFORMATIVE AND COMPARATIVE TYPES
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Poddubskaya, O.N.
2016-06-01
Full Text Available The relevance of this article is related to the fact that nowadays advertising has a very strong impact both on the consumer market, political and cultural life of society, and on the language and its development as a system. Advertising has given rise to the development of a special set of stylistic features of a text, formed under the influence of reviving advertising traditions in the Russian language and under the active impact of energetic and pushy European advertising. The purpose of this study is to explore stylistic features of informative and comparative advertising texts. The object of research is Russian-language advertising in printed media and on television. In the end of the article we made conclusions about groups of language means used for different stylistic devices in informative and comparative advertising texts. Analysis of stylistic features of modern informative and comparative advertising texts can be of great interest to specialists in the field of theoretical studies of modern advertising.
The Language; his study and his teaching
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Álvaro William Santiago Galvis
2007-01-01
Full Text Available This text talks about language and its relationship with language teaching. In which the concept of language is characterized by presenting an overall vision of some language schools; the applied linguistics current issues and, finally, it makes a reflection about the language teaching process.
Programming Language Pragmatics
Scott, Michael L
2005-01-01
Thoroughly updated to reflect the most current developments in language design and implementation, the second edition*Addresses key developments in programming language design:+ Finalized C99 standard+ Java 5+ C# 2.0+ Java concurrency package (JSR 166) and comparable mechanisms in C#+ Java and C# generics*Introduces and discusses scripting languages throughout the book and in an entire new chapter that covers:+ Application domains: shell languages, text processing and report generation, mathematics and statistics, "glue" languages and general purpose scripting, extension languages, scripting t
A source of parametric variation in the lexicon
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Guglielmo Cinque
2016-12-01
Full Text Available An influential conjecture concerning parameters is that they can possibly be “restricted to formal features of functional categories” (Chomsky 1995: 6. In Rizzi (2009, 2011 such features are understood as instructions triggering one of the following syntactic actions: (1 External Merge; (2 Internal Merge (Move; (3 Pronunciation/Non pronunciation (the latter arguably dependent on Internal Merge – Kayne 2005a, b. In this article I consider a particular source of parametric variation across languages in the domain of the lexicon (both functional and substantive which appears to be due to the possibility of underspecifying certain features in some languages. The paradigmatic variation can be characterized as follows: language A has two (or more lexical items which correspond to just one lexical item in language B.
A UMLS-based spell checker for natural language processing in vaccine safety
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Liu Fang
2007-02-01
Full Text Available Abstract Background The Institute of Medicine has identified patient safety as a key goal for health care in the United States. Detecting vaccine adverse events is an important public health activity that contributes to patient safety. Reports about adverse events following immunization (AEFI from surveillance systems contain free-text components that can be analyzed using natural language processing. To extract Unified Medical Language System (UMLS concepts from free text and classify AEFI reports based on concepts they contain, we first needed to clean the text by expanding abbreviations and shortcuts and correcting spelling errors. Our objective in this paper was to create a UMLS-based spelling error correction tool as a first step in the natural language processing (NLP pipeline for AEFI reports. Methods We developed spell checking algorithms using open source tools. We used de-identified AEFI surveillance reports to create free-text data sets for analysis. After expansion of abbreviated clinical terms and shortcuts, we performed spelling correction in four steps: (1 error detection, (2 word list generation, (3 word list disambiguation and (4 error correction. We then measured the performance of the resulting spell checker by comparing it to manual correction. Results We used 12,056 words to train the spell checker and tested its performance on 8,131 words. During testing, sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value (PPV for the spell checker were 74% (95% CI: 74–75, 100% (95% CI: 100–100, and 47% (95% CI: 46%–48%, respectively. Conclusion We created a prototype spell checker that can be used to process AEFI reports. We used the UMLS Specialist Lexicon as the primary source of dictionary terms and the WordNet lexicon as a secondary source. We used the UMLS as a domain-specific source of dictionary terms to compare potentially misspelled words in the corpus. The prototype sensitivity was comparable to currently available
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Znikina Ludmila
2017-01-01
Full Text Available The article deals with the distribution of informative intensity of the English-language scientific text based on its structural features contributing to the process of formalization of the scientific text and the preservation of the adequacy of the text with derived semantic information in relation to the primary. Discourse analysis is built on specific compositional and meaningful examples of scientific texts taken from the mining field. It also analyzes the adequacy of the translation of foreign texts into another language, the relationships between elements of linguistic systems, the degree of a formal conformance, translation with the specific objectives and information needs of the recipient. Some key words and ideas are emphasized in the paragraphs of the English-language mining scientific texts. The article gives the characteristic features of the structure of paragraphs of technical text and examples of constructions in English scientific texts based on a mining theme with the aim to explain the possible ways of their adequate translation.
Automated analysis of instructional text
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Norton, L.M.
1983-05-01
The development of a capability for automated processing of natural language text is a long-range goal of artificial intelligence. This paper discusses an investigation into the issues involved in the comprehension of descriptive, as opposed to illustrative, textual material. The comprehension process is viewed as the conversion of knowledge from one representation into another. The proposed target representation consists of statements of the prolog language, which can be interpreted both declaratively and procedurally, much like production rules. A computer program has been written to model in detail some ideas about this process. The program successfully analyzes several heavily edited paragraphs adapted from an elementary textbook on programming, automatically synthesizing as a result of the analysis a working Prolog program which, when executed, can parse and interpret let commands in the basic language. The paper discusses the motivations and philosophy of the project, the many kinds of prerequisite knowledge which are necessary, and the structure of the text analysis program. A sentence-by-sentence account of the analysis of the sample text is presented, describing the syntactic and semantic processing which is involved. The paper closes with a discussion of lessons learned from the project, possible alternative approaches, and possible extensions for future work. The entire project is presented as illustrative of the nature and complexity of the text analysis process, rather than as providing definitive or optimal solutions to any aspects of the task. 12 references.
Sharing Expository Texts with Preschool Children in Special Education
Breit-Smith, Allison; Busch, Jamie; Guo, Ying
2015-01-01
Although a general limited availability of expository texts currently exists in preschool special education classrooms, expository tests offer speech-language pathologists (SLPs) a rich context for addressing the language goals of preschool children with language impairment on their caseloads. Thus, this article highlights the differences between…
Paradigm Shift in Language Teaching and Language Teacher Education
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Elaine Ferreira do Vale Borges
2014-11-01
Full Text Available In this article, I intend to conduct a short literature review and discussion about paradigm shift in language teaching and language teacher education from Cartesian to the complexity paradigm. For that, I use the Kuhnian notion of scientific revolution to present a short compilation of works related to paradigm shift in different sciences, including psychology, linguistics and, more emphatically, applied linguistics. The main proposal is to show the evolutions of paradigm shift in language and social sciences and its impact on the emergence of the complexity paradigm in language teaching and language teacher education fields.
Ohm's Law and Electrical Sources, a Programmed Text.
Balabanian, Norman
This programed textbook was developed under contract with the United States Office of Education as Number 2 of a series of materials for use in an electrical engineering sequence. It is divided into five parts--(1) Ohm's Law, (2) resistance, (3) conductance, (4) voltage sources, and (5) current sources. (DH)
Kwon, Hyun Joo; Schallert, Diane L.
2016-01-01
Ten adult readers, advanced in their control of two languages, Korean and English, were recruited for a study of academic literacy practices to examine the various linguistic repertoires on which they drew. Analysis of their language use revealed many instances of "translanguaging," that is, a flexible reliance on two languages to serve…
Znikina, Ludmila; Rozhneva, Elena
2017-11-01
The article deals with the distribution of informative intensity of the English-language scientific text based on its structural features contributing to the process of formalization of the scientific text and the preservation of the adequacy of the text with derived semantic information in relation to the primary. Discourse analysis is built on specific compositional and meaningful examples of scientific texts taken from the mining field. It also analyzes the adequacy of the translation of foreign texts into another language, the relationships between elements of linguistic systems, the degree of a formal conformance, translation with the specific objectives and information needs of the recipient. Some key words and ideas are emphasized in the paragraphs of the English-language mining scientific texts. The article gives the characteristic features of the structure of paragraphs of technical text and examples of constructions in English scientific texts based on a mining theme with the aim to explain the possible ways of their adequate translation.
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Leni Amalia Suek
2014-05-01
Full Text Available The maintenance of community languages of migrant students is heavily determined by language use and language attitudes. The superiority of a dominant language over a community language contributes to attitudes of migrant students toward their native languages. When they perceive their native languages as unimportant language, they will reduce the frequency of using that language even though at home domain. Solutions provided for a problem of maintaining community languages should be related to language use and attitudes of community languages, which are developed mostly in two important domains, school and family. Hence, the valorization of community language should be promoted not only in family but also school domains. Several programs such as community language school and community language program can be used for migrant students to practice and use their native languages. Since educational resources such as class session, teachers and government support are limited; family plays significant roles to stimulate positive attitudes toward community language and also to develop the use of native languages.
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Márcio Carneiro dos Santos
2016-07-01
Full Text Available It describes the experiment of building a software capable of generating leads and newspaper titles in an automated fashion from information obtained from the Internet. The theoretical possibility Lage already provided by the end of last century is based on relatively rigid and simple structure of this type of story construction, which facilitates the representation or translation of its syntax in terms of instructions that the computer can execute. The paper also discusses the relationship between society, technique and technology, making a brief history of the introduction of digital solutions in newsrooms and their impacts. The development was done with the Python programming language and NLTK- Natural Language Toolkit library - and used the results of the Brazilian Soccer Championship 2013 published on an internet portal as a data source.
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Kathryn M. Howard
2009-08-01
Full Text Available This article focuses on surveys of first-year language learners studying 19 different languages at two large East Coast Universities. The survey included questions about why students decided to study these languages, including career plans, study abroad, interest in liter-ature and culture, desire to communicate with speakers of the lan-guage, desire to speak with family members, building on previous language skills, and love of languages in general. Results were broken down by language and by language types, such as whether the lan-guages were commonly taught in the United States, how the lan-guages are politicized in the current historical context, and how the languages intersect with historical and geographic trends in immigra-tion and immigration policy. This article examines in particular the presence of heritage language learners in these language classrooms, the varying reasons that students choose to study these languages, and students’ prior attainment and exposure to the language. The pa-per discusses the political, historical, and social contexts of language study in the United States and the associated implications for effec-tive language recruitment and effective language program design.
He, Qiwei; Veldkamp, Bernard P; Glas, Cees A W; de Vries, Theo
2017-03-01
Patients' narratives about traumatic experiences and symptoms are useful in clinical screening and diagnostic procedures. In this study, we presented an automated assessment system to screen patients for posttraumatic stress disorder via a natural language processing and text-mining approach. Four machine-learning algorithms-including decision tree, naive Bayes, support vector machine, and an alternative classification approach called the product score model-were used in combination with n-gram representation models to identify patterns between verbal features in self-narratives and psychiatric diagnoses. With our sample, the product score model with unigrams attained the highest prediction accuracy when compared with practitioners' diagnoses. The addition of multigrams contributed most to balancing the metrics of sensitivity and specificity. This article also demonstrates that text mining is a promising approach for analyzing patients' self-expression behavior, thus helping clinicians identify potential patients from an early stage.
VisualUrText: A Text Analytics Tool for Unstructured Textual Data
Zainol, Zuraini; Jaymes, Mohd T. H.; Nohuddin, Puteri N. E.
2018-05-01
The growing amount of unstructured text over Internet is tremendous. Text repositories come from Web 2.0, business intelligence and social networking applications. It is also believed that 80-90% of future growth data is available in the form of unstructured text databases that may potentially contain interesting patterns and trends. Text Mining is well known technique for discovering interesting patterns and trends which are non-trivial knowledge from massive unstructured text data. Text Mining covers multidisciplinary fields involving information retrieval (IR), text analysis, natural language processing (NLP), data mining, machine learning statistics and computational linguistics. This paper discusses the development of text analytics tool that is proficient in extracting, processing, analyzing the unstructured text data and visualizing cleaned text data into multiple forms such as Document Term Matrix (DTM), Frequency Graph, Network Analysis Graph, Word Cloud and Dendogram. This tool, VisualUrText, is developed to assist students and researchers for extracting interesting patterns and trends in document analyses.
Development of Markup Language for Medical Record Charting: A Charting Language.
Jung, Won-Mo; Chae, Younbyoung; Jang, Bo-Hyoung
2015-01-01
Nowadays a lot of trials for collecting electronic medical records (EMRs) exist. However, structuring data format for EMR is an especially labour-intensive task for practitioners. Here we propose a new mark-up language for medical record charting (called Charting Language), which borrows useful properties from programming languages. Thus, with Charting Language, the text data described in dynamic situation can be easily used to extract information.
Kieffer, Michael J.; Vukovic, Rose K.
2012-01-01
Drawing on the cognitive and ecological domains within the componential model of reading, this longitudinal study explores heterogeneity in the sources of reading difficulties for language minority learners and native English speakers in urban schools. Students (N = 150) were followed from first through third grade and assessed annually on…
Use of Popular Culture Texts in Mother Tongue Education
Bal, Mazhar
2018-01-01
The aim of this study was to associate popular culture texts with Turkish language lessons of middle school students. For this purpose, a model was proposed and a suitable curriculum was prepared for this model. It was aimed to determine how this program, which was the result of associating popular culture texts with Turkish language lesson…
RevManHAL: towards automatic text generation in systematic reviews.
Torres Torres, Mercedes; Adams, Clive E
2017-02-09
Systematic reviews are a key part of healthcare evaluation. They involve important painstaking but repetitive work. A major producer of systematic reviews, the Cochrane Collaboration, employs Review Manager (RevMan) programme-a software which assists reviewers and produces XML-structured files. This paper describes an add-on programme (RevManHAL) which helps auto-generate the abstract, results and discussion sections of RevMan-generated reviews in multiple languages. The paper also describes future developments for RevManHAL. RevManHAL was created in Java using NetBeans by a programmer working full time for 2 months. The resulting open-source programme uses editable phrase banks to envelop text/numbers from within the prepared RevMan file in formatted readable text of a chosen language. In this way, considerable parts of the review's 'abstract', 'results' and 'discussion' sections are created and a phrase added to 'acknowledgements'. RevManHAL's output needs to be checked by reviewers, but already, from our experience within the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group (200 maintained reviews, 900 reviewers), RevManHAL has saved much time which is better employed thinking about the meaning of the data rather than restating them. Many more functions will become possible as review writing becomes increasingly automated.
Language translation challenges with Arabic speakers participating in qualitative research studies.
Al-Amer, Rasmieh; Ramjan, Lucie; Glew, Paul; Darwish, Maram; Salamonson, Yenna
2016-02-01
This paper discusses how a research team negotiated the challenges of language differences in a qualitative study that involved two languages. The lead researcher shared the participants' language and culture, and the interviews were conducted using the Arabic language as a source language, which was then translated and disseminated in the English language (target language). The challenges in relation to translation in cross-cultural research were highlighted from a perspective of establishing meaning as a vital issue in qualitative research. The paper draws on insights gained from a study undertaken among Arabic-speaking participants involving the use of in-depth semi-structured interviews. The study was undertaken using a purposive sample of 15 participants with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and co-existing depression and explored their perception of self-care management behaviours. Data analysis was performed in two phases. The first phase entailed translation and transcription of the data, and the second phase entailed thematic analysis of the data to develop categories and themes. In this paper there is discussion on the translation process and its inherent challenges. As translation is an interpretive process and not merely a direct message transfer from a source language to a target language, translators need to systematically and accurately capture the full meaning of the spoken language. This discussion paper highlights difficulties in the translation process, specifically in managing data in relation to metaphors, medical terminology and connotation of the text, and importantly, preserving the meaning between the original and translated data. Recommendations for future qualitative studies involving interviews with non-English speaking participants are outlined, which may assist researchers maintain the integrity of the data throughout the translation process. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
THE BIBLE LANGUAGE IN THE AMERICAN LYRIC
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Bruno Rosario Candelier
2015-04-01
Full Text Available The footprint of the Bible in its intellectual and aesthetic expression is manifested in the creation of poetry and fiction. The religious and mystical poetry, and the use of biblical language through the recreation of characters, themes or motifs inspired by the sacred text, are a tribute to the Holy Book and a creative vein of literature inspired by this paradigmatic work of our culture. The biblical language that channel profound teachings and revealed truths through diverse literary figures, has been a fruitful means of creation. Besides intuition and inspiration, in the poetic language flowing the signals of revelation that synthesize perception of consciousness, the metaphysics slope of the existing and the effluvia of Transcendence. In its implementation intervenes the creative power of poetry that the word formalized in images, myths and concepts. In numerous poetic creations there are formal, conceptual and spiritual reminiscent of the Holy Book. It’s prolific the trace of the Bible in literature, culture and spiritual awareness. The word that creates and raises is a melting pot of the aesthetic feeling and spirituality. In fact, the Gospel contains the inspiring principle of Christian mystical literature. By focusing biblical language in poetic creation, we appreciate literary formulas and compositional resources. There is a wisdom and a stylistic inherent in biblical language, which manifests itself in a biblical tone, a biblical image and a biblical technique that the language arts formalized in various forms of creation. Knowing from the biblical heritage is reflected in judgments, prophetic visions, parables, allegories, parallelisms and other resources that have fallen into the lyrical flow. The biblical language embodies a format registered by proverbs, hymns, prayers, metaphors and other expressive resources format. In the biblical text we find various literary forms that have fueled the substance of poetic creation, as
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Tunde Opeibi
2013-03-01
Full Text Available Since the turn of the new millennium, the new media has continued to alter the communication configuration in modern societies. The social media tools have been influencing the way we interact and communicate. These wireless networks have confirmed that our world has indeed become a global village by creating a superhighway for communication possibilities never witnessed in human history. While scholars have explored the roles of some of the new media platforms e.g. Facebook blogging, and twitter for private and public discourses(e.g., Taiwo, 2010; Presley, 2010, 2012, previous studies in the use of SMS in Nigeria have concentrated more on sociolinguistic, lexical, or morpho-syntactic features of text messages (e.g., Awonusi, 2004; Chiluwa, 2010. The present study, however, considers aspects of the new media discourse strategies as resources in a second language setting that demonstrate users’ bilingual creativity. It adopts a discursive-semiotic approach in its analytical paradigm to examine how participants, sharing the mobile protocols, deploy linguistic and non-linguistic facilities as well as contextual resources to create relationship and to enact meaning. The approaches of Discourse Analysis (DA and Semiotics (Schiffrin, 1994; Chandler, 2001 as well as insight from Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC, and Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (CMDA(Herring 2001, 2004; O’Riley, 2005; Herring, 2007 provide the theoretical underpinning for this study. CMC and CMDA, for instance, have been used as tool kits to study and to explain how the new media technologies influence the strategies with which language users within a given virtual sphere engage a wide range of audience through the virtual protocols. The study finds that the use of text messages has opened up creative ways of deploying the resources of a non-native language (English among bilinguals in Nigeria. The outcome of this innovative and reproduction process
Text Induced Spelling Correction
Reynaert, M.W.C.
2004-01-01
We present TISC, a language-independent and context-sensitive spelling checking and correction system designed to facilitate the automatic removal of non-word spelling errors in large corpora. Its lexicon is derived from a very large corpus of raw text, without supervision, and contains word
Kocbek, Simon; Cavedon, Lawrence; Martinez, David; Bain, Christopher; Manus, Chris Mac; Haffari, Gholamreza; Zukerman, Ingrid; Verspoor, Karin
2016-12-01
Text and data mining play an important role in obtaining insights from Health and Hospital Information Systems. This paper presents a text mining system for detecting admissions marked as positive for several diseases: Lung Cancer, Breast Cancer, Colon Cancer, Secondary Malignant Neoplasm of Respiratory and Digestive Organs, Multiple Myeloma and Malignant Plasma Cell Neoplasms, Pneumonia, and Pulmonary Embolism. We specifically examine the effect of linking multiple data sources on text classification performance. Support Vector Machine classifiers are built for eight data source combinations, and evaluated using the metrics of Precision, Recall and F-Score. Sub-sampling techniques are used to address unbalanced datasets of medical records. We use radiology reports as an initial data source and add other sources, such as pathology reports and patient and hospital admission data, in order to assess the research question regarding the impact of the value of multiple data sources. Statistical significance is measured using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. A second set of experiments explores aspects of the system in greater depth, focusing on Lung Cancer. We explore the impact of feature selection; analyse the learning curve; examine the effect of restricting admissions to only those containing reports from all data sources; and examine the impact of reducing the sub-sampling. These experiments provide better understanding of how to best apply text classification in the context of imbalanced data of variable completeness. Radiology questions plus patient and hospital admission data contribute valuable information for detecting most of the diseases, significantly improving performance when added to radiology reports alone or to the combination of radiology and pathology reports. Overall, linking data sources significantly improved classification performance for all the diseases examined. However, there is no single approach that suits all scenarios; the choice of the
Communicative Language Teaching in Second Language Class
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)
Xiao Juan
2010-01-01
IntroductionReturn the class to the students and let the students be the masters of the class.This is what I have changed during the last three years in my class.I have been using Communicative Language Teaching method instead of Grammar Translation method.In the Grammar Translation method, students only study grammar and learn lists of words and then translate what they have learned into Chinese.In the classroom,the teacher uses the students' first language to explain the grammar and vocabulary in the text and then helps the students to translate it.This method is based on the idea that language is made up of words and that language changes according to the grammar rules.
Anto, A.G.; Coenders, Ferdinand G.M.; Voogt, Joke
2012-01-01
This study has attempted to assess the current implementation of communicative language teaching (CLT) approach in two Ethiopian universities to identify professional development (PD) needs of English language teachers. A cross-sectional study using teachers, students and management as sources of
Language and Ageing--Exploring Propositional Density in Written Language--Stability over Time
Spencer, Elizabeth; Craig, Hugh; Ferguson, Alison; Colyvas, Kim
2012-01-01
This study investigated the stability of propositional density (PD) in written texts, as this aspect of language shows promise as an indicator and as a predictor of language decline with ageing. This descriptive longitudinal study analysed written texts obtained from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women's Health in which participants were…
Advanced text and video analytics for proactive decision making
Bowman, Elizabeth K.; Turek, Matt; Tunison, Paul; Porter, Reed; Thomas, Steve; Gintautas, Vadas; Shargo, Peter; Lin, Jessica; Li, Qingzhe; Gao, Yifeng; Li, Xiaosheng; Mittu, Ranjeev; Rosé, Carolyn Penstein; Maki, Keith; Bogart, Chris; Choudhari, Samrihdi Shree
2017-05-01
Today's warfighters operate in a highly dynamic and uncertain world, and face many competing demands. Asymmetric warfare and the new focus on small, agile forces has altered the framework by which time critical information is digested and acted upon by decision makers. Finding and integrating decision-relevant information is increasingly difficult in data-dense environments. In this new information environment, agile data algorithms, machine learning software, and threat alert mechanisms must be developed to automatically create alerts and drive quick response. Yet these advanced technologies must be balanced with awareness of the underlying context to accurately interpret machine-processed indicators and warnings and recommendations. One promising approach to this challenge brings together information retrieval strategies from text, video, and imagery. In this paper, we describe a technology demonstration that represents two years of tri-service research seeking to meld text and video for enhanced content awareness. The demonstration used multisource data to find an intelligence solution to a problem using a common dataset. Three technology highlights from this effort include 1) Incorporation of external sources of context into imagery normalcy modeling and anomaly detection capabilities, 2) Automated discovery and monitoring of targeted users from social media text, regardless of language, and 3) The concurrent use of text and imagery to characterize behaviour using the concept of kinematic and text motifs to detect novel and anomalous patterns. Our demonstration provided a technology baseline for exploiting heterogeneous data sources to deliver timely and accurate synopses of data that contribute to a dynamic and comprehensive worldview.
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Darja Premrl
2012-12-01
Full Text Available In this article we present the parents‘ opinions about the contemporary sources in the field of early foreign language teaching and learning and their influence on the decisions parents make about including/excluding their child into the program of early foreign language learning. We found out, on the one hand, that parents are poorly informed about the current state of early foreign language learning both in Slovenia and abroad. On the other hand, parents reported positive attitudes about early foreign language teaching, a remarkable sense of right approach in early foreign language learning and, above all, their desire to know more about the subject.
Automatic theory generation from analyst text files using coherence networks
Shaffer, Steven C.
2014-05-01
This paper describes a three-phase process of extracting knowledge from analyst textual reports. Phase 1 involves performing natural language processing on the source text to extract subject-predicate-object triples. In phase 2, these triples are then fed into a coherence network analysis process, using a genetic algorithm optimization. Finally, the highest-value sub networks are processed into a semantic network graph for display. Initial work on a well- known data set (a Wikipedia article on Abraham Lincoln) has shown excellent results without any specific tuning. Next, we ran the process on the SYNthetic Counter-INsurgency (SYNCOIN) data set, developed at Penn State, yielding interesting and potentially useful results.
Laws of Language and Legal Language: A Study of Legal Language in Some Indonesian Regulations
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Shidarta Shidarta
2017-01-01
Full Text Available Legal language must follow the laws of language (grammar that widely known and commonly used by the public, including groups of the scientist. Legal language on the other hand also recognizes specific terminologies. These terminologies were introduced by jurists or by legislative power holders. Accordingly, legal language became the product of legal doctrines or political decisions. The problems arose when a number of compositions and legal terms turned out to be elusive, convoluted, and ambiguous due to the pattern of writing that was once done and because of certain considerations. This article proposed reviewing the factors that result in problems. The author presented a solution to observe using hermeneutic methods of law and legal reasoning. The author argued that the text of the law was not neutral since it was trapped not only by the laws of language but also by the perspective of the interpreters as they believed such a perspective was based on the guidance of legal science. By using legal hermeneutics can be checked the depth of the meaning of the law; while over the legal reasoning can be seen its rationale according to legal science.
Finding and associating the core in the texts within Turkish textbooks
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Mustafa Volkan COŞKUN
2016-04-01
Full Text Available The main purpose of Turkish language teaching is to foster students’ emotional, intellectual and imaginative worlds by means of text-based language studies and thus inculcation of language skills such as listening, speaking and writing in students. Given that Turkish language teaching texts are usually the starting point, for these skills to be imparted in students, importance should be attached to surface-deep and deep-surface relationships while studying texts and thus texts should be studied with the greatest emphasis put on not the detection of the main idea, but on the comprehension of the core and its connection with the internal and external world. The purpose of the current study is to determine the core finding skills of first-year undergraduate students from the Department of Turkish Language Teaching and to provide some insights for teachers and pre-service teachers into how to instill the skill of core finding. Within the context of the current study, 50 first-year students from the Department of Turkish Language Teaching of Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Turkey, during the 2015-2016 academic year were informed about the concepts of core and finding the core and they were asked to find and write the core of the text entitled “Morning Discussion at the Children’s Library” from a Turkish language textbook used in the sixth grade. Data was collected through the document analysis method and it was concluded that the students were unable to find the core; and that they could not reach the deep meanings, but only the superficial meanings.
New Ways to Learn a Foreign Language.
Hall, Robert A., Jr.
This text focuses on the nature of language learning in the light of modern linguistic analysis. Common linguistic problems encountered by students of eight major languages are examined--Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and Russian. The text discusses the nature of language, building new language habits, overcoming…
MINORITY LANGUAGES IN ESTONIAN SEGREGATIVE LANGUAGE ENVIRONMENTS
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Elvira Küün
2011-01-01
Full Text Available The goal of this project in Estonia was to determine what languages are spoken by students from the 2nd to the 5th year of basic school at their homes in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. At the same time, this problem was also studied in other segregated regions of Estonia: Kohtla-Järve and Maardu. According to the database of the population census from the year 2000 (Estonian Statistics Executive Office's census 2000, there are representatives of 142 ethnic groups living in Estonia, speaking a total of 109 native languages. At the same time, the database doesn’t state which languages are spoken at homes. The material presented in this article belongs to the research topic “Home Language of Basic School Students in Tallinn” from years 2007–2008, specifically financed and ordered by the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research (grant No. ETF 7065 in the framework of an international study called “Multilingual Project”. It was determined what language is dominating in everyday use, what are the factors for choosing the language for communication, what are the preferred languages and language skills. This study reflects the actual trends of the language situation in these cities.
Language structure is partly determined by social structure.
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Gary Lupyan
Full Text Available BACKGROUND: Languages differ greatly both in their syntactic and morphological systems and in the social environments in which they exist. We challenge the view that language grammars are unrelated to social environments in which they are learned and used. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We conducted a statistical analysis of >2,000 languages using a combination of demographic sources and the World Atlas of Language Structures--a database of structural language properties. We found strong relationships between linguistic factors related to morphological complexity, and demographic/socio-historical factors such as the number of language users, geographic spread, and degree of language contact. The analyses suggest that languages spoken by large groups have simpler inflectional morphology than languages spoken by smaller groups as measured on a variety of factors such as case systems and complexity of conjugations. Additionally, languages spoken by large groups are much more likely to use lexical strategies in place of inflectional morphology to encode evidentiality, negation, aspect, and possession. Our findings indicate that just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the environment (niche in which they are being learned and used. As adults learn a language, features that are difficult for them to acquire, are less likely to be passed on to subsequent learners. Languages used for communication in large groups that include adult learners appear to have been subjected to such selection. Conversely, the morphological complexity common to languages used in small groups increases redundancy which may facilitate language learning by infants. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: We hypothesize that language structures are subjected to different evolutionary pressures in different social environments. Just as biological organisms are shaped by ecological niches, language structures appear to adapt to the
Clinical Natural Language Processing in languages other than English: opportunities and challenges.
Névéol, Aurélie; Dalianis, Hercules; Velupillai, Sumithra; Savova, Guergana; Zweigenbaum, Pierre
2018-03-30
Natural language processing applied to clinical text or aimed at a clinical outcome has been thriving in recent years. This paper offers the first broad overview of clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) for languages other than English. Recent studies are summarized to offer insights and outline opportunities in this area. We envision three groups of intended readers: (1) NLP researchers leveraging experience gained in other languages, (2) NLP researchers faced with establishing clinical text processing in a language other than English, and (3) clinical informatics researchers and practitioners looking for resources in their languages in order to apply NLP techniques and tools to clinical practice and/or investigation. We review work in clinical NLP in languages other than English. We classify these studies into three groups: (i) studies describing the development of new NLP systems or components de novo, (ii) studies describing the adaptation of NLP architectures developed for English to another language, and (iii) studies focusing on a particular clinical application. We show the advantages and drawbacks of each method, and highlight the appropriate application context. Finally, we identify major challenges and opportunities that will affect the impact of NLP on clinical practice and public health studies in a context that encompasses English as well as other languages.
Lucas, Rebecca; Norbury, Courtenay Frazier
2014-01-01
Many children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reading comprehension difficulties, but the level of processing at which comprehension is most vulnerable and the influence of language phenotype on comprehension skill is currently unclear. We explored comprehension at sentence and passage levels across language phenotypes. Children with ASD…
Revising the worksheet with L3: a language and environment foruser-script interaction
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Hohn, Michael H.
2008-01-22
This paper describes a novel approach to the parameter anddata handling issues commonly found in experimental scientific computingand scripting in general. The approach is based on the familiarcombination of scripting language and user interface, but using alanguage expressly designed for user interaction and convenience. The L3language combines programming facilities of procedural and functionallanguages with the persistence and need-based evaluation of data flowlanguages. It is implemented in Python, has access to all Pythonlibraries, and retains almost complete source code compatibility to allowsimple movement of code between the languages. The worksheet interfaceuses metadata produced by L3 to provide selection of values through thescriptit self and allow users to dynamically evolve scripts withoutre-running the prior versions. Scripts can be edited via text editors ormanipulated as structures on a drawing canvas. Computed values are validscripts and can be used further in other scripts via simplecopy-and-paste operations. The implementation is freely available underan open-source license.
CloudLM: a Cloud-based Language Model for Machine Translation
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Ferrández-Tordera Jorge
2016-04-01
Full Text Available Language models (LMs are an essential element in statistical approaches to natural language processing for tasks such as speech recognition and machine translation (MT. The advent of big data leads to the availability of massive amounts of data to build LMs, and in fact, for the most prominent languages, using current techniques and hardware, it is not feasible to train LMs with all the data available nowadays. At the same time, it has been shown that the more data is used for a LM the better the performance, e.g. for MT, without any indication yet of reaching a plateau. This paper presents CloudLM, an open-source cloud-based LM intended for MT, which allows to query distributed LMs. CloudLM relies on Apache Solr and provides the functionality of state-of-the-art language modelling (it builds upon KenLM, while allowing to query massive LMs (as the use of local memory is drastically reduced, at the expense of slower decoding speed.
Twitter Language Use Reflects Psychological Differences between Democrats and Republicans.
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Karolina Sylwester
Full Text Available Previous research has shown that political leanings correlate with various psychological factors. While surveys and experiments provide a rich source of information for political psychology, data from social networks can offer more naturalistic and robust material for analysis. This research investigates psychological differences between individuals of different political orientations on a social networking platform, Twitter. Based on previous findings, we hypothesized that the language used by liberals emphasizes their perception of uniqueness, contains more swear words, more anxiety-related words and more feeling-related words than conservatives' language. Conversely, we predicted that the language of conservatives emphasizes group membership and contains more references to achievement and religion than liberals' language. We analysed Twitter timelines of 5,373 followers of three Twitter accounts of the American Democratic and 5,386 followers of three accounts of the Republican parties' Congressional Organizations. The results support most of the predictions and previous findings, confirming that Twitter behaviour offers valid insights to offline behaviour.
Data Processing Languages for Business Intelligence. SQL vs. R
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Marin FOTACHE
2016-01-01
Full Text Available As data centric approach, Business Intelligence (BI deals with the storage, integration, processing, exploration and analysis of information gathered from multiple sources in various formats and volumes. BI systems are generally synonymous to costly, complex platforms that require vast organizational resources. But there is also an-other face of BI, that of a pool of data sources, applications, services developed at different times using different technologies. This is “democratic” BI or, in some cases, “fragmented”, “patched” (or “chaotic” BI. Fragmentation creates not only integration problems, but also supports BI agility as new modules can be quickly developed. Among various languages and tools that cover large extents of BI activities, SQL and R are instrumental for both BI platform developers and BI users. SQL and R address both monolithic and democratic BI. This paper compares essential data processing features of two languages, identifying similarities and differences among them and also their strengths and limits.
The Grounds of Artistic Creation in Mystical Texts
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A Mohammadi Kalesar
2011-02-01
To achieve this goal, defamiliarization has been used as a criterion for recognizing the artistic aspects of mystical texts. Therefore, by giving a general review of literary theories of 20th century, defamiliarization and foregrounding have been considered in the works of Formalists and Structuralists. In this framework, the function of some of the features of mystical thought such as symbol and interpretation, revelation, relativism, repeated creation and wonder (Hayrat in artistic creation have been investigated. These features produce a multilayered insight in authors of mystical texts. The results of such insight can be seen in the language of these texts. In this language, defamiliarized features produce an artistic perception in the readers of the texts.
Text Mining Applications and Theory
Berry, Michael W
2010-01-01
Text Mining: Applications and Theory presents the state-of-the-art algorithms for text mining from both the academic and industrial perspectives. The contributors span several countries and scientific domains: universities, industrial corporations, and government laboratories, and demonstrate the use of techniques from machine learning, knowledge discovery, natural language processing and information retrieval to design computational models for automated text analysis and mining. This volume demonstrates how advancements in the fields of applied mathematics, computer science, machine learning
Kieffer, Michael J; Vukovic, Rose K
2012-01-01
Drawing on the cognitive and ecological domains within the componential model of reading, this longitudinal study explores heterogeneity in the sources of reading difficulties for language minority learners and native English speakers in urban schools. Students (N = 150) were followed from first through third grade and assessed annually on standardized English language and reading measures. Structural equation modeling was used to investigate the relative contributions of code-related and linguistic comprehension skills in first and second grade to third grade reading comprehension. Linguistic comprehension and the interaction between linguistic comprehension and code-related skills each explained substantial variation in reading comprehension. Among students with low reading comprehension, more than 80% demonstrated weaknesses in linguistic comprehension alone, whereas approximately 15% demonstrated weaknesses in both linguistic comprehension and code-related skills. Results were remarkably similar for the language minority learners and native English speakers, suggesting the importance of their shared socioeconomic backgrounds and schooling contexts.
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András Kornai
Full Text Available Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken today, some 2,500 are generally considered endangered. Here we argue that this consensus figure vastly underestimates the danger of digital language death, in that less than 5% of all languages can still ascend to the digital realm. We present evidence of a massive die-off caused by the digital divide.
COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Angela JIREGHIE
2012-06-01
Full Text Available This paper focuses on the idea of an effective communication between teacher and students aiming to prove that classroom activities maximize opportunities for learners to use target language in a communicative way for meaningful activities. The emphasis lies on meaning (messages they are creating or tasks they are completing rather than form (correctness of language and language structure.
Internationalisms--Identical Vocabularies in European Languages.
Braun, Peter
Linguistic history has described borrowing in the European languages as a process exclusive to one language at any given time. However, it is more likely that there is a core of common loan words, or internationalisms, in many European languages. These internationalisms have come from a variety of sources: the historic interrelatedness of…
Syntactic Aspects in Text Messages of University of Zimbabwe Students
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Leslei Kahari
2013-11-01
Full Text Available This study is a syntactic analysis of text messages in English language used by University of Zimbabwe students. The study specifically focuses on sentences where there are omissions of pronouns, auxiliary verbs and where contractions occur. The study also analyzes the impact of sociolinguistic variables on the sentence structure of English language in text messages. The fifty respondents’ forwarded two messages each from their sent items on their cell phones to the researcher and to understand the factors triggering the syntactic structures the researcher carried out unstructured interviews. The data collected showed that cell phone texting has indeed been affected by the socio-economic factors and these factors trigger omissions of important elements of English language sentence structure such as ,pronouns, auxiliary verbs and contraction of phrases.
Leveling L2 Texts through Readability: Combining Multilevel Linguistic Features with the CEFR
Sung, Yao-Ting; Lin, Wei-Chun; Dyson, Scott Benjamin; Chang, Kuo-En; Chen, Yu-Chia
2015-01-01
Selecting appropriate texts for L2 (second/foreign language) learners is an important approach to enhancing motivation and, by extension, learning. There is currently no tool for classifying foreign language texts according to a language proficiency framework, which makes it difficult for students and educators to determine the precise…
Combining Different Tools for EEG Analysis to Study the Distributed Character of Language Processing
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Armando Freitas da Rocha
2015-01-01
Full Text Available Recent studies on language processing indicate that language cognition is better understood if assumed to be supported by a distributed intelligent processing system enrolling neurons located all over the cortex, in contrast to reductionism that proposes to localize cognitive functions to specific cortical structures. Here, brain activity was recorded using electroencephalogram while volunteers were listening or reading small texts and had to select pictures that translate meaning of these texts. Several techniques for EEG analysis were used to show this distributed character of neuronal enrollment associated with the comprehension of oral and written descriptive texts. Low Resolution Tomography identified the many different sets (si of neurons activated in several distinct cortical areas by text understanding. Linear correlation was used to calculate the information H(ei provided by each electrode of the 10/20 system about the identified si. H(ei Principal Component Analysis (PCA was used to study the temporal and spatial activation of these sources si. This analysis evidenced 4 different patterns of H(ei covariation that are generated by neurons located at different cortical locations. These results clearly show that the distributed character of language processing is clearly evidenced by combining available EEG technologies.
The Medline/full-text research project.
McKinin, E J; Sievert, M; Johnson, E D; Mitchell, J A
1991-05-01
This project was designed to test the relative efficacy of index terms and full-text for the retrieval of documents in those MEDLINE journals for which full-text searching was also available. The full-text files used were MEDIS from Mead Data Central and CCML from BRS Information Technologies. One hundred clinical medical topics were searched in these two files as well as the MEDLINE file to accumulate the necessary data. It was found that full-text identified significantly more relevant articles than did the indexed file, MEDLINE. The full-text searches, however, lacked the precision of searches done in the indexed file. Most relevant items missed in the full-text files, but identified in MEDLINE, were missed because the searcher failed to account for some aspect of natural language, used a logical or positional operator that was too restrictive, or included a concept which was implied, but not expressed in the natural language. Very few of the unique relevant full-text citations would have been retrieved by title or abstract alone. Finally, as of July, 1990 the more current issue of a journal was just as likely to appear in MEDLINE as in one of the full-text files.
Authentic Language Input Through Audiovisual Technology and Second Language Acquisition
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Taher Bahrani
2014-09-01
Full Text Available Second language acquisition cannot take place without having exposure to language input. With regard to this, the present research aimed at providing empirical evidence about the low and the upper-intermediate language learners’ preferred type of audiovisual programs and language proficiency development outside the classroom. To this end, 60 language learners (30 low level and 30 upper-intermediate level were asked to have exposure to their preferred types of audiovisual program(s outside the classroom and keep a diary of the amount and the type of exposure. The obtained data indicated that the low-level participants preferred cartoons and the upper-intermediate participants preferred news more. To find out which language proficiency level could improve its language proficiency significantly, a post-test was administered. The results indicated that only the upper-intermediate language learners gained significant improvement. Based on the findings, the quality of the language input should be given priority over the amount of exposure.
Probing the statistical properties of unknown texts: application to the Voynich Manuscript.
Amancio, Diego R; Altmann, Eduardo G; Rybski, Diego; Oliveira, Osvaldo N; Costa, Luciano da F
2013-01-01
While the use of statistical physics methods to analyze large corpora has been useful to unveil many patterns in texts, no comprehensive investigation has been performed on the interdependence between syntactic and semantic factors. In this study we propose a framework for determining whether a text (e.g., written in an unknown alphabet) is compatible with a natural language and to which language it could belong. The approach is based on three types of statistical measurements, i.e. obtained from first-order statistics of word properties in a text, from the topology of complex networks representing texts, and from intermittency concepts where text is treated as a time series. Comparative experiments were performed with the New Testament in 15 different languages and with distinct books in English and Portuguese in order to quantify the dependency of the different measurements on the language and on the story being told in the book. The metrics found to be informative in distinguishing real texts from their shuffled versions include assortativity, degree and selectivity of words. As an illustration, we analyze an undeciphered medieval manuscript known as the Voynich Manuscript. We show that it is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts. We also obtain candidates for keywords of the Voynich Manuscript which could be helpful in the effort of deciphering it. Because we were able to identify statistical measurements that are more dependent on the syntax than on the semantics, the framework may also serve for text analysis in language-dependent applications.
Habash, Nizar; Olive, Joseph; Christianson, Caitlin; McCary, John
Machine translation (MT) from text, the topic of this chapter, is perhaps the heart of the GALE project. Beyond being a well defined application that stands on its own, MT from text is the link between the automatic speech recognition component and the distillation component. The focus of MT in GALE is on translating from Arabic or Chinese to English. The three languages represent a wide range of linguistic diversity and make the GALE MT task rather challenging and exciting.
SMS Language and College Writing :The languages of the College Texters
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Norizul Azida Darus
2010-03-01
Full Text Available Many students have become avid texters and are seriously reinventing language to accommodate the 160-character limit of short messages. They are more interested in getting their messages across and thus becoming less concerned about correct spelling, grammar and punctuation. Since texting has become a way of life of many students, it is feared that the SMS language can affect students’ written performance. This research examines the effects of frequent usage of text messaging (SMS on undergraduates academic writing. For the purpose of the study, 264 Diploma students of UiTM Perlis were selected as participants. They were 94 male texters and 170 female texters aged between 18 – 22 years old who were taking three different English courses namely Preparatory English, Mainstream English 1 and Mainstream English 2. The data includes participants’ SMS messages, class assignments and examinations scripts which were analyzed in order to detect the existence of SMS language by using measuring instruments of Orthographic forms (Shortis, 2001. The findings reveal that there were few occurrences of SMS language in students’ examinations scripts among weak students.
Sentiment analysis of Arabic tweets using text mining techniques
Al-Horaibi, Lamia; Khan, Muhammad Badruddin
2016-07-01
Sentiment analysis has become a flourishing field of text mining and natural language processing. Sentiment analysis aims to determine whether the text is written to express positive, negative, or neutral emotions about a certain domain. Most sentiment analysis researchers focus on English texts, with very limited resources available for other complex languages, such as Arabic. In this study, the target was to develop an initial model that performs satisfactorily and measures Arabic Twitter sentiment by using machine learning approach, Naïve Bayes and Decision Tree for classification algorithms. The datasets used contains more than 2,000 Arabic tweets collected from Twitter. We performed several experiments to check the performance of the two algorithms classifiers using different combinations of text-processing functions. We found that available facilities for Arabic text processing need to be made from scratch or improved to develop accurate classifiers. The small functionalities developed by us in a Python language environment helped improve the results and proved that sentiment analysis in the Arabic domain needs lot of work on the lexicon side.
Beasley, Robert E.
2009-01-01
The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of symbolic expressions (e.g., "BTW," "LOL," "UR") in an SMS text messaging corpus consisting of over 10,000 text messages. More specifically, the purpose was to determine, not only how frequently these symbolic expressions are used, but how they are utilized in terms of the language functions…
LISp-Miner Control Language description of scripting language implementation
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Milan Simunek
2014-04-01
Full Text Available This paper introduces the LISp-Miner Control Language – a scripting language for the LISp-Miner system, an academic system for knowledge discovery in databases. The main purpose of this language is to provide programmable means to all the features of the LISp-Miner system and mainly to automate the main phases of data mining – from data introduction and preprocessing, formulation of analytical tasks, to discovery of the most interesting patterns. In this sense, the language is a necessary prerequisite for the EverMiner project of data mining automation. Language will serve other purposes too – for an automated verification of the LISp-Miner system functionality before a new version is released and as an educational tool in advanced data mining courses.
Guarinello, Ana Cristina; Massi, Giselle; Berberian, Ana Paula; Tonocchi, Rita; Lustosa, Sandra Silva
2015-01-01
This study aimed to analyze the written production of a deaf person who is in the process of written language acquisition. One person with hearing disability, called R., participated in this study together with his Speech Language Pathologist. The therapist, proficient in sign language, acted as an interlocutor and interpreter, prioritizing the interactive nature of language and interfering in the written production only when it was requested. During the 3 years of work with R., a change in stance toward written language was observed. In addition, he began to reflect on his texts and utilize written Portuguese in a way that allowed his texts to be more coherent. Writing became an opportunity to show his singularity and to begin reconstructing his relationship with language. Speech language pathology and audiology therapy, at a bilingual clinic, can allow people with hearing disability early access to sign language and, consequently, enable the development of the written form of Portuguese.
Walsh, Lucas
2007-01-01
This article seeks to provide an introduction to Extensible Markup Language (XML) by looking at its use in a single source publishing approach to the provision of teaching resources in both hardcopy and online. Using the development of the International Baccalaureate Organisation's online Economics Subject Guide as a practical example, this…
Petersen, Douglas B.
2011-01-01
This systematic review focuses on research articles published since 1980 that assess outcomes of narrative-based language intervention for preschool and school-age children with language impairment. The author conducted a comprehensive search of electronic databases and hand searches of other sources for studies using all research designs except…
Deconstructing Equivalence in the Translation of Texts from French to Indonesian
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Sajarwa Sajarwa
2017-06-01
Full Text Available Translation is a process of reproducing a source text (ST in the equivalent target text (TT. The equivalence of translation includes the message of the text. Several factors such as writer, translator, publisher, reader, or spirit of certain era, determine the translation equivalency. In translation, equivalence is negotiated and transactioned; in consequence it is highly likely that the current equivalency will be different in the future. Deconstruction theory claims that the relationship between a signifier and a signified is inconstant; however, it can be “deferred” to obtain a new or different relationship. As a result, a meaning may change in accordance with the will of its user. The result of this research indicates four differences between TT1 and TT2 translation; (1 within a period of twenty years of social and political change (1990 – 2010, TT1 reveals regional issues, while TT2 reveals social class issues; (2 the TT2’s disclosure of meaning is more direct, open, and occasionally rude than the subtle and euphemistic TT1; (3 the TT2 tends to follow ideology of foreignization by inserting foreign words or words from the source language, while the TT1 tends to follow ideology of domestication; (4 there are different viewpoints between the TT1 translator and the TT2 translator.
Constructing Hardware in a Scale Embedded Language
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
2014-08-21
Chisel is a new open-source hardware construction language developed at UC Berkeley that supports advanced hardware design using highly parameterized generators and layered domain-specific hardware languages. Chisel is embedded in the Scala programming language, which raises the level of hardware design abstraction by providing concepts including object orientation, functional programming, parameterized types, and type inference. From the same source, Chisel can generate a high-speed C++-based cycle-accurate software simulator, or low-level Verilog designed to pass on to standard ASIC or FPGA tools for synthesis and place and route.
The limitations of data perturbation for ASR of learner data in under-resourced languages
CSIR Research Space (South Africa)
Badenhorst, Jacob AC
2017-11-01
Full Text Available receive their training in English or one of the other dominant languages and who start their careers in rural areas therefore often work in communities where people communicate in a language that they are not proficient in. The most prominent example....05. IV. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN A. ASR system We trained phone recognition systems using the open source Kaldi toolkit and followed a training recipe based on the Wall Street Journal and TIMIT example recipes [11]. In particular, we used a setup of position...
Russian Language Analysis Project
Serianni, Barbara; Rethwisch, Carolyn
2011-01-01
This paper is the result of a language analysis research project focused on the Russian Language. The study included a diverse literature review that included published materials as well as online sources in addition to an interview with a native Russian speaker residing in the United States. Areas of study include the origin and history of the…
A Leaner, Meaner Markup Language.
Online & CD-ROM Review, 1997
1997-01-01
In 1996 a working group of the World Wide Web Consortium developed and released a simpler form of markup language, Extensible Markup Language (XML), combining the flexibility of standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and the Web suitability of HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Reviews SGML and discusses XML's suitability for journal…
Language choice, language alternation and code-switching in the Mercator-Hondius Atlas
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Aleksi Mäkilähde
2016-05-01
Full Text Available The atlas of Gerardus Mercator (Gerard de Cremer, or the Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura, is one of first modern atlases and one of the most famous of those compiled in the Netherlands. The first (unfinished edition was published in 1595, but the copperplates were later acquired by Jodocus Hondius (Joost de Hondt and his business associates. The revised Mercator-Hondius Atlas was published for the first time in 1606 with added maps and texts. The texts printed on verso of the maps were written by Petrus Montanus (Pieter van den Berg, who was a brother-in-law of Hondius and a Latin teacher. Many subsequent editions of the atlas were produced in the years that followed. The first editions were in Latin, but versions in European vernaculars such as French, German and Italian were produced later as well. The present article focuses on the multilingual nature of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas (1613, editio quarta by discussing language choice, language alternation and code-switching patterns in different parts of the atlas. The dominant language of the descriptive texts is Latin, but there are also switches into many other languages, including Greek (written in Greek script and several vernaculars. Furthermore, the map pages tend to indicate the names of different types of area (e.g. cities, seas, and oceans in different languages. The aim of the present article is to provide a preliminary exploration of the possibilities of approaching the atlas with the aid of concepts and ideas derived from modern code-switching studies. I demonstrate how these concepts can be used to describe the language choice patterns in the text and discuss some of the challenges the data poses for a linguistic approach.
The Linguistic Interpretation for Language Union – Language Family
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E.A. Balalykina
2016-10-01
Full Text Available The paper is dedicated to the problem of determination of the essence of language union and language family in modern linguistics, which is considered important, because these terms are often used as absolute synonyms. The research is relevant due to the need to distinguish the features of languages that are inherited during their functioning within either language union or language family when these languages are compared. The research has been carried out in order to present the historical background of the problem and to justify the need for differentiation of language facts that allow relating languages to particular language union or language family. In order to fulfill the goal of this work, descriptive, comparative, and historical methods have been used. A range of examples has been provided to prove that some languages, mainly Slavonic and Baltic languages, form a language family rather than a language union, because a whole number of features in their systems are the heritage of their common Indo-European past. Firstly, it is necessary to take into account changes having either common or different nature in the system of particular languages; secondly, one must have a precise idea of what features in the phonetic and morphological systems of compared languages allow to relate them to language union or language family; thirdly, it must be determined whether the changes in compared languages are regular or of any other type. On the basis of the obtained results, the following conclusions have been drawn: language union and language family are two different types of relations between modern languages; they allow identifying both degree of similarity of these languages and causes of differences between them. It is most important that one should distinguish and describe the specific features of two basic groups of languages forming language family or language union. The results obtained during the analysis are very important for linguistics
A Study of Readability of Texts in Bangla through Machine Learning Approaches
Sinha, Manjira; Basu, Anupam
2016-01-01
In this work, we have investigated text readability in Bangla language. Text readability is an indicator of the suitability of a given document with respect to a target reader group. Therefore, text readability has huge impact on educational content preparation. The advances in the field of natural language processing have enabled the automatic…
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Irena SRDANOVIĆ
2011-05-01
Full Text Available In this paper, we explore presence of collocational relations in the computer-assisted language learning systems and other language resources for the Japanese language, on one side, and, in the Japanese language learning textbooks and wordlists, on the other side. After introducing how important it is to learn collocational relations in a foreign language, we examine their coverage in the various learners’ resources for the Japanese language. We particularly concentrate on a few collocations at the beginner’s level, where we demonstrate their treatment across various resources. A special attention is paid to what is referred to as unpredictable collocations, which have a bigger foreign language learning-burden than the predictable ones.
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Tarwacka-Odolczyk Agata
2014-08-01
Full Text Available This paper discusses the communicative competence of deaf children. It illustrates the process in which such children build narrative texts in interaction with a deaf teacher, and presents the diversity of this process due to the shared vs. non-shared perception of a picture - the source of the topic. Detailed analyses focus on the formal and semantic aspect of the stories, including the length of the text in sign language, the content selected, information categories, and types of answers to the teacher’s questions. This text is our contribution in memory of Professor Grace Wales Shugar, whose idea of dual agentivity of child-adult interaction inspired the research presented here.
THE TRACES OF PROTO-LANGUAGES OF AUSTRONESIA IN SOME MODERN LANGUAGES IN SUMATRA
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Ermanto
2017-10-01
Full Text Available This study discusses the traces proto-languages of Austronesian in modern languages in Sumatra. Modern languages in Sumatra are the languages of the subgroups of Sumatra as part of a group which is an Austronesian Southwestern which is Western Austronesian group. The purpose of this study is to find and assess reflex etimon mother language of Austronesian present in some modern languages in the language of Sumatra namely Aceh, Batak Toba, Mandailaing language, language Kerinci, Minangkabau and Mentawai language. To find reflex (reflection mother language of Austronesian in several languages in Sumatra used comparative methods are qualitative. The use of the method is to reconstruct antarabahasa relationship based on the legacy of rank higher language that PAN into several languages with the lower rank (top-down reconstruction namely the Acehnese language, language Batak Toba, Mandailing language, language Kerinci, Minangkabau and Mentawai language. Research findings indicate that there are reflex (reflection etimon mother language of Austronesian in some modern languages in the language of Sumatra, Aceh, Batak Toba, Mandailaing language, language Kerinci, Minangkabau and Mentawai language. This indicates that all six of these languages is a derivative of the PAN.
Multilingual text induced spelling correction
Reynaert, M.W.C.
2004-01-01
We present TISC, a multilingual, language-independent and context-sensitive spelling checking and correction system designed to facilitate the automatic removal of non-word spelling errors in large corpora. Its lexicon is derived from raw text corpora, without supervision, and contains word unigrams
Monolingual accounting dictionaries for EFL text production
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Sandro Nielsen
2006-10-01
Full Text Available Monolingual accounting dictionaries are important for producing financial reporting texts in English in an international setting, because of the lack of specialised bilingual dictionaries. As the intended user groups have different factual and linguistic competences, they require specific types of information. By identifying and analysing the users' factual and linguistic competences, user needs, use-situations and the stages involved in producing accounting texts in English as a foreign language, lexicographers will have a sound basis for designing the optimal English accounting dictionary for EFL text production. The monolingual accounting dictionary needs to include information about UK, US and international accounting terms, their grammatical properties, their potential for being combined with other words in collocations, phrases and sentences in order to meet user requirements. Data items that deal with these aspects are necessary for the international user group as they produce subject-field specific and register-specific texts in a foreign language, and the data items are relevant for the various stages in text production: draft writing, copyediting, stylistic editing and proofreading.
Language as the visual: Exploring the intersection of linguistic and visual language in manga
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Giancarla Unser-Schutz
2011-03-01
Full Text Available In manga studies, a distinction is made between linguistic text (language and visual language. However, because linguistic text is mediated by visual structures, there is a a tendency to assume that it is a secondary element. I would argue, however, that examination of both languages might give a better idea of how manga functions, and start that process here by looking at two manga text types: handwritten lines, thoughts and authorial comments. Visually differentiated from other texts, and more common in series for girls (shōjo-manga, I compare them with Ōtsuka's (1994 highly-visual monologues from 1970s/1980s shōjo-manga, and demonstrate similarities to Takeuchi's (2005 mediator and spectator characters, and argue that these texts offer a sense of closeness to authors while also visually-coding data in terms of relevance. While non-essential secondary text, their visual-encoding offers a space of dynamic interpretation, with readerships able to ignore or read them as per their needs.
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Joe LaValle
2017-06-01
Full Text Available This paper addresses the possibilities of combining Spanish language learners and English language learners in high school and post-secondary institutions for mutual benefit to learn authentic language. Academic or "classroom" Spanish is insufficient to empower students for today's workplace. The concept behind "Real Language" is illustrated by an example of an interdisciplinary activity to facilitate communicative interaction in genuine language and promote cultural understanding between intermediate Spanish students and ESOL/native speakers at the high school and post-secondary level. Students are asked to utilize their life skills in interactive, freestyle conversation without the intervention of an instructor. The learning space for language exchange is an out-of-class venue for a non-intimidating, more authentic setting. This simple qualitative study investigates the potential value of this sort of interdisciplinary activity. The intent is to evaluate attitudes of the participants in relation to confidence in their ability to use the target language, and their willingness to use it in social and professional environments and, in addition, to facilitate cultural understanding. The positive result of the project is validated by the voice of the student participants as they reflect on their experience in "Real Language". Could this concept facilitate evolving strategies for interdisciplinary contemporary foreign language learning?
Decision table languages and systems
Metzner, John R
1977-01-01
ACM Monograph Series: Decision Table Languages and Systems focuses on linguistic examination of decision tables and survey of the features of existing decision table languages and systems. The book first offers information on semiotics, programming language features, and generalization. Discussions focus on semantic broadening, outer language enrichments, generalization of syntax, limitations, implementation improvements, syntactic and semantic features, decision table syntax, semantics of decision table languages, and decision table programming languages. The text then elaborates on design im
LANGUAGE TRAVEL SUPPLY: LANGUAGE TOURISM PRODUCT COMPOSITION
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Montserrat Iglesias
2017-01-01
Full Text Available A systematic review of literature up to date reflects great scholarly interest in the impacts of study abroad (SA sojourns on foreign language learners’ communicative competence. This paper provides an overview on gains in sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences drawing upon research carried out in this field, which in broad terms supports the belief that both types of competences are effectively developed in SA stays. This article also offers a detailed account of the main constituents of the language tourism product -the travel component and the language learning component- with a special focus on the educational input and the language learning complements included in the latter. Thus, a fundamental part of the language tourism market system will be depicted from a supply perspective. Following an exploratory approach, a literature review was conducted in order to identify existing and missing knowledge in the field of language travel supply, and key aspects were pinpointed and classified. The taxonomy and underpinning concepts resulting from the categorisation of those key features may be considered the starting point for future investigations on SA programmes. The model offered in this exploratory study aims at constituting the underlying conceptual framework for subsequent research on the role of different SA programme design characteristics within the language tourism experience.
Perceptions and Beliefs about Textual Appropriation and Source Use in Second Language Writing
Polio, Charlene; Shi, Ling
2012-01-01
Perceptions and judgments on plagiarism or acceptable use of source texts are contingent on one's interpretations and experiences in reading and writing academic texts in a specific disciplinary context. The lack of consensus on what is acceptable textual appropriation in student writing has led to the scholarship on perceptions of textual…
Blinds Bluffing of Vision: Paul de Man on Text
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Ali Jamalinesari
2014-11-01
Full Text Available Because of its figural or rhetorical component, language cannot be a reliable medium for stating truth. Rhetoric continually undermines the abstract systems of grammar and logic and any attempt to fix a connection between the book and the world is futile. Regarding the metaphoricity of language, this article tries to prove that how the critic’s search for meaning is defied by the difference between what is meant and what is said which is a de Man’s focal point. To have a correct misreading, we have to allow language express itself in its full multiplicity, taking as many possible significations as it can and as many various contradictory direction that it heads toward. There is no authoritative, authentic voice in a text. Each is as helpless and baseless as any other. The text dismantles itself. It annihilates the ground on which it stands.
Dictionaries for text production
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro; Bergenholtz, Henning
2018-01-01
Dictionaries for Text Production are information tools that are designed and constructed for helping users to produce (i.e. encode) texts, both oral and written texts. These can be broadly divided into two groups: (a) specialized text production dictionaries, i.e., dictionaries that only offer...... a small amount of lexicographic data, most or all of which are typically used in a production situation, e.g. synonym dictionaries, grammar and spelling dictionaries, collocation dictionaries, concept dictionaries such as the Longman Language Activator, which is advertised as the World’s First Production...... Dictionary; (b) general text production dictionaries, i.e., dictionaries that offer all or most of the lexicographic data that are typically used in a production situation. A review of existing production dictionaries reveals that there are many specialized text production dictionaries but only a few general...
Foreign Language Reading Anxiety among Yemeni Secondary School Students
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Yehia Ahmed Y. Al-Sohbani
2018-03-01
Full Text Available The aim of this study was to examine Foreign Language (FL reading anxiety level of Arabicspeaking Yemeni students learning English as a foreign language (n = 106. It utilized (a a background information questionnaire, (b the Foreign Language Reading Anxiety Scale (FLRAS, and (c students' English school marks. Results of the study showed that learners of English experienced an above moderate level of FL reading anxiety. There was no significant difference between students' FL reading anxiety and their gender. However, a statistically reliable difference between the means of public and private schools regarding their FL reading anxiety in favor of the private school. Moreover, a positive correlation was found between students' FL reading anxiety and their type of school. Difficulties of uncertainty, pronunciation of English words, unfamiliar topic, unknown vocabulary, reading aloud, using word by word translation, unfamiliar English culture and history, unfamiliar grammar, English letters and symbols were identified as the major sources of FL reading anxiety.
Exploring subdomain variation in biomedical language
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Séaghdha Diarmuid Ó
2011-05-01
Full Text Available Abstract Background Applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP technology to biomedical texts have generated significant interest in recent years. In this paper we identify and investigate the phenomenon of linguistic subdomain variation within the biomedical domain, i.e., the extent to which different subject areas of biomedicine are characterised by different linguistic behaviour. While variation at a coarser domain level such as between newswire and biomedical text is well-studied and known to affect the portability of NLP systems, we are the first to conduct an extensive investigation into more fine-grained levels of variation. Results Using the large OpenPMC text corpus, which spans the many subdomains of biomedicine, we investigate variation across a number of lexical, syntactic, semantic and discourse-related dimensions. These dimensions are chosen for their relevance to the performance of NLP systems. We use clustering techniques to analyse commonalities and distinctions among the subdomains. Conclusions We find that while patterns of inter-subdomain variation differ somewhat from one feature set to another, robust clusters can be identified that correspond to intuitive distinctions such as that between clinical and laboratory subjects. In particular, subdomains relating to genetics and molecular biology, which are the most common sources of material for training and evaluating biomedical NLP tools, are not representative of all biomedical subdomains. We conclude that an awareness of subdomain variation is important when considering the practical use of language processing applications by biomedical researchers.
User interfaces for computational science: A domain specific language for OOMMF embedded in Python
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Marijan Beg
2017-05-01
Full Text Available Computer simulations are used widely across the engineering and science disciplines, including in the research and development of magnetic devices using computational micromagnetics. In this work, we identify and review different approaches to configuring simulation runs: (i the re-compilation of source code, (ii the use of configuration files, (iii the graphical user interface, and (iv embedding the simulation specification in an existing programming language to express the computational problem. We identify the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches and discuss their implications on effectiveness and reproducibility of computational studies and results. Following on from this, we design and describe a domain specific language for micromagnetics that is embedded in the Python language, and allows users to define the micromagnetic simulations they want to carry out in a flexible way. We have implemented this micromagnetic simulation description language together with a computational backend that executes the simulation task using the Object Oriented MicroMagnetic Framework (OOMMF. We illustrate the use of this Python interface for OOMMF by solving the micromagnetic standard problem 4. All the code is publicly available and is open source.
Ghana language-in-education policy: The survival of two South Guan minority dialects
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Ansah, Mercy Akrofi
2015-12-01
Full Text Available The paper investigates the survival of two South-Guan minority dialects, Leteh and Efutu, in the context of the Ghana language-in-education policy. The study is done from the perspective of the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Linguistic Rights (1996. In every multilingual state, the formulation of policies concerning language use has always presented challenges. The government has to decide which of the languages need to be promoted and for what purposes. In Ghana, since the introduction of formal education, English has indubitably been the language of education, trade, law, media, government and administration. However, there has always been a debate surrounding the language-in-education policy, especially at the basic level of education. The argument has always been whether English should be emphasised or Ghanaian languages. For purposes of formal education, the government of Ghana has promoted nine languages known as government-sponsored languages. These are languages which have literary tradition and can be used as media of instruction in schools. This decision was to the detriment of some Ghanaian languages; languages which are often described as minority languages, and which are not government-sponsored. The paper argues that, if language and culture are intertwined, and the culture of a people must be preserved, then language policymakers need to consider the linguistic rights of speakers of the so-called minority languages. Data for the study were sourced from language surveys and observation.
Iconicity as a general property of language: evidence from spoken and signed languages
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Pamela Perniss
2010-12-01
Full Text Available Current views about language are dominated by the idea of arbitrary connections between linguistic form and meaning. However, if we look beyond the more familiar Indo-European languages and also include both spoken and signed language modalities, we find that motivated, iconic form-meaning mappings are, in fact, pervasive in language. In this paper, we review the different types of iconic mappings that characterize languages in both modalities, including the predominantly visually iconic mappings in signed languages. Having shown that iconic mapping are present across languages, we then proceed to review evidence showing that language users (signers and speakers exploit iconicity in language processing and language acquisition. While not discounting the presence and importance of arbitrariness in language, we put forward the idea that iconicity need also be recognized as a general property of language, which may serve the function of reducing the gap between linguistic form and conceptual representation to allow the language system to hook up to motor and perceptual experience.
The benefits of sign language for deaf learners with language challenges
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Van Staden, Annalene
2009-12-01
Full Text Available This article argues the importance of allowing deaf children to acquire sign language from an early age. It demonstrates firstly that the critical/sensitive period hypothesis for language acquisition can be applied to specific language aspects of spoken language as well as sign languages (i.e. phonology, grammatical processing and syntax. This makes early diagnosis and early intervention of crucial importance. Moreover, research findings presented in this article demonstrate the advantage that sign language offers in the early years of a deaf child’s life by comparing the language development milestones of deaf learners exposed to sign language from birth to those of late-signers, orally trained deaf learners and hearing learners exposed to spoken language. The controversy over the best medium of instruction for deaf learners is briefly discussed, with emphasis placed on the possible value of bilingual-bicultural programmes to facilitate the development of deaf learners’ literacy skills. Finally, this paper concludes with a discussion of the implications/recommendations of sign language teaching and Deaf education in South Africa.
Text cohesion by the deaf as seen by the hearer: the use of oral cues in written texts
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Wagner Teobaldo Lopes de Andrade
2010-10-01
Full Text Available The use of sign language by the deaf, though a means of providing access to knowledge, offers some specific difficulties on reading/writing due to the impossibility on acquiring the written code of the official spoken language. Taking into account that some oral cues favor textual cohesion, the question this paper is mainly concerned with is whether the use of oral cues in writing favors comprehension as well. The aim of this research was to offer written texts produced by the deaf to the non deaf to see how the text was understood by these speakers. Some written fragments contained two or more oral cues, some with just one cue or with no cues produced by the deaf and some texts produced by the non deaf were offered to university hearing students who were asked to score the texts by means of levels of comprehension. The results showed that the answers favored the texts produced by the non deaf people followed by those with more than two oral cues produced by the deaf; the texts that offered difficulty for comprehension were those with no oral cues produced by the deaf. This paper suggests that the oral cues bring cohesion to the texts produced by the deaf thus favoring the hearer text comprehension. Keywords: deafness; oral cues; writing; text cohesion.
Rendering of Foreign Language Inclusions in the Russian Translations of the Novels by Graham Greene
Valeeva, Roza A.; Martynova, Irina N.
2016-01-01
The importance of the problem under discussion is preconditioned by the scientific inquiry of the best variants of foreign language inclusions translation which would suite original narration in the source text stylistically, emotionally and conceptually and also fully projects the author's communicative intention in every particular case. The…
The Qur’anic Language in a Linguistic Perspective: The Language Engineering Viewpoint
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Mohammed Akram A.M. Sa‘Adeddin
1994-06-01
Full Text Available This article is an attempt to draw a plan for developing curricula for teaching the Qur’anic Language at the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM. The article is in four sections. The first offers an overview of Language Engineering, the language profile in Malaysia, the Qur 'anic Language teaching situation at IIUM, and the conditions for competent Corpus Planning. The second discusses the significance of the Qur’anic Language, and the Islamic semantic affinity between the Qur’anic Language and Bahasa Melayu. The third focuses on the implications of the Qur’anic language Corpus Planning for language teachers, materials writers and curriculum designers. The fourth briefly introduces our theory of interpretive reading, goes on to apply it to an active reading of sūratu likhlās, and considers the implications of this type of reading for the Qur’anic Language syllabus design.
Adaptation of Russian Christian Names into the Mari Language
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Alexander L. Pustyakov
2017-11-01
Full Text Available This article analyses the phonetic and morphological adaptation of Christian personal names in the Mari language. The work examines personal names recorded in different regions among the Mari. The composition of the presented data is not exhaustive; it does, however, allow one to observe some general patterns of the adaptation process. The main part of the article is preceded by a brief overview of the Christianization of the Mari region and the contacts between the Mari and the Russian-speaking population; the features of the local dialects of the Russian language are briefly stated. The Mari language incorporated a significant number of Russian names. The source of loans included, besides the standard church name forms, also the numerous varieties found in the Russian dialects. As part of the study, phonetic, structural changes of Christian names in the Mari language are revealed and the reasons for the majority of these transformations are identified. The author also pays attention to the intermediary role of the neighbouring Turkic languages in the penetration of Russian names into the Mari language. Changes in borrowed names were induced by internal Mari linguistic rules, as well as dialectal features of the local Russian dialects. The identification of systematic phonetic and structural transformations helps to determine the origin of obscure anthroponyms.
A Language Socialization Approach to Uzbek Language Learning
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Baburhan Uzum
2013-08-01
Full Text Available Using an ethnographic case study design, this study investigates language learners' socialization into the cultural values of Uzbek language. Informed by a language socialization theoretical framework, the study focuses on the classroom routines and interactions that socialize students into certain social values through mini-lectures that are beyond the linguistic objectives of the curriculum. The research questions addressed are: What social values are being taught implicitly or explicitly? What cultural values are students being socialized into? What constitutes valuable cultural knowledge as claimed by the teacher? In the audio and video recorded observation data, a selected excerpt of typical classroom interactions is analyzed adopting discourse analysis methods. The findings of the study could be implemented in teacher education programs and in designing textbooks and curriculum for less commonly taught languages.
Slovene-English Language Contact and Language Change
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Nada Šabec
2011-05-01
Full Text Available The paper focuses on Slovene - English language contact and the potential language change resulting from it. Both the immigrant context (the U.S. and Canada and Slovenia, where direct and indirect language contact can be observed respectively, are examined from two perspectives: social on the one hand and linguistic on the other. In the case of Slovene Americans and Canadians the emphasis is on language maintenance and shift, and on the relationship between mother tongue preservation and ethnic awareness. The linguistic section examines different types of bilingual discourse (borrowing, code switching, showing how the Slovene inflectional system in particular is being increasingly generalized, simplified and reduced, and how Slovene word order is gradually beginning to resemble that of English. In the case of Slovenia we are witnessing an unprecedented surge in the influence of English on Slovene, especially in the media (both classic and electronic, advertising, science, and the language of the young. This influence will be discussed on a number of levels, such as lexical, syntactic and intercultural, and illustrated by relevant examples.
Historical Slovenian Language Resources
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Tomaž Erjavec
2013-09-01
and »ajfrom« and their archaic forms »ajfram« and »aifram« and by attestattion: »…shaz noi frihtei tu shebranje karbo sdei udrukono is velzhim aifram noi is flisam inu is andohtjo 3 vezhiere saporedama …« (Tapravi inu tazieli Colemone-Shegen, 1800, p. 183. At present, the lexicon contains over 25,000 entries (including modern words in archaic texts, 50,000 word-forms and 70,000 archaic forms. The third resource is represented by an extensive collection of digitised texts similar to the corpus. The difference is that the words are annotated automatically by a tool developed to process historical Slovenian text named ToTrTaLe. The tool implements a pipeline, where it first tokenises the text and then attempts to transcribe the archaic words to their modern day equivalents. Then, the text is tagged and lemmatised using the models for modern Slovenian language. It contains about 5 million words of hand-corrected transcriptions from the following digitised texts: • Slovenian books and editions of the newspaper »Kmetijske in rokodelske novice«, digitised by the National University Library (NUK in the frame of the EU project IMPACT (5000 pages; • Digital library AHLib,1 comprising Slovenian books translated from German (100 books; • A selection of Slovenian books2 All three resources (corpus, lexicon, collection are encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines TEI P5, which enable the definition of XML schemas for encoding texts for scholarly purposes. The home page of the project at http://nl.ijs.si/imp/ enables access to the resources. The collection and the lexicon are available for on-line browsing, the corpus and the automatically annotated collection for linguistics searches via a concordancer, while all the resources can be also downloaded in their source XML form under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. In future we expect to extend the resources, however, even their present scope is sufficient for corpus based diachronic
White, Kelsey D.; Heidrich, Emily
2013-01-01
Most educators are aware that some students utilize web-based machine translators for foreign language assignments, however, little research has been done to determine how and why students utilize these programs, or what the implications are for language learning and teaching. In this mixed-methods study we utilized surveys, a translation task,…
A Case Study of Inter-sentence Conjunctions in Chinese_English Legal Parallel Texts
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Yan Xi
2009-10-01
Full Text Available The present study is a contrastive study of inter-sentence conjunctions in Chinese/English legal parallel texts. Conjunction is one of the five cohesive devices put forward by Halliday and Hasan (1976. Many scholars have applied their model of cohesion to the study of English and Chinese languages. As for the use of conjunction in Chinese and English, most scholars believe that there are more cases of conjunction in the English legal texts than in the Chinese ones because it is generally considered that Chinese is predominantly paratactic and English mainly hypotactic. Besides, up to now little detailed contrastive study has been done on conjunctions in Chinese/English non-literary texts. Legal language is a specialized language whose distinctive feature is the pursuit of precision. As a result of the importance attached to the letter of law and the pursuit of precision in legal texts, most studies on legal language are devoted to the characteristic features of legal language at the word and sentence level, to the exclusion of textual and pragmatic considerations. The present study will mainly look at the features of legal texts from the perspective of conjunction at the textual level and find out whether Chinese uses fewer cases of conjunction than English in legal texts. The Chinese and English legal parallel texts about arbitration rules will be used for this contrastive analysis. It is hoped that the findings of this research will test the explanatory force of hypotaxis and parataxis in the use of conjunction in legal texts and give a clearer picture of conjunction at the textual level in Chinese and English legal parallel texts, and therefore reconstruct the discourse on the Chinese language.
Text mixing shapes the anatomy of rank-frequency distributions
Williams, Jake Ryland; Bagrow, James P.; Danforth, Christopher M.; Dodds, Peter Sheridan
2015-05-01
Natural languages are full of rules and exceptions. One of the most famous quantitative rules is Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of occurrence of a word is approximately inversely proportional to its rank. Though this "law" of ranks has been found to hold across disparate texts and forms of data, analyses of increasingly large corpora since the late 1990s have revealed the existence of two scaling regimes. These regimes have thus far been explained by a hypothesis suggesting a separability of languages into core and noncore lexica. Here we present and defend an alternative hypothesis that the two scaling regimes result from the act of aggregating texts. We observe that text mixing leads to an effective decay of word introduction, which we show provides accurate predictions of the location and severity of breaks in scaling. Upon examining large corpora from 10 languages in the Project Gutenberg eBooks collection, we find emphatic empirical support for the universality of our claim.
Hoelzer, Simon; Schweiger, Ralf K; Dudeck, Joachim
2003-01-01
With the introduction of ICD-10 as the standard for diagnostics, it becomes necessary to develop an electronic representation of its complete content, inherent semantics, and coding rules. The authors' design relates to the current efforts by the CEN/TC 251 to establish a European standard for hierarchical classification systems in health care. The authors have developed an electronic representation of ICD-10 with the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) that facilitates integration into current information systems and coding software, taking different languages and versions into account. In this context, XML provides a complete processing framework of related technologies and standard tools that helps develop interoperable applications. XML provides semantic markup. It allows domain-specific definition of tags and hierarchical document structure. The idea of linking and thus combining information from different sources is a valuable feature of XML. In addition, XML topic maps are used to describe relationships between different sources, or "semantically associated" parts of these sources. The issue of achieving a standardized medical vocabulary becomes more and more important with the stepwise implementation of diagnostically related groups, for example. The aim of the authors' work is to provide a transparent and open infrastructure that can be used to support clinical coding and to develop further software applications. The authors are assuming that a comprehensive representation of the content, structure, inherent semantics, and layout of medical classification systems can be achieved through a document-oriented approach.
Mahotas: Open source software for scriptable computer vision
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Luis Pedro Coelho
2013-07-01
Full Text Available Mahotas is a computer vision library for Python. It contains traditional image processing functionality such as filtering and morphological operations as well as more modern computer vision functions for feature computation, including interest point detection and local descriptors. The interface is in Python, a dynamic programming language, which is appropriate for fast development, but the algorithms are implemented in C++ and are tuned for speed. The library is designed to fit in with the scientific software ecosystem in this language and can leverage the existing infrastructure developed in that language. Mahotas is released under a liberal open source license (MIT License and is available from http://github.com/luispedro/mahotas and from the Python Package Index (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mahotas. Tutorials and full API documentation are available online at http://mahotas.readthedocs.org/.
尹, 松
2002-01-01
Among the four skills of the language acquisition, it has been pointed out that listening comprehension is the most difficult skill. The research on effective methods of teaching listening comprehension has been carried out from various viewpoints. After introducing the theory of listening comprehension, this review will describe recent trends in the teach-ing of listening as a second/foreign language. This will be done by focusing primarily on schema activator and strategy-instruction in tea...
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Ergeshali kyzy A.
2017-01-01
Full Text Available this article describes some theoretical tasks of multicultural education of teenagers in foreign language teaching. The work also has analyzed inter-functional influence of the language and culture in the process of foreign language teaching.
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Joelton Duarte de Santana
2012-06-01
Full Text Available Language as a social element is constitutive to every human being. Language gives each person, as well as to his or her own linguistic community, an individual and peculiar way to figure out the world and its surroundings. Language is influenced by several processes, including sociocultural and historical ones. If we say that each language may allow its speaker to do a very own world reading, a question about its language behavior in other continents arises. This way we were able to understand how sociocultural influences could improve the whole cultural identity construction process. Both defining linguistic communities and specifying social groups, language becomes a symbolic space of identification. The movie – Language- lives In Portuguese reunites Portuguese speakers reports around the world aiming to illustrate Portuguese language as a nations identity construction, autoafirmation and legitimation factor through social, cultural and historic processes. This study is based on the belief in such a kind of dialogism between Language and Culture. The sociolinguistic studies nowadays do not intend, as they used to, understanding or describing structural language aspects and very individuals ones, but especially to reflect upon relations among subject, language, identity, culture and history.
A Cognitive Approach to Tantric Language
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Sthaneshwar Timalsina
2016-11-01
Full Text Available By applying the contemporary theories of schema, metonymy, metaphor, and conceptual blending, I argue in this paper that salient cognitive categories facilitate a deeper analysis of Tantric language. Tantras use a wide range of symbolic language expressed in terms of mantric speech and visual maṇḍalas, and Tantric texts relate the process of deciphering meaning with the surge of mystical experience. In this essay, I will focus on some distinctive varieties of Tantric language with a conviction that select cognitive tools facilitate coherent reading of these expressions. Mystical language broadly utilizes images and metaphors. Deciphering Tantric language should therefore also provide a framework for reading other varieties of mystical expressions across cultures.
Kobayashi, Keiichi
2014-01-01
This study investigated students' spontaneous use of source information for the resolution of conflicts between texts. One-hundred fifty-four undergraduate students read two conflicting explanations concerning the relationship between blood type and personality under two conditions: either one explanation with a higher credibility source and…
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Margarita Rosa Vargas Torres
2010-10-01
Full Text Available This article states that in order to exercise citizenship with responsibility, language teachers need to popularize a discourse for criticism in which students and teachers transcend tacit knowledge and common sense due to meta-cognition and argumentation and reach systematic knowledge and procedures posed by experts in the different disciplines. As illustrated inside, the source and objective of analysis by means of which this discourse can be contextualized in language teaching is the language of mass media and all the sociocultural and signifying practices that it invokes. We conclude that through the analysis of mass media it is possible to educate students with the basic knowledge and skills necessary to interact critically in the world.
ANGLICISMS IN THE ECONOMIC TERMINOLOGY OF THE CROATIAN LANGUAGE AND THE STANDARD LANGUAGE NORM
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Branka Drljača
2006-01-01
Full Text Available The standard language norm fulfils two basic requirements: stability of language and its development. The former covers replacing of foreign terms with Croatian equivalents or at least their adaptation according to the rules of the Croatian language. The latter implies fulfilling new lexical needs. The economic power of the United States of America is reflected in the influence of the English language on term-formation in Croatian. Acceptance of lexical innovations is primarily gained due to the language of the media.
The geometry description markup language
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Chytracek, R.
2001-01-01
Currently, a lot of effort is being put on designing complex detectors. A number of simulation and reconstruction frameworks and applications have been developed with the aim to make this job easier. A very important role in this activity is played by the geometry description of the detector apparatus layout and its working environment. However, no real common approach to represent geometry data is available and such data can be found in various forms starting from custom semi-structured text files, source code (C/C++/FORTRAN), to XML and database solutions. The XML (Extensible Markup Language) has proven to provide an interesting approach for describing detector geometries, with several different but incompatible XML-based solutions existing. Therefore, interoperability and geometry data exchange among different frameworks is not possible at present. The author introduces a markup language for geometry descriptions. Its aim is to define a common approach for sharing and exchanging of geometry description data. Its requirements and design have been driven by experience and user feedback from existing projects which have their geometry description in XML
The Meta-Language of Advertising in a Synergetic Vision of the World (in English Language
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Aila E. Zhumabekova
2016-06-01
Full Text Available The relevance of this article is determined by necessity of consideration of the metalanguage, which is considered a language that expresses the hidden meaning of advertising through natural language, from the point of view of linguistic analysis in the synergy aspect as a main tool used by the metalanguage in the process of representation created in the framework of this direction terminology. The article creates a lexical reservoir used on the respective orientation, which detects the connection with the language phenomena and the facts in our case in advertising. Formed the language of "second order", which is the object of the natural language in all its manifestations. The new synergetic way of thinking in the meta-language of advertising is nonlinear, and evolutionary. This is the current stage of development of linguistics as an attempt of system description meta-language of advertising and its effects on customers are different segments of the population, that is, a synergistic perception of the content of advertising texts in English and their components.
Home language shift and its implications for Chinese language teaching in Singapore
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Li Li
2016-12-01
Full Text Available In a bilingual society like Singapore, home language environment (HLE of Singaporean children is becoming increasingly concerned, especially for those who are yet to have formal education in schools. The reported rapid shift of family language has increased the tensions among families, schools and communities. This study examined some of the many facets of Singaporean Chinese preschoolers’ HLE, and further discussed how these facets are related to children’s Chinese language proficiency in oral and written forms. Three hundred and seventy-six Singaporean Chinese six-year olds completed Chinese oral and written language proficiency screening. Their parents completed a HLE survey. The findings revealed the possible trend of home language shift from Mandarin Chinese to English in the younger generation. Aside from home language use factors, the importance of other facets that form a rich language environment is also highlighted for children's language development.
The Sources of Authority for Shamanic Speech: Examples from the Kham-Magar of Nepal
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Anne de Sales
2016-10-01
Full Text Available This article tries to identify the sources of authority that allow the ritual specialists of the Kham-Magar community to act as its spokespersons with invisible partners and say the truth. The author partly challenges Bourdieu’s vision that ritual techniques such as ritual language are mainly techniques of domination. She explores, rather, the truth conditions of shamanic speech and the pragmatic effects of the ritual use of language, including a complex definition of the performer.
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Chun Lai
2006-09-01
Full Text Available This study examined the capacity of text-based online chat to promote learners’ noticing of their problematic language productions and of the interactional feedback from their interlocutors. In this study, twelve ESL learners formed six mixed-proficiency dyads. The same dyads worked on two spot-the-difference tasks, one via online chat and the other through face-to-face conversation. Stimulated recall sessions were held subsequently to identify instances of noticing. It was found that text-based online chat promotes noticing more than face-to-face conversations, especially in terms of learners’ noticing of their own linguistic mistakes.
Balance Toward Language Mastery
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Virginia R. Heslinga
2017-01-01
Full Text Available Problems in attaining language mastery with students from diverse language backgrounds and levels of ability confront educators around the world. Experiments, research, and experience see positive effects of adding sign language in communication methods to pre-school and K-12 education. Augmentative, alternative, interactive, accommodating, and enriching strategies using sign language aid learners in balancing the skills needed to mastery of one language or multiple languages. Theories of learning that embrace play, drama, motion, repetition, socializing, and self-efficacy connect to the options for using sign language with learners in inclusive and mainstream classes. The methodical use of sign language by this researcher-educator over two and a half decades showed signing does build thinking skills, add enjoyment, stimulate communication, expand comprehension, increase vocabulary acquisition, encourage collaboration, and helps build appreciation for cultural diversity.
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Janus Ruel T. Cabazares
2016-12-01
Full Text Available In the Filipino version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, only a single deontic modal marker is found, a curious absence given that such a category conveys the performative function crucial to the language used in laws. Regardless of the current attitude against seeking equivalence in translation analysis, questioning the semantics of the target text (TT is a necessary endeavour for the translation of legal texts, whether or not the relevant linguistic features of the TT language contribute to or facilitate the expression of any of the properties of deontic modality (DM. To this end, the paper analyzes the Filipino translation of the UDHR to look for this type of semantic category. The analysis of the TT focuses on three important points: [1] use of the prospective aspect does not contribute to the expression of the necessary features of DM, notwithstanding their shared notion of futurity; [2] volition, an essential part of DM, is implied by the transitivity triggered by the TT verb voice, but the source and perspective of the volition is different; and [3] use of the modal marker dapat (i.e., necessary carries the primary features of DM. The paper suggests that the consistent use of this modal marker can assign a performative function to the TT, a trait that helps define the source text (ST as a legal text. The study can offer helpful points to translators of legal documents and other forms of technical translation. The methods used can help future translation analyses by providing conceptual tools for the semantic comparison of the linguistic traits of an ST and TT, particularly the semantic representation of Filipino sentences including the transitivity of the verb and modality. Ultimately, the study hopes to contribute to quality translations of text as part of promoting the intellectualization of Filipino and other Philippine languages.
How does language model size effects speech recognition accuracy for the Turkish language?
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Behnam ASEFİSARAY
2016-05-01
Full Text Available In this paper we aimed at investigating the effect of Language Model (LM size on Speech Recognition (SR accuracy. We also provided details of our approach for obtaining the LM for Turkish. Since LM is obtained by statistical processing of raw text, we expect that by increasing the size of available data for training the LM, SR accuracy will improve. Since this study is based on recognition of Turkish, which is a highly agglutinative language, it is important to find out the appropriate size for the training data. The minimum required data size is expected to be much higher than the data needed to train a language model for a language with low level of agglutination such as English. In the experiments we also tried to adjust the Language Model Weight (LMW and Active Token Count (ATC parameters of LM as these are expected to be different for a highly agglutinative language. We showed that by increasing the training data size to an appropriate level, the recognition accuracy improved on the other hand changes on LMW and ATC did not have a positive effect on Turkish speech recognition accuracy.
Accounting Knowledge Representation in PROLOG Language
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Bogdan Patrut
2010-03-01
Full Text Available This paper presents some original techniques for implementing accounting knowledge in PROLOG language. We will represent rules of operation of accounts, the texts of accounting operations, and how to compute the depreciation.Keywords: accounting, knowledge representation, PROLOG, depreciation, natural language processing
Structured multi-stream command language
International Nuclear Information System (INIS)
Glad, A.S.
1982-12-01
A multi-stream command language was implemented to provide the sequential and decision-making operations necessary to run the neutral-beam ion sources connected to the Doublet III tokamak fusion device. A multi-stream command language was implemented in Pascal on a Classic 7870 running under MAX IV. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, to provide a brief description of the programs comprising the command language including the operating system interaction. Second, to give a description of the language syntax and commands necessary to develop a procedure stream. Third, to provide a description of the normal operating procedures for executing either the sequential or interactive streams
LINGUISTIC DATABASE FOR AUTOMATIC GENERATION SYSTEM OF ENGLISH ADVERTISING TEXTS
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N. A. Metlitskaya
2017-01-01
Full Text Available The article deals with the linguistic database for the system of automatic generation of English advertising texts on cosmetics and perfumery. The database for such a system includes two main blocks: automatic dictionary (that contains semantic and morphological information for each word, and semantic-syntactical formulas of the texts in a special formal language SEMSINT. The database is built on the result of the analysis of 30 English advertising texts on cosmetics and perfumery. First, each word was given a unique code. For example, N stands for nouns, A – for adjectives, V – for verbs, etc. Then all the lexicon of the analyzed texts was distributed into different semantic categories. According to this semantic classification each word was given a special semantic code. For example, the record N01 that is attributed to the word «lip» in the dictionary means that this word refers to nouns of the semantic category «part of a human’s body».The second block of the database includes the semantic-syntactical formulas of the analyzed advertising texts written in a special formal language SEMSINT. The author gives a brief description of this language, presenting its essence and structure. Also, an example of one formalized advertising text in SEMSINT is provided.
The Importance of Culture in Second and Foreign Language Learning
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Sheeraz Ali
2015-06-01
Full Text Available English has been designated as a source of intercultural communication among the people from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. A range of linguistic and cultural theories contribute meaningful insights on the development of competence in intercultural communication. The speculations suggest the use of communicative strategies focusing on the development of learners’ efficiency in communicating language through cultural context. However, the teaching of culture in communication has not been paid due importance in a number of academic and language settings of Pakistan and Iran. This assignment study indicates problems in view of teaching English as a medium of instruction in public sector colleges of interior Sindh, Pakistan and prescribed textbooks in Iranian schools. It also aims to identify drawbacks and shortcoming in prescribed textbooks for intermediate students at college level and schools. Therefore, the assignment study recommends integration of cultural awareness into a language teaching programme for an overall achievement of competence in intercultural communication.
An Efficient and Flexible Implementation of Aspect-Oriented Languages
Bockisch, Christoph
2008-01-01
Compilers for modern object-oriented programming languages generate code in a platform independent intermediate language preserving the concepts of the source language; for example, classes, fields, methods, and virtual or static dispatch can be directly identified within the intermediate code. To
Potential risks of "risk" language in breastfeeding advocacy.
Wallace, Lora J Ebert; Taylor, Erin N
2011-06-21
In this article the authors analyze the use of "risks of formula language" versus "benefits of breastfeeding language" in breastfeeding advocacy texts. Feeding intentionality and 434 adult respondents' assessments of advocacy texts were examined at a mid-western university in the fall of 2009. No significant difference was observed between those who read text phrased in terms of "risks of formula feeding" and those who read text describing "benefits of breastfeeding" in feeding intentionality. Results supported the expectation that respondents would less favorably assess texts using risk language-respondents rated risk texts as less trustworthy, accurate, and helpful compared to benefit text. Texts were also varied in "medical" and "breastfeeding advocacy group" affiliations. Analyses revealed that texts including the medical logo were rated significantly more favorably compared to breastfeeding advocacy logo and no logo conditions. Findings suggest that use of risk language may not be an advantageous health promotion strategy, but may be counter-productive to the goals of breastfeeding advocates.
Sex differences in foreign language text comprehension : The role of interests and prior knowledge
Bügel, K; Buunk, Abraham (Bram)
1996-01-01
The scores obtained by female students on the national foreign language examinations in the Netherlands have been slightly but consistently lower than those of male students. The present research among 2980 high school students tested the hypothesis that, owing to sex differences in prior knowledge
Dascălu, Mihai
2014-01-01
With the advent and increasing popularity of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and e-learning technologies, the need of automatic assessment and of teacher/tutor support for the two tightly intertwined activities of comprehension of reading materials and of collaboration among peers has grown significantly. In this context, a polyphonic model of discourse derived from Bakhtin’s work as a paradigm is used for analyzing both general texts and CSCL conversations in a unique framework focused on different facets of textual cohesion. As specificity of our analysis, the individual learning perspective is focused on the identification of reading strategies and on providing a multi-dimensional textual complexity model, whereas the collaborative learning dimension is centered on the evaluation of participants’ involvement, as well as on collaboration assessment. Our approach based on advanced Natural Language Processing techniques provides a qualitative estimation of the learning process and enhance...
Language and embodied consciousness: A Peircean ontological ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
An ontology of language: its source and place in First Language ... knowledge they supposedly gain in school with their immediate environment and their lived .... looking stick in space looks bent at the point it enters the medium of water.
ACOUSTIC SPEECH RECOGNITION FOR MARATHI LANGUAGE USING SPHINX
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Aman Ankit
2016-09-01
Full Text Available Speech recognition or speech to text processing, is a process of recognizing human speech by the computer and converting into text. In speech recognition, transcripts are created by taking recordings of speech as audio and their text transcriptions. Speech based applications which include Natural Language Processing (NLP techniques are popular and an active area of research. Input to such applications is in natural language and output is obtained in natural language. Speech recognition mostly revolves around three approaches namely Acoustic phonetic approach, Pattern recognition approach and Artificial intelligence approach. Creation of acoustic model requires a large database of speech and training algorithms. The output of an ASR system is recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers and computerized devices. ASR today finds enormous application in tasks that require human machine interfaces like, voice dialing, and etc. Our key contribution in this paper is to create corpora for Marathi language and explore the use of Sphinx engine for automatic speech recognition
LANGUAGE AWARENESS IN AN INTERNET CHAT ROOM
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Leszek Szymański
2013-10-01
Full Text Available When communicating on the Internet, the participants, so to say, mingle two traditional modes of communication: writing and speech. The phenomenon appears to be most noticeable in chat room interactions. This suggestion is based on the fact that users try to behave as though they are engaged in a spoken act of communication, though the actual medium of communication employs written language forms. Therefore, Internet users need to know what conventions to employ and how to perform such actions in order to express the desired meanings, all with the aim of driving the interaction as close as possible to speech. Such implementations of certain language-related customs require a specific kind of language awareness from the users. This concept, plus the applied conventions, constitute the essence of this article. The discussion begins with an introduction to the research problem, in this case the intentional utilization by Internet chat participants of the graphic mode of communication in order to express their desired meanings. Second, the reader becomes acquainted with the terminology used in the paper, which includes: language awareness, (Internet chat, and (language corpus. Moreover, the source of the studied language material—a corpus of Internet chats—is presented. The said description additionally includes the informants’ characteristics, as well as the topicality of their conversations. The further sections of the paper discus the application of selected non-normative spelling conventions and word-formation processes, with the support of examples taken from the corpus. Based on the discussion, an attempt is made to indicate which features comprise certain values to the participants of Internet chats.
Text Mining the History of Medicine.
Thompson, Paul; Batista-Navarro, Riza Theresa; Kontonatsios, Georgios; Carter, Jacob; Toon, Elizabeth; McNaught, John; Timmermann, Carsten; Worboys, Michael; Ananiadou, Sophia
2016-01-01
Historical text archives constitute a rich and diverse source of information, which is becoming increasingly readily accessible, due to large-scale digitisation efforts. However, it can be difficult for researchers to explore and search such large volumes of data in an efficient manner. Text mining (TM) methods can help, through their ability to recognise various types of semantic information automatically, e.g., instances of concepts (places, medical conditions, drugs, etc.), synonyms/variant forms of concepts, and relationships holding between concepts (which drugs are used to treat which medical conditions, etc.). TM analysis allows search systems to incorporate functionality such as automatic suggestions of synonyms of user-entered query terms, exploration of different concepts mentioned within search results or isolation of documents in which concepts are related in specific ways. However, applying TM methods to historical text can be challenging, according to differences and evolutions in vocabulary, terminology, language structure and style, compared to more modern text. In this article, we present our efforts to overcome the various challenges faced in the semantic analysis of published historical medical text dating back to the mid 19th century. Firstly, we used evidence from diverse historical medical documents from different periods to develop new resources that provide accounts of the multiple, evolving ways in which concepts, their variants and relationships amongst them may be expressed. These resources were employed to support the development of a modular processing pipeline of TM tools for the robust detection of semantic information in historical medical documents with varying characteristics. We applied the pipeline to two large-scale medical document archives covering wide temporal ranges as the basis for the development of a publicly accessible semantically-oriented search system. The novel resources are available for research purposes, while
Learners Programming Language a Helping System for Introductory Programming Courses
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MUHAMMAD SHUMAIL NAVEED
2016-07-01
Full Text Available Programming is the core of computer science and due to this momentousness a special care is taken in designing the curriculum of programming courses. A substantial work has been conducted on the definition of programming courses, yet the introductory programming courses are still facing high attrition, low retention and lack of motivation. This paper introduced a tiny pre-programming language called LPL (Learners Programming Language as a ZPL (Zeroth Programming Language to illuminate novice students about elementary concepts of introductory programming before introducing the first imperative programming course. The overall objective and design philosophy of LPL is based on a hypothesis that the soft introduction of a simple and paradigm specific textual programming can increase the motivation level of novice students and reduce the congenital complexities and hardness of the first programming course and eventually improve the retention rate and may be fruitful in reducing the dropout/failure level. LPL also generates the equivalent high level programs from user source program and eventually very fruitful in understanding the syntax of introductory programming languages. To overcome the inherent complexities of unusual and rigid syntax of introductory programming languages, the LPL provide elementary programming concepts in the form of algorithmic and plain natural language based computational statements. The initial results obtained after the introduction of LPL are very encouraging in motivating novice students and improving the retention rate.
Formal language constrained path problems
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Barrett, C.; Jacob, R.; Marathe, M.
1997-07-08
In many path finding problems arising in practice, certain patterns of edge/vertex labels in the labeled graph being traversed are allowed/preferred, while others are disallowed. Motivated by such applications as intermodal transportation planning, the authors investigate the complexity of finding feasible paths in a labeled network, where the mode choice for each traveler is specified by a formal language. The main contributions of this paper include the following: (1) the authors show that the problem of finding a shortest path between a source and destination for a traveler whose mode choice is specified as a context free language is solvable efficiently in polynomial time, when the mode choice is specified as a regular language they provide algorithms with improved space and time bounds; (2) in contrast, they show that the problem of finding simple paths between a source and a given destination is NP-hard, even when restricted to very simple regular expressions and/or very simple graphs; (3) for the class of treewidth bounded graphs, they show that (i) the problem of finding a regular language constrained simple path between source and a destination is solvable in polynomial time and (ii) the extension to finding context free language constrained simple paths is NP-complete. Several extensions of these results are presented in the context of finding shortest paths with additional constraints. These results significantly extend the results in [MW95]. As a corollary of the results, they obtain a polynomial time algorithm for the BEST k-SIMILAR PATH problem studied in [SJB97]. The previous best algorithm was given by [SJB97] and takes exponential time in the worst case.
Green, Anthony; Hawkey, Roger
2012-01-01
The important yet under-researched role of item writers in the selection and adaptation of texts for high-stakes reading tests is investigated through a case study involving a group of trained item writers working on the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). In the first phase of the study, participants were invited to reflect in…
The Balinese Unicode Text Processing
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Imam Habibi
2009-06-01
Full Text Available In principal, the computer only recognizes numbers as the representation of a character. Therefore, there are many encoding systems to allocate these numbers although not all characters are covered. In Europe, every single language even needs more than one encoding system. Hence, a new encoding system known as Unicode has been established to overcome this problem. Unicode provides unique id for each different characters which does not depend on platform, program, and language. Unicode standard has been applied in a number of industries, such as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, and Unisys. In addition, language standards and modern information exchanges such as XML, Java, ECMA Script (JavaScript, LDAP, CORBA 3.0, and WML make use of Unicode as an official tool for implementing ISO/IEC 10646. There are four things to do according to Balinese script: the algorithm of transliteration, searching, sorting, and word boundary analysis (spell checking. To verify the truth of algorithm, some applications are made. These applications can run on Linux/Windows OS platform using J2SDK 1.5 and J2ME WTK2 library. The input and output of the algorithm/application are character sequence that is obtained from keyboard punch and external file. This research produces a module or a library which is able to process the Balinese text based on Unicode standard. The output of this research is the ability, skill, and mastering of 1. Unicode standard (21-bit as a substitution to ASCII (7-bit and ISO8859-1 (8-bit as the former default character set in many applications. 2. The Balinese Unicode text processing algorithm. 3. An experience of working with and learning from an international team that consists of the foremost experts in the area: Michael Everson (Ireland, Peter Constable (Microsoft US, I Made Suatjana, and Ida Bagus Adi Sudewa.
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Nielsen, Sandro
2014-01-01
production process reveal that this also includes grammar, language conventions, genre conventions and style. Specialists can be expected to know conventions and style in their own source language culture but cannot be expected to know how these are realised in a foreign language. Bilingual specialised...... dictionaries can help users if they contain domain-specific example sentences illustrating how source language convention and style can be transposed to a foreign language. This means that bilingual specialised dictionaries should not merely help users translate terms but be lexicographical tools designed...
A Review on Developing Critical Thinking Skills through Literary Texts
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Noraini Ahmad Shukri
2015-04-01
Full Text Available Many ESL instructors are generally in agreement with the belief that it is essential that students should be assisted in developing critical thinking skills while being engaged in their language learning process especially those learning the target language at higher level (Stern, 1985; Dickinson, 1991; McKay, 2001; Terry, 2007; Van, 2009; Odenwald, 2010. As it enables language learners to engage in a more purposeful and self-regulatory in judgment, helping them in their evaluation of the arguments of others and of their own, coming to well-reasoned resolutions to any complex problems and to be able to resolve conflicts encountered in their daily lives. Critical thinking requires them to be actively involved in their own learning process as they attempt to individually understand and apply the information they are exposed to during the classroom interaction (Landsberger, 1999; Tung & Chang, 2009. The many advantageous and feasibility of teaching instruction that incorporates the study of literature in the ESL classroom which suggests that literature texts, if correctly chosen and instructed, can prove to be beneficial to ESL students’ overall level of literacy and critical thinking skills. Numerous empirical researches also asserted that literary texts that are authentic, enjoyable, and motivating would naturally increase both their knowledge of the target language patterns and cultural awareness. Keywords: Critical thinking, ESL classroom, literature, literary text
Application of LSP Texts in Translator Training
Ilynska, Larisa; Smirnova, Tatjana; Platonova, Marina
2017-01-01
The paper presents discussion of the results of extensive empirical research into efficient methods of educating and training translators of LSP (language for special purposes) texts. The methodology is based on using popular LSP texts in the respective fields as one of the main media for translator training. The aim of the paper is to investigate…
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Maria Eugenia Guapacha Chamorro
2017-07-01
Full Text Available This paper reports an action-research study on language learning strategies in tertiary education at a Colombian university. The study aimed at improving the English language performance and language learning strategies use of 33 first-year pre-service language teachers by combining elements from two models: the cognitive academic language learning approach and task-based language teaching. Data were gathered through surveys, a focus group, students’ and teachers’ journals, language tests, and documentary analysis. Results evidenced that the students improved in speaking, writing, grammar, vocabulary and in their language learning strategies repertoire. As a conclusion, explicit strategy instruction in the proposed model resulted in a proper combination to improve learners’ language learning strategies and performance.
RAY TRACING IMPLEMENTATION IN JAVA PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE
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Aybars UĞUR
2002-01-01
Full Text Available In this paper realism in computer graphics and components providing realism are discussed at first. It is mentioned about illumination models, surface rendering methods and light sources for this aim. After that, ray tracing which is a technique for creating two dimensional image of a three-dimensional virtual environment is explained briefly. A simple ray tracing algorithm was given. "SahneIzle" which is a ray tracing program implemented in Java programming language which can be used on the internet is introduced. As a result, importance of network-centric ray tracing software is discussed.
Layout-aware text extraction from full-text PDF of scientific articles
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Ramakrishnan Cartic
2012-05-01
Full Text Available Abstract Background The Portable Document Format (PDF is the most commonly used file format for online scientific publications. The absence of effective means to extract text from these PDF files in a layout-aware manner presents a significant challenge for developers of biomedical text mining or biocuration informatics systems that use published literature as an information source. In this paper we introduce the ‘Layout-Aware PDF Text Extraction’ (LA-PDFText system to facilitate accurate extraction of text from PDF files of research articles for use in text mining applications. Results Our paper describes the construction and performance of an open source system that extracts text blocks from PDF-formatted full-text research articles and classifies them into logical units based on rules that characterize specific sections. The LA-PDFText system focuses only on the textual content of the research articles and is meant as a baseline for further experiments into more advanced extraction methods that handle multi-modal content, such as images and graphs. The system works in a three-stage process: (1 Detecting contiguous text blocks using spatial layout processing to locate and identify blocks of contiguous text, (2 Classifying text blocks into rhetorical categories using a rule-based method and (3 Stitching classified text blocks together in the correct order resulting in the extraction of text from section-wise grouped blocks. We show that our system can identify text blocks and classify them into rhetorical categories with Precision1 = 0.96% Recall = 0.89% and F1 = 0.91%. We also present an evaluation of the accuracy of the block detection algorithm used in step 2. Additionally, we have compared the accuracy of the text extracted by LA-PDFText to the text from the Open Access subset of PubMed Central. We then compared this accuracy with that of the text extracted by the PDF2Text system, 2commonly used to extract text from PDF
On the Diversity of Linguistic Data and the Integration of the Language Sciences
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Roberta D’Alessandro
2017-11-01
Full Text Available An integrated science of language is usually advocated as a step forward for linguistic research. In this paper, we maintain that integration of this sort is premature, and cannot take place before we identify a common object of study. We advocate instead a science of language that is inherently multi-faceted, and takes into account the different viewpoints as well as the different definitions of the object of study. We also advocate the use of different data sources, which, if non-contradictory, can provide more solid evidence for linguistic analysis. Last, we argue that generative grammar is an important tile in the puzzle.
DEEP LEARNING MODEL FOR BILINGUAL SENTIMENT CLASSIFICATION OF SHORT TEXTS
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Y. B. Abdullin
2017-01-01
Full Text Available Sentiment analysis of short texts such as Twitter messages and comments in news portals is challenging due to the lack of contextual information. We propose a deep neural network model that uses bilingual word embeddings to effectively solve sentiment classification problem for a given pair of languages. We apply our approach to two corpora of two different language pairs: English-Russian and Russian-Kazakh. We show how to train a classifier in one language and predict in another. Our approach achieves 73% accuracy for English and 74% accuracy for Russian. For Kazakh sentiment analysis, we propose a baseline method, that achieves 60% accuracy; and a method to learn bilingual embeddings from a large unlabeled corpus using a bilingual word pairs.
Layout-aware text extraction from full-text PDF of scientific articles.
Ramakrishnan, Cartic; Patnia, Abhishek; Hovy, Eduard; Burns, Gully Apc
2012-05-28
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the most commonly used file format for online scientific publications. The absence of effective means to extract text from these PDF files in a layout-aware manner presents a significant challenge for developers of biomedical text mining or biocuration informatics systems that use published literature as an information source. In this paper we introduce the 'Layout-Aware PDF Text Extraction' (LA-PDFText) system to facilitate accurate extraction of text from PDF files of research articles for use in text mining applications. Our paper describes the construction and performance of an open source system that extracts text blocks from PDF-formatted full-text research articles and classifies them into logical units based on rules that characterize specific sections. The LA-PDFText system focuses only on the textual content of the research articles and is meant as a baseline for further experiments into more advanced extraction methods that handle multi-modal content, such as images and graphs. The system works in a three-stage process: (1) Detecting contiguous text blocks using spatial layout processing to locate and identify blocks of contiguous text, (2) Classifying text blocks into rhetorical categories using a rule-based method and (3) Stitching classified text blocks together in the correct order resulting in the extraction of text from section-wise grouped blocks. We show that our system can identify text blocks and classify them into rhetorical categories with Precision1 = 0.96% Recall = 0.89% and F1 = 0.91%. We also present an evaluation of the accuracy of the block detection algorithm used in step 2. Additionally, we have compared the accuracy of the text extracted by LA-PDFText to the text from the Open Access subset of PubMed Central. We then compared this accuracy with that of the text extracted by the PDF2Text system, 2commonly used to extract text from PDF. Finally, we discuss preliminary error analysis for
AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENT‘S DESCRIPTIVE TEXT: SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS PERSPECTIVES
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Rizka Maulina Wulandari
2017-12-01
Full Text Available In Indonesia where different languages co-exist, and where English is used as a foreign language, the learners‘ capabilities in writing toward English plays an important role in formulating effective learning method. This descriptive qualitative research aimed to investigate the student‘s errors in writing descriptive text in SFL perspectives. A secondary, yet important, objective of this research is also to design the appropriate pedagogical plans that can be used for junior high school students in Indonesian education based on the result of the research. The results indicated that the student has good control about the schematic structure of descriptive text although many of his idea still uses Indonesian context which make the reader can be confused in understanding his meaning. It can be concluded that there is intervention from L1, that is Indonesian language, while he wrote his descriptive text.. Hence, the study highlighted that cooperative learning could be an option as an appropriate learning method to solve the students problem on writing descriptive text.
A multiresolutional approach to fuzzy text meaning: A first attempt
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Mehler, A.
1996-12-31
The present paper focuses on the connotative meaning aspect of language signs especially above the level of words. In this context the view is taken that texts can be defined as a kind of supersign, to which-in the same way as to other signs-a meaning can be assigned. A text can therefore be described as the result of a sign articulation which connects the material text sign with a corresponding meaning. For the constitution of the structural text meaning a kind of a semiotic composition principle is responsible, which leads to the emergence of interlocked levels of language units, demonstrating different grades of resolution. Starting on the level of words, and going through the level of sentences this principle reaches finally the level of texts by aggregating step by step the meaning of a unit on a higher level out of the meanings of all components one level below, which occur within this unit. Besides, this article will elaborate the hypothesis that the meaning constitution as a two-stage process, corresponding to the syntagmatic and paradigmatic restrictions of language elements among each other, obtains equally on the level of texts. On text level this two-levelledness leads to the constitution of the connotative text meaning, whose constituents are determined on word level by the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations of the words. The formalization of the text meaning representation occurs with the help of fuzzy set theory.
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Adi Suryani
2017-04-01
Full Text Available The flourish of ICT and complexity of today‘s social-cultural and technological issues entails a strong need for a change in education. Today‘s education should be more directed outward by observing what happens in the society instead of just inward by indoctrinating certain perspectives and memorizing facts. Thus, it is not classroomcentred education anymore, but it is now becoming society-centred and being the miniature of society. Today‘s classrooms are expected to facilitate broader and various learning process, dynamic mental process and provide autonomy and creativity for students to construct their own knowledge by observing, sensing and learning from society. Through this process, students can see society as place and source of learning. Learning from society can also trigger social learning. Together, the aspect of observing issues emerging in society and being able to accommodate various perspectives in jointlearning lay the foundation for creating socio-affective conscious learners. This study aims to explore how and what the students can learn by observing, thinking, feeling and proposing problem solving for social, cultural and technological issues in joint-learning and what challenges they encounter during their learning process. The data is grounded on students‘ reflective notes and the result of collaborated problem solving in groups in language classroom. The data shows that the students learn some constellations of socioaffective learning aspects. Those are the exercises of multiple sensory, social learning (awareness, coordination, affinity, sharing, respect, communication, emotional learning (regulation, awareness, positive emotional contagion in group, adaptive. Their sensory, social and affective learning are enhanced by ICT.
Text genres and registers the computation of linguistic features
Fang, Chengyu Alex
2015-01-01
This book is a description of some of the most recent advances in text classification as part of a concerted effort to achieve computer understanding of human language. In particular, it addresses state-of-the-art developments in the computation of higher-level linguistic features, ranging from etymology to grammar and syntax for the practical task of text classification according to genres, registers and subject domains. Serving as a bridge between computational methods and sophisticated linguistic analysis, this book will be of particular interest to academics and students of computational linguistics as well as professionals in natural language engineering.
Competing Desires and Realities: Language Policies in the French-Language Classroom
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Angela Giovanangeli
2009-03-01
Full Text Available French language policy has historically centred on ways French can be considered a dominant and influential language. It has done this since the Middle Ages, by allowing the French language to serve as a political tool. On an international level, language was a way of subjugating conquered peoples (former colonies. It promoted France’s international status (by the 18th century French was the diplomatic language of Europe. On a national level, the French language was one of the ways governments were able to centralise political power (suppression of regional languages. One of the ways French language authorities have promoted the use of language has been through education policies and the way language is taught in schools. For example, the French language was imposed on the colonised territories of France through teaching in missionary schools. Within France, stringent laws were adopted, in particular during the nineteenth century, allowing the French language to replace local languages in schools. In France today, language policies continue to exist and to have an influence on the way we view language and society. One of the main priorities of French language policy is to protect the status of the national language in particular with respect to the increasing use of English as a global dominant language in areas such as science, technology, tourism, entertainment and the media (Nunan: 2007, 178. Consequently, France has adopted policies to respond to this linguistic climate. This has implications on the way the French language is taught both within France as well as outside of France. This paper will examine some of the policies and agencies created over recent years that affect the French language. It will also identify some of the consequences these policies have on the teaching of language. Finally it will argue that a space has been created within the language classroom that attempts to find a compromise between the language policies of
Knowledge Representation in Travelling Texts
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Mousten, Birthe; Locmele, Gunta
2014-01-01
Today, information travels fast. Texts travel, too. In a corporate context, the question is how to manage which knowledge elements should travel to a new language area or market and in which form? The decision to let knowledge elements travel or not travel highly depends on the limitation...... and the purpose of the text in a new context as well as on predefined parameters for text travel. For texts used in marketing and in technology, the question is whether culture-bound knowledge representation should be domesticated or kept as foreign elements, or should be mirrored or moulded—or should not travel...... at all! When should semantic and pragmatic elements in a text be replaced and by which other elements? The empirical basis of our work is marketing and technical texts in English, which travel into the Latvian and Danish markets, respectively....
Flanagan, David
2008-01-01
This book begins with a quick-start tutorial to the language, and then explains the language in detail from the bottom up: from lexical and syntactic structure to datatypes to expressions and statements and on through methods, blocks, lambdas, closures, classes and modules. The book also includes a long and thorough introduction to the rich API of the Ruby platform, demonstrating -- with heavily-commented example code -- Ruby's facilities for text processing, numeric manipulation, collections, input/output, networking, and concurrency. An entire chapter is devoted to Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities. The Ruby Programming Language documents the Ruby language definitively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to challenge their understanding and increase their mastery of the language.
Momota, Ryusuke; Ohtsuka, Aiji
2018-01-01
Anatomy is the science and art of understanding the structure of the body and its components in relation to the functions of the whole-body system. Medicine is based on a deep understanding of anatomy, but quite a few introductory-level learners are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of anatomical terminology that must be understood, so they regard anatomy as a dull and dense subject. To help them learn anatomical terms in a more contextual way, we started a new open-source project, the Network of Anatomical Texts (NAnaTex), which visualizes relationships of body components by integrating text-based anatomical information using Cytoscape, a network visualization software platform. Here, we present a network of bones and muscles produced from literature descriptions. As this network is primarily text-based and does not require any programming knowledge, it is easy to implement new functions or provide extra information by making changes to the original text files. To facilitate collaborations, we deposited the source code files for the network into the GitHub repository ( https://github.com/ryusukemomota/nanatex ) so that anybody can participate in the evolution of the network and use it for their own non-profit purposes. This project should help not only introductory-level learners but also professional medical practitioners, who could use it as a quick reference.
Cross-lingual parser selection for low-resource languages
DEFF Research Database (Denmark)
Agic, Zeljko
2017-01-01
In multilingual dependency parsing, transferring delexicalized models provides unmatched language coverage and competitive scores, with minimal requirements. Still, selecting the single best parser for any target language poses a challenge. Here, we propose a lean method for parser selection. It ....... It offers top performance, and it does so without disadvantaging the truly low-resource languages. We consistently select appropriate source parsers for our target languages in a realistic cross-lingual parsing experiment....
Linguacultural space “Man-Nature” in literary texts: cognitive and pragmatic approach
Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)
Eldarova Ruzanna Alievna
2016-06-01
Full Text Available The magnitude of representation of nature images, the links to the author’s mind, the hero, the reader can be considered in literary texts as one of the most important sources for identifying the parameters of the national picture of the world and the individually author’s transformation of its components. Researches that identify patterns of functioning linguacultural spaces in the texts are able to give new results projected in the linguistic picture of the ethnic group of the world due to reflections in literary texts of archetypal, stereotyped images of peculiar linguistic culture and ethnic group as a whole as well as individually-copyright, which characterize a particular linguistic identity and its conception of the world. Cognitive paradigm of modern linguistics, anthropocentric in nature allows to consider culture as a process modeling language, which naturally highlights the problem of linguistic linguaculture of predetermined value. Great importance in this regard is the concept of space as linguocultural cognitive model of objective reality. Cognitive-pragmatic potential of a literary text is deepening due to the introduction the descriptions of nature, since they always implement the ethical, aesthetic, and intellectual abilities of the creative subject.
Basic Test Framework for the Evaluation of Text Line Segmentation and Text Parameter Extraction
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Darko Brodić
2010-05-01
Full Text Available Text line segmentation is an essential stage in off-line optical character recognition (OCR systems. It is a key because inaccurately segmented text lines will lead to OCR failure. Text line segmentation of handwritten documents is a complex and diverse problem, complicated by the nature of handwriting. Hence, text line segmentation is a leading challenge in handwritten document image processing. Due to inconsistencies in measurement and evaluation of text segmentation algorithm quality, some basic set of measurement methods is required. Currently, there is no commonly accepted one and all algorithm evaluation is custom oriented. In this paper, a basic test framework for the evaluation of text feature extraction algorithms is proposed. This test framework consists of a few experiments primarily linked to text line segmentation, skew rate and reference text line evaluation. Although they are mutually independent, the results obtained are strongly cross linked. In the end, its suitability for different types of letters and languages as well as its adaptability are its main advantages. Thus, the paper presents an efficient evaluation method for text analysis algorithms.
Using Specification and Description Language for Life Cycle Assesment in Buildings
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Pau Fonseca i Casas
2017-06-01
Full Text Available The definition of a Life Cycle Assesment (LCA for a building or an urban area is a complex task due to the inherent complexity of all the elements that must be considered. Furthermore, a multidisciplinary approach is required due to the different sources of knowledge involved in this project. This multidisciplinary approach makes it necessary to use formal language to fully represent the complexity of the used models. In this paper, we explore the use of Specification and Description Language (SDL to represent the LCA of a building and residential area. We also introduce a tool that uses this idea to implement an optimization and simulation mechanism to define the optimal solution for the sustainability of a specific building or residential.
Input and language development in bilingually developing children.
Hoff, Erika; Core, Cynthia
2013-11-01
Language skills in young bilingual children are highly varied as a result of the variability in their language experiences, making it difficult for speech-language pathologists to differentiate language disorder from language difference in bilingual children. Understanding the sources of variability in bilingual contexts and the resulting variability in children's skills will help improve language assessment practices by speech-language pathologists. In this article, we review literature on bilingual first language development for children under 5 years of age. We describe the rate of development in single and total language growth, we describe effects of quantity of input and quality of input on growth, and we describe effects of family composition on language input and language growth in bilingual children. We provide recommendations for language assessment of young bilingual children and consider implications for optimizing children's dual language development. Thieme Medical Publishers 333 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10001, USA.
Reading in Asian Languages: Making Sense of Written Texts in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
Goodman, Kenneth S., Ed.; Wang, Shaomei, Ed.; Iventosch, Mieko, Ed.; Goodman, Yetta M., Ed.
2011-01-01
"Reading in Asian Languages" is rich with information about how literacy works in the non-alphabetic writing systems (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) used by hundreds of millions of people and refutes the common Western belief that such systems are hard to learn or to use. The contributors share a comprehensive view of reading as construction…
Instructional Text: The Transition from Page to Screen.
Kerr, Stephen T.
1986-01-01
Discusses the types of problems that arise when text is presented in electronic form: (1) surface design, which involves typography, layout, graphics and illustrations, and the quality of language; and (2) interface design, which is manifested on the levels of immediate surface of the text, internal structure, and external structure. (SKC)
Planning Multisentential English Text Using Communicative Acts
1990-12-01
Composition, Vol. XI in series Advances in Discourse Processing, Alex Publishing Corporation. de Joia , A. and Stenton, A. 1980. Terms in Linguistics: A Guide to...investigate how attentional constraints relate to text planning and linguistic realization. 14 SUBJECT TE1MS I I N& De OF PAGES Natural Language Generation...surface form? Page I 4. What is the relation of communicative intentions to text structure and surface form? 5. What effects can texts be designed to have
Cellular Phone Text Communication in English Language Among ...
African Journals Online (AJOL)
Considering the place of English in Nigeria, pupils and students are enjoined to use it constantly in their activities including phone calls. In view of the significant roles that cellular phones play in the lives of youths, and sustainable development of the economy, this paper looks into Nigerian youths' cellular phone text ...
Spanish language teacher program
Caraban Gonzalez, Noemi
2017-01-01
These one-week programmes are held in one of the national languages of CERN Member States. National teacher programmes are also open for teachers from other countries speaking the same language. To follow up after each teacher programme, the lecture material and video recordings of selected lectures are archived to act as unique resources for all physics teachers when introducing particle physics into the classroom. CERN provides all scientific, administrative and technical support for the programme free of charge. This includes the scientific content and provision of national language facilitators, lecturers, and guides. However, costs for travel, accommodation and meals have to be covered individually by the teachers or by official sources, e.g. educational foundations or national authorities.
Language, Shyness and Social Contexts: Commentary
Durkin, Kevin
2009-01-01
Language is a gift of special significance to the human species. Whether the source of the generosity is nature or nurture, or some combination, is controversial, but few scientists or laypeople would dispute the evolutionary and practical value of the key mode of communication. From infancy, language is integral to just about everything one does,…
ERRORS AND DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING LEGAL TEXTS
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Camelia, CHIRILA
2014-11-01
Full Text Available Nowadays the accurate translation of legal texts has become highly important as the mistranslation of a passage in a contract, for example, could lead to lawsuits and loss of money. Consequently, the translation of legal texts to other languages faces many difficulties and only professional translators specialised in legal translation should deal with the translation of legal documents and scholarly writings. The purpose of this paper is to analyze translation from three perspectives: translation quality, errors and difficulties encountered in translating legal texts and consequences of such errors in professional translation. First of all, the paper points out the importance of performing a good and correct translation, which is one of the most important elements to be considered when discussing translation. Furthermore, the paper presents an overview of the errors and difficulties in translating texts and of the consequences of errors in professional translation, with applications to the field of law. The paper is also an approach to the differences between languages (English and Romanian that can hinder comprehension for those who have embarked upon the difficult task of translation. The research method that I have used to achieve the objectives of the paper was the content analysis of various Romanian and foreign authors' works.
A Qualitative Study on Foreign Language Teaching Anxiety
İpek, Hülya
2018-01-01
Affective constructs such as motivation, self-esteem, and anxiety play an important role in learning a foreign language. Scholars have conducted many studies to find out how these constructs affect foreign language (FL) learning. They aimed to find out how anxiety affects language learning, the sources of anxiety in FL learners, and how to overcome this anxiety. Teachers were offered various strategies to lower their students’ anxiety. Studies on Foreign Language (FL) anxiety mostly focused o...
Menzerath-Altmann law for distinct word distribution analysis in a large text
Eroglu, Sertac
2013-06-01
The empirical law uncovered by Menzerath and formulated by Altmann, known as the Menzerath-Altmann law (henceforth the MA law), reveals the statistical distribution behavior of human language in various organizational levels. Building on previous studies relating organizational regularities in a language, we propose that the distribution of distinct (or different) words in a large text can effectively be described by the MA law. The validity of the proposition is demonstrated by examining two text corpora written in different languages not belonging to the same language family (English and Turkish). The results show not only that distinct word distribution behavior can accurately be predicted by the MA law, but that this result appears to be language-independent. This result is important not only for quantitative linguistic studies, but also may have significance for other naturally occurring organizations that display analogous organizational behavior. We also deliberately demonstrate that the MA law is a special case of the probability function of the generalized gamma distribution.
THE TEACHING OF FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGE SKILLS IN A SECOND LANGUAGE TO A CHILD WITH AUTISM
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Renee Chong
2006-01-01
Full Text Available This article examined the rate of self-initiated communication acquisition, in a second language, of a child with autism. The language treatment objective was to teach functional communication skills in English through the use of Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS. The findings of this study show that it is possible for a child with autism to acquire functional communication skills in his second language even though he did not possess such communication skills in his first language.
Kotler, R. S.
1983-01-01
File Comparator program IFCOMP, is text file comparator for IBM OS/VScompatable systems. IFCOMP accepts as input two text files and produces listing of differences in pseudo-update form. IFCOMP is very useful in monitoring changes made to software at the source code level.
Knowledge representation and natural language processing
Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)
Weischedel, R.M.
1986-07-01
In principle, natural language and knowledge representation are closely related. This paper investigates this by demonstrating how several natural language phenomena, such as definite reference, ambiguity, ellipsis, ill-formed input, figures of speech, and vagueness, require diverse knowledge sources and reasoning. The breadth of kinds of knowledge needed to represent morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics is surveyed. Furthermore, several current issues in knowledge representation, such as logic versus semantic nets, general-purpose versus special-purpose reasoners, adequacy of first-order logic, wait-and-see strategies, and default reasoning, are illustrated in terms of their relation to natural language processing and how natural language impact the issues.
Estimation of Cross-Lingual News Similarities Using Text-Mining Methods
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Zhouhao Wang
2018-01-01
Full Text Available In this research, two estimation algorithms for extracting cross-lingual news pairs based on machine learning from financial news articles have been proposed. Every second, innumerable text data, including all kinds news, reports, messages, reviews, comments, and tweets are generated on the Internet, and these are written not only in English but also in other languages such as Chinese, Japanese, French, etc. By taking advantage of multi-lingual text resources provided by Thomson Reuters News, we developed two estimation algorithms for extracting cross-lingual news pairs from multilingual text resources. In our first method, we propose a novel structure that uses the word information and the machine learning method effectively in this task. Simultaneously, we developed a bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM based method to calculate cross-lingual semantic text similarity for long text and short text, respectively. Thus, when an important news article is published, users can read similar news articles that are written in their native language using our method.
Leiser, Kara; Heffelfinger, Amy; Kaugars, Astrida
2017-02-01
To examine associations among parent-child relationship characteristics and child cognitive and language outcomes. Preschool children (n = 72) with early neurological insult completed assessments of cognitive and language functioning and participated in a parent-child semi-structured interaction. Quality of the parent-child relationship accounted for a significant amount of unique variance (12%) in predicting children's overall cognitive and language functioning. Impact of neurological insult was a significant predictor. Caregiver-child interactions that are harmonious and reciprocal as evidenced by affective and/or verbal exchanges support children's cognitive and language development. Observations of interactions can guide providers in facilitating child- and family-centered interventions.
Frantzeskou, Georgia; Stamatatos, Efstathios; Gritzalis, Stefanos
Source code authorship analysis is the particular field that attempts to identify the author of a computer program by treating each program as a linguistically analyzable entity. This is usually based on other undisputed program samples from the same author. There are several cases where the application of such a method could be of a major benefit, such as tracing the source of code left in the system after a cyber attack, authorship disputes, proof of authorship in court, etc. In this paper, we present our approach which is based on byte-level n-gram profiles and is an extension of a method that has been successfully applied to natural language text authorship attribution. We propose a simplified profile and a new similarity measure which is less complicated than the algorithm followed in text authorship attribution and it seems more suitable for source code identification since is better able to deal with very small training sets. Experiments were performed on two different data sets, one with programs written in C++ and the second with programs written in Java. Unlike the traditional language-dependent metrics used by previous studies, our approach can be applied to any programming language with no additional cost. The presented accuracy rates are much better than the best reported results for the same data sets.
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Novia Tri Febriani
2017-11-01
Full Text Available Language learning belief and language learning strategies are two essential predictors that have significant effect toward students’ language proficiency. Learners’ belief is dealing with what comes from inside the learners in learning the language, such as foreign language aptitude; difficulty of language learning; nature of language learning; learning and communication strategies; and motivation. Meanwhile, language learning strategies are learners’ plan in achieving certain goals or mastering the target language. A preliminary research was conducted in order to find what strategy mostly used by the learners. It turned out that the strategy mostly used by them was metacognitive strategies. Thus, this study aims to investigate about the correlation between metacognitive strategies and certain belief’ variables in students’ language learning which are foreign language aptitude and motivation. Moreover, twenty postgraduate students of English education department participated in this study. This study used correlational research, in which the BALLI (Beliefs about Language Learning Inventory and SILL (Strategies Inventory for Language Learners questionnaires were adopted as the instruments in collecting the data. The findings of this study indicated that there is negative linear correlation between metacognitive strategy and foreign language aptitude (rXY = -0,049 while there is significant positive linear correlation between metacognitive and motivation (rXY =+0,79 in students’ language learning. Furthermore, this study also provide some recommendations, which is it is expected that there will be more researches use studies using different respondents with various contexts. Secondly, the further research will use both of quantitative and qualitative data relating to this issue in order to make a more accurate data.
Human Rights Texts: Converting Human Rights Primary Source Documents into Data.
Fariss, Christopher J; Linder, Fridolin J; Jones, Zachary M; Crabtree, Charles D; Biek, Megan A; Ross, Ana-Sophia M; Kaur, Taranamol; Tsai, Michael
2015-01-01
We introduce and make publicly available a large corpus of digitized primary source human rights documents which are published annually by monitoring agencies that include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and the United States Department of State. In addition to the digitized text, we also make available and describe document-term matrices, which are datasets that systematically organize the word counts from each unique document by each unique term within the corpus of human rights documents. To contextualize the importance of this corpus, we describe the development of coding procedures in the human rights community and several existing categorical indicators that have been created by human coding of the human rights documents contained in the corpus. We then discuss how the new human rights corpus and the existing human rights datasets can be used with a variety of statistical analyses and machine learning algorithms to help scholars understand how human rights practices and reporting have evolved over time. We close with a discussion of our plans for dataset maintenance, updating, and availability.
LOTUS: Adaptive text search for big linked data
Ilievski, F.; Beek, Wouter; van Erp, Marieke; Rietveld, Laurens; Schlobach, Stefan
2016-01-01
Finding relevant resources on the Semantic Web today is a dirty job: no centralized query service exists and the support for natural language access is limited. We present LOTUS: Linked Open Text Un- leaShed, a text-based entry point to a massive subset of today’s Linked Open Data Cloud. Recognizing
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Thomas Wiben Jensen
2014-07-01
Full Text Available This article argues for a view on languaging as inherently affective. Informed by recent ecological tendencies within cognitive science and distributed language studies a distinction between first order languaging (language as whole-body sense making and second order language (language as system like constraints is put forward. Contrary to common assumptions within linguistics and communication studies separating language-as-a-system from language use (resulting in separations between language vs. body-language and verbal vs. non-verbal communication etc. the first/second order distinction sees language as emanating from behavior making it possible to view emotion and affect as integral parts languaging behavior. Likewise, emotion and affect are studied, not as inner mental states, but as processes of organism-environment interactions. Based on video recordings of interaction between 1 children with special needs, and 2 couple in therapy and the therapist patterns of reciprocal influences between interactants are examined. Through analyzes of affective stance and patterns of inter-affectivity it is exemplified how language and emotion should not be seen as separate phenomena combined in language use, but rather as completely intertwined phenomena in languaging behavior constrained by second order patterns.
The Language Grid: supporting intercultural collaboration
Ishida, T.
2018-03-01
A variety of language resources already exist online. Unfortunately, since many language resources have usage restrictions, it is virtually impossible for each user to negotiate with every language resource provider when combining several resources to achieve the intended purpose. To increase the accessibility and usability of language resources (dictionaries, parallel texts, part-of-speech taggers, machine translators, etc.), we proposed the Language Grid [1]; it wraps existing language resources as atomic services and enables users to create new services by combining the atomic services, and reduces the negotiation costs related to intellectual property rights [4]. Our slogan is “language services from language resources.” We believe that modularization with recombination is the key to creating a full range of customized language environments for various user communities.
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Ahmad Mosa Batianeh
2014-10-01
Full Text Available Abstractــ-This study explored the effects of using online chat and word processors on students' writing skills that include; organizing a text, spelling, punctuation, grammar, phrasal verbs, idioms, idiomatic expressions, pragmatics, creativity, vocabulary growth, content, relational words, conjunctions, authenticity, figures of speech, imagination, coherence, style, socio-cultural aspects, language use, and the production of authentic text. The study group consisted of students in the Department of Languages and Translation at Taibah University who registered for the Writing Two course in the first semester of the 2012 - 2013 academic year. Fourty subjects were divided into two sections: section one was assigned as an experimental group (supported by Facebook and Skype and section two was assigned as a control group and was asked to write their essays with paper and pencil. Facebook and Skype accounts were created for every student in the experimental group. Data was analyzed from pre-test and post-test results to evaluate the question posed by the study: Does the use of online text chat assisted with word processors help undergraduate students develop their writing skills more than traditional methods of teaching? The results revealed that students who worked with Facebook and Skype showed a significant improvement in their writing skills when compared to the control group. In light of these findings, it is recommended that online discussions via Facebook, Skype, and other social media sites should be utilized when teaching writing and the other language skills.
Perceived teacher support and language anxiety in Polish secondary school EFL learners
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Ewa Piechurska-Kuciel
2011-04-01
Full Text Available The teacher’s role is vital, both in respect to achieving academic goals, and with regard to the regulation of emotional and social processes. Positive perceptions of teacher support can endorse psychological wellness, and help maintain students’ academic interests, higher academic achievement and more positive peer relationships. The teacher who shows understanding, empathy and consistency in their behavior helps students start forming an identity, which will assist them in coping with stress and anxiety directly connected with the foreign language learning process (language anxiety. The main aim of this research is to investigate the relationship between teacher support and language anxiety levels. It is speculated that teacher support functions as a buffer from the effects of negative emotions, such as language anxiety experienced in the foreign language learning process. The participants of the study were 621 secondary grammar school students whose responses to a questionnaire were the main data source. The results of the study demonstrate that students with higher levels of teacher support experience lower language anxiety levels in comparison to their peers with lower levels of teacher support. Students who have a feeling that they can count on the instructor’s help, advice, assistance, or backing manage the learning process more successfully. They evaluate their language abilities highly and receive better final grades. Nevertheless, gender and residential location do not moderate teacher support and language anxiety due to the specificity of the sample consisting of novice secondary grammar school students.
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Vita Banionytė
2016-06-01
Full Text Available The semantic models of sentences with verbs of motion in German standard language and in scientific language used in biology are analyzed in the article. In its theoretic part it is affirmed that the article is based on the semantic theory of the sentence. This theory, in its turn, is grounded on the correlation of semantic predicative classes and semantic roles. The combination of semantic predicative classes and semantic roles is expressed by the main semantic formula – proposition. In its practical part the differences between the semantic models of standard and scientific language used in biology are explained. While modelling sentences with verbs of motion, two groups of semantic models of sentences are singled out: that of action (Handlung and process (Vorgang. The analysis shows that the semantic models of sentences with semantic action predicatives dominate in the text of standard language while the semantic models of sentences with semantic process predicatives dominate in the texts of scientific language used in biology. The differences how the doer and direction are expressed in standard and in scientific language are clearly seen and the semantic cases (Agens, Patiens, Direktiv1 help to determine that. It is observed that in scientific texts of high level of specialization (biology science in contrast to popular scientific literature models of sentences with moving verbs are usually seldom found. They are substituted by denominative constructions. In conclusions it is shown that this analysis can be important in methodics, especially planning material for teaching professional-scientific language.
Fourth and fifth grade Latino(a) students making meaning of scientific informational texts
Croce, Keri-Anne
Using a socio-psycholinguistic perspective of literacy and a social-semiotic analysis of texts, this study investigates how six students made meaning of informational texts. The students came to school from a variety of English and Spanish language backgrounds. The research question being asked was 'How do Latino(a) fourth and fifth grade students make meaning of English informational texts?' Miscue analysis was used as a tool to investigate how students who have been labeled non-struggling readers by their classroom teacher and are from various language backgrounds approached five informational texts. In order to investigate students' responses to the nature of informational texts, this dissertation draws on commonly occurring structures within texts. Primary data collected included read alouds and retellings of five texts, retrospective miscue analysis, and interviews with six participant students. Two of these participants are discussed within this dissertation. Secondary data included classroom observations and teacher interviews. This study proposes that non-native speakers may use scientific concept placeholders as they transact with informational texts. The use of scientific concept placeholders by a reader indicates that the reader is engaged in the meaning making process and possesses evolving scientific knowledge about a phenomenon. The findings suggest that Latino(a) students' understandings of English informational texts is influenced not only by a student's language development but also (1) the nature of the text; (2) the reading strategies that a student uses, such as the use of placeholders; (3) the influence of the researcher during the aided retelling. This study contributes methodological tools to assess English language learners' reading. The conclusions presented within this study also support the idea that students from a variety of language backgrounds slightly altered their reliance on certain cuing systems as they encountered various sub
George, Nathan R; Göksun, Tilbe; Hirsh-Pasek, Kathy; Golinkoff, Roberta Michnick
2014-01-01
Linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience all have rich histories in language research. Crosstalk among these disciplines, as realized in studies of phonology, is pivotal for understanding a fundamental challenge for first and second language learners (SLLs): learning verbs. Linguistic and behavioral research with monolinguals suggests that infants attend to foundational event components (e.g., path, manner). Language then heightens or dampens attention to these components as children map word to world in language-specific ways. Cross-linguistic differences in semantic organization also reveal sources of struggles for SLLs. We discuss how better integrating neuroscience into this literature can unlock additional mysteries of verb learning.
Why are some languages confused for others? Investigating data from the Great Language Game.
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Hedvig Skirgård
Full Text Available In this paper we explore the results of a large-scale online game called 'the Great Language Game', in which people listen to an audio speech sample and make a forced-choice guess about the identity of the language from 2 or more alternatives. The data include 15 million guesses from 400 audio recordings of 78 languages. We investigate which languages are confused for which in the game, and if this correlates with the similarities that linguists identify between languages. This includes shared lexical items, similar sound inventories and established historical relationships. Our findings are, as expected, that players are more likely to confuse two languages that are objectively more similar. We also investigate factors that may affect players' ability to accurately select the target language, such as how many people speak the language, how often the language is mentioned in written materials and the economic power of the target language community. We see that non-linguistic factors affect players' ability to accurately identify the target. For example, languages with wider 'global reach' are more often identified correctly. This suggests that both linguistic and cultural knowledge influence the perception and recognition of languages and their similarity.
Language meddles with infants’ processing of observed actions
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Alessandra Sciutti
2016-08-01
Full Text Available When learning from actions, language can be a crucial source to specify the learning content. Understanding its interactions with action processing is therefore fundamental when attempting to model the development of human learning to replicate it in artificial agents. From early childhood two different processes participate in shaping infants’ understanding of the events occurring around them: Infants’ motor system influences their action perception, driving their attention to the action goal; additionally, parental language influences the way children parse what they observe into relevant units. To date, however, it has barely been investigated whether these two cognitive processes – action understanding and language – are separate and independent or whether language might interfere with the former. To address this question we evaluated whether a verbal narrative concurrent with action observation could avert 14-month-old infants’ attention from an agent’s action goal, which is otherwise naturally selected when the action is performed by an agent. The infants observed movies of an actor reaching and transporting balls into a box. In three between-subject conditions, the reaching movement was accompanied either with no audio (Base condition, a sine-wave sound (Sound condition, or a speech sample (Speech condition. The results show that the presence of a speech sample underlining the movement phase reduced significantly the number of predictive gaze shifts to the goal compared to the other conditions. Our findings thus indicate that any modelling of the interaction between language and action processing will have to consider a potential top-down effect of the former, as language can be a meddler in the predictive behavior typical of the observation of goal oriented actions.
L2 Students’ Comments on Language Exchange Communities in Language Learning
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Cem Balçıkanlı
2012-04-01
Full Text Available Problem Statement: EFL learners are rarely given opportunities to interact with native speakers and “…to do something with a language”. In Turkish settings, language learners mostly complain that they do not have enough opportunities to interact with native speakers, and class hours are too limited to acquire a language and more importantly they are not taught expressions that help them express themselves in daily contexts.Purpose of Study: This study aimed at investigating EFL (English as a Foreign Language learners’ experiences in a Language Exchange Community, namely xLingo.Method: 16 students from a state university spent time on language exchange communities. The researcher met these students once a week to make sure that everything was going fine. The students used xLingo for almost six months. The researcher interviewed them through the five questions that were earlier developed and piloted by the researcher himself.Findings and Results: The findings mostly focused on four aspects namely language development, autonomy, culture and self-confidence. Conclusions and Recommendations: Given the challenges Turkish EFL learners have to face in the process of language learning, language exchange communities are believed to open up more possibilities for language learners to get more comprehensible input and to interact with more native speakers and more importantly to do something with a language. In order to make best use of these communities, it is a mandatory step that language teachers be introduced to the concept along with practical applications and that these communities should be integrated into language testing system.
Pooling ASR data for closely related languages
CSIR Research Space (South Africa)
Van Heerden, C
2010-05-01
Full Text Available We describe several experiments that were conducted to assess the viability of data pooling as a means to improve speech-recognition performance for under-resourced languages. Two groups of closely related languages from the Southern Bantu language...
Academic Language in Early Childhood Classrooms
Barnes, Erica M.; Grifenhagen, Jill F.; Dickinson, David K.
2016-01-01
This article defines academic language by examining the central features of vocabulary, syntax, and discourse function. Examples of each feature are provided, as well as methods of identifying them in oral language and printed text. We describe a yearlong study that found teachers used different types of academic language based on instructional…
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Traikovskaya Natalya Petrovna
2015-12-01
Full Text Available The article deals with phonetic and lexical-morphological language means participating in the process of extracting implicit information in English-speaking advertising texts for men and women. The functioning of phonetic means of the English language is not the basis for implication of information in advertising texts. Lexical and morphological means play the role of markers of relevant information, playing the role of the activator ofimplicit information in the texts of advertising.
Sevenster, Merlijn; Bozeman, Jeffrey; Cowhy, Andrea; Trost, William
2015-02-01
To standardize and objectivize treatment response assessment in oncology, guidelines have been proposed that are driven by radiological measurements, which are typically communicated in free-text reports defying automated processing. We study through inter-annotator agreement and natural language processing (NLP) algorithm development the task of pairing measurements that quantify the same finding across consecutive radiology reports, such that each measurement is paired with at most one other ("partial uniqueness"). Ground truth is created based on 283 abdomen and 311 chest CT reports of 50 patients each. A pre-processing engine segments reports and extracts measurements. Thirteen features are developed based on volumetric similarity between measurements, semantic similarity between their respective narrative contexts and structural properties of their report positions. A Random Forest classifier (RF) integrates all features. A "mutual best match" (MBM) post-processor ensures partial uniqueness. In an end-to-end evaluation, RF has precision 0.841, recall 0.807, F-measure 0.824 and AUC 0.971; with MBM, which performs above chance level (P0.960) indicates that the task is well defined. Domain properties and inter-section differences are discussed to explain superior performance in abdomen. Enforcing partial uniqueness has mixed but minor effects on performance. A combined machine learning-filtering approach is proposed for pairing measurements, which can support prospective (supporting treatment response assessment) and retrospective purposes (data mining). Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Three Writers of Arabic Texts in Yogyakarta
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Muhamad Murtadlo
2015-02-01
Full Text Available This study examines the use of the Arabic alphabet in religious literature in Yogyakarta. This study uses a case study on three figure writers of religious texts that using the Arabic alphabet in southern part of Central Java (Yogyakarta, namely Asrori Ahmad (Magelang, Ali Maksum (Yogyakarta, and Ahmad Mujab Mahalli (Bantul. This study concluded that the writing of religious texts in Arabic alphabet in the southern Java area had been carried out by means of using Arabic Pegon, and only a few people who wrote in the Arabic language. The transmission of Arabic Pegon in Yogyakarta is allegedly from north coast of Java, especially from Lasem / East Java. The tradition of Arabic language teaching in the pesantrens still focuses mostly on the reading effort, communication, and understanding and it is not oriented to the writing skill. The presence of international journals initiated by the College of Islamic religious institutions and the effort of translation business into Arabic from certain institutions gives an opportunity to strengthen the use of the Arabic alphabet in Indonesia.
Modelling SDL, Modelling Languages
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Michael Piefel
2007-02-01
Full Text Available Today's software systems are too complex to implement them and model them using only one language. As a result, modern software engineering uses different languages for different levels of abstraction and different system aspects. Thus to handle an increasing number of related or integrated languages is the most challenging task in the development of tools. We use object oriented metamodelling to describe languages. Object orientation allows us to derive abstract reusable concept definitions (concept classes from existing languages. This language definition technique concentrates on semantic abstractions rather than syntactical peculiarities. We present a set of common concept classes that describe structure, behaviour, and data aspects of high-level modelling languages. Our models contain syntax modelling using the OMG MOF as well as static semantic constraints written in OMG OCL. We derive metamodels for subsets of SDL and UML from these common concepts, and we show for parts of these languages that they can be modelled and related to each other through the same abstract concepts.
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Anna Borbely
2011-01-01
Full Text Available A central issue of this paper is to study the patterns in variation of attitudes toward minority language varieties in four minority communities from Hungary: German, Slovak, Serb and Romanian. This study takes part from the research which focuses on how to obtain significant information about the mechanism of the language shift process concerning autochthonous minorities in Hungary. The results demonstrate that in the course of language shift communities at an advanced stage of language shift have less positive attitudes toward their minority languages than individuals from communities where language shift is in a less advanced stage.In Hungarian minority groups speakers’ attitudes toward minority language varieties (dialect vs. standard are the symptoms of language shift.
Digital Game-Based Language Learning in Foreign Language Teacher Education
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Yunus ALYAZ
2016-10-01
Full Text Available New technologies including digital game-based language learning have increasingly received attention. However, their implementation is far from expected and desired levels due to technical, instructional, financial and sociological barriers. Previous studies suggest that there is a strong need to establish courses in order to support adaptation of game-based learning pedagogy through helping teachers experience digital games themselves before they are expected to use them in teaching. This study was conducted to investigate educational digital games in foreign language teaching, to identify the determining reasons behind the pittfalls in applications and to explore the contribution of a serious game to the development of professional language skills of pre-service teachers. Pre- and post-tests were applied to measure the contribution of the game to the development of their language skills. In addition, a game diary and semi-structured interviews were used to elicit information about the problems pre-service teachers had and their perceptions on the whole process. The analysis of the data illustrated that there was great improvement in pre-service teachers’ professional language skills and attitudes towards using these games while teaching in the future. This is important in foreign language teacher education in terms of enhancing digital game-based language learning pedagogy for teachers.
Measuring language lateralisation with different language tasks: a systematic review
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Abigail R. Bradshaw
2017-10-01
Full Text Available Language lateralisation refers to the phenomenon in which one hemisphere (typically the left shows greater involvement in language functions than the other. Measurement of laterality is of interest both to researchers investigating the neural organisation of the language system and to clinicians needing to establish an individual’s hemispheric dominance for language prior to surgery, as in patients with intractable epilepsy. Recently, there has been increasing awareness of the possibility that different language processes may develop hemispheric lateralisation independently, and to varying degrees. However, it is not always clear whether differences in laterality across language tasks with fMRI are reflective of meaningful variation in hemispheric lateralisation, or simply of trivial methodological differences between paradigms. This systematic review aims to assess different language tasks in terms of the strength, reliability and robustness of the laterality measurements they yield with fMRI, to look at variability that is both dependent and independent of aspects of study design, such as the baseline task, region of interest, and modality of the stimuli. Recommendations are made that can be used to guide task design; however, this review predominantly highlights that the current high level of methodological variability in language paradigms prevents conclusions as to how different language functions may lateralise independently. We conclude with suggestions for future research using tasks that engage distinct aspects of language functioning, whilst being closely matched on non-linguistic aspects of task design (e.g., stimuli, task timings etc; such research could produce more reliable and conclusive insights into language lateralisation. This systematic review was registered as a protocol on Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/5vmpt/.
Journal for Language Teaching - Vol 37, No 1 (2003)
African Journals Online (AJOL)
Intervention and language attitudes: the effects of one development programme on the language attitudes of primary school educators · EMAIL FULL TEXT EMAIL FULL TEXT · DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD FULL TEXT. Charlyn Dyers, 60-73. http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/jlt.v37i1.5980 ...
SuML: A Survey Markup Language for Generalized Survey Encoding
Barclay, MW; Lober, WB; Karras, BT
2002-01-01
There is a need in clinical and research settings for a sophisticated, generalized, web based survey tool that supports complex logic, separation of content and presentation, and computable guidelines. There are many commercial and open source survey packages available that provide simple logic; few provide sophistication beyond “goto” statements; none support the use of guidelines. These tools are driven by databases, static web pages, and structured documents using markup languages such as eXtensible Markup Language (XML). We propose a generalized, guideline aware language and an implementation architecture using open source standards.
Using Open Source Tools to Create a Mobile Optimized, Crowdsourced Translation Tool
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Evviva Weinraub Lajoie
2014-04-01
Full Text Available In late 2012, OSU Libraries and Press partnered with Maria's Libraries, an NGO in Rural Kenya, to provide users the ability to crowdsource translations of folk tales and existing children's books into a variety of African languages, sub-languages, and dialects. Together, these two organizations have been creating a mobile optimized platform using open source libraries such as Wink Toolkit (a library which provides mobile-friendly interaction from a website and Globalize3 to allow for multiple translations of database entries in a Ruby on Rails application. Research regarding successes of similar tools has been utilized in providing a consistent user interface. The OSU Libraries & Press team delivered a proof-of-concept tool that has the opportunity to promote technology exploration, improve early childhood literacy, change the way we approach foreign language learning, and to provide opportunities for cost-effective, multi-language publishing.
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H Gülru Yüksel
2014-03-01
Full Text Available This longitudinal study aimed to trace changes in Turkish pre-service English as a foreign language teachers' self-efficacy over a year, and to detect possible sources of information influencing their efficacy. Utilizing concurrent mixed model design of Creswell (2003 both qualitative and quantitative data was collected. A total of 40 pre-service teachers participated in the study. Findings indicated that pre-service English language teachers' efficacy changed significantly over time. We also found that pre-service teachers seem to depend more on enactive mastery experience and social persuasion than on vicarious experience and affective state as sources of information. Based on our findings, measures are suggested on how to support pre-service teachers to improve their sense of efficacy. Implications for research on teaching and teacher education are discussed.
Atatürk and the History of Foreign Language Education in Turkey
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Gülay SARIÇOBAN
2012-04-01
Full Text Available Background and Problem: There have been various opinions on the policies of foreign language education in our country since the foundation of our republic. There is no doubt that Atatürk placed much more importance in foreign language education than the other nations’ founders on earth. For the purpose of foreign language education, the department of western languages and literatures was established in the faculty of language, history, and geography at Ankara University. This department was also considered to contribute the fields of history and Turkish studies. Foreign language and literature studies are believed to be responsible for establishing interaction and communication between cultures. If a scientific approach to a foreign language and its literature and the knowledge of methodology leads to acquisition of a native language, this means that it performs its real function. Atatürk, believing this contribution of knowing a foreign language to the mother tongue of a nation, absorbs the importance of this fact. He strongly asserted that we should make use of this advantage for our national benefits: by not teaching a topic in a foreign language, but teaching a foreign language. To him, the courses should be conducted in Turkish. However, just contrary to his views, we had courses conducted in the foreign language in Anatolian high schools, science high schools, and/or in private colleges. Thus, the number of these schools has increased and therefore, the importance of mother tongue has lessened even in our country. Purpose: This study aims at discussing the foreign language policies followed in our country by referring to certain periods.Method: For the purpose of the current study, the researchers have gone through literature review process in detail and compiled the data they could reach from various reliable sources.
Translanguaging in Self-Access Language Advising: Informing Language Policy
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Naoki Fujimoto-Adamson
2012-03-01
Full Text Available This study investigates language advising in a self-access center (SAC with the purpose of informing language policy. This center is located in a new Japanese university and has shifted from an initially teacher-imposed ‘English-only’ language policy into one which encourages “translanguaging” (Blackledge & Creese, 2010, p. 105 between the students’ and center advisors’ (termed as mentors in this center L1 (Japanese and their L2 (English. Data from audio-recordings of interaction with advisors and students and between students themselves, interviews with mentors, and student questionnaires all reveal how translanguaging occurs in practice and how it helps to create a learning space in which the “local, pragmatic coping tactics” (Lin, 2005, p. 46 of code-switching offer a more viable approach for learning than under its initial monolingual policy. Mentor interviews and student questionnaires indicate generally positive attitudes towards translanguaging; however, some students still favor an ‘English-only’ policy. Conclusions reveal that a looser language policy in the center is emerging in which mentors now guide students towards their own individualized language policies. It is argued in this paper that this “code choice” (Levine, 2011 in language use is therefore aligned more closely to the principles of student-direction in self-access use.
State Traditions and Language Regimes: A Historical Institutionalism Approach to Language Policy
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Sonntag Selma K.
2015-12-01
Full Text Available This paper is an elaboration of a theoretical framework we developed in the introductory chapter of our co-edited volume, State Traditions and Language Regimes (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015. Using a historical institutionalism approach derived from political science, we argue that language policies need to be understood in terms of their historical and institutional context. The concept of ‘state tradition’ focuses our attention on the relative autonomy of the state in terms of its normative and institutional traditions that lead to particular path dependencies of language policy choices, subject to change at critical junctures. ‘Language regime’ is the conceptual link between state traditions and language policy choices: it allows us to analytically conceptualize how and why these choices are made and how and why they change. We suggest that our framework offers a more robust analysis of language politics than other approaches found in sociolinguistics and normative theory. It also challenges political science to become more engaged with scholarly debate on language policy and linguistic diversity.
Text mining and IRT for psychiatric and psychological assessment
He, Qiwei
2013-01-01
The information age has made it easy to store and process large amounts of data, including both structured data (e.g., responses to questionnaires) and unstructured data (e.g., natural language or prose). As an additional source of information in assessments, textual data has been increasingly used
Part-of-speech effects on text-to-speech synthesis
CSIR Research Space (South Africa)
Schlunz, GI
2010-11-01
Full Text Available One of the goals of text-to-speech (TTS) systems is to produce natural-sounding synthesised speech. Towards this end various natural language processing (NLP) tasks are performed to model the prosodic aspects of the TTS voice. One of the fundamental...
Gendered Language in Recent Short Stories by Japanese Women, and in English Translation
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Lucy Fraser
2008-12-01
Full Text Available This article analyses five recent Japanese short stories written by women, with female first person narrators, and the English translations of these stories. I examine how the writers interact with the culturally loaded concept of gendered language to develop characters and themes. The strategies used by translators to render gendered styles into English are also discussed: case-by-case creative solutions appear most effective. ‘Feminine’ and other gendered styles are used to index social identity, to highlight the difference between the social and inner self, and different styles are mixed together for impact. Gendered styles, therefore, are of central importance and translators wishing to adhere closely to the source text should pay close attention to them. All the narrators of the stories demonstrate an understanding of ‘social sanction and taboo’. Two accustom themselves to a socially acceptable future, another displays an uneasy attitude to language and convention, while others fall into stereotypes imposed on them or chastise themselves for inappropriate behaviour. The stories illustrate the way in which gendered language styles in Japanese can be manipulated, as both the writers and the characters they create deliberately use different styles for effect.
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German A. Ivanov
2011-04-01
Full Text Available In this paper the problem of interdependence between power and language is viewed. The authors point out that the problem may be investigated in two aspects: from the point of view of a conscious use of language as a political instrument and from the point of view of an unconscious dependence of an individual on language and ideology. In this context, the authors investigate the ideas expressed by Louis Althusser and Michel Pźcheux. The theory of Ideological State Apparatuses by Althusser is represented here as one of possible conceptual bases for defining gender distribution of power. In this paper the specificity of the Pźcheux’s discourse analysis is revealed: discourse is viewed by Pźcheux as a sphere of intersection of language and extra-linguistic restrictions created by ideology.
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Sündüz ÖZTÜRK KASAR
2017-04-01
Full Text Available Among the literary genres, poetry is the one that resists translation the most. Creating a new and innovative language that breaks the usual rules of the standard language with brand-new uses and meanings is probably one of the most important goals of the poet. Poetry challenges the translator to capture not only original images, exceptional symbolism, and subjective connotations but also its musicality, rhythm, and measure. Faced with this revolutionary use of language, the translator needs a guide so as to not get lost in the labyrinths of the poetic universe. The universe of sound and meaning unique to each language and the incompatibility of these languages with each other makes the duty of the translator seem impossible. At this point, semiotics may function as a guide, opening up the mysteries of the universe built by the poet and giving clues as to how it can be conveyed in the target language. This allows us to suggest the cooperation of semiotics and translation. From this perspective, we aim to present a case study that exemplifies this cooperation. Our corpus comprises Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 and its Turkish and French translations. The study treats the translator as the receiver of the source text and the producer of the target text in the light of the Theory of Instances of Enunciation propounded by Jean-Claude Coquet. Further, through the Systematics of Designificative Tendencies propounded by Sündüz Öztürk Kasar, the study compares the translators’ creations to the original sonnet to see the extent to which the balance of the original text’s meaning and form is preserved in the translations and how skillfully and competently the signs that constitute the universe of meaning are transmitted in the target languages.
Creativity in foreign language teaching
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Monika Ševečková
2016-09-01
Full Text Available Developing creativity in foreign language teaching provides students with the opportunity to effectively build language skills as well as increasing their motivation for learning. Practical examples are given using folklore materials (songs, tales, etc. in learning Russian, as well as contemporary materials reflecting the culture of Russian speaking countries (films, poems, etc.. As well as increasing their ability in the target foreign language students also acquire factual information (realia through creative language games. In this paper we describe recent findings in the field and propose possible directions for future research.
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Graham-Marr Alastair
2015-01-01
Full Text Available Improving student understanding of a foreign language culture is anything but a peripheral issue in the teaching of a foreign language. This pilot study reports on a second year required English course in a university in Japan that took a Literature Circles approach, where students were asked to read short stories out of class and then discuss these stories in class. Although students reported that they did not gain any special insights into the target language culture presented, they did report that reading fiction as source material for classroom activity helps with the acquisition of a vocabulary set that is more closely associated with lifestyle and culture. The results suggest that further study is warranted. Procedures of this pilot study are described and interpreted in the context of the English education system in Japan.
Phenomenon of displacement in Arabic language
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2015-09-01
Full Text Available Displacement is one of the characteristics of language and common phenomena in the Arabic language. Not only is this phenomenon limited to Arabic poetry and prose, but it is also broadened, so we can see examples of this in the Qur'an. Because of this phenomenon extensively in Arabic literature and also because of its essence that leads to the transmission of the elements for the first visibility to the other visibility in the sentence and sometimes had to change the grammatical role of the words, its identify helps us in a better understanding of text and the correct translation of it and protects the reader from mistakes. This paper in the descriptive analytical approach tries studying of the phenomenon of the displacement in the Arabic language and bringing its instances in Arabic poetry and prose as well as verses contained in the Holy Quran, to show that through the types and characteristics in the Arabic language and to response to several questions, including: how important is the displacement and what is its types in rhetoric, and the reasons of the displacement, and etc... Of the most important results of this study may refer to the undeniable role of the displacement as a rhetorical method to better understanding of the texts including: one of the most important reasons of the displacement in the use of language is to improve speech verbally and morally, and violation of the standard language and create a poetic atmosphere, and the recognition of the occurrence of the phenomenon of displacement in the Arabic language that uphold different interpretations remote and estimates when faced with the displacement in the text and help us to understand it and etc...
Descriptive markup languages and the development of digital humanities
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Boris Bosančić
2012-11-01
Full Text Available The paper discusses the role of descriptive markup languages in the development of digital humanities, a new research discipline that is part of social sciences and humanities, which focuses on the use of computers in research. A chronological review of the development of digital humanities, and then descriptive markup languages is exposed, through several developmental stages. It is shown that the development of digital humanities since the mid-1980s and the appearance of SGML, markup language that was the foundation of TEI, a key standard for the encoding and exchange of humanities texts in the digital environment, is inseparable from the development of markup languages. Special attention is dedicated to the presentation of the Text Encoding Initiative – TEI development, a key organization that developed the titled standard, both from organizational and markup perspectives. By this time, TEI standard is published in five versions, and during 2000s SGML is replaced by XML markup language. Key words: markup languages, digital humanities, text encoding, TEI, SGML, XML
Language Muse: Automated Linguistic Activity Generation for English Language Learners
Madnani, Nitin; Burstein, Jill; Sabatini, John; Biggers, Kietha; Andreyev, Slava
2016-01-01
Current education standards in the U.S. require school students to read and understand complex texts from different subject areas (e.g., social studies). However, such texts usually contain figurative language, complex phrases and sentences, as well as unfamiliar discourse relations. This may present an obstacle to students whose native language…
Training for Auditing (Listening of Foreign Texts: Methodology and Experience
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Anzhelika S. Boutousova
2017-10-01
Full Text Available Auditing is considered systematically as a psychophysiological and cognitive process, on the one hand, and as a type of speech activity, on the other. The levels and stages of learning to listen to foreign language texts with their inherent difficulties are singled out. There are elementary, intermediate and advanced levels of learning listening. The stages of training are divided into pretext, text and post-text. Based on the analysis of scientific literature and personal observations, language, cognitive and socio-cultural difficulties in listening have been discovered. A system of exercises aimed at forming an auditory skills is described. Audience skills include segmentation of speech into parts, anticipation of the meaning of parts of words and sentences, forecasting of form and meaning at the text level, skills related to the development of the mechanism of memory; compression and interpretation of the text. The auditory skills are interpreted as listening recognition and understanding of individual words and expressions and grammatical structures.
A human language corpus for interstellar message construction
Elliott, John
2011-02-01
The aim of HuLCC (the human language chorus corpus), is to provide a resource of sufficient size to facilitate inter-language analysis by incorporating languages from all the major language families: for the first time all aspects of typology will be incorporated within a single corpus, adhering to a consistent grammatical classification and granularity, which historically adopt a plethora of disparate schemes. An added feature will be the inclusion of a common text element, which will be translated across all languages, to provide a precise comparable thread for detailed linguistic analysis for translation strategies and a mechanism by which these mappings can be explicitly achieved. Methods developed to solve unambiguous mappings across these languages can then be adopted for any subsequent message authored by the SETI community. Initially, it is planned to provide at least 20,000 words for each chosen language, as this amount of text exceeds the point where randomly generated text can be disambiguated from natural language and is of sufficient size useful for message transmission [1] (Elliot, 2002). This paper details the design of this resource, which ultimately will be made available to SETI upon its completion, and discusses issues 'core' to any message construction.
The "SignOn"-Model for Teaching Written Language to Deaf People
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Marlene Hilzensauer
2012-08-01
Full Text Available This paper shows a method of teaching written language to deaf people using sign language as the language of instruction. Written texts in the target language are combined with sign language videos which provide the users with various modes of translation (words/phrases/sentences. As examples, two EU projects for English for the Deaf are presented which feature English texts and translations into the national sign languages of all the partner countries plus signed grammar explanations and interactive exercises. Both courses are web-based; the programs may be accessed free of charge via the respective homepages (without any download or log-in.
LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM:INDONESIAN CASE
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Pradana Boy ZTF
2017-09-01
Full Text Available The discourse of language, culture and imperialism are closely intertwined. In this paper I will describe cultural imperialism through language by taking Indonesian case as an example. This essay will develop two main arguments. Firstly, it sets forth that language is a medium through which cultural imperialism could take place, since language is an important and even fundamental aspect of culture. The cultural imperialism through language starts to occur when a certain foreign language is arbitrarily and irresponsibly used in correspondence and combination with local languages within formal and colloquial contexts. Secondly, using Frantz Fannon’s theory as described in his Black Skin White Masks, Indonesian case of use of mixed language of Bahasa and English in any medium is an obvious example of how this language imperialism in contemporary setting arises.
CERN. Geneva
2015-01-01
WhiteArea lectures' twiki HERE How can we document detailed data about all the world's language in a consistent, unified source, in a way that can serve knowledge and technology needs for people and their machines around the globe? Dictionaries have historically presented selective information about words and their meanings within a language, or translation equivalents between languages, in idiosyncratic, incommensurable formats with little basis in data science. The Kamusi Project introduces a new approach, conceiving of language as a matrix of interrelated data elements. By documenting these elements within each language, and linking elements at conceptual and functional nodes across languages, Kamusi aims toward an elusive Big Data goal: "every word in every language." If successful, the results will run the gamut from preserving the human heritage embedded in endangered languages, to providing international vocabularies for students to succeed in science, to a Star Trek-...
Literary Language in Development of L2 Competence
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Dan Lu
2012-11-01
Full Text Available Nowadays it is believed that language in daily communication rather than literary language should be the target of learning in L2 education. This is mainly because literary language is said to be uncommon in life. This paper reports on a study in which some Hong Kong ESL learners’ English proficiency was re-examined through literary texts. These learners had reached intermediate or advanced levels of English prior to the study and were generally competent in daily English. However, many of them encountered difficulty in understanding literary language. Their proficiency in general English test could not match their performances in understanding literary works. The findings reveal that learners who are strong in general proficiency may not be good in understanding literary language. Lack of literary language in the curriculum results in a false and distorted picture about the learners’ proficiency. Literary language helps upgrade L2 learners’ real proficiency in the target language.
MANAGING THE TRANSLATION OF ECONOMIC TEXTS
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Pop Anamaria Mirabela
2012-12-01
Full Text Available Theoretically, translation may pass as science; practically, it seems closer to art. Translation is a challenging activity requiring a set of abilities and posing few difficulties that appear during the translation process. This paper investigates the extent to which sub-technical vocabulary can constitute a problem to Romanian students of economics reading in English, by looking at the translations produced as independent or pair work during English classes and analyzing the various errors which may appeared. The exigencies required by the efficient business communication have increased in the past few decades because of rising international trade, increased migration, globalization, the recognition of linguistic minorities, and the expansion of the mass media and technology. All these led us to approach the topic of translation which is actually a job that requires skills, stages of research necessary for disclosure of transfer characteristic into the target language, training, experience and a good sense of languages. The paper defines the theoretical issues and terminology: translation, types of translation, economic texts and then focuses on the presentation of the practical work carried out throughout the academic year of second year students. Considering that only 28% of the entire European population can read English, and even less people in South America and Asia can, it is obvious that an effective communication of business matters relies on an accurate understanding of terminology. Economics is a field of knowledge in accelerated scientific and technological development. As there is a permanent and ever increasing need to quickly update their knowledge, economists read and learn directly in the original language of the publication and stick to it in daily usage, including conferences, scientific events and articles written in Romanian. Besides researching properly the markets, finding distribution channels, and dealing with legal
An IBM 370 assembly language program verifier
Maurer, W. D.
1977-01-01
The paper describes a program written in SNOBOL which verifies the correctness of programs written in assembly language for the IBM 360 and 370 series of computers. The motivation for using assembly language as a source language for a program verifier was the realization that many errors in programs are caused by misunderstanding or ignorance of the characteristics of specific computers. The proof of correctness of a program written in assembly language must take these characteristics into account. The program has been compiled and is currently running at the Center for Academic and Administrative Computing of The George Washington University.
Babayigit, Selma
2014-01-01
The study examined the role of oral language skills in reading comprehension and listening comprehension levels of 125 monolingual (L1) and bilingual (L2) English-speaking learners (M = 121.5 months, SD = 4.65) in England. All testing was conducted in English. The L1 learners outperformed their L2 peers on the measures of oral language and text…
Grant, Gloria W.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of text materials with relevant language, illustrations, and content upon the reading achievement and reading preference (attitude) of black primary and intermediate grade inner-city students. The subjects for the study were 330 black students enrolled in three schools in a large urban area. A…
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Sylwester Arabas
2014-01-01
Full Text Available Three object-oriented implementations of a prototype solver of the advection equation are introduced. The presented programs are based on Blitz++ (C++, NumPy (Python and Fortran's built-in array containers. The solvers constitute implementations of the Multidimensional Positive-Definite Advective Transport Algorithm (MPDATA. The introduced codes serve as examples for how the application of object-oriented programming (OOP techniques and new language constructs from C++11 and Fortran 2008 allow to reproduce the mathematical notation used in the literature within the program code. A discussion on the tradeoffs of the programming language choice is presented. The main angles of comparison are code brevity and syntax clarity (and hence maintainability and auditability as well as performance. All performance tests are carried out using free and open-source compilers. In the case of Python, a significant performance gain is observed when switching from the standard interpreter (CPython to the PyPy implementation of Python. Entire source code of all three implementations is embedded in the text and is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL license.
Assessing Children with Language Impairments: A Study on Kannada, a South Indian Language
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Srimani Chakravarthi
2012-12-01
Full Text Available Purpose: This is one of the first comprehensive studies to assess receptive and expressive language skills in a South Indian language, Kannada. It demystifies language impairments and provides a model for future research to understand other languages in India and in countries around the world.Method: Language impairments were identified in 68 students of Grades 3 and 4, in elementary schools where Kannada was the medium of instruction. The children were assessed in different language components. The results were analysed in terms of their ages and their levels of functioning in each language component and sub-component.Results: As a group, the subjects showed no significant deficits in phonological and semantic skills; however, individual deficits and deficits within sub-component skills of semantics were noted. Mean and individual deficits in auditory reception, aural comprehension and receptive vocabulary were also noted. Deficits in syntax & verbal expression were notably significant. The extent of language delay increases with age, and plateaus at higher ages.Conclusion: Children with language impairments in Kannada, display many similar characteristics in terms of problems in different components of language. Early intervention is called for because the language delay increases as age advances. A thorough assessment reveals specific strengths and weaknesses in language components and skills. This can be used as a starting point to base remediation activities.doi: 10.5463/dcid.v23i3.134
Politeness Strategies and Levels In Tourism-Service Language in Surakarta Residency
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Budi Purnomo
2016-07-01
Full Text Available In tourism industry, tourists act as guests and tourism industry practitioners act as hosts. Typically tourism industry practitioners will try to act politely and follow politeness strategies as well as possible when serving tourists to ensure their satisfaction. Levels of satisfaction could be determined by the politeness of the hosts' behaviour towards their guests, including the politeness levels of their tourism-service language. This research was done in Surakarta Residency, the main tourist destination in Central Java. Data sources of this research came from (1 informants and (2 events. The data were analyzed by Brown and Levinson’s politeness strategies (1987. The results of this research show that the tourism industry practitioners in Surakarta Residency use various politeness strategies and levels in tourism-service language to serve their guests.
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Ries, Veronika
2014-03-01
Full Text Available Within the scope of my investigation on language use and language attitudes of People of German Descent from the USSR, I find almost regular different language contact phenomena, such as viel bliny habn=wir gbackt (engl.: 'we cooked lots of pancakes' (cf. Ries 2011. The aim of analysis is to examine both language use with regard to different forms of language contact and the language attitudes of the observed speakers. To be able to analyse both of these aspects and synthesize them, different types of data are required. The research is based on the following two data types: everyday conversations and interviews. In addition, the individual speakers' biography is a key part of the analysis, because it allows one to draw conclusions about language attitudes and use. This qualitative research is based on morpho-syntactic and interactional linguistic analysis of authentic spoken data. The data arise from a corpus compiled and edited by myself. My being a member of the examined group allowed me to build up an authentic corpus. The natural language use is analysed from the perspective of different language contact phenomena and potential functions of language alternations. One central issue is: How do speakers use the languages available to them, German and Russian? Structural characteristics such as code switching and discursive motives for these phenomena are discussed as results, together with the socio-cultural background of the individual speaker. Within the scope of this article I present exemplarily the data and results of one speaker.
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Vladimir M. Alpatov
2013-01-01
Full Text Available Much of what previously characterized the language situation and language policy within states is transferred to the international level due to globalization. We are facing the growing importance of world languages, especially English. However, globalization (at least in the form in which it exists now does not satisfy the need of identitification for the majority people (except, of course, those for whom English is a mother tongue. This situation can lead to conflicts and even question the effectiveness of globalization processes.
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Zinovieva, E.I.
2016-06-01
Full Text Available The article provides a detailed analysis of semantics and functioning of Russian set comparisons according to dictionaries, literary context, periodicals and the Internet and studies stereotypical perception of what is considered small or large amounts of money and the way it is reflected in consciousness of native speakers and the Russian language on the basis of survey. Set comparisons in Russian language are contrasted with other Slavic languages to identify their universal and distinctive features.
A GENRE ANALYSIS OF PROMOTIONAL TEXTS IN AN INDONESIAN BATIK INDUSTRY
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Diah Kristina
2017-09-01
Full Text Available This study explored sales promotion letters (SPLs and company profiles (CPs of two prominent batik companies in Solo, Central Java, Indonesia. This essay draws its data from the most important primary source of information on sales promotion letters and company profiles namely words, phrases, and clauses taken from the SPLs and CPs of batik written in Indonesian. Secondary sources were also consulted in this research, among these transcribed data obtained from in-depth interviews with the text writers and buyers. Three SPLs and two batik CPs were analyzed. In addition, two informants (marketing and promotion managers typifying the text production perspective and two buyers typifying the text consumption perspective were interviewed. This research was guided by theories of genre analysis which focuses on patterns of rhetorical organization and genre-specific language features. This study employed the multi-dimensional and multi perspective model of analysis focusing on textual, socio-cognitive and ethnographic aspects of the texts. This study concludes that the strong Javanese cultural influence has made the underlying intention of gaining profits to be less explicitly stated. Secondly, the textual analysis and the in-depth interviews supported the view that CPs of batik had been ideally used to create a favorable image of the company. Thirdly, the most distinctive feature that differentiated establishing credentials in the Indonesian batik business context had been the utilization of a sense of moral obligation to preserve native culture. Fourthly, the chemistry between writers and readers of SPLs and CPs built a strong foundation for mutual understanding and thus paved the way for making purchases. To conclude, this study has shown how the wider culture and the culture of the discourse community has contributed to the framing and formatting of SPLs and CPs of batik in terms of lexico-grammar, cognitive structuring, intertextuality and
Natural language generation of surgical procedures.
Wagner, J C; Rogers, J E; Baud, R H; Scherrer, J R
1999-01-01
A number of compositional Medical Concept Representation systems are being developed. Although these provide for a detailed conceptual representation of the underlying information, they have to be translated back to natural language for used by end-users and applications. The GALEN programme has been developing one such representation and we report here on a tool developed to generate natural language phrases from the GALEN conceptual representations. This tool can be adapted to different source modelling schemes and to different destination languages or sublanguages of a domain. It is based on a multilingual approach to natural language generation, realised through a clean separation of the domain model from the linguistic model and their link by well defined structures. Specific knowledge structures and operations have been developed for bridging between the modelling 'style' of the conceptual representation and natural language. Using the example of the scheme developed for modelling surgical operative procedures within the GALEN-IN-USE project, we show how the generator is adapted to such a scheme. The basic characteristics of the surgical procedures scheme are presented together with the basic principles of the generation tool. Using worked examples, we discuss the transformation operations which change the initial source representation into a form which can more directly be translated to a given natural language. In particular, the linguistic knowledge which has to be introduced--such as definitions of concepts and relationships is described. We explain the overall generator strategy and how particular transformation operations are triggered by language-dependent and conceptual parameters. Results are shown for generated French phrases corresponding to surgical procedures from the urology domain.
Facebook for informal language learning: Perspectives from tertiary language students
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Antonie Alm
2015-09-01
Full Text Available This paper investigates the use of Facebook for out-of-class, informal language learning. 190 New Zealand university language students (Chinese, German, French, Japanese and Spanish completed an anonymous online questionnaire on (1 their perceptions of Facebook as a multilingual environment, (2 their online writing practices and (3 their views on the educational value of their experiences. Findings indicate that language students are using a range of Facebook features to expose themselves to the languages they study (L2 and to communicate in their L2 with native speaker Facebook friends. The use of the social networking site varied according to proficiency-levels of the participants (beginner, intermediate and advanced levels, strength of social ties with native speaker Facebook friends and personal attitudes towards the site. Learning experiences on Facebook were not perceived as useful for the formal language learning context which suggests the need for bridging strategies between informal and formal learning environments.