Zur Wortbildung in wissenschaftlichen Texten (Word Formation in Scientific Texts)

Science.gov (United States)

Rogalla, Hanna; Rogalla, Willy

1976-01-01

Discusses a German frequency list of 1,500 to 2,000 scientific words, which is being developed, and the importance of learning word-building principles. Substantive and adjective suffixes are listed according to frequency, followed by remarks on copulative compounds, with examples and frequency ranking, and, finally, prefixes. (Text is in German.)…

Key word placing in Web page body text to increase visibility to search engines

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

W. T. Kritzinger

2007-11-01

Full Text Available The growth of the World Wide Web has spawned a wide variety of new information sources, which has also left users with the daunting task of determining which sources are valid. Many users rely on the Web as an information source because of the low cost of information retrieval. It is also claimed that the Web has evolved into a powerful business tool. Examples include highly popular business services such as Amazon.com and Kalahari.net. It is estimated that around 80% of users utilize search engines to locate information on the Internet. This, by implication, places emphasis on the underlying importance of Web pages being listed on search engines indices. Empirical evidence that the placement of key words in certain areas of the body text will have an influence on the Web sites' visibility to search engines could not be found in the literature. The result of two experiments indicated that key words should be concentrated towards the top, and diluted towards the bottom of a Web page to increase visibility. However, care should be taken in terms of key word density, to prevent search engine algorithms from raising the spam alarm.

Is Word-Problem Solving a Form of Text Comprehension?

Science.gov (United States)

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…

Detecting New Words from Chinese Text Using Latent Semi-CRF Models

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Xiao; Huang, Degen; Ren, Fuji

Chinese new words and their part-of-speech (POS) are particularly problematic in Chinese natural language processing. With the fast development of internet and information technology, it is impossible to get a complete system dictionary for Chinese natural language processing, as new words out of the basic system dictionary are always being created. A latent semi-CRF model, which combines the strengths of LDCRF (Latent-Dynamic Conditional Random Field) and semi-CRF, is proposed to detect the new words together with their POS synchronously regardless of the types of the new words from the Chinese text without being pre-segmented. Unlike the original semi-CRF, the LDCRF is applied to generate the candidate entities for training and testing the latent semi-CRF, which accelerates the training speed and decreases the computation cost. The complexity of the latent semi-CRF could be further adjusted by tuning the number of hidden variables in LDCRF and the number of the candidate entities from the Nbest outputs of the LDCRF. A new-words-generating framework is proposed for model training and testing, under which the definitions and distributions of the new words conform to the ones existing in real text. Specific features called “Global Fragment Information” for new word detection and POS tagging are adopted in the model training and testing. The experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of detecting even low frequency new words together with their POS tags. The proposed model is found to be performing competitively with the state-of-the-art models presented.

Measuring, Predicting and Visualizing Short-Term Change in Word Representation and Usage in VKontakte Social Network

OpenAIRE

Stewart, Ian; Arendt, Dustin; Bell, Eric; Volkova, Svitlana

2017-01-01

Language in social media is extremely dynamic: new words emerge, trend and disappear, while the meaning of existing words can fluctuate over time. Such dynamics are especially notable during a period of crisis. This work addresses several important tasks of measuring, visualizing and predicting short term text representation shift, i.e. the change in a word's contextual semantics, and contrasting such shift with surface level word dynamics, or concept drift, observed in social media streams. ...

A Text Steganographic System Based on Word Length Entropy Rate

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Francis Xavier Kofi Akotoye

2017-10-01

Full Text Available The widespread adoption of electronic distribution of material is accompanied by illicit copying and distribution. This is why individuals, businesses and governments have come to think of how to protect their work, prevent such illicit activities and trace the distribution of a document. It is in this context that a lot of attention is being focused on steganography. Implementing steganography in text document is not an easy undertaking considering the fact that text document has very few places in which to embed hidden data. Any minute change introduced to text objects can easily be noticed thus attracting attention from possible hackers. This study investigates the possibility of embedding data in text document by employing the entropy rate of the constituent characters of words not less than four characters long. The scheme was used to embed bits in text according to the alphabetic structure of the words, the respective characters were compared with their neighbouring characters and if the first character was alphabetically lower than the succeeding character according to their ASCII codes, a zero bit was embedded otherwise 1 was embedded after the characters had been transposed. Before embedding, the secret message was encrypted with a secret key to add a layer of security to the secret message to be embedded, and then a pseudorandom number was generated from the word counts of the text which was used to paint the starting point of the embedding process. The embedding capacity of the scheme was relatively high compared with the space encoding and semantic method.

Evaluating a Bilingual Text-Mining System with a Taxonomy of Key Words and Hierarchical Visualization for Understanding Learner-Generated Text

Science.gov (United States)

Kong, Siu Cheung; Li, Ping; Song, Yanjie

2018-01-01

This study evaluated a bilingual text-mining system, which incorporated a bilingual taxonomy of key words and provided hierarchical visualization, for understanding learner-generated text in the learning management systems through automatic identification and counting of matching key words. A class of 27 in-service teachers studied a course…

Long-Range Memory in Literary Texts: On the Universal Clustering of the Rare Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Tanaka-Ishii, Kumiko; Bunde, Armin

2016-01-01

A fundamental problem in linguistics is how literary texts can be quantified mathematically. It is well known that the frequency of a (rare) word in a text is roughly inverse proportional to its rank (Zipf's law). Here we address the complementary question, if also the rhythm of the text, characterized by the arrangement of the rare words in the text, can be quantified mathematically in a similar basic way. To this end, we consider representative classic single-authored texts from England/Ireland, France, Germany, China, and Japan. In each text, we classify each word by its rank. We focus on the rare words with ranks above some threshold Q and study the lengths of the (return) intervals between them. We find that for all texts considered, the probability SQ(r) that the length of an interval exceeds r, follows a perfect Weibull-function, SQ(r) = exp(-b(β)rβ), with β around 0.7. The return intervals themselves are arranged in a long-range correlated self-similar fashion, where the autocorrelation function CQ(s) of the intervals follows a power law, CQ(s) ∼ s-γ, with an exponent γ between 0.14 and 0.48. We show that these features lead to a pronounced clustering of the rare words in the text.

Long-Range Memory in Literary Texts: On the Universal Clustering of the Rare Words.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii

Full Text Available A fundamental problem in linguistics is how literary texts can be quantified mathematically. It is well known that the frequency of a (rare word in a text is roughly inverse proportional to its rank (Zipf's law. Here we address the complementary question, if also the rhythm of the text, characterized by the arrangement of the rare words in the text, can be quantified mathematically in a similar basic way. To this end, we consider representative classic single-authored texts from England/Ireland, France, Germany, China, and Japan. In each text, we classify each word by its rank. We focus on the rare words with ranks above some threshold Q and study the lengths of the (return intervals between them. We find that for all texts considered, the probability SQ(r that the length of an interval exceeds r, follows a perfect Weibull-function, SQ(r = exp(-b(βrβ, with β around 0.7. The return intervals themselves are arranged in a long-range correlated self-similar fashion, where the autocorrelation function CQ(s of the intervals follows a power law, CQ(s ∼ s-γ, with an exponent γ between 0.14 and 0.48. We show that these features lead to a pronounced clustering of the rare words in the text.

Metric Characterizations of Superreflexivity in Terms of Word Hyperbolic Groups and Finite Graphs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ostrovskii Mikhail

2014-01-01

Full Text Available We show that superreflexivity can be characterized in terms of bilipschitz embeddability of word hyperbolic groups.We compare characterizations of superrefiexivity in terms of diamond graphs and binary trees.We show that there exist sequences of series-parallel graphs of increasing topological complexitywhich admit uniformly bilipschitz embeddings into a Hilbert space, and thus do not characterize superrefiexivity.

Sentiment analysis methods for understanding large-scale texts: a case for using continuum-scored words and word shift graphs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrew J Reagan

2017-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract The emergence and global adoption of social media has rendered possible the real-time estimation of population-scale sentiment, an extraordinary capacity which has profound implications for our understanding of human behavior. Given the growing assortment of sentiment-measuring instruments, it is imperative to understand which aspects of sentiment dictionaries contribute to both their classification accuracy and their ability to provide richer understanding of texts. Here, we perform detailed, quantitative tests and qualitative assessments of 6 dictionary-based methods applied to 4 different corpora, and briefly examine a further 20 methods. We show that while inappropriate for sentences, dictionary-based methods are generally robust in their classification accuracy for longer texts. Most importantly they can aid understanding of texts with reliable and meaningful word shift graphs if (1 the dictionary covers a sufficiently large portion of a given text’s lexicon when weighted by word usage frequency; and (2 words are scored on a continuous scale.

THE EFFECT OF TEACHING WITHIN-TEXT KEY WORDS ON STUDENTS’ PERFORMANCE IN READING COMPREHENSION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohammad Reza Khodasenas

2013-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract: The present study was conducted to investigate the effects of teaching within-text key word synonyms, opposites and related words on students’ performance on reading comprehension of TOEFL among Iranian EFL learners. To carry out the research, 60 Iranian EFL learners, who participated in a TOEFL preparation course, were selected as the participants of the study. Afterward they were randomly assigned into experimental and comparison groups. The experimental group was given a treatment including within-text key word synonyms, opposites and their translations, while the comparison group was given a placebo. To collect the required data, two instruments (a pre-test, and a post-test were administered to both groups during the experimentation. Subsequently, students’ scores were collected through the administration of different tests and the results were statistically analyzed. The results of these analyses revealed that the experimental group outperformed the comparison group and thus, it was concluded that teaching within-text key word synonyms, opposites and related words can improve the reading comprehension ability and general proficiency of EFL language learners.

The Effect of Frequency of Input-Enhancements on Word Learning and Text Comprehension

Science.gov (United States)

Rott, Susanne

2007-01-01

Research on second language lexical development during reading has found positive effects for word frequency, the provision of glosses, and elaborative word processing. However, findings have been inconclusive regarding the effect of such intervention tasks on long-term retention. Likewise, few studies have looked at the cumulative effect of…

Model of the Dynamic Construction Process of Texts and Scaling Laws of Words Organization in Language Systems.

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.

Alleged nursery words and hypocorisms among Germanic kinship terms

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard

2017-01-01

By (re-)evaluating the etymologies of the three Proto-Germanic kinship terms *aiþīn-/-ōn- ‘mother’, *aiþma- ‘daughter’s husband’ and *faþōn- ‘father’s sister’ that are all claimed by at least some etymological handbooks to be nursery words or hypocorisms, I contend that we must abandon their nurs......By (re-)evaluating the etymologies of the three Proto-Germanic kinship terms *aiþīn-/-ōn- ‘mother’, *aiþma- ‘daughter’s husband’ and *faþōn- ‘father’s sister’ that are all claimed by at least some etymological handbooks to be nursery words or hypocorisms, I contend that we must abandon...... their nursery-word interpretations and rather regard them as inherited words derived from known Indo-European lexical material in a way that reveals important information on the Old Germanic society and its family pattern....

Model of the Dynamic Construction Process of Texts and Scaling Laws of Words Organization in Language Systems.

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Artful Terms: A Study on Aesthetic Word Usage for Visual Art versus Film and Music

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M Dorothee Augustin

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Despite the importance of the arts in human life, psychologists still know relatively little about what characterises their experience for the recipient. The current research approaches this problem by studying people's word usage in aesthetics, with a focus on three important art forms: visual art, film, and music. The starting point was a list of 77 words known to be useful to describe aesthetic impressions of visual art (Augustin et al 2012, Acta Psychologica 139 187–201. Focusing on ratings of likelihood of use, we examined to what extent word usage in aesthetic descriptions of visual art can be generalised to film and music. The results support the claim of an interplay of generality and specificity in aesthetic word usage. Terms with equal likelihood of use for all art forms included beautiful, wonderful, and terms denoting originality. Importantly, emotion-related words received higher ratings for film and music than for visual art. To our knowledge this is direct evidence that aesthetic experiences of visual art may be less affectively loaded than, for example, experiences of music. The results render important information about aesthetic word usage in the realm of the arts and may serve as a starting point to develop tailored measurement instruments for different art forms.

Fast words boundaries localization in text fields for low quality document images

Science.gov (United States)

Ilin, Dmitry; Novikov, Dmitriy; Polevoy, Dmitry; Nikolaev, Dmitry

2018-04-01

The paper examines the problem of word boundaries precise localization in document text zones. Document processing on a mobile device consists of document localization, perspective correction, localization of individual fields, finding words in separate zones, segmentation and recognition. While capturing an image with a mobile digital camera under uncontrolled capturing conditions, digital noise, perspective distortions or glares may occur. Further document processing gets complicated because of its specifics: layout elements, complex background, static text, document security elements, variety of text fonts. However, the problem of word boundaries localization has to be solved at runtime on mobile CPU with limited computing capabilities under specified restrictions. At the moment, there are several groups of methods optimized for different conditions. Methods for the scanned printed text are quick but limited only for images of high quality. Methods for text in the wild have an excessively high computational complexity, thus, are hardly suitable for running on mobile devices as part of the mobile document recognition system. The method presented in this paper solves a more specialized problem than the task of finding text on natural images. It uses local features, a sliding window and a lightweight neural network in order to achieve an optimal algorithm speed-precision ratio. The duration of the algorithm is 12 ms per field running on an ARM processor of a mobile device. The error rate for boundaries localization on a test sample of 8000 fields is 0.3

METHOD OF RARE TERM CONTRASTIVE EXTRACTION FROM NATURAL LANGUAGE TEXTS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

I. A. Bessmertny

2017-01-01

Full Text Available The paper considers a problem of automatic domain term extraction from documents corpus by means of a contrast collection. Existing contrastive methods successfully extract often used terms but mishandle rare terms. This could yield poorness of the resulting thesaurus. Assessment of point-wise mutual information is one of the known statistical methods of term extraction and it finds rare terms successfully. Although, it extracts many false terms at that. The proposed approach consists of point-wise mutual information application for rare terms extraction and filtering of candidates by criterion of joint occurrence with the other candidates. We build “documents-by-terms” matrix that is subjected to singular value decomposition to eliminate noise and reveal strong interconnections. Then we pass on to the resulting matrix “terms-by-terms” that reproduces strength of interconnections between words. This approach was approved on a documents collection from “Geology” domain with the use of contrast documents from such topics as “Politics”, “Culture”, “Economics” and “Accidents” on some Internet resources. The experimental results demonstrate operability of this method for rare terms extraction.

Short-term verbal memory and psychophysiological response to emotion-related words in children who stutter

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stokić Miodrag

2012-01-01

Full Text Available Emotions play a significant role in fluency disorders. In this research we wanted to examine immediate and delayed verbal recall for auditory presented words that carry information about different emotional state (emotion-related words and emotionally neutral words in children who stutter (N=35 and their peers (N=35. Using only word semantics, we wanted to eliminate emotional verbal expression of words as a factor that can influence memory abilities. In addition, we also wanted to examine skin conductance measure as an indicator of autonomic nervous system arousal during short-term memory task for emotion-related and emotionally neutral words. Parental questionnaire (Stuttering Intensity in Children Who Stutter in Positive and Negative Emotion-Related Everyday Situations was given to parents of children who stutter in order to collect data regarding stuttering severity in emotionally arousing situations in everyday life. Differences between the experimental and the control group in global memory capacity are highest in immediate recall (p=0,01 with the tendency for lowering statistical significance with prolongation of retention interval. According to the questionnaire results, children who stutter show a higher degree of stuttering in situations with positive emotional valence (p< 0.00. Skin conductance measurements showed higher autonomic nervous system arousal during perception and free recall of positive emotion-related words in children who stutter when compared to negative and emotionally neutral words. The results indicate higher emotional arousal to positive emotions in children who stutter (p=0.02, leading to either less fluent speech or suppression of verbal short-term memory capacity.

Long-term repetition priming with symmetrical polygons and words.

Science.gov (United States)

Kersteen-Tucker, Z

1991-01-01

In two different tasks, subjects were asked to make lexical decisions (word or nonword) and symmetry judgments (symmetrical or nonsymmetrical) about two-dimensional polygons. In both tasks, every stimulus was repeated at one of four lags (0, 1, 4, or 8 items interposed between the first and second stimulus presentations). This paradigm, known as repetition priming, revealed comparable short-term priming (Lag 0) and long-term priming (Lags 1, 4, and 8) both for symmetrical polygons and for words. A shorter term component (Lags 0 and 1) of priming was observed for nonwords, and only very short-term priming (Lag 0) was observed for nonsymmetrical polygons. These results indicate that response facilitation accruing from repeated exposure can be observed for stimuli that have no preexisting memory representations and suggest that perceptual factors contribute to repetition-priming effects.

Short-term retention of pictures and words: evidence for dual coding systems.

Science.gov (United States)

Pellegrino, J W; Siegel, A W; Dhawan, M

1975-03-01

The recall of picture and word triads was examined in three experiments that manipulated the type of distraction in a Brown-Peterson short-term retention task. In all three experiments recall of pictures was superior to words under auditory distraction conditions. Visual distraction produced high performance levels with both types of stimuli, whereas combined auditory and visual distraction significantly reduced picture recall without further affecting word recall. The results were interpreted in terms of the dual coding hypothesis and indicated that pictures are encoded into separate visual and acoustic processing systems while words are primarily acoustically encoded.

Word2Vec inversion and traditional text classifiers for phenotyping lupus.

Science.gov (United States)

Turner, Clayton A; Jacobs, Alexander D; Marques, Cassios K; Oates, James C; Kamen, Diane L; Anderson, Paul E; Obeid, Jihad S

2017-08-22

Identifying patients with certain clinical criteria based on manual chart review of doctors' notes is a daunting task given the massive amounts of text notes in the electronic health records (EHR). This task can be automated using text classifiers based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques along with pattern recognition machine learning (ML) algorithms. The aim of this research is to evaluate the performance of traditional classifiers for identifying patients with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE) in comparison with a newer Bayesian word vector method. We obtained clinical notes for patients with SLE diagnosis along with controls from the Rheumatology Clinic (662 total patients). Sparse bag-of-words (BOWs) and Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs) matrices were produced using NLP pipelines. These matrices were subjected to several different NLP classifiers: neural networks, random forests, naïve Bayes, support vector machines, and Word2Vec inversion, a Bayesian inversion method. Performance was measured by calculating accuracy and area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) of a cross-validated (CV) set and a separate testing set. We calculated the accuracy of the ICD-9 billing codes as a baseline to be 90.00% with an AUC of 0.900, the shallow neural network with CUIs to be 92.10% with an AUC of 0.970, the random forest with BOWs to be 95.25% with an AUC of 0.994, the random forest with CUIs to be 95.00% with an AUC of 0.979, and the Word2Vec inversion to be 90.03% with an AUC of 0.905. Our results suggest that a shallow neural network with CUIs and random forests with both CUIs and BOWs are the best classifiers for this lupus phenotyping task. The Word2Vec inversion method failed to significantly beat the ICD-9 code classification, but yielded promising results. This method does not require explicit features and is more adaptable to non-binary classification tasks. The Word2Vec inversion is

On the origin and meaning of the German word Luft and some meteorological terms concerning atmospheric water, especially fog

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Möller, Detlev

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The English and French word “air” is derived from the Latin aer, which comes from the Greek άήρ. In contrast, the German word “Luft” is a common Proto-Germanic word; in Old English “ lift” and “ lyft”. The word Luft (also Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is associated with brightness; the German Licht (light, an air (in an atmospheric sense without fog or clouds. Air and water were originally “elements” in ancient Greek and were transmutable; they represented two kinds of the “ layer of mist” (atmosphere. Dark or thick air was mist or cloud, hiding the gods (who lived in the upper air or sky; the aether. Different terms are presented that describe fog and clouds in connection with the history of the process of understanding. Finally, the word Luft (air as a term for gaseous chemical compounds (“kinds of gases” is discussed. In addition to the German, all terms are given in Greek, Latin, English and French .

Knowledge based word-concept model estimation and refinement for biomedical text mining.

Science.gov (United States)

Jimeno Yepes, Antonio; Berlanga, Rafael

2015-02-01

Text mining of scientific literature has been essential for setting up large public biomedical databases, which are being widely used by the research community. In the biomedical domain, the existence of a large number of terminological resources and knowledge bases (KB) has enabled a myriad of machine learning methods for different text mining related tasks. Unfortunately, KBs have not been devised for text mining tasks but for human interpretation, thus performance of KB-based methods is usually lower when compared to supervised machine learning methods. The disadvantage of supervised methods though is they require labeled training data and therefore not useful for large scale biomedical text mining systems. KB-based methods do not have this limitation. In this paper, we describe a novel method to generate word-concept probabilities from a KB, which can serve as a basis for several text mining tasks. This method not only takes into account the underlying patterns within the descriptions contained in the KB but also those in texts available from large unlabeled corpora such as MEDLINE. The parameters of the model have been estimated without training data. Patterns from MEDLINE have been built using MetaMap for entity recognition and related using co-occurrences. The word-concept probabilities were evaluated on the task of word sense disambiguation (WSD). The results showed that our method obtained a higher degree of accuracy than other state-of-the-art approaches when evaluated on the MSH WSD data set. We also evaluated our method on the task of document ranking using MEDLINE citations. These results also showed an increase in performance over existing baseline retrieval approaches. Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Primary School Text Comprehension Predicts Mathematical Word Problem-Solving Skills in Secondary School

Science.gov (United States)

Björn, Piia Maria; Aunola, Kaisa; Nurmi, Jari-Erik

2016-01-01

This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the extent to which primary school text comprehension predicts mathematical word problem-solving skills in secondary school among Finnish students. The participants were 224 fourth graders (9-10 years old at the baseline). The children's text-reading fluency, text comprehension and basic calculation…

Measuring, Predicting and Visualizing Short-Term Change in Word Representation and Usage in VKontakte Social Network

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Stewart, Ian B.; Arendt, Dustin L.; Bell, Eric B.; Volkova, Svitlana

2017-05-17

Language in social media is extremely dynamic: new words emerge, trend and disappear, while the meaning of existing words can fluctuate over time. This work addresses several important tasks of visualizing and predicting short term text representation shift, i.e. the change in a word’s contextual semantics. We study the relationship between short-term concept drift and representation shift on a large social media corpus – VKontakte collected during the Russia-Ukraine crisis in 2014 – 2015. We visualize short-term representation shift for example keywords and build predictive models to forecast short-term shifts in meaning from previous meaning as well as from concept drift. We show that short-term representation shift can be accurately predicted up to several weeks in advance and that visualization provides insight into meaning change. Our approach can be used to explore and characterize specific aspects of the streaming corpus during crisis events and potentially improve other downstream classification tasks including real-time event forecasting in social media.

Ambiguity Analysis Of Words And Terms In Movie Script Entitled “Shooter”

OpenAIRE

Putra, Hendry Oktama

2014-01-01

There are general words and terms which is used in military language in movie “Shooter”. In its subtitles or movie transcripts, many words and terms in general context are found on in certain scene, where the scene is taking place. To put it simply, a word in general context, when used by military force, it gives different meaning. As such, those English learners who do not know such language will encounter difficulty to learn them as some of them may have certain interest. Describing the mil...

Basic East German Words, Terms, Names: Why Know Them?

Science.gov (United States)

Mayer, Elizabeth M.

Terms basic to any understanding of East German culture and politics are defined in this paper. The items selected are grouped in five categories: (1) the state, (2) political and philosophical terms, (3) economics, (4) education, and (5) the family, ethics, and the arts. The author emphasizes semantic differences despite similarities to words in…

Using WordNet to Complement Training Information in Text Categorization

OpenAIRE

Rodriguez, Manuel de Buenaga; Hidalgo, Jose Maria Gomez; Agudo, Belen Diaz

1997-01-01

Automatic Text Categorization (TC) is a complex and useful task for many natural language applications, and is usually performed through the use of a set of manually classified documents, a training collection. We suggest the utilization of additional resources like lexical databases to increase the amount of information that TC systems make use of, and thus, to improve their performance. Our approach integrates WordNet information with two training approaches through the Vector Space Model. ...

31 CFR 342.1 - Definition of words and terms used in this part.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Definition of words and terms used in this part. 342.1 Section 342.1 Money and Finance: Treasury Regulations Relating to Money and Finance... SAVINGS NOTES § 342.1 Definition of words and terms used in this part. (a) Payroll savings plan refers to...

The Effect of Text Chat Assisted with Word Processors on Saudi English Major Students' Writing Accuracy and Productivity of Authentic Texts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

Menzerath-Altmann law for distinct word distribution analysis in a large text

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Word position affects stimulus recognition: evidence for early ERP short-term plastic modulation.

Science.gov (United States)

Spironelli, Chiara; Galfano, Giovanni; Umiltà, Carlo; Angrilli, Alessandro

2011-12-01

The present study was aimed at investigating the short-term plastic changes that follow word learning at a neurophysiological level. The main hypothesis was that word position (left or right visual field, LVF/RH or RVF/LH) in the initial learning phase would leave a trace that affected, in the subsequent recognition phase, the Recognition Potential (i.e., the first negative component distinguishing words from other stimuli) elicited 220-240 ms after centrally presented stimuli. Forty-eight students were administered, in the learning phase, 125 words for 4s, randomly presented half in the left and half in the right visual field. In the recognition phase, participants were split into two equal groups, one was assigned to the Word task, the other to the Picture task (in which half of the 125 pictures were new, and half matched prior studied words). During the Word task, old RVF/LH words elicited significantly greater negativity in left posterior sites with respect to old LVF/RH words, which in turn showed the same pattern of activation evoked by new words. Therefore, correspondence between stimulus spatial position and hemisphere specialized in automatic word recognition created a robust prime for subsequent recognition. During the Picture task, pictures matching old RVF/LH words showed no differences compared with new pictures, but evoked significantly greater negativity than pictures matching old LVF/RH words. Thus, the priming effect vanished when the task required a switch from visual analysis to stored linguistic information, whereas the lack of correspondence between stimulus position and network specialized in automatic word recognition (i.e., when words were presented to the LVF/RH) revealed the implicit costs for recognition. Results support the view that short-term plastic changes occurring in a linguistic learning task interact with both stimulus position and modality (written word vs. picture representation). Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights

Don’t words come easy?A psychophysical exploration of word superiority

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Randi eStarrfelt

2013-09-01

Full Text Available Words are made of letters, and yet sometimes it is easier to identify a word than a single letter. This word superiority effect (WSE has been observed when written stimuli are presented very briefly or degraded by visual noise. We compare performance with letters and words in three experiments, to explore the extents and limits of the WSE. Using a carefully controlled list of three letter words, we show that a word superiority effect can be revealed in vocal reaction times even to undegraded stimuli. With a novel combination of psychophysics and mathematical modelling, we further show that the typical WSE is specifically reflected in perceptual processing speed: single words are simply processed faster than single letters. Intriguingly, when multiple stimuli are presented simultaneously, letters are perceived more easily than words, and this is reflected both in perceptual processing speed and visual short term memory capacity. So, even if single words come easy, there is a limit to the word superiority effect.

A 38 million words Dutch text corpus and its users | Kruyt | Lexikos

African Journals Online (AJOL)

In August 1996, the 38 Million Words Corpus was available for consultation by the international research community. The present paper reports on the characteristics of this corpus (design, text classification, linguistic annotation) and on its use, both in dictionary projects and in linguistic research. In spite of limitations with ...

Infants' long-term memory for the sound patterns of words and voices.

Science.gov (United States)

Houston, Derek M; Jusczyk, Peter W

2003-12-01

Infants' long-term memory for the phonological patterns of words versus the indexical properties of talkers' voices was examined in 3 experiments using the Headturn Preference Procedure (D. G. Kemler Nelson et al., 1995). Infants were familiarized with repetitions of 2 words and tested on the next day for their orientation times to 4 passages--2 of which included the familiarized words. At 7.5 months of age, infants oriented longer to passages containing familiarized words when these were produced by the original talker. At 7.5 and 10.5 months of age, infants did not recognize words in passages produced by a novel female talker. In contrast, 7.5-month-olds demonstrated word recognition in both talker conditions when presented with passages produced by both the original and the novel talker. The findings suggest that talker-specific information can prime infants' memory for words and facilitate word recognition across talkers. ((c) 2003 APA, all rights reserved)

31 CFR 306.2 - Definitions of words and terms as used in these regulations.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Definitions of words and terms as used in these regulations. 306.2 Section 306.2 Money and Finance: Treasury Regulations Relating to... GENERAL REGULATIONS GOVERNING U.S. SECURITIES General Information § 306.2 Definitions of words and terms...

Word list recall in youngsters and older adults

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sogol Gerami

2011-01-01

Full Text Available

text-justify: kashida; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify; text-kashida: 0%;">A word-list recall is an experiment examines the effect of age on the change in memory. The ability to understand or use language is more or less dependent on the memory capacity. Any person may know what s/he wants to say but may not be able to say it if the memory does not help. We use some form of memory in all aspects of language processing. Whatever we have in our mind is stored whether for seconds, hours, or years. By short-term memory, a person can remember different things for a period of seconds or minutes only. By rehearsal, the duration and the quantity of storage will increase. Therefore, rehearsal transforms the short-term memory into the long-term memory. This experiment, which examines the number of words recalled by different age groups after presenting a word list, reveals that the younger a person the more are the words he or she recalls. The experiment also reveals that semantically related words have greater chance to be remembered when they are compared with unrelated words.

Word List Recall in Youngsters and Older Adults

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sogol Gerami

2011-01-01

Full Text Available

text-justify: kashida; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; direction: ltr; unicode-bidi: embed; text-align: justify; text-kashida: 0%;">A word-list recall is an experiment examines the effect of age on the change in memory. The ability to understand or use language is more or less dependent on the memory capacity. Any person may know what s/he wants to say but may not be able to say it if the memory does not help. We use some form of memory in all aspects of language processing. Whatever we have in our mind is stored whether for seconds, hours, or years. By short-term memory, a person can remember different things for a period of seconds or minutes only. By rehearsal, the duration and the quantity of storage will increase. Therefore, rehearsal transforms the short-term memory into the long-term memory. This experiment, which examines the number of words recalled by different age groups after presenting a word list, reveals that the younger a person the more are the words he or she recalls. The experiment also reveals that semantically related words have greater chance to be remembered when they are compared with unrelated words.

Examining the Effect of Interference on Short-term Memory Recall of Arabic Abstract and Concrete Words Using Free, Cued, and Serial Recall Paradigms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ahmed Mohammed Saleh Alduais

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Purpose: To see if there is a correlation between interference and short-term memory recall and to examine interference as a factor affecting memory recalling of Arabic and abstract words through free, cued, and serial recall tasks. Method: Four groups of undergraduates in King Saud University, Saudi Arabia participated in this study. The first group consisted of 9 undergraduates who were trained to perform three types of recall for 20 Arabic abstract and concrete words. The second, third and fourth groups consisted of 27 undergraduates where each group was trained only to perform one recall type: free recall, cued recall and serial recall respectively. Interference (short-term memory interruption was the independent variable and a number of recalled abstract and concrete words was the dependent variable. The used materials in this study were: abstract and concrete words classification form based on four factors was distributed to the participants (concreteness, imageability, meaningfulness, and age of acquisition, three oral recall forms, three written recall forms, and observation sheets for each type of recall. Also, three methods were used: auditory, visual, and written methods. Results: Findings indicated that interference effect on short-term memory recall of Arabic abstract and concrete words was not significant especially in the case of free and serial recall paradigms. The difference between the total number of recalled Arabic abstract and concrete words was also very slight. One other the hand, we came to the conclusion that Pearson’s correlation between interference at these memory recall paradigms (M: 1.66, SD= .47 and the short-term memory recall (M: 1.75, SD= .43 supported the research hypothesis that those participants with oral interruptions tended to recall slightly less Arabic abstract and concrete words, whereas those participants with no oral interruptions would tend to recall slightly more Arabic abstract and concrete

31 CFR 339.1 - Definitions of words and terms as used in this circular.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-07-01

... 31 Money and Finance: Treasury 2 2010-07-01 2010-07-01 false Definitions of words and terms as used in this circular. 339.1 Section 339.1 Money and Finance: Treasury Regulations Relating to Money... OFFERING OF UNITED STATES SAVINGS BONDS, SERIES H § 339.1 Definitions of words and terms as used in this...

Strong and long: effects of word length on phonological binding in verbal short-term memory.

Science.gov (United States)

Jefferies, Elizabeth; Frankish, Clive; Noble, Katie

2011-02-01

This study examined the effects of item length on the contribution of linguistic knowledge to immediate serial recall (ISR). Long words are typically recalled more poorly than short words, reflecting the greater demands that they place on phonological encoding, rehearsal, and production. However, reverse word length effects--that is, better recall of long than short words--can also occur in situations in which phonological maintenance is difficult, suggesting that long words derive greater support from long-term lexical knowledge. In this study, long and short words and nonwords (containing one vs. three syllables) were presented for immediate serial recall in (a) pure lists and (b) unpredictable mixed lists of words and nonwords. The mixed-list paradigm is known to disrupt the phonological stability of words, encouraging their phonemes to recombine with the elements of other list items. In this situation, standard length effects were seen for nonwords, while length effects for words were absent or reversed. A detailed error analysis revealed that long words were more robust to the mixed-list manipulation than short words: Their phonemes were less likely to be omitted and to recombine with phonemes from other list items. These findings support an interactive view of short-term memory, in which long words derive greater benefits from lexical knowledge than short words-especially when their phonological integrity is challenged by the inclusion of nonwords in mixed lists.

Language Identification of Kannada, Hindi and English Text Words Through Visual Discriminating Features

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.

Developmental, Component-Based Model of Reading Fluency: An Investigation of Predictors of Word-Reading Fluency, Text-Reading Fluency, and Reading Comprehension.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Young-Suk Grace

2015-01-01

The primary goal was to expand our understanding of text reading fluency (efficiency or automaticity)-how its relation to other constructs (e.g., word reading fluency and reading comprehension) changes over time and how it is different from word reading fluency and reading comprehension. We examined (1) developmentally changing relations among word reading fluency, listening comprehension, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension; (2) the relation of reading comprehension to text reading fluency; (3) unique emergent literacy predictors (i.e., phonological awareness, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, letter name knowledge, vocabulary) of text reading fluency vs. word reading fluency; and (4) unique language and cognitive predictors (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, theory of mind) of text reading fluency vs. reading comprehension. These questions were addressed using longitudinal data (two timepoints; Mean age = 5;24 & 6;08) from Korean-speaking children ( N = 143). Results showed that listening comprehension was related to text reading fluency at time 2, but not at time 1. At both times text reading fluency was related to reading comprehension, and reading comprehension was related to text reading fluency over and above word reading fluency and listening comprehension. Orthographic awareness was related to text reading fluency over and above other emergent literacy skills and word reading fluency. Vocabulary and grammatical knowledge were independently related to text reading fluency and reading comprehension whereas theory of mind was related to reading comprehension, but not text reading fluency. These results reveal developmental nature of relations and mechanism of text reading fluency in reading development.

Developmental, Component-Based Model of Reading Fluency: An Investigation of Predictors of Word-Reading Fluency, Text-Reading Fluency, and Reading Comprehension

OpenAIRE

Kim, Young-Suk Grace

2015-01-01

The primary goal was to expand our understanding of text reading fluency (efficiency or automaticity)—how its relation to other constructs (e.g., word reading fluency and reading comprehension) changes over time and how it is different from word reading fluency and reading comprehension. We examined (1) developmentally changing relations among word reading fluency, listening comprehension, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension; (2) the relation of reading comprehension to text readi...

Text Detection in Natural Scene Images by Stroke Gabor Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Yi, Chucai; Tian, Yingli

2011-01-01

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, based on stroke components and descriptive Gabor filters, to detect text regions in natural scene images. Text characters and strings are constructed by stroke components as basic units. Gabor filters are used to describe and analyze the stroke components in text characters or strings. We define a suitability measurement to analyze the confidence of Gabor filters in describing stroke component and the suitability of Gabor filters on an image window. From the training set, we compute a set of Gabor filters that can describe principle stroke components of text by their parameters. Then a K -means algorithm is applied to cluster the descriptive Gabor filters. The clustering centers are defined as Stroke Gabor Words (SGWs) to provide a universal description of stroke components. By suitability evaluation on positive and negative training samples respectively, each SGW generates a pair of characteristic distributions of suitability measurements. On a testing natural scene image, heuristic layout analysis is applied first to extract candidate image windows. Then we compute the principle SGWs for each image window to describe its principle stroke components. Characteristic distributions generated by principle SGWs are used to classify text or nontext windows. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our algorithm can handle complex backgrounds and variant text patterns (font, color, scale, etc.).

Text in social networking Web sites: A word frequency analysis of Live Spaces

OpenAIRE

Thelwall, Mike

2008-01-01

Social networking sites are owned by a wide section of society and seem to dominate Web usage. Despite much research into this phenomenon, little systematic data is available. This article partially fills this gap with a pilot text analysis of one social networking site, Live Spaces. The text in 3,071 English language Live Spaces sites was monitored daily for six months and word frequency statistics calculated and compared with those from the British National Corpus. The results confirmed the...

Short-Term Memory for Pictures and Words by Mentally Retarded and Nonretarded Persons.

Science.gov (United States)

Ellis, Norman R.; Wooldridge, Peter W.

1985-01-01

Twelve mentally retarded and 12 nonretarded adults were compared in a Brown-Peterson short-term memory task for the retention of words and pictures over intervals up to 30 seconds. The retarded subjects forgot more rapidly over the initial 10 seconds. They also retained pictures better than they did words. (Author/DB)

Dependence of exponents on text length versus finite-size scaling for word-frequency distributions

Science.gov (United States)

Corral, Álvaro; Font-Clos, Francesc

2017-08-01

Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of this scaling law, using both careful statistical tests and analytical arguments based on the generalized central-limit theorem applied to the moments of the distribution (and obtaining a novel derivation of Heaps' law as a by-product). We also find that the picture of word-frequency distributions with power-law exponents that decrease with text length [X. Yan and P. Minnhagen, Physica A 444, 828 (2016), 10.1016/j.physa.2015.10.082] does not stand with rigorous statistical analysis. Instead, we show that the distributions are perfectly described by power-law tails with stable exponents, whose values are close to 2, in agreement with the classical Zipf's law. Some misconceptions about scaling are also clarified.

The role of short-term memory impairment in nonword repetition, real word repetition, and nonword decoding: A case study.

Science.gov (United States)

Peter, Beate

2018-01-01

In a companion study, adults with dyslexia and adults with a probable history of childhood apraxia of speech showed evidence of difficulty with processing sequential information during nonword repetition, multisyllabic real word repetition and nonword decoding. Results suggested that some errors arose in visual encoding during nonword reading, all levels of processing but especially short-term memory storage/retrieval during nonword repetition, and motor planning and programming during complex real word repetition. To further investigate the role of short-term memory, a participant with short-term memory impairment (MI) was recruited. MI was confirmed with poor performance during a sentence repetition and three nonword repetition tasks, all of which have a high short-term memory load, whereas typical performance was observed during tests of reading, spelling, and static verbal knowledge, all with low short-term memory loads. Experimental results show error-free performance during multisyllabic real word repetition but high counts of sequence errors, especially migrations and assimilations, during nonword repetition, supporting short-term memory as a locus of sequential processing deficit during nonword repetition. Results are also consistent with the hypothesis that during complex real word repetition, short-term memory is bypassed as the word is recognized and retrieved from long-term memory prior to producing the word.

Culture-Bound Words of the Danube Basin Countries: Translation into English

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chetverikova Olena

2015-08-01

Full Text Available Any course in linguistic country study or popular text translation is impossible without adequate understanding and presentation of culture-bound elements, which present one of the most difficult topics to deal with, especially in multicultural countries. Our investigation aims to show the problems, which appear when we deal with equivalent-lacking words related to culture. Sometimes equivalent-lacking words are associated with culture-bound words, the Ukrainian equivalent for them is “реалії” (derived from Latin realis, pl. realia. However, the term “culture-bound word” is of narrower meaning than the term “equivalent-lacking word”. A culture-bound word names an object peculiar to this or that ethnic culture. Equivalent-lacking words include, along with culture-bound words, neologisms, i.e. newly coined forms, dialect words, slang, taboo-words, foreign (third language terms, proper names, misspellings, archaisms. Comparison of languages and cultures reveals the various types of culture-bound words. Reasons for using them can be extralinguistic, lexical or stylistic. When translating culture-bound words a translator should be aware of the receptor’s potential problems, take into account his background knowledge and choose the best means of translation.

A Novel Text Clustering Approach Using Deep-Learning Vocabulary Network

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Junkai Yi

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Text clustering is an effective approach to collect and organize text documents into meaningful groups for mining valuable information on the Internet. However, there exist some issues to tackle such as feature extraction and data dimension reduction. To overcome these problems, we present a novel approach named deep-learning vocabulary network. The vocabulary network is constructed based on related-word set, which contains the “cooccurrence” relations of words or terms. We replace term frequency in feature vectors with the “importance” of words in terms of vocabulary network and PageRank, which can generate more precise feature vectors to represent the meaning of text clustering. Furthermore, sparse-group deep belief network is proposed to reduce the dimensionality of feature vectors, and we introduce coverage rate for similarity measure in Single-Pass clustering. To verify the effectiveness of our work, we compare the approach to the representative algorithms, and experimental results show that feature vectors in terms of deep-learning vocabulary network have better clustering performance.

Vocabulary Constraint on Texts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

C. Sutarsyah

2008-01-01

Full Text Available This case study was carried out in the English Education Department of State University of Malang. The aim of the study was to identify and describe the vocabulary in the reading text and to seek if the text is useful for reading skill development. A descriptive qualitative design was applied to obtain the data. For this purpose, some available computer programs were used to find the description of vocabulary in the texts. It was found that the 20 texts containing 7,945 words are dominated by low frequency words which account for 16.97% of the words in the texts. The high frequency words occurring in the texts were dominated by function words. In the case of word levels, it was found that the texts have very limited number of words from GSL (General Service List of English Words (West, 1953. The proportion of the first 1,000 words of GSL only accounts for 44.6%. The data also show that the texts contain too large proportion of words which are not in the three levels (the first 2,000 and UWL. These words account for 26.44% of the running words in the texts.  It is believed that the constraints are due to the selection of the texts which are made of a series of short-unrelated texts. This kind of text is subject to the accumulation of low frequency words especially those of content words and limited of words from GSL. It could also defeat the development of students' reading skills and vocabulary enrichment.

Periodic words connected with the Fibonacci words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

G. M. Barabash

2016-06-01

Full Text Available In this paper we introduce two families of periodic words (FLP-words of type 1 and FLP-words of type 2 that are connected with the Fibonacci words and investigated their properties.

Text Classification and Distributional features techniques in Datamining and Warehousing

OpenAIRE

Bethu, Srikanth; Babu, G Charless; Vinoda, J; Priyadarshini, E; rao, M Raghavendra

2013-01-01

Text Categorization is traditionally done by using the term frequency and inverse document frequency.This type of method is not very good because, some words which are not so important may appear in the document .The term frequency of unimportant words may increase and document may be classified in the wrong category.For reducing the error of classifying of documents in wrong category. The Distributional features are introduced. In the Distribuional Features, the Distribution of the words in ...

Word Reading Efficiency, Text Reading Fluency, and Reading Comprehension among Chinese Learners of English

Science.gov (United States)

Jiang, Xiangying; Sawaki, Yasuyo; Sabatini, John

2012-01-01

This study examined the relationship among word reading efficiency, text reading fluency, and reading comprehension for adult English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. Data from 185 adult Chinese EFL learners preparing to take the Test-of-English-as-a-Foreign-Language[TM] (TOEFL[R]) were analyzed in this study. The participants completed a…

Social Media Text Classification by Enhancing Well-Formed Text Trained Model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Phat Jotikabukkana

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Social media are a powerful communication tool in our era of digital information. The large amount of user-generated data is a useful novel source of data, even though it is not easy to extract the treasures from this vast and noisy trove. Since classification is an important part of text mining, many techniques have been proposed to classify this kind of information. We developed an effective technique of social media text classification by semi-supervised learning utilizing an online news source consisting of well-formed text. The computer first automatically extracts news categories, well-categorized by publishers, as classes for topic classification. A bag of words taken from news articles provides the initial keywords related to their category in the form of word vectors. The principal task is to retrieve a set of new productive keywords. Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency weighting (TF-IDF and Word Article Matrix (WAM are used as main methods. A modification of WAM is recomputed until it becomes the most effective model for social media text classification. The key success factor was enhancing our model with effective keywords from social media. A promising result of 99.50% accuracy was achieved, with more than 98.5% of Precision, Recall, and F-measure after updating the model three times.

A spatially-supported forced-choice recognition test reveals children’s long-term memory for newly learned word forms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Katherine R. Gordon

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Children’s memories for the link between a newly trained word and its referent have been the focus of extensive past research. However, memory for the word form itself is rarely assessed among preschool-age children. When it is, children are typically asked to verbally recall the forms, and they generally perform at floor on such tests. To better measure children’s memory for word forms, we aimed to design a more sensitive test that required recognition rather than recall, provided spatial cues to off-set the phonological memory demands of the test, and allowed pointing rather than verbal responses. We taught 12 novel word-referent pairs via ostensive naming to sixteen 4-to-6-year-olds and measured their memory for the word forms after a week-long retention interval using the new spatially-supported form recognition test. We also measured their memory for the word-referent links and the generalization of the links to untrained referents with commonly used recognition tests. Children demonstrated memory for word forms at above chance levels; however, their memory for forms was poorer than their memory for trained or generalized word-referent links. When in error, children were no more likely to select a foil that was a close neighbor to the target form than a maximally different foil. Additionally, they more often selected correct forms that were among the first six than the last six to be trained. Overall, these findings suggest that children are able to remember word forms after a limited number of ostensive exposures and a long-term delay. However, word forms remain more difficult to learn than word-referent links and there is an upper limit on the number of forms that can be learned within a given period of time.

Uro-words making history: ureter and urethra.

Science.gov (United States)

Marx, Franz Josef; Karenberg, Axel

2010-06-15

We comprehensively review the history of the terms "ureter" and "urethra" from 700 BC to the present. Using a case study approach, ancient medical texts were analyzed to clarify the etymology and use of both terms. In addition, selected anatomy textbooks from the 15th to 17th centuries were searched to identify and compare descriptions, illustrations, and various expressions used by contemporary authors to designate the upper and lower parts of the urinary tract. The Ancient Greek words "ureter" and "urethra" appear early in Hippocratic and Aristotelian writings. However, both terms designated what we today call the urethra. It was only with increasing anatomical knowledge in Greek medical texts after the 1st century AD that definitions of these words evolved similar to those we employ today. Numerous synonyms were used which served as a basis for translation into Arabic and later Latin during the transfer of ancient knowledge to the cultures of the medieval period. When Greek original texts and their Arabic-Latin version were compared during the Renaissance, this led to terminological confusion which could only be gradually overcome. Around the year 1600, the use of the latinized terms "ureter" and "urethra" became generally accepted. The dissemination of these terms in modern national languages and the emergence of clinical derivatives complete this historical development. The history of the terms "ureter" and "urethra" is exemplary of the difficulties with which the development of a precise urologic terminology had to struggle. The story behind the words also clarifies why even today we still have imprecise or misleading terms.

Word Domain Disambiguation via Word Sense Disambiguation

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Sanfilippo, Antonio P.; Tratz, Stephen C.; Gregory, Michelle L.

2006-06-04

Word subject domains have been widely used to improve the perform-ance of word sense disambiguation al-gorithms. However, comparatively little effort has been devoted so far to the disambiguation of word subject do-mains. The few existing approaches have focused on the development of al-gorithms specific to word domain dis-ambiguation. In this paper we explore an alternative approach where word domain disambiguation is achieved via word sense disambiguation. Our study shows that this approach yields very strong results, suggesting that word domain disambiguation can be ad-dressed in terms of word sense disam-biguation with no need for special purpose algorithms.

Influence of the Number of Predicted Words on Text Input Speed in Participants With Cervical Spinal Cord Injury.

Science.gov (United States)

Pouplin, Samuel; Roche, Nicolas; Vaugier, Isabelle; Jacob, Antoine; Figere, Marjorie; Pottier, Sandra; Antoine, Jean-Yves; Bensmail, Djamel

2016-02-01

To determine whether the number of words displayed in the word prediction software (WPS) list affects text input speed (TIS) in people with cervical spinal cord injury (SCI), and whether any influence is dependent on the level of the lesion. A cross-sectional trial. A rehabilitation center. Persons with cervical SCI (N=45). Lesion level was high (C4 and C5, American Spinal Injury Association [ASIA] grade A or B) for 15 participants (high-lesion group) and low (between C6 and C8, ASIA grade A or B) for 30 participants (low-lesion group). TIS was evaluated during four 10-minute copying tasks: (1) without WPS (Without); (2) with a display of 3 predicted words (3Words); (3) with a display of 6 predicted words (6Words); and (4) with a display of 8 predicted words (8Words). During the 4 copying tasks, TIS was measured objectively (characters per minute, number of errors) and subjectively through subject report (fatigue, perception of speed, cognitive load, satisfaction). For participants with low-cervical SCI, TIS without WPS was faster than with WPS, regardless of the number of words displayed (Pwords displayed in a word prediction list on TIS; however, perception of TIS differed according to lesion level. For persons with low-cervical SCI, a small number of words should be displayed, or WPS should not be used at all. For persons with high-cervical SCI, a larger number of words displayed increases the comfort of use of WPS. Copyright © 2016 American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Artful terms: A study on aesthetic word usage for visual art versus film and music

Science.gov (United States)

Augustin, M Dorothee; Carbon, Claus-Christian; Wagemans, Johan

2012-01-01

Despite the importance of the arts in human life, psychologists still know relatively little about what characterises their experience for the recipient. The current research approaches this problem by studying people's word usage in aesthetics, with a focus on three important art forms: visual art, film, and music. The starting point was a list of 77 words known to be useful to describe aesthetic impressions of visual art (Augustin et al 2012, Acta Psychologica 139 187–201). Focusing on ratings of likelihood of use, we examined to what extent word usage in aesthetic descriptions of visual art can be generalised to film and music. The results support the claim of an interplay of generality and specificity in aesthetic word usage. Terms with equal likelihood of use for all art forms included beautiful, wonderful, and terms denoting originality. Importantly, emotion-related words received higher ratings for film and music than for visual art. To our knowledge this is direct evidence that aesthetic experiences of visual art may be less affectively loaded than, for example, experiences of music. The results render important information about aesthetic word usage in the realm of the arts and may serve as a starting point to develop tailored measurement instruments for different art forms. PMID:23145287

Artful terms: A study on aesthetic word usage for visual art versus film and music.

Science.gov (United States)

Augustin, M Dorothee; Carbon, Claus-Christian; Wagemans, Johan

2012-01-01

Despite the importance of the arts in human life, psychologists still know relatively little about what characterises their experience for the recipient. The current research approaches this problem by studying people's word usage in aesthetics, with a focus on three important art forms: visual art, film, and music. The starting point was a list of 77 words known to be useful to describe aesthetic impressions of visual art (Augustin et al 2012, Acta Psychologica139 187-201). Focusing on ratings of likelihood of use, we examined to what extent word usage in aesthetic descriptions of visual art can be generalised to film and music. The results support the claim of an interplay of generality and specificity in aesthetic word usage. Terms with equal likelihood of use for all art forms included beautiful, wonderful, and terms denoting originality. Importantly, emotion-related words received higher ratings for film and music than for visual art. To our knowledge this is direct evidence that aesthetic experiences of visual art may be less affectively loaded than, for example, experiences of music. The results render important information about aesthetic word usage in the realm of the arts and may serve as a starting point to develop tailored measurement instruments for different art forms.

Ontological Annotation with WordNet

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Sanfilippo, Antonio P.; Tratz, Stephen C.; Gregory, Michelle L.; Chappell, Alan R.; Whitney, Paul D.; Posse, Christian; Paulson, Patrick R.; Baddeley, Bob; Hohimer, Ryan E.; White, Amanda M.

2006-06-06

Semantic Web applications require robust and accurate annotation tools that are capable of automating the assignment of ontological classes to words in naturally occurring text (ontological annotation). Most current ontologies do not include rich lexical databases and are therefore not easily integrated with word sense disambiguation algorithms that are needed to automate ontological annotation. WordNet provides a potentially ideal solution to this problem as it offers a highly structured lexical conceptual representation that has been extensively used to develop word sense disambiguation algorithms. However, WordNet has not been designed as an ontology, and while it can be easily turned into one, the result of doing this would present users with serious practical limitations due to the great number of concepts (synonym sets) it contains. Moreover, mapping WordNet to an existing ontology may be difficult and requires substantial labor. We propose to overcome these limitations by developing an analytical platform that (1) provides a WordNet-based ontology offering a manageable and yet comprehensive set of concept classes, (2) leverages the lexical richness of WordNet to give an extensive characterization of concept class in terms of lexical instances, and (3) integrates a class recognition algorithm that automates the assignment of concept classes to words in naturally occurring text. The ensuing framework makes available an ontological annotation platform that can be effectively integrated with intelligence analysis systems to facilitate evidence marshaling and sustain the creation and validation of inference models.

On avoided words, absent words, and their application to biological sequence analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Almirantis, Yannis; Charalampopoulos, Panagiotis; Gao, Jia; Iliopoulos, Costas S; Mohamed, Manal; Pissis, Solon P; Polychronopoulos, Dimitris

2017-01-01

The deviation of the observed frequency of a word w from its expected frequency in a given sequence x is used to determine whether or not the word is avoided . This concept is particularly useful in DNA linguistic analysis. The value of the deviation of w , denoted by [Formula: see text], effectively characterises the extent of a word by its edge contrast in the context in which it occurs. A word w of length [Formula: see text] is a [Formula: see text]-avoided word in x if [Formula: see text], for a given threshold [Formula: see text]. Notice that such a word may be completely absent from x . Hence, computing all such words naïvely can be a very time-consuming procedure, in particular for large k . In this article, we propose an [Formula: see text]-time and [Formula: see text]-space algorithm to compute all [Formula: see text]-avoided words of length k in a given sequence of length n over a fixed-sized alphabet. We also present a time-optimal [Formula: see text]-time algorithm to compute all [Formula: see text]-avoided words (of any length) in a sequence of length n over an integer alphabet of size [Formula: see text]. In addition, we provide a tight asymptotic upper bound for the number of [Formula: see text]-avoided words over an integer alphabet and the expected length of the longest one. We make available an implementation of our algorithm. Experimental results, using both real and synthetic data, show the efficiency and applicability of our implementation in biological sequence analysis. The systematic search for avoided words is particularly useful for biological sequence analysis. We present a linear-time and linear-space algorithm for the computation of avoided words of length k in a given sequence x . We suggest a modification to this algorithm so that it computes all avoided words of x , irrespective of their length, within the same time complexity. We also present combinatorial results with regards to avoided words and absent words.

The Comparison between Contextual Guessing Strategies vs. Memorizing a List of Isolated Words in Vocabulary Learning Regarding Long Term Memory

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Leyla Vakili S AMIYAN

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Guessing the meaning of unknown vocabularies within a text is a way of learning new words which is named textual vocabulary acquisition. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of a textual guessing strategy on vocabulary learning at the intermediate le vel. Textual guessing strategy is to guess the meaning of vocabularies with the help of surrounding words or sentences in the co - text without any translation. This paper reports the findings of two quantitative studies conducted on English language learner s with the Intermediate 2 level of proficiency in Kavosh foreign language institute, Mashhad, Iran. Twenty male and female attendants were selected and assigned to ’context’ and ‘non - context’ groups. The context group received an instruction to infer the m eaning of new words while the non - context participants were treated as learning new vocabularies individually (autonomously. The result of the independent sample t - test at the post - test stage revealed that the probability value of t - test with an equality of variances assumption is lower than 0.05 (0.04700. So this result represented that there is a meaningful difference between the experimental group and the control group considering their amount of learning. The results indicated that textual guessing s trategy had more effect on their long term memory. It was also revealed that the words learned through context are used more frequently than those learned in isolation in the speaking repertoire of the participants.

Phraseosemantic peculiarities of idioms with the word «silki» (snares (a case study of Russian classics and modern literature texts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Andrianova D.A.

2017-03-01

Full Text Available this article explores semantic and stylistic meaning changes of idioms with the word “silki” (snares during XVIII–XXI centuries on the basis of Russian classics and modern literature texts and publicistic writing. It is proved that the word “silki” (snares was used as a biblical expression in ecclesiastic and some fiction texts, this explanes its strong negative connotation, which is out of use in up-to-date contexts.

Set of Frequent Word Item sets as Feature Representation for Text with Indonesian Slang

Science.gov (United States)

Sa'adillah Maylawati, Dian; Putri Saptawati, G. A.

2017-01-01

Indonesian slang are commonly used in social media. Due to their unstructured syntax, it is difficult to extract their features based on Indonesian grammar for text mining. To do so, we propose Set of Frequent Word Item sets (SFWI) as text representation which is considered match for Indonesian slang. Besides, SFWI is able to keep the meaning of Indonesian slang with regard to the order of appearance sentence. We use FP-Growth algorithm with adding separation sentence function into the algorithm to extract the feature of SFWI. The experiments is done with text data from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and personal website. The result of experiments shows that Indonesian slang were more correctly interpreted based on SFWI.

Word-length effect in verbal short-term memory in individuals with Down's syndrome.

Science.gov (United States)

Kanno, K; Ikeda, Y

2002-11-01

Many studies have indicated that individuals with Down's syndrome (DS) show a specific deficit in short-term memory for verbal information. The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of the length of words on verbal short-term memory in individuals with DS. Twenty-eight children with DS and 10 control participants matched for memory span were tested on verbal serial recall and speech rate, which are thought to involve rehearsal and output speed. Although a significant word-length effect was observed in both groups for the recall of a larger number of items with a shorter spoken duration than for those with a longer spoken duration, the number of correct recalls in the group with DS was reduced compared to the control subjects. The results demonstrating poor short-term memory in children with DS were irrelevant to speech rate. In addition, the proportion of repetition-gained errors in serial recall was higher in children with DS than in control subjects. The present findings suggest that poor access to long-term lexical knowledge, rather than overt articulation speed, constrains verbal short-term memory functions in individuals with DS.

Handwriting segmentation of unconstrained Oriya text

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Segmentation of handwritten text into lines, words and characters .... We now discuss here some terms relating to water reservoirs that will be used in feature ..... is found. Next, based on the touching position, reservoir base-area points, ...

Incidental Vocabulary Acquisition: The Effects of Task Type, Word Occurrence and Their Combination

Science.gov (United States)

Laufer, Batia; Rozovski-Roitblat, Bella

2011-01-01

We investigated how long-term retention of new words was affected by task type, number of word occurrences in the teaching materials and the combination of the two factors. The tasks were: reading a text with occasional Focus on Form when learners used dictionaries (T+F), or reading a text with Focus on Forms, i.e. word focused exercises (T+Fs).…

Automating Ontological Annotation with WordNet

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Sanfilippo, Antonio P.; Tratz, Stephen C.; Gregory, Michelle L.; Chappell, Alan R.; Whitney, Paul D.; Posse, Christian; Paulson, Patrick R.; Baddeley, Bob L.; Hohimer, Ryan E.; White, Amanda M.

2006-01-22

Semantic Web applications require robust and accurate annotation tools that are capable of automating the assignment of ontological classes to words in naturally occurring text (ontological annotation). Most current ontologies do not include rich lexical databases and are therefore not easily integrated with word sense disambiguation algorithms that are needed to automate ontological annotation. WordNet provides a potentially ideal solution to this problem as it offers a highly structured lexical conceptual representation that has been extensively used to develop word sense disambiguation algorithms. However, WordNet has not been designed as an ontology, and while it can be easily turned into one, the result of doing this would present users with serious practical limitations due to the great number of concepts (synonym sets) it contains. Moreover, mapping WordNet to an existing ontology may be difficult and requires substantial labor. We propose to overcome these limitations by developing an analytical platform that (1) provides a WordNet-based ontology offering a manageable and yet comprehensive set of concept classes, (2) leverages the lexical richness of WordNet to give an extensive characterization of concept class in terms of lexical instances, and (3) integrates a class recognition algorithm that automates the assignment of concept classes to words in naturally occurring text. The ensuing framework makes available an ontological annotation platform that can be effectively integrated with intelligence analysis systems to facilitate evidence marshaling and sustain the creation and validation of inference models.

The effect of word prediction settings (frequency of use) on text input speed in persons with cervical spinal cord injury: a prospective study.

Science.gov (United States)

Pouplin, Samuel; Roche, Nicolas; Antoine, Jean-Yves; Vaugier, Isabelle; Pottier, Sandra; Figere, Marjorie; Bensmail, Djamel

2017-06-01

To determine whether activation of the frequency of use and automatic learning parameters of word prediction software has an impact on text input speed. Forty-five participants with cervical spinal cord injury between C4 and C8 Asia A or B accepted to participate to this study. Participants were separated in two groups: a high lesion group for participants with lesion level is at or above C5 Asia AIS A or B and a low lesion group for participants with lesion is between C6 and C8 Asia AIS A or B. A single evaluation session was carried out for each participant. Text input speed was evaluated during three copying tasks: • without word prediction software (WITHOUT condition) • with automatic learning of words and frequency of use deactivated (NOT_ACTIV condition) • with automatic learning of words and frequency of use activated (ACTIV condition) Results: Text input speed was significantly higher in the WITHOUT than the NOT_ACTIV (pword prediction software with the activation of frequency of use and automatic learning increased text input speed in participants with high-level tetraplegia. For participants with low-level tetraplegia, the use of word prediction software with frequency of use and automatic learning activated only decreased the number of errors. Implications in rehabilitation   Access to technology can be difficult for persons with disabilities such as cervical spinal cord injury (SCI). Several methods have been developed to increase text input speed such as word prediction software.This study show that parameter of word prediction software (frequency of use) affected text input speed in persons with cervical SCI and differed according to the level of the lesion. • For persons with high-level lesion, our results suggest that this parameter must be activated so that text input speed is increased. • For persons with low lesion group, this parameter must be activated so that the numbers of errors are decreased. • In all cases, the

Stemming Malay Text and Its Application in Automatic Text Categorization

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Texts, Transmissions, Receptions. Modern Approaches to Narratives

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Lardinois, A.P.M.H.; Levie, S.A.; Hoeken, H.; Lüthy, C.H.

2015-01-01

The papers collected in this volume study the function and meaning of narrative texts from a variety of perspectives. The word 'text' is used here in the broadest sense of the term: it denotes literary books, but also oral tales, speeches, newspaper articles and comics. One of the purposes of this

Words with Multiple Meanings in Authentic L2 Texts: An Analysis of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone"

Science.gov (United States)

Ozturk, Meral

2017-01-01

Dictionary studies have suggested that nearly half of the English lexicon have multiple meanings. It is not yet clear, however, if second language learners reading English texts will encounter words with multiple meanings to the same degree. This study investigates the use of words with multiple meanings in an authentic English novel. Two samples…

Syllabic Length Effect in Visual Word Recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roya Ranjbar Mohammadi

2014-07-01

Full Text Available Studies on visual word recognition have resulted in different and sometimes contradictory proposals as Multi-Trace Memory Model (MTM, Dual-Route Cascaded Model (DRC, and Parallel Distribution Processing Model (PDP. The role of the number of syllables in word recognition was examined by the use of five groups of English words and non-words. The reaction time of the participants to these words was measured using reaction time measuring software. The results indicated that there was syllabic effect on recognition of both high and low frequency words. The pattern was incremental in terms of syllable number. This pattern prevailed in high and low frequency words and non-words except in one syllable words. In general, the results are in line with the PDP model which claims that a single processing mechanism is used in both words and non-words recognition. In other words, the findings suggest that lexical items are mainly processed via a lexical route.  A pedagogical implication of the findings would be that reading in English as a foreign language involves analytical processing of the syllable of the words.

Words Do Come Easy (Sometimes)

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Starrfelt, Randi; Petersen, Anders; Vangkilde, Signe Allerup

multiple stimuli are presented simultaneously: Are words treated as units or wholes in visual short term memory? Using methods based on a Theory of Visual Attention (TVA), we measured perceptual threshold, visual processing speed and visual short term memory capacity for words and letters, in two simple...... a different pattern: Letters are perceived more easily than words, and this is reflected both in perceptual processing speed and short term memory capacity. So even if single words do come easy, they seem to enjoy no advantage in visual short term memory....

Don't words come easy? A psychophysical exploration of word superiority

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Starrfelt, Randi; Petersen, Anders; Vangkilde, Signe Allerup

2013-01-01

Words are made of letters, and yet sometimes it is easier to identify a word than a single letter. This word superiority effect (WSE) has been observed when written stimuli are presented very briefly or degraded by visual noise. We compare performance with letters and words in three experiments, ...... and visual short term memory capacity. So, even if single words come easy, there is a limit to the word superiority effect....

Combinatorics on words Christoffel words and repetitions in words

CERN Document Server

Berstel, Jean; Reutenauer, Christophe; Saliola, Franco V

2008-01-01

The two parts of this text are based on two series of lectures delivered by Jean Berstel and Christophe Reutenauer in March 2007 at the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques, Montréal, Canada. Part I represents the first modern and comprehensive exposition of the theory of Christoffel words. Part II presents numerous combinatorial and algorithmic aspects of repetition-free words stemming from the work of Axel Thue-a pioneer in the theory of combinatorics on words. A beginner to the theory of combinatorics on words will be motivated by the numerous examples, and the large variety of exercises, which make the book unique at this level of exposition. The clean and streamlined exposition and the extensive bibliography will also be appreciated. After reading this book, beginners should be ready to read modern research papers in this rapidly growing field and contribute their own research to its development. Experienced readers will be interested in the finitary approach to Sturmian words that Christoffel words offe...

Effects of dynamic text in an AAC app on sight word reading for individuals with autism spectrum disorder.

Science.gov (United States)

Caron, Jessica; Light, Janice; Holyfield, Christine; McNaughton, David

2018-06-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of Transition to Literacy (T2L) software features (i.e., dynamic text and speech output upon selection of a graphic symbol) within a grid display in an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app, on the sight word reading skills of individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and complex communication needs. The study implemented a single-subject multiple probe research design across one set of three participants. The same design was utilized with an additional set of two participants. As part of the intervention, the participants were exposed to an AAC app with the T2L features during a highly structured matching task. With only limited exposure to the features, the five participants all demonstrated increased accuracy of identification of 12 targeted sight words. This study provides preliminary evidence that redesigning AAC apps to include the provision of dynamic text combined with speech output, can positively impact the sight-word reading of participants during a structured task. This adaptation in AAC system design could be used to complement literacy instruction and to potentially infuse components of literacy learning into daily communication.

Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death

Science.gov (United States)

Petersen, Alexander M.; Tenenbaum, Joel; Havlin, Shlomo; Stanley, H. Eugene

2012-03-01

We analyze the dynamic properties of 107 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800-2008 in order to gain insight into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language independent patterns useful as benchmarks for theoretical models of language evolution. A significantly decreasing (increasing) trend in the birth (death) rate of words indicates a recent shift in the selection laws governing word use. For new words, we observe a peak in the growth-rate fluctuations around 40 years after introduction, consistent with the typical entry time into standard dictionaries and the human generational timescale. Pronounced changes in the dynamics of language during periods of war shows that word correlations, occurring across time and between words, are largely influenced by coevolutionary social, technological, and political factors. We quantify cultural memory by analyzing the long-term correlations in the use of individual words using detrended fluctuation analysis.

Interference Effects on the Recall of Pictures, Printed Words, and Spoken Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Burton, John K.; Bruning, Roger H.

1982-01-01

Nouns were presented in triads as pictures, printed words, or spoken words and followed by various types of interference. Measures of short- and long-term memory were obtained. In short-term memory, pictorial superiority occurred with acoustic, and visual and acoustic, but not visual interference. Long-term memory showed superior recall for…

Long-term memory traces for familiar spoken words in tonal languages as revealed by the Mismatch Negativity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Naiphinich Kotchabhakdi

2004-11-01

Full Text Available Mismatch negativity (MMN, a primary response to an acoustic change and an index of sensory memory, was used to investigate the processing of the discrimination between familiar and unfamiliar Consonant-Vowel (CV speech contrasts. The MMN was elicited by rare familiar words presented among repetitive unfamiliar words. Phonetic and phonological contrasts were identical in all conditions. MMN elicited by the familiar word deviant was larger than that elicited by the unfamiliar word deviant. The presence of syllable contrast did significantly alter the word-elicited MMN in amplitude and scalp voltage field distribution. Thus, our results indicate the existence of word-related MMN enhancement largely independent of the word status of the standard stimulus. This enhancement may reflect the presence of a longterm memory trace for familiar spoken words in tonal languages.

A Typed Text Retrieval Query Language for XML Documents.

Science.gov (United States)

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;…

From Word Alignment to Word Senses, via Multilingual Wordnets

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dan Tufis

2006-05-01

Full Text Available Most of the successful commercial applications in language processing (text and/or speech dispense with any explicit concern on semantics, with the usual motivations stemming from the computational high costs required for dealing with semantics, in case of large volumes of data. With recent advances in corpus linguistics and statistical-based methods in NLP, revealing useful semantic features of linguistic data is becoming cheaper and cheaper and the accuracy of this process is steadily improving. Lately, there seems to be a growing acceptance of the idea that multilingual lexical ontologisms might be the key towards aligning different views on the semantic atomic units to be used in characterizing the general meaning of various and multilingual documents. Depending on the granularity at which semantic distinctions are necessary, the accuracy of the basic semantic processing (such as word sense disambiguation can be very high with relatively low complexity computing. The paper substantiates this statement by presenting a statistical/based system for word alignment and word sense disambiguation in parallel corpora. We describe a word alignment platform which ensures text pre-processing (tokenization, POS-tagging, lemmatization, chunking, sentence and word alignment as required by an accurate word sense disambiguation.

Text mining by Tsallis entropy

Science.gov (United States)

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.

NERBio: using selected word conjunctions, term normalization, and global patterns to improve biomedical named entity recognition

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hung Hsieh-Chuan

2006-12-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Biomedical named entity recognition (Bio-NER is a challenging problem because, in general, biomedical named entities of the same category (e.g., proteins and genes do not follow one standard nomenclature. They have many irregularities and sometimes appear in ambiguous contexts. In recent years, machine-learning (ML approaches have become increasingly common and now represent the cutting edge of Bio-NER technology. This paper addresses three problems faced by ML-based Bio-NER systems. First, most ML approaches usually employ singleton features that comprise one linguistic property (e.g., the current word is capitalized and at least one class tag (e.g., B-protein, the beginning of a protein name. However, such features may be insufficient in cases where multiple properties must be considered. Adding conjunction features that contain multiple properties can be beneficial, but it would be infeasible to include all conjunction features in an NER model since memory resources are limited and some features are ineffective. To resolve the problem, we use a sequential forward search algorithm to select an effective set of features. Second, variations in the numerical parts of biomedical terms (e.g., "2" in the biomedical term IL2 cause data sparseness and generate many redundant features. In this case, we apply numerical normalization, which solves the problem by replacing all numerals in a term with one representative numeral to help classify named entities. Third, the assignment of NE tags does not depend solely on the target word's closest neighbors, but may depend on words outside the context window (e.g., a context window of five consists of the current word plus two preceding and two subsequent words. We use global patterns generated by the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm to identify such structures and modify the results of our ML-based tagger. This is called pattern-based post-processing. Results To develop our ML

Novel word retention in bilingual and monolingual speakers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pui Fong eKan

2014-09-01

Full Text Available The goal of this research was to examine word retention in bilinguals and monolinguals. Long-term word retention is an essential part of vocabulary learning. Previous studies have documented that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in terms of retrieving newly-exposed words. Yet, little is known about whether or to what extent bilinguals are different from monolinguals in word retention. Participants were 30 English-speaking monolingual adults and 30 bilingual adults who speak Spanish as a home language and learned English as a second language during childhood. In a previous study (Kan, Sadagopan, Janich, & Andrade, 2014, the participants were exposed to the target novel words in English, Spanish, and Cantonese. In this current study, word retention was measured a week after the fast mapping task. No exposures were given during the one-week interval. Results showed that bilinguals and monolinguals retain a similar number of words. However, participants produced more words in English than in either Spanish or Cantonese. Correlation analyses revealed that language knowledge plays a role in the relationships between fast mapping and word retention. Specifically, within- and across-language relationships between bilinguals’ fast mapping and word retention were found in Spanish and English, by contrast, within-language relationships between monolinguals’ fast mapping and word retention were found in English and across-language relationships between their fast mapping and word retention performance in English and Cantonese. Similarly, bilinguals differed from monolinguals in the relationships among the word retention scores in three languages. Significant correlations were found among bilinguals’ retention scores. However, no such correlations were found among monolinguals’ retention scores. The overall findings suggest that bilinguals’ language experience and language knowledge most likely contribute to how they learn and retain new words.

VisualUrText: A Text Analytics Tool for Unstructured Textual Data

Science.gov (United States)

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.

The word-length effect and disyllabic words.

Science.gov (United States)

Lovatt, P; Avons, S E; Masterson, J

2000-02-01

Three experiments compared immediate serial recall of disyllabic words that differed on spoken duration. Two sets of long- and short-duration words were selected, in each case maximizing duration differences but matching for frequency, familiarity, phonological similarity, and number of phonemes, and controlling for semantic associations. Serial recall measures were obtained using auditory and visual presentation and spoken and picture-pointing recall. In Experiments 1a and 1b, using the first set of items, long words were better recalled than short words. In Experiments 2a and 2b, using the second set of items, no difference was found between long and short disyllabic words. Experiment 3 confirmed the large advantage for short-duration words in the word set originally selected by Baddeley, Thomson, and Buchanan (1975). These findings suggest that there is no reliable advantage for short-duration disyllables in span tasks, and that previous accounts of a word-length effect in disyllables are based on accidental differences between list items. The failure to find an effect of word duration casts doubt on theories that propose that the capacity of memory span is determined by the duration of list items or the decay rate of phonological information in short-term memory.

How Objective a Neutral Word Is? A Neutrosophic Approach for the Objectivity Degrees of Neutral Words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mihaela Colhon

2017-11-01

Full Text Available In the latest studies concerning the sentiment polarity of words, the authors mostly consider the positive and negative constructions, without paying too much attention to the neutral words, which can have, in fact, significant sentiment degrees. More precisely, not all the neutral words have zero positivity or negativity scores, some of them having quite important nonzero scores for these polarities. At this moment, in the literature, a word is considered neutral if its positive and negative scores are equal, which implies two possibilities: (1 zero positive and negative scores; (2 nonzero, but equal positive and negative scores. It is obvious that these cases represent two different categories of neutral words that must be treated separately by a sentiment analysis task. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study about the neutral words applied to English as is developed with the aid of SentiWordNet 3.0: the publicly available lexical resource for opinion mining. We designed our study in order to provide an accurate classification of the so-called “neutral words” described in terms of sentiment scores and using measures from neutrosophy theory. The intended scope is to fill the gap concerning the neutrality aspect by giving precise measurements for the words’ objectivity.

Word Translation Entropy

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Schaeffer, Moritz; Dragsted, Barbara; Hvelplund, Kristian Tangsgaard

This study reports on an investigation into the relationship between the number of translation alternatives for a single word and eye movements on the source text. In addition, the effect of word order differences between source and target text on eye movements on the source text is studied. In p...

Unpacking Direct and Indirect Relationships of Short-Term Memory to Word Reading: Evidence From Korean-Speaking Children.

Science.gov (United States)

Kim, Young-Suk Grace; Cho, Jeung-Ryeul; Park, Soon-Gil

2017-08-01

We examined the relations of short-term memory (STM), metalinguistic awareness (phonological, morphological, and orthographic awareness), and rapid automatized naming (RAN) to word reading in Korean, a language with a relatively transparent orthography. STM, metalinguistic awareness, and RAN have been shown to be important to word reading, but the nature of the relations of STM, metalinguistic awareness, and RAN to word reading has rarely been investigated. Two alternative models were fitted. In the indirect relation model, STM was hypothesized to be indirectly related to word reading via metalinguistic awareness and RAN. In the direct and indirect relations model, STM was hypothesized to be directly and indirectly related to word reading. Results from 207 beginning readers in South Korea showed that STM was directly related to word reading as well as indirectly via metalinguistic awareness and RAN. Although the direct effect of STM was relatively small (.16), the total effect incorporating the indirect effect was substantial (.42). These results suggest that STM is an important, foundational cognitive capacity that underpins metalinguistic awareness and RAN as well as word reading, and further indicate the importance of considering both direct and indirect effects of language and cognitive skills on word reading.

Interference Effects on the Recall of Pictures, Printed Words and Spoken Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Burton, John K.; Bruning, Roger H.

Thirty college undergraduates participated in a study of the effects of acoustic and visual interference on the recall of word and picture triads in both short-term and long-term memory. The subjects were presented 24 triads of monosyllabic nouns representing all of the possible combinations of presentation types: pictures, printed words, and…

Meaningful Words and Non-Words Repetitive Articulatory Rate (Oral Diadochokinesis) in Persian Speaking Children.

Science.gov (United States)

Zamani, Peyman; Rezai, Hossein; Garmatani, Neda Tahmasebi

2017-08-01

Repetitive articulatory rate or Oral Diadochokinesis (oral-DDK) shows a guideline for appraisal and diagnosis of subjects with oral-motor disorder. Traditionally, meaningless words repetition has been utilized in this task and preschool children have challenges with them. Therefore, we aimed to determine some meaningful words in order to test oral-DDK in Persian speaking preschool children. Participants were 142 normally developing children, (age range 4-6 years), who were asked to produce /motæka, golabi/ as two meaningful Persian words and /pa-ta-ka/ as non-word in conventional oral-DDK task. We compared the time taken for 10-times fast repetitions of two meaningful Persian words and the tri-syllabic nonsense word /pa-ta-ka/. Praat software was used to calculate the average time that subjects took to produce the target items. In 4-5 year old children, [Formula: see text] of time taken for 10-times repetitions of /pa-ta-ka, motæka, golabi/ were [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] seconds respectively, and in 5-6 year old children were [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] seconds respectively. Findings showed that the main effect of type of words on oral diadochokinesis was significant ([Formula: see text]). Children repeated meaningful words /motæka, golabi/ faster than the non-word /pa-ta-ka/. Sex and age factors had no effect on time taken for repetition of oral-DDK test. It is suggested that Speech Therapists can use meaningful words to facilitate oral-DDK test for children.

Multi-word Lexical Units in English and Slovak Linguistics Terminology

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Магдалена Била

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The research issue discussed in the paper falls within pragmatics, lexicographic and translation studies. It is part of the research grant project entitled “Virtual interactive English-Slovak bilingual encyclopedic linguistics dictionary”. One of the key tasks is to deal with the linguistics term as a concept. This presupposes understanding not only the surface structure but also the deep structure of the term. In preparing the inventory of the prospective dictionary, conceptualization has to take place and defining and translating of the term has to be done accordingly. The ongoing research has shown that one of the most problematic terms is “multi-word lexical unit” (in Slovak “viacslovné pomenovanie”. The problem lies in the different conceptualization of the terms in the two languages. Straightforwardly, in Slovak, the term implies examples that in English would be mostly considered compounds (Ološtiak, Ivanová 2015; in other words word-formation is the case here. In English, the term is more heterogeneous and encompasses categories like collocation, phrasal verb, idioms, speech formulas (on the term, see Sonomura 1996, situation bound utterances (on the term, see Kecskes 2010, and paremiological expressions (Moon 2015. In these categories, pragmatics rather than word-formation and syntax is the case (Erman and Warren 2000; Gibbs Jr. 2002, Kecskes 2014. The paper offers the analysis of the deep structure of the term in question, explores the role of figurativeness, exemplifies the differences, proposes the translation equivalents, and justifies the different nature of the seemingly corresponding terms, often making an impression of being a calque.

Word/sub-word lattices decomposition and combination for speech recognition

OpenAIRE

Le , Viet-Bac; Seng , Sopheap; Besacier , Laurent; Bigi , Brigitte

2008-01-01

International audience; This paper presents the benefit of using multiple lexical units in the post-processing stage of an ASR system. Since the use of sub-word units can reduce the high out-of-vocabulary rate and improve the lack of text resources in statistical language modeling, we propose several methods to decompose, normalize and combine word and sub-word lattices generated from different ASR systems. By using a sub-word information table, every word in a lattice can be decomposed into ...

Analysis on the Word-formation of English Netspeak Neologism

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wei Liu

2014-12-01

Full Text Available The emergence of computer-mediated communication provides a resourceful database for language researchers as well as learners. This study focuses on the Internet neologisms, a derivative of new media age, which in many ways affects the netizens in terms of communication. The collected data are examined empirically to figure out the characteristics of netspeak neologisms and their patterns of formation. It suggests that the most frequently occurring word-formation process of netspeak neologisms is compounding, subsequently, blending, affixation, old words with new meaning, acronyms, conversion, and clipping. Through probing into each process, the examples are illustrated and sub-categories are listed in terms of blending for further understanding. This study has proven that the diversity of word-formation processes of English netspeak neologism and may shed light on the creativity of language in the online context.

Questionable Word Choice in Scientific Writing in Orthopedic Surgery

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Casey M. O`Connor

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Background: Given the strong influence of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors on musculoskeletal symptoms andlimitations it’s important that both scientific and lay writing use the most positive, hopeful, and adaptive words andconcepts consistent with medical evidence. The use of words that might reinforce misconceptions about preferencesensitiveconditions (particularly those associated with age could increase symptoms and limitations and might alsodistract patients from the treatment preferences they would select when informed and at ease.Methods: We reviewed 100 consecutive papers published in 2014 and 2015 in 6 orthopedic surgery scientific journals.We counted the number and proportion of journal articles with questionable use of one or more of the following words:tear, aggressive, required, and fail. For each word, we counted the rate of misuse per journal and the number of specificterms misused per article per journalResults: Eighty percent of all orthopedic scientific articles reviewed had questionable use of at least one term. Tearwas most questionably used with respect to rotator cuff pathology. The words fail and require were the most commonquestionably used terms overall.Conclusion: The use of questionable words and concepts is common in scientific writing in orthopedic surgery. It’sworth considering whether traditional ways or referring to musculoskeletal illness merit rephrasing.

GeoSegmenter: A statistically learned Chinese word segmenter for the geoscience domain

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Lan; Du, Youfu; Chen, Gongyang

2015-03-01

Unlike English, the Chinese language has no space between words. Segmenting texts into words, known as the Chinese word segmentation (CWS) problem, thus becomes a fundamental issue for processing Chinese documents and the first step in many text mining applications, including information retrieval, machine translation and knowledge acquisition. However, for the geoscience subject domain, the CWS problem remains unsolved. Although a generic segmenter can be applied to process geoscience documents, they lack the domain specific knowledge and consequently their segmentation accuracy drops dramatically. This motivated us to develop a segmenter specifically for the geoscience subject domain: the GeoSegmenter. We first proposed a generic two-step framework for domain specific CWS. Following this framework, we built GeoSegmenter using conditional random fields, a principled statistical framework for sequence learning. Specifically, GeoSegmenter first identifies general terms by using a generic baseline segmenter. Then it recognises geoscience terms by learning and applying a model that can transform the initial segmentation into the goal segmentation. Empirical experimental results on geoscience documents and benchmark datasets showed that GeoSegmenter could effectively recognise both geoscience terms and general terms.

Semantic relatedness and similarity of biomedical terms: examining the effects of recency, size, and section of biomedical publications on the performance of word2vec.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhu, Yongjun; Yan, Erjia; Wang, Fei

2017-07-03

Understanding semantic relatedness and similarity between biomedical terms has a great impact on a variety of applications such as biomedical information retrieval, information extraction, and recommender systems. The objective of this study is to examine word2vec's ability in deriving semantic relatedness and similarity between biomedical terms from large publication data. Specifically, we focus on the effects of recency, size, and section of biomedical publication data on the performance of word2vec. We download abstracts of 18,777,129 articles from PubMed and 766,326 full-text articles from PubMed Central (PMC). The datasets are preprocessed and grouped into subsets by recency, size, and section. Word2vec models are trained on these subtests. Cosine similarities between biomedical terms obtained from the word2vec models are compared against reference standards. Performance of models trained on different subsets are compared to examine recency, size, and section effects. Models trained on recent datasets did not boost the performance. Models trained on larger datasets identified more pairs of biomedical terms than models trained on smaller datasets in relatedness task (from 368 at the 10% level to 494 at the 100% level) and similarity task (from 374 at the 10% level to 491 at the 100% level). The model trained on abstracts produced results that have higher correlations with the reference standards than the one trained on article bodies (i.e., 0.65 vs. 0.62 in the similarity task and 0.66 vs. 0.59 in the relatedness task). However, the latter identified more pairs of biomedical terms than the former (i.e., 344 vs. 498 in the similarity task and 339 vs. 503 in the relatedness task). Increasing the size of dataset does not always enhance the performance. Increasing the size of datasets can result in the identification of more relations of biomedical terms even though it does not guarantee better precision. As summaries of research articles, compared with article

Nursery words and hypocorisms among Germanic kinship terms

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Bjarne Simmelkjær Sandgaard

2018-01-01

By using Jakobson’s (1960: 127-130) criteria for determining the nursery-word sta-tus of a given lexeme, I argue in this article that, even if we should no longer re-gard PG *aiþīn-/-ōn- ‘mother’ (Goth. aiþei), *aiþma- ‘daughter’s husband’ and *faþōn- ‘father’s sister’ as nursery words...

Examining the Conditions of Using an On-Line Dictionary to Learn Words and Comprehend Texts

Science.gov (United States)

Dilenschneider, Robert Francis

2018-01-01

This study investigated three look-up conditions for language learners to learn unknown target words and comprehend a reading passage when their attention is transferred away to an on-line dictionary. The research questions focused on how each look-up condition impacted the recall and recognition of word forms, word meanings, and passage…

Evidence for human fronto-central gamma activity during long-term memory encoding of word sequences.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Esther Berendina Meeuwissen

Full Text Available Although human gamma activity (30-80 Hz associated with visual processing is often reported, it is not clear to what extend gamma activity can be reliably detected non-invasively from frontal areas during complex cognitive tasks such as long term memory (LTM formation. We conducted a memory experiment composed of 35 blocks each having three parts: LTM encoding, working memory (WM maintenance and LTM retrieval. In the LTM encoding and WM maintenance parts, participants had to respectively encode or maintain the order of three sequentially presented words. During LTM retrieval subjects had to reproduce these sequences. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG we identified significant differences in the gamma and beta activity. Robust gamma activity (55-65 Hz in left BA6 (supplementary motor area (SMA/pre-SMA was stronger during LTM rehearsal than during WM maintenance. The gamma activity was sustained throughout the 3.4 s rehearsal period during which a fixation cross was presented. Importantly, the difference in gamma band activity correlated with memory performance over subjects. Further we observed a weak gamma power difference in left BA6 during the first half of the LTM rehearsal interval larger for successfully than unsuccessfully reproduced word triplets. In the beta band, we found a power decrease in left anterior regions during LTM rehearsal compared to WM maintenance. Also this suppression of beta power correlated with memory performance over subjects. Our findings show that an extended network of brain areas, characterized by oscillatory activity in different frequency bands, supports the encoding of word sequences in LTM. Gamma band activity in BA6 possibly reflects memory processes associated with language and timing, and suppression of beta activity at left frontal sensors is likely to reflect the release of inhibition directly associated with the engagement of language functions.

Auditory word recognition: extrinsic and intrinsic effects of word frequency.

Science.gov (United States)

Connine, C M; Titone, D; Wang, J

1993-01-01

Two experiments investigated the influence of word frequency in a phoneme identification task. Speech voicing continua were constructed so that one endpoint was a high-frequency word and the other endpoint was a low-frequency word (e.g., best-pest). Experiment 1 demonstrated that ambiguous tokens were labeled such that a high-frequency word was formed (intrinsic frequency effect). Experiment 2 manipulated the frequency composition of the list (extrinsic frequency effect). A high-frequency list bias produced an exaggerated influence of frequency; a low-frequency list bias showed a reverse frequency effect. Reaction time effects were discussed in terms of activation and postaccess decision models of frequency coding. The results support a late use of frequency in auditory word recognition.

Representation Learning of Logic Words by an RNN: From Word Sequences to Robot Actions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tatsuro Yamada

2017-12-01

Full Text Available An important characteristic of human language is compositionality. We can efficiently express a wide variety of real-world situations, events, and behaviors by compositionally constructing the meaning of a complex expression from a finite number of elements. Previous studies have analyzed how machine-learning models, particularly neural networks, can learn from experience to represent compositional relationships between language and robot actions with the aim of understanding the symbol grounding structure and achieving intelligent communicative agents. Such studies have mainly dealt with the words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs that directly refer to real-world matters. In addition to these words, the current study deals with logic words, such as “not,” “and,” and “or” simultaneously. These words are not directly referring to the real world, but are logical operators that contribute to the construction of meaning in sentences. In human–robot communication, these words may be used often. The current study builds a recurrent neural network model with long short-term memory units and trains it to learn to translate sentences including logic words into robot actions. We investigate what kind of compositional representations, which mediate sentences and robot actions, emerge as the network's internal states via the learning process. Analysis after learning shows that referential words are merged with visual information and the robot's own current state, and the logical words are represented by the model in accordance with their functions as logical operators. Words such as “true,” “false,” and “not” work as non-linear transformations to encode orthogonal phrases into the same area in a memory cell state space. The word “and,” which required a robot to lift up both its hands, worked as if it was a universal quantifier. The word “or,” which required action generation that looked apparently random, was represented as an

Recurrent Partial Words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Francine Blanchet-Sadri

2011-08-01

Full Text Available Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words. Given an infinite partial word w, the number of distinct full words over the alphabet that are compatible with factors of w of length n, called subwords of w, refers to a measure of complexity of infinite partial words so-called subword complexity. This measure is of particular interest because we can construct partial words with subword complexities not achievable by full words. In this paper, we consider the notion of recurrence over infinite partial words, that is, we study whether all of the finite subwords of a given infinite partial word appear infinitely often, and we establish connections between subword complexity and recurrence in this more general framework.

Algorithm of Syntactic Idioms Recognition in the Text: Attempt of Construction

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sytar Hanna

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Background: Attention of national and foreign researchers was focused so far on structural and semantic features of syntactic idioms. Automatic analysis of these peculiar units that are on the verge of syntax and phraseology still was not carried out in the scientific literature. This issue requires a theoretical understanding and practical implementation. Purpose: To create an algorithm of recognition of syntactic idioms with one- or two-term core component in the corpus of texts. Results: Based on the results of previous theoretical studies we highlighted a number of formal and statistical criteria that enable to distinguish syntactic idioms from other language units in the corpus of Ukrainian-language texts. The author developed a block diagram of syntactic idioms recognition, incorporating two branches constructed accordingly for the sentences with one-term and sentences with two-term core component. The first branch is based on the presence of word repeats (full words concurrence or presence of other word forms of the word and the list of core components determined on previous stages of the study (є, це, то, не, так; як; з/із/зі, між, над, серед; а, але, зате, однак, проте. The second branch was created for another type of syntactic idioms – one with a two-term core component. It takes into account the following properties of the analyzed units: the presence of combinations of service parts of speech, service parts of speech with pronoun or adverb, pronoun and adverb; compliance of words combinations with the register of the syntactic idioms core components currently comprising 92 structures; association measure of mutual information ≥9, etc. Discussion: Offered algorithm enables automatic identification of syntactic idioms in the corpus of texts and removal of contexts of their use, it can be used to improve the procedure of automatic text processing and creation of automated translation

Exploratory analysis of textual data from the Mother and Child Handbook using a text mining method (II): Monthly changes in the words recorded by mothers.

Science.gov (United States)

Tagawa, Miki; Matsuda, Yoshio; Manaka, Tomoko; Kobayashi, Makiko; Ohwada, Michitaka; Matsubara, Shigeki

2017-01-01

The aim of the study was to examine the possibility of converting subjective textual data written in the free column space of the Mother and Child Handbook (MCH) into objective information using text mining and to compare any monthly changes in the words written by the mothers. Pregnant women without complications (n = 60) were divided into two groups according to State-Trait Anxiety Inventory grade: low trait anxiety (group I, n = 39) and high trait anxiety (group II, n = 21). Exploratory analysis of the textual data from the MCH was conducted by text mining using the Word Miner software program. Using 1203 structural elements extracted after processing, a comparison of monthly changes in the words used in the mothers' comments was made between the two groups. The data was mainly analyzed by a correspondence analysis. The structural elements in groups I and II were divided into seven and six clusters, respectively, by cluster analysis. Correspondence analysis revealed clear monthly changes in the words used in the mothers' comments as the pregnancy progressed in group I, whereas the association was not clear in group II. The text mining method was useful for exploratory analysis of the textual data obtained from pregnant women, and the monthly change in the words used in the mothers' comments as pregnancy progressed differed according to their degree of unease. © 2016 Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Dynamics of Semantic and Word-Formation Subsystems of the Russian Language: Historical Dynamics of the Word Family

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Olga Ivanovna Dmitrieva

2015-09-01

Full Text Available The article provides comprehensive justification of the principles and methods of the synchronic and diachronic research of word-formation subsystems of the Russian language. The authors also study the ways of analyzing historical dynamics of word family as the main macro-unit of word-formation system. In the field of analysis there is a family of words with the stem 'ход-' (the meaning of 'motion', word-formation of which is investigated in different periods of the Russian literary language. Significance of motion-verbs in the process of forming a language picture of the world determined the character and the structure of this word family as one of the biggest in the history of the Russian language. In the article a structural and semantic dynamics of the word family 'ход-' is depicted. The results of the study show that in the ancient period the prefixes of verbal derivatives were formed, which became the apex-branched derivational paradigms existing in modern Russian. The old Russian period of language development is characterized by the appearance of words with connotative meaning (with suffixes -ishk-, -ichn-, as well as the words with possessive semantics (with suffixes –ev-, -sk-. In this period the verbs with the postfix -cz also supplement the analyzed word family. The period of formation of the National Russian language was marked by the loss of a large number of abstract nouns and the appearance of neologisms from some old Russian abstract nouns. The studied family in the modern Russian language is characterized by the following processes: the appearance of terms, the active semantic derivation, the weakening of word-formation variability, the semantic differentiation of duplicate units, the development of subsystem of words with connotative meanings, and the preservation of derivatives in all functional styles.

Hemispheric asymmetries in discourse processing: evidence from false memories for lists and texts.

Science.gov (United States)

Ben-Artzi, Elisheva; Faust, Miriam; Moeller, Edna

2009-01-01

Previous research suggests that the right hemisphere (RH) may contribute uniquely to discourse and text processing by activating and maintaining a wide range of meanings, including more distantly related meanings. The present study used the word-lists false memory paradigm [Roediger, H. L., III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803-814.] to examine the hypothesis that difference between the two cerebral hemispheres in discourse processing may be due, at least partly, to memory representations for implicit text-related semantic information. Specifically, we tested the susceptibility of the left hemisphere (LH) and RH to unpresented target words following the presentation of semantically related words appearing in either word lists or short texts. Findings showed that the RH produced more false alarms than the LH for unpresented target words following either word lists or texts. These findings reveal hemispheric differences in memory for semantically related information and suggest that RH advantage in long-term maintenance of a wide range of text-related word meanings may be one aspect of its unique contribution to the construction of a discourse model. The results support the RH coarse semantic coding theory [Beeman, M. (1998). Coarse semantic coding and discourse comprehension. In M. Beeman & C. Chiarello (Eds.), Right hemisphere language comprehension: Perspectives from cognitive neuroscience (pp. 255-284). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.] and suggest that hemispheric differences in semantic processing during language comprehension extend also to verbal memory.

Center of attention: A network text analysis of American Sniper

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Starling Hunter

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Network Text Analysis (NTA is a term used to describe a variety of software - supported methods for modeling texts as networks of concepts. In this study we apply NTA to the screenplay of American Sniper, an Academy Award nominee for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2014. Specifically, we est ablish prior expectations as to the key themes associated with war films. We then empirically test whether words associated with the most influentially - positioned nodes in the network signify themes common to the war - film genre. As predicted, we find tha t words and concepts associated with the least constrained nodes in the text network were significantly more likely to be associated with the war genre and significantly less likely to be associated with genres to which the film did not belong.

Idiomaticity of English Business Terms and Their Equivalents in Lithuanian

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pavel Skorupa

2011-04-01

Full Text Available The paper presents the survey of idiomatic English business terms and their Lithuanian equivalents. The study was based on the theory of idioms and idiomaticity, highlighting the idea that idiomaticity can affect single words, word combinations, and longer text passages. Idiomatic business terms were taken from different English and Lithuanian general and special dictionaries, course books, as well as business texts. The analyzed terms were classified into distinct groups according to their meaning. The key problem encountered was the lack of Lithuanian translation equivalents to certain idiomatic English business terms. Possible Lithuanian translation was provided.

Fracture Mechanics Method for Word Embedding Generation of Neural Probabilistic Linguistic Model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Size Bi

2016-01-01

Full Text Available Word embedding, a lexical vector representation generated via the neural linguistic model (NLM, is empirically demonstrated to be appropriate for improvement of the performance of traditional language model. However, the supreme dimensionality that is inherent in NLM contributes to the problems of hyperparameters and long-time training in modeling. Here, we propose a force-directed method to improve such problems for simplifying the generation of word embedding. In this framework, each word is assumed as a point in the real world; thus it can approximately simulate the physical movement following certain mechanics. To simulate the variation of meaning in phrases, we use the fracture mechanics to do the formation and breakdown of meaning combined by a 2-gram word group. With the experiments on the natural linguistic tasks of part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and semantic role labeling, the result demonstrated that the 2-dimensional word embedding can rival the word embeddings generated by classic NLMs, in terms of accuracy, recall, and text visualization.

Using Gazetteers to Extract Sets of Keywords from Free-Flowing Texts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Adam Crymble

2015-12-01

Full Text Available If you have a copy of a text in electronic format stored on your computer, it is relatively easy to keyword search for a single term. Often you can do this by using the built-in search features in your favourite text editor. However, scholars are increasingly needing to find instances of many terms within a text or texts. For example, a scholar may want to use a gazetteer to extract all mentions of English placenames within a collection of texts so that those places can later be plotted on a map. Alternatively, they may want to extract all male given names, all pronouns, stop words, or any other set of words. Using those same built-in search features to achieve this more complex goal is time consuming and clunky. This lesson will teach you how to use Python to extract a set of keywords very quickly and systematically from a set of texts. It is expected that once you have completed this lesson, you will be able to generalise the skills to extract custom sets of keywords from any set of locally saved files.

Reader, Word, and Character Attributes Contributing to Chinese Children's Concept of Word

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Jing; Lin, Tzu-Jung; Ku, Yu-Min; Zhang, Jie; O'Connell, Ann

2018-01-01

Concept of word--the awareness of how words differ from nonwords or other linguistic properties--is important to learning to read Chinese because words in Chinese texts are not separated by space, and most characters can be productively compounded with other characters to form new words. The current study examined the effects of reader, word, and…

Word sets, keywords, and text contents: an investigation of text topic on the computer Iniciando a língüística do corpus do português: explorando um corpus para ensinar português como língua estrangeira

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Antonio P. BERBER SARDINHA

1999-02-01

Full Text Available This study presents a methodology for the identification of coherent word sets. Eight sets were initially identified and further grouped into two main sets: a `company' set and a `non-company' set. These two sets shared very few collocates, and therefore they seemed to represent distinct topics. The positions of the words in the `company' and `non-company' sets across the text were computed. The results indicated that the `non-company' sets referred to `company' implicitly. Finally, the key words were compared to an automatic abridgment of the text which revealed that nearly all key words were present in the ahridgment. This was interpreted as suggesting that the key words may indeed represent the main contents of the text.Este estudo apresenta uma metodologia para a identificação de conjuntos de palavras coerentes. Oito conjuntos foram identificados inicialmente e posteriormente agrupados em dois conjuntos principais: um conjunto denominado `companhia' e outro denominado `não-companhia'. Estes dois conjuntos partilham alguns colocados, e portanto parecem representar tópicos distintos. A posição das palavras de ambos os conjuntos foi computada ao longo do texto analisado. Os resultados indicaram que os conjuntos `não-companhia' se referiam indiretamente à companhia. Por fim, as palavras-chave dos conjuntos foram comparadas a um resumo do texto automático gerado por computador o qual revelou que quase todas as palavras-chave estavam presentes no resumo. Este fato foi interpretado como indício de que as palavras-chave representam o conteúdo central do texto.

Google Advertising Tools Cashing in with AdSense and AdWords

CERN Document Server

Davis, Harold

2010-01-01

With this book, you'll learn how to take full advantage of Google AdWords and AdSense, the sophisticated online advertising tools used by thousands of large and small businesses. This new edition provides a substantially updated guide to advertising on the Web, including how it works in general, and how Google's advertising programs in particular help you make money. You'll find everything you need to work with AdWords, which lets you generate text ads to accompany specific search term results, and AdSense, which automatically delivers precisely targeted text and image ads to your website.

Short-Term and Long-Term Effects on Visual Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Protopapas, Athanassios; Kapnoula, Efthymia C.

2016-01-01

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item…

Word Origins of Common Neuroscience Terms for Use in an Undergraduate Classroom.

Science.gov (United States)

Hallock, Robert M; Brand, Emma C; Mihalic, Taylor B

2016-01-01

We compiled a list of nearly 300 neuroscience terms and list their language of origin (typically Latin or Greek), their literal meaning, and their pronunciation in a table. The table was distributed to students in an undergraduate neuroscience class a few weeks before the first examination. A follow-up survey asked students how long they spent with the handout, and also assessed whether they thought it helped them better understand the terms, apply the terms, and whether they thought it helped them enough to get a higher grade on the exam. Results were positive: nearly 78% of students used the table while reviewing the material, and these students overwhelmingly reported that the table helped them better understand and apply the terms. However, students were equally split on whether the handout resulted in a better grade on the first exam. It was our premise that better understanding the derivation of the words can help students make associations between the terms and their meanings/functions. This handout can be used in any undergraduate neuroscience to help students better understand the complex terminology associated with the material.

Increase in posterior alpha activity during rehearsal predicts successful long-term memory formation of word sequences.

Science.gov (United States)

Meeuwissen, Esther B; Takashima, Atsuko; Fernández, Guillén; Jensen, Ole

2011-12-01

It is becoming increasingly clear that demanding cognitive tasks rely on an extended network engaging task-relevant areas and, importantly, disengaging task-irrelevant areas. Given that alpha activity (8-12 Hz) has been shown to reflect the disengagement of task-irrelevant regions in attention and working memory tasks, we here ask if alpha activity plays a related role for long-term memory formation. Subjects were instructed to encode and maintain the order of word sequences while the ongoing brain activity was recorded using magnetoencephalography (MEG). In each trial, three words were presented followed by a 3.4 s rehearsal interval. Considering the good temporal resolution of MEG this allowed us to investigate the word presentation and rehearsal interval separately. The sequences were grouped in trials where word order either could be tested immediately (working memory trials; WM) or later (LTM trials) according to instructions. Subjects were tested on their ability to retrieve the order of the three words. The data revealed that alpha power in parieto-occipital regions was lower during word presentation compared to rehearsal. Our key finding was that parieto-occipital alpha power during the rehearsal period was markedly stronger for successfully than unsuccessfully encoded LTM sequences. This subsequent memory effect demonstrates that high posterior alpha activity creates an optimal brain state for successful LTM formation possibly by actively reducing parieto-occipital activity that might interfere with sequence encoding. Copyright © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Convolutional Neural Networks for Text Categorization: Shallow Word-level vs. Deep Character-level

OpenAIRE

Johnson, Rie; Zhang, Tong

2016-01-01

This paper reports the performances of shallow word-level convolutional neural networks (CNN), our earlier work (2015), on the eight datasets with relatively large training data that were used for testing the very deep character-level CNN in Conneau et al. (2016). Our findings are as follows. The shallow word-level CNNs achieve better error rates than the error rates reported in Conneau et al., though the results should be interpreted with some consideration due to the unique pre-processing o...

The Relationships among Verbal Short-Term Memory, Phonological Awareness, and New Word Learning: Evidence from Typical Development and Down Syndrome

Science.gov (United States)

Jarrold, Christopher; Thorn, Annabel S. C.; Stephens, Emma

2009-01-01

This study examined the correlates of new word learning in a sample of 64 typically developing children between 5 and 8 years of age and a group of 22 teenagers and young adults with Down syndrome. Verbal short-term memory and phonological awareness skills were assessed to determine whether learning new words involved accurately representing…

Reading Authentic Texts

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Balling, Laura Winther

2013-01-01

Most research on cognates has focused on words presented in isolation that are easily defined as cognate between L1 and L2. In contrast, this study investigates what counts as cognate in authentic texts and how such cognates are read. Participants with L1 Danish read news articles in their highly...... proficient L2, English, while their eye-movements were monitored. The experiment shows a cognate advantage for morphologically simple words, but only when cognateness is defined relative to translation equivalents that are appropriate in the context. For morphologically complex words, a cognate disadvantage...... word predictability indexed by the conditional probability of each word....

Learning Semantic Tags from Big Data for Clinical Text Representation.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Yanpeng; Liu, Hongfang

2015-01-01

In clinical text mining, it is one of the biggest challenges to represent medical terminologies and n-gram terms in sparse medical reports using either supervised or unsupervised methods. Addressing this issue, we propose a novel method for word and n-gram representation at semantic level. We first represent each word by its distance with a set of reference features calculated by reference distance estimator (RDE) learned from labeled and unlabeled data, and then generate new features using simple techniques of discretization, random sampling and merging. The new features are a set of binary rules that can be interpreted as semantic tags derived from word and n-grams. We show that the new features significantly outperform classical bag-of-words and n-grams in the task of heart disease risk factor extraction in i2b2 2014 challenge. It is promising to see that semantics tags can be used to replace the original text entirely with even better prediction performance as well as derive new rules beyond lexical level.

Phonological Adaptation of Borrowed Terms in Duramazwi reMimhanzi

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gift Mheta

2011-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract: This article analyses the phonological characteristics of Shona musical terms borrowed from English. It discusses the phonological processes that take place when words are borrowed directly or indi-rectly from English. Essentially, the article analyses the adoption and adaptation of Shona loan-words at phonological level. It draws examples from the dictionary of Shona musical terms Duramazwi reMimhanzi (2005. This exploration of loan-word adaptation enhances the understanding of the phonological changes that the musical terms undergo during the borrowing process.

Flexible Word Classes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

• First major publication on the phenomenon • Offers cross-linguistic, descriptive, and diverse theoretical approaches • Includes analysis of data from different language families and from lesser studied languages This book is the first major cross-linguistic study of 'flexible words', i.e. words...... that cannot be classified in terms of the traditional lexical categories Verb, Noun, Adjective or Adverb. Flexible words can - without special morphosyntactic marking - serve in functions for which other languages must employ members of two or more of the four traditional, 'specialised' word classes. Thus......, flexible words are underspecified for communicative functions like 'predicating' (verbal function), 'referring' (nominal function) or 'modifying' (a function typically associated with adjectives and e.g. manner adverbs). Even though linguists have been aware of flexible world classes for more than...

Effects of word frequency and transitional probability on word reading durations of younger and older speakers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Moers, C.; Meyer, A.S.; Janse, E.

2017-01-01

High-frequency units are usually processed faster than low-frequency units in language comprehension and language production. Frequency effects have been shown for words as well as word combinations. Word co-occurrence effects can be operationalized in terms of transitional probability (TP). TPs

Short-term retention of pictures and words as a function of type of distraction and length of delay interval.

Science.gov (United States)

Pellegrino, J W; Siegel, A W; Dhawan, M

1976-01-01

Picture and word triads were tested in a Brown-Peterson short-term retention task at varying delay intervals (3, 10, or 30 sec) and under acoustic and simultaneous acoustic and visual distraction. Pictures were superior to words at all delay intervals under single acoustic distraction. Dual distraction consistently reduced picture retention while simultaneously facilitating word retention. The results were interpreted in terms of the dual coding hypothesis with modality-specific interference effects in the visual and acoustic processing systems. The differential effects of dual distraction were related to the introduction of visual interference and differential levels of functional acoustic interference across dual and single distraction tasks. The latter was supported by a constant 2/1 ratio in the backward counting rates of the acoustic vs. dual distraction tasks. The results further suggest that retention may not depend on total processing load of the distraction task, per se, but rather that processing load operates within modalities.

Word classes

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Rijkhoff, Jan

2007-01-01

in grammatical descriptions of some 50 languages, which together constitute a representative sample of the world’s languages (Hengeveld et al. 2004: 529). It appears that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences between word class systems of individual languages. Whereas some languages employ...... a parts-of-speech system that includes the categories Verb, Noun, Adjective and Adverb, other languages may use only a subset of these four lexical categories. Furthermore, quite a few languages have a major word class whose members cannot be classified in terms of the categories Verb – Noun – Adjective...... – Adverb, because they have properties that are strongly associated with at least two of these four traditional word classes (e.g. Adjective and Adverb). Finally, this article discusses some of the ways in which word class distinctions interact with other grammatical domains, such as syntax and morphology....

Finding Rising and Falling Words

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Tjong Kim Sang, E.

2016-01-01

We examine two different methods for finding rising words (among which neologisms) and falling words (among which archaisms) in decades of magazine texts (millions of words) and in years of tweets (billions of words): one based on correlation coefficients of relative frequencies and time, and one

WORD PROCESSING AND SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING: A LONGITUDINAL CASE STUDY

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alister Cumming

2001-12-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study was to determine whether word processing might change a second language (L2 leamer's writing processes and improve the quality of his essays over a relatively long period of time. We worked from the assumption that research comparing word-processing to pen and paper composing tends to show positive results when studies include lengthy terms of data collection and when appropriate instruction and training are provided. We compared the processes and products of L2 composing displayed by a 29-year-old, male Mandarin leamer of English with intermediate proficiency in English while he wrote, over 8 months, 14 compositions grouped into 7 comparable pairs of topics altemating between uses of a lap-top computer and of pen and paper. Al1 keystrokes were recorded electronically in the computer environrnent; visual records of al1 text changes were made for the pen-and paper writing. Think-aloud protocols were recorded in al1 sessions. Analyses indicate advantages for the word-processing medium over the pen-and-paper medium in terms ofi a greater frequency of revisions made at the discourse level and at the syntactical level; higher scores for content on analytic ratings of the completed compositions; and more extensive evaluation ofwritten texts in think-aloud verbal reports.

"What is relevant in a text document?": An interpretable machine learning approach.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Leila Arras

Full Text Available Text documents can be described by a number of abstract concepts such as semantic category, writing style, or sentiment. Machine learning (ML models have been trained to automatically map documents to these abstract concepts, allowing to annotate very large text collections, more than could be processed by a human in a lifetime. Besides predicting the text's category very accurately, it is also highly desirable to understand how and why the categorization process takes place. In this paper, we demonstrate that such understanding can be achieved by tracing the classification decision back to individual words using layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP, a recently developed technique for explaining predictions of complex non-linear classifiers. We train two word-based ML models, a convolutional neural network (CNN and a bag-of-words SVM classifier, on a topic categorization task and adapt the LRP method to decompose the predictions of these models onto words. Resulting scores indicate how much individual words contribute to the overall classification decision. This enables one to distill relevant information from text documents without an explicit semantic information extraction step. We further use the word-wise relevance scores for generating novel vector-based document representations which capture semantic information. Based on these document vectors, we introduce a measure of model explanatory power and show that, although the SVM and CNN models perform similarly in terms of classification accuracy, the latter exhibits a higher level of explainability which makes it more comprehensible for humans and potentially more useful for other applications.

Assessing neglect dyslexia with compound words.

Science.gov (United States)

Reinhart, Stefan; Schunck, Alexander; Schaadt, Anna Katharina; Adams, Michaela; Simon, Alexandra; Kerkhoff, Georg

2016-10-01

The neglect syndrome is frequently associated with neglect dyslexia (ND), which is characterized by omissions or misread initial letters of single words. ND is usually assessed with standardized reading texts in clinical settings. However, particularly in the chronic phase of ND, patients often report reading deficits in everyday situations but show (nearly) normal performances in test situations that are commonly well-structured. To date, sensitive and standardized tests to assess the severity and characteristics of ND are lacking, although reading is of high relevance for daily life and vocational settings. Several studies found modulating effects of different word features on ND. We combined those features in a novel test to enhance test sensitivity in the assessment of ND. Low-frequency words of different length that contain residual pronounceable words when the initial letter strings are neglected were selected. We compared these words in a group of 12 ND-patients suffering from right-hemispheric first-ever stroke with word stimuli containing no existing residual words. Finally, we tested whether the serially presented words are more sensitive for the diagnosis of ND than text reading. The severity of ND was modulated strongly by the ND-test words and error frequencies in single word reading of ND words were on average more than 10 times higher than in a standardized text reading test (19.8% vs. 1.8%). The novel ND-test maximizes the frequency of specific ND-errors and is therefore more sensitive for the assessment of ND than conventional text reading tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).

Pre-learning stress differentially affects long-term memory for emotional words, depending on temporal proximity to the learning experience.

Science.gov (United States)

Zoladz, Phillip R; Clark, Brianne; Warnecke, Ashlee; Smith, Lindsay; Tabar, Jennifer; Talbot, Jeffery N

2011-07-06

Stress exerts a profound, yet complex, influence on learning and memory and can enhance, impair or have no effect on these processes. Here, we have examined how the administration of stress at different times before learning affects long-term (24-hr) memory for neutral and emotional information. Participants submerged their dominant hand into a bath of ice cold water (Stress) or into a bath of warm water (No stress) for 3 min. Either immediately (Exp. 1) or 30 min (Exp. 2) after the water bath manipulation, participants were presented with a list of 30 words varying in emotional valence. The next day, participants' memory for the word list was assessed via free recall and recognition tests. In both experiments, stressed participants exhibited greater blood pressure, salivary cortisol levels, and subjective pain and stress ratings than non-stressed participants in response to the water bath manipulation. Stress applied immediately prior to learning (Exp. 1) enhanced the recognition of positive words, while stress applied 30 min prior to learning (Exp. 2) impaired free recall of negative words. Participants' recognition of positive words in Experiment 1 was positively associated with their heart rate responses to the water bath manipulation, while participants' free recall of negative words in Experiment 2 was negatively associated with their blood pressure and cortisol responses to the water bath manipulation. These findings indicate that the differential effects of pre-learning stress on long-term memory may depend on the temporal proximity of the stressor to the learning experience and the emotional nature of the to-be-learned information. Copyright © 2011. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Gesture en route to words

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Jensen de López, Kristine M.

2010-01-01

This study explores the communicative production of gestrural and vocal modalities by 8 normally developing children in two different cultures (Danish and Zapotec: Mexican indigenous) 16 to 20 months). We analyzed spontaneous production of gestrures and words in children's transition to the two-word...... the children showed an early preference for the gestural or vocal modality. Through Analyzes of two-element combinations of words and/or gestures, we observd a relative increase in cross-modal (gesture-word and two-word) combinations. The results are discussed in terms understanding gestures as a transition...

Encoding in the visual word form area: an fMRI adaptation study of words versus handwriting.

Science.gov (United States)

Barton, Jason J S; Fox, Christopher J; Sekunova, Alla; Iaria, Giuseppe

2010-08-01

Written texts are not just words but complex multidimensional stimuli, including aspects such as case, font, and handwriting style, for example. Neuropsychological reports suggest that left fusiform lesions can impair the reading of text for word (lexical) content, being associated with alexia, whereas right-sided lesions may impair handwriting recognition. We used fMRI adaptation in 13 healthy participants to determine if repetition-suppression occurred for words but not handwriting in the left visual word form area (VWFA) and the reverse in the right fusiform gyrus. Contrary to these expectations, we found adaptation for handwriting but not for words in both the left VWFA and the right VWFA homologue. A trend to adaptation for words but not handwriting was seen only in the left middle temporal gyrus. An analysis of anterior and posterior subdivisions of the left VWFA also failed to show any adaptation for words. We conclude that the right and the left fusiform gyri show similar patterns of adaptation for handwriting, consistent with a predominantly perceptual contribution to text processing.

Pictures Improve Memory of SAT Vocabulary Words.

Science.gov (United States)

Price, Melva; Finkelstein, Arleen

1994-01-01

Suggests that students can improve their memory of Scholastic Aptitude Test vocabulary words by associating the words with corresponding pictures taken from magazines. Finds that long-term recall of words associated with pictures was higher than recall of words not associated with pictures. (RS)

Professional Music Training and Novel Word Learning: From Faster Semantic Encoding to Longer-lasting Word Representations.

Science.gov (United States)

Dittinger, Eva; Barbaroux, Mylène; D'Imperio, Mariapaola; Jäncke, Lutz; Elmer, Stefan; Besson, Mireille

2016-10-01

On the basis of previous results showing that music training positively influences different aspects of speech perception and cognition, the aim of this series of experiments was to test the hypothesis that adult professional musicians would learn the meaning of novel words through picture-word associations more efficiently than controls without music training (i.e., fewer errors and faster RTs). We also expected musicians to show faster changes in brain electrical activity than controls, in particular regarding the N400 component that develops with word learning. In line with these hypotheses, musicians outperformed controls in the most difficult semantic task. Moreover, although a frontally distributed N400 component developed in both groups of participants after only a few minutes of novel word learning, in musicians this frontal distribution rapidly shifted to parietal scalp sites, as typically found for the N400 elicited by known words. Finally, musicians showed evidence for better long-term memory for novel words 5 months after the main experimental session. Results are discussed in terms of cascading effects from enhanced perception to memory as well as in terms of multifaceted improvements of cognitive processing due to music training. To our knowledge, this is the first report showing that music training influences semantic aspects of language processing in adults. These results open new perspectives for education in showing that early music training can facilitate later foreign language learning. Moreover, the design used in the present experiment can help to specify the stages of word learning that are impaired in children and adults with word learning difficulties.

Baby's first 10 words.

Science.gov (United States)

Tardif, Twila; Fletcher, Paul; Liang, Weilan; Zhang, Zhixiang; Kaciroti, Niko; Marchman, Virginia A

2008-07-01

Although there has been much debate over the content of children's first words, few large sample studies address this question for children at the very earliest stages of word learning. The authors report data from comparable samples of 265 English-, 336 Putonghua- (Mandarin), and 369 Cantonese-speaking 8- to 16-month-old infants whose caregivers completed MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories and reported them to produce between 1 and 10 words. Analyses of individual words indicated striking commonalities in the first words that children learn. However, substantive cross-linguistic differences appeared in the relative prevalence of common nouns, people terms, and verbs as well as in the probability that children produced even one of these word types when they had a total of 1-3, 4-6, or 7-10 words in their vocabularies. These data document cross-linguistic differences in the types of words produced even at the earliest stages of vocabulary learning and underscore the importance of parental input and cross-linguistic/cross-cultural variations in children's early word-learning.

A Finnic holy word and its subsequent history

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mauno Koski

1990-01-01

Full Text Available This article concentrates on a specific ancient holy word in Finnish and its subsequent development, hiisi. In the Finnish language region hiisi appears as an element in place names in over 230 villages established by the end of the thirteenth century, and at least a majority of these must have existed since prehistoric times. In Finland as well as in Estonia it is possible to demonstrate an earlier sacral function in places which contain hiisi as a component of their name, partly with the help of archeological discoveries, and partly with the help of oral folk tradition. It is particularly among the earliest settlement areas of Southwest Finland, Satakunta and Häme that hiisi features in the names of sacrificial sites or trees, in other words in the same areas where it features in the names of burial grounds. Names in which the hiisi element precedes a word meaning a lake, pond, or other water formation, occur particularly in the eastern Finnish dialect regions, as well as in the regions of Karelian, Olonets, Lydian, and Vepsian. In addition to its factual meaning of cult place, the Finnish word hiisi has come to denote a supernatural entity both in terms of its reference to a place and in terms of its reference to a being.

EVALUATION OF THE TEXTS IN TURKISH AS A FOREI GN LANGUAGE COUR SE BOOKS IN TERMS OF FORMULAIC EXPRESSI ONS

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.

Niche as a determinant of word fate in online groups.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eduardo G Altmann

2011-05-01

Full Text Available Patterns of word use both reflect and influence a myriad of human activities and interactions. Like other entities that are reproduced and evolve, words rise or decline depending upon a complex interplay between their intrinsic properties and the environments in which they function. Using Internet discussion communities as model systems, we define the concept of a word niche as the relationship between the word and the characteristic features of the environments in which it is used. We develop a method to quantify two important aspects of the size of the word niche: the range of individuals using the word and the range of topics it is used to discuss. Controlling for word frequency, we show that these aspects of the word niche are strong determinants of changes in word frequency. Previous studies have already indicated that word frequency itself is a correlate of word success at historical time scales. Our analysis of changes in word frequencies over time reveals that the relative sizes of word niches are far more important than word frequencies in the dynamics of the entire vocabulary at shorter time scales, as the language adapts to new concepts and social groupings. We also distinguish endogenous versus exogenous factors as additional contributors to the fates of words, and demonstrate the force of this distinction in the rise of novel words. Our results indicate that short-term nonstationarity in word statistics is strongly driven by individual proclivities, including inclinations to provide novel information and to project a distinctive social identity.

Corticospinal excitability during the processing of handwritten and typed words and non-words.

Science.gov (United States)

Gordon, Chelsea L; Spivey, Michael J; Balasubramaniam, Ramesh

2017-06-09

A number of studies have suggested that perception of actions is accompanied by motor simulation of those actions. To further explore this proposal, we applied Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the left primary motor cortex during the observation of handwritten and typed language stimuli, including words and non-word consonant clusters. We recorded motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) from the right first dorsal interosseous (FDI) muscle to measure cortico-spinal excitability during written text perception. We observed a facilitation in MEPs for handwritten stimuli, regardless of whether the stimuli were words or non-words, suggesting potential motor simulation during observation. We did not observe a similar facilitation for the typed stimuli, suggesting that motor simulation was not occurring during observation of typed text. By demonstrating potential simulation of written language text during observation, these findings add to a growing literature suggesting that the motor system plays a strong role in the perception of written language. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Arabic word recognizer for mobile applications

Science.gov (United States)

Khanna, Nitin; Abdollahian, Golnaz; Brame, Ben; Boutin, Mireille; Delp, Edward J.

2011-03-01

When traveling in a region where the local language is not written using a "Roman alphabet," translating written text (e.g., documents, road signs, or placards) is a particularly difficult problem since the text cannot be easily entered into a translation device or searched using a dictionary. To address this problem, we are developing the "Rosetta Phone," a handheld device (e.g., PDA or mobile telephone) capable of acquiring an image of the text, locating the region (word) of interest within the image, and producing both an audio and a visual English interpretation of the text. This paper presents a system targeted for interpreting words written in Arabic script. The goal of this work is to develop an autonomous, segmentation-free Arabic phrase recognizer, with computational complexity low enough to deploy on a mobile device. A prototype of the proposed system has been deployed on an iPhone with a suitable user interface. The system was tested on a number of noisy images, in addition to the images acquired from the iPhone's camera. It identifies Arabic words or phrases by extracting appropriate features and assigning "codewords" to each word or phrase. On a dictionary of 5,000 words, the system uniquely mapped (word-image to codeword) 99.9% of the words. The system has a 82% recognition accuracy on images of words captured using the iPhone's built-in camera.

MOJIBAKE – The Rehearsal of Word Fragments In Verbal Recall

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dr. Christiane eLange-Küttner

2015-04-01

Full Text Available Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the ‘grain size’ of word units (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005. In the current study, a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF English words versus geographical UK town names to control for content. We also tested unfamiliar international (INT non-words and names of international (INT European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design. Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and semantically constrained words.

Effects of word width and word length on optimal character size for reading of horizontally scrolling Japanese words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wataru eTeramoto

2016-02-01

Full Text Available The present study investigated whether word width and length affect the optimal character size for reading of horizontally scrolling Japanese words, using reading speed as a measure. In Experiment 1, three Japanese words, each consisting of 4 Hiragana characters, sequentially scrolled on a display screen from right to left. Participants, all Japanese native speakers, were instructed to read the words aloud as accurately as possible, irrespective of their order within the sequence. To quantitatively measure their reading performance, we used rapid serial visual presentation paradigm, where the scrolling rate was increased until the participants began to make mistakes. Thus, the highest scrolling rate at which the participants’ performance exceeded 88.9% correct rate was calculated for each character size (0.3, 0.6, 1.0, and 3.0° and scroll window size (5 or 10 character spaces. Results showed that the reading performance was highest in the range of 0.6° to 1.0°, irrespective of the scroll window size. Experiment 2 investigated whether the optimal character size observed in Experiment 1 was applicable for any word width and word length (i.e., the number of characters in a word. Results showed that reading speeds were slower for longer than shorter words and the word width of 3.6° was optimal among the word lengths tested (3, 4, and 6 character words. Considering that character size varied depending on word width and word length in the present study, this means that the optimal character size can be changed by word width and word length.

Generating descriptive visual words and visual phrases for large-scale image applications.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Shiliang; Tian, Qi; Hua, Gang; Huang, Qingming; Gao, Wen

2011-09-01

Bag-of-visual Words (BoWs) representation has been applied for various problems in the fields of multimedia and computer vision. The basic idea is to represent images as visual documents composed of repeatable and distinctive visual elements, which are comparable to the text words. Notwithstanding its great success and wide adoption, visual vocabulary created from single-image local descriptors is often shown to be not as effective as desired. In this paper, descriptive visual words (DVWs) and descriptive visual phrases (DVPs) are proposed as the visual correspondences to text words and phrases, where visual phrases refer to the frequently co-occurring visual word pairs. Since images are the carriers of visual objects and scenes, a descriptive visual element set can be composed by the visual words and their combinations which are effective in representing certain visual objects or scenes. Based on this idea, a general framework is proposed for generating DVWs and DVPs for image applications. In a large-scale image database containing 1506 object and scene categories, the visual words and visual word pairs descriptive to certain objects or scenes are identified and collected as the DVWs and DVPs. Experiments show that the DVWs and DVPs are informative and descriptive and, thus, are more comparable with the text words than the classic visual words. We apply the identified DVWs and DVPs in several applications including large-scale near-duplicated image retrieval, image search re-ranking, and object recognition. The combination of DVW and DVP performs better than the state of the art in large-scale near-duplicated image retrieval in terms of accuracy, efficiency and memory consumption. The proposed image search re-ranking algorithm: DWPRank outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithm by 12.4% in mean average precision and about 11 times faster in efficiency.

Word Recognition during Reading: The Interaction between Lexical Repetition and Frequency

Science.gov (United States)

Lowder, Matthew W.; Choi, Wonil; Gordon, Peter C.

2013-01-01

Memory studies utilizing long-term repetition priming have generally demonstrated that priming is greater for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words and that this effect persists if words intervene between the prime and the target. In contrast, word-recognition studies utilizing masked short-term repetition priming typically show that the magnitude of repetition priming does not differ as a function of word frequency and does not persist across intervening words. We conducted an eye-tracking while reading experiment to determine which of these patterns more closely resembles the relationship between frequency and repetition during the natural reading of a text. Frequency was manipulated using proper names that were high-frequency (e.g., Stephen) or low-frequency (e.g., Dominic). The critical name was later repeated in the sentence, or a new name was introduced. First-pass reading times and skipping rates on the critical name revealed robust repetition-by-frequency interactions such that the magnitude of the repetition-priming effect was greater for low-frequency names than for high-frequency names. In contrast, measures of later processing showed effects of repetition that did not depend on lexical frequency. These results are interpreted within a framework that conceptualizes eye-movement control as being influenced in different ways by lexical- and discourse-level factors. PMID:23283808

Graphic Organizer in Action: Solving Secondary Mathematics Word Problems

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Khoo Jia Sian

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Mathematics word problems are one of the most challenging topics to learn and teach in secondary schools. This is especially the case in countries where English is not the first language for the majority of the people, such as in Brunei Darussalam. Researchers proclaimed that limited language proficiency and limited Mathematics strategies are the possible causes to this problem. However, whatever the reason is behind difficulties students face in solving Mathematical word problems, it is perhaps the teaching and learning of the Mathematics that need to be modified. For example, the use of four-square-and-a-diamond graphic organizer that infuses model drawing skill; and Polya’s problem solving principles, to solve Mathematical word problems may be some of the strategies that can help in improving students’ word problem solving skills. This study, through quantitative analysis found that the use of graphic organizer improved students’ performance in terms of Mathematical knowledge, Mathematical strategy and Mathematical explanation in solving word problems. Further qualitative analysis revealed that the use of graphic organizer boosted students’ confidence level and positive attitudes towards solving word problems.Keywords: Word Problems, Graphic Organizer, Algebra, Action Research, Secondary School Mathematics DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22342/jme.7.2.3546.83-90

NERBio: using selected word conjunctions, term normalization, and global patterns to improve biomedical named entity recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Tsai, Richard Tzong-Han; Sung, Cheng-Lung; Dai, Hong-Jie; Hung, Hsieh-Chuan; Sung, Ting-Yi; Hsu, Wen-Lian

2006-12-18

Biomedical named entity recognition (Bio-NER) is a challenging problem because, in general, biomedical named entities of the same category (e.g., proteins and genes) do not follow one standard nomenclature. They have many irregularities and sometimes appear in ambiguous contexts. In recent years, machine-learning (ML) approaches have become increasingly common and now represent the cutting edge of Bio-NER technology. This paper addresses three problems faced by ML-based Bio-NER systems. First, most ML approaches usually employ singleton features that comprise one linguistic property (e.g., the current word is capitalized) and at least one class tag (e.g., B-protein, the beginning of a protein name). However, such features may be insufficient in cases where multiple properties must be considered. Adding conjunction features that contain multiple properties can be beneficial, but it would be infeasible to include all conjunction features in an NER model since memory resources are limited and some features are ineffective. To resolve the problem, we use a sequential forward search algorithm to select an effective set of features. Second, variations in the numerical parts of biomedical terms (e.g., "2" in the biomedical term IL2) cause data sparseness and generate many redundant features. In this case, we apply numerical normalization, which solves the problem by replacing all numerals in a term with one representative numeral to help classify named entities. Third, the assignment of NE tags does not depend solely on the target word's closest neighbors, but may depend on words outside the context window (e.g., a context window of five consists of the current word plus two preceding and two subsequent words). We use global patterns generated by the Smith-Waterman local alignment algorithm to identify such structures and modify the results of our ML-based tagger. This is called pattern-based post-processing. To develop our ML-based Bio-NER system, we employ conditional

Linking Working Memory and Long-Term Memory: A Computational Model of the Learning of New Words

Science.gov (United States)

Jones, Gary; Gobet, Fernand; Pine, Julian M.

2007-01-01

The nonword repetition (NWR) test has been shown to be a good predictor of children's vocabulary size. NWR performance has been explained using phonological working memory, which is seen as a critical component in the learning of new words. However, no detailed specification of the link between phonological working memory and long-term memory…

Tracing Knowledge Transfer from Universities to Industry: A Text Mining Approach

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Woltmann, Sabrina; Alkærsig, Lars

2017-01-01

This paper identifies transferred knowledge between universities and the industry by proposing the use of a computational linguistic method. Current research on university-industry knowledge exchange relies often on formal databases and indicators such as patents, collaborative publications and l...... is the first step to enable the identification of common knowledge and knowledge transfer via text mining to increase its measurability....... and license agreements, to assess the contribution to the socioeconomic surrounding of universities. We, on the other hand, use the texts from university abstracts to identify university knowledge and compare them with texts from firm webpages. We use these text data to identify common key words and thereby...... identify overlapping contents among the texts. As method we use a well-established word ranking method from the field of information retrieval term frequency–inverse document frequency (TFIDF) to identify commonalities between texts from university. In examining the outcomes of the TFIDF statistic we find...

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)

Word Recognition in Auditory Cortex

Science.gov (United States)

DeWitt, Iain D. J.

2013-01-01

Although spoken word recognition is more fundamental to human communication than text recognition, knowledge of word-processing in auditory cortex is comparatively impoverished. This dissertation synthesizes current models of auditory cortex, models of cortical pattern recognition, models of single-word reading, results in phonetics and results in…

Semantic Change Type in Old Javanese Word and Sanskrit Loan Word to Modern Javanese

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hendy Yuniarto

2016-12-01

Full Text Available This research aims to describe type classifier of semantic change and to explain the factors causing semantic change. This research was conducted with a qualitative-descriptive approach. The research method is conducted by comparing the meaning of words from the Old Javanese and Sanskrit loan wordto Modern Javanese. The collection data is done by looking for words that the meaning suspected change in Old Javanese dictionary. Words meaning determined precisely by tracing to the Old Javanese text. Furthermore, words meaning are compared to present time meaning through Modern Javanese dictionary. In addition, searching Modern Javanese meaning are also using Javanese news on the internet pages. The analysis of this research is to classify Old Javanese words and Sanskrit loan words meaning that undergo change to Modern Javanese. It’s also explained why the change in the word meaning can occur. The result shows that, semantic change of Old Javanese words and Sanskrit loan words to Modern Javanese can be classified into seven types, involving widening, narrowing, shifting, metaphor, metonymy, pejoration, and euphemism. In addition, the result shows that semantic change can occur because of some factors. Psychological factor concerning emotive and taboo, and polysemy. religion spreading, the growth of science and technology, the socio-political development, and the needs of a new name.   DOI: https://doi.org/10.24071/llt.2013.160101

Cultural Words in Slovenian Translations of the Works of Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Uršula Kastelic Vukadinović

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The paper, based on the author´s thesis entitled Kulturno besedje v slovenskih prevodih del Juana Rulfa in Carlosa Fuentesa, discusses cultural words in the Slovenian translations of the novel Pedro Páramo, some of the stories of The Plain in Flames by Juan Rulfo published in the same volume and the novel The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. In the analyzed texts there are a number of terms (also including cultural words which denote animals, plants, dishes, clothes and geographical surroundings of Mexico that may be unknown even to the Spanish speaking readers who are not familiar with the wider Hispanic environment, and Mexican in particular. Cultural words have no exact equivalents in other languages and cultures, therefore, they most commonly indicate that we are reading a translated text. These are also the elements that contribute to the foreignization of the target text and show us the textual world as exotic and unknown. The translator of the studied texts, Alenka Bole Vrabec, tends to choose the transfer of the cultural words in order to retain some local colour, even when she could find equivalents in the Slovenian or, at least, adapt the words to the writing in accordance with the rules of the Slovenian language. These decisions accentuate the foreignizing character of her translations.

The effect of word length in short-term memory: Is rehearsal necessary?

Science.gov (United States)

Campoy, Guillermo

2008-05-01

Three experiments investigated the effect of word length on a serial recognition task when rehearsal was prevented by a high presentation rate with no delay between study and test lists. Results showed that lists of short four-phoneme words were better recognized than lists of long six-phoneme words. Moreover, this effect was equivalent to that observed in conditions in which there was a delay between lists, thereby making rehearsal possible in the interval. These findings imply that rehearsal does not play a central role in the origin of the word length effect. An alternative explanation based on differences in the degree of retroactive interference generated by long and short words is proposed.

Fracture Mechanics Method for Word Embedding Generation of Neural Probabilistic Linguistic Model.

Science.gov (United States)

Bi, Size; Liang, Xiao; Huang, Ting-Lei

2016-01-01

Word embedding, a lexical vector representation generated via the neural linguistic model (NLM), is empirically demonstrated to be appropriate for improvement of the performance of traditional language model. However, the supreme dimensionality that is inherent in NLM contributes to the problems of hyperparameters and long-time training in modeling. Here, we propose a force-directed method to improve such problems for simplifying the generation of word embedding. In this framework, each word is assumed as a point in the real world; thus it can approximately simulate the physical movement following certain mechanics. To simulate the variation of meaning in phrases, we use the fracture mechanics to do the formation and breakdown of meaning combined by a 2-gram word group. With the experiments on the natural linguistic tasks of part-of-speech tagging, named entity recognition and semantic role labeling, the result demonstrated that the 2-dimensional word embedding can rival the word embeddings generated by classic NLMs, in terms of accuracy, recall, and text visualization.

Mining protein function from text using term-based support vector machines

Science.gov (United States)

Rice, Simon B; Nenadic, Goran; Stapley, Benjamin J

2005-01-01

Background Text mining has spurred huge interest in the domain of biology. The goal of the BioCreAtIvE exercise was to evaluate the performance of current text mining systems. We participated in Task 2, which addressed assigning Gene Ontology terms to human proteins and selecting relevant evidence from full-text documents. We approached it as a modified form of the document classification task. We used a supervised machine-learning approach (based on support vector machines) to assign protein function and select passages that support the assignments. As classification features, we used a protein's co-occurring terms that were automatically extracted from documents. Results The results evaluated by curators were modest, and quite variable for different problems: in many cases we have relatively good assignment of GO terms to proteins, but the selected supporting text was typically non-relevant (precision spanning from 3% to 50%). The method appears to work best when a substantial set of relevant documents is obtained, while it works poorly on single documents and/or short passages. The initial results suggest that our approach can also mine annotations from text even when an explicit statement relating a protein to a GO term is absent. Conclusion A machine learning approach to mining protein function predictions from text can yield good performance only if sufficient training data is available, and significant amount of supporting data is used for prediction. The most promising results are for combined document retrieval and GO term assignment, which calls for the integration of methods developed in BioCreAtIvE Task 1 and Task 2. PMID:15960835

A scalable machine-learning approach to recognize chemical names within large text databases

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wren Jonathan D

2006-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract Motivation The use or study of chemical compounds permeates almost every scientific field and in each of them, the amount of textual information is growing rapidly. There is a need to accurately identify chemical names within text for a number of informatics efforts such as database curation, report summarization, tagging of named entities and keywords, or the development/curation of reference databases. Results A first-order Markov Model (MM was evaluated for its ability to distinguish chemical names from words, yielding ~93% recall in recognizing chemical terms and ~99% precision in rejecting non-chemical terms on smaller test sets. However, because total false-positive events increase with the number of words analyzed, the scalability of name recognition was measured by processing 13.1 million MEDLINE records. The method yielded precision ranges from 54.7% to 100%, depending upon the cutoff score used, averaging 82.7% for approximately 1.05 million putative chemical terms extracted. Extracted chemical terms were analyzed to estimate the number of spelling variants per term, which correlated with the total number of times the chemical name appeared in MEDLINE. This variability in term construction was found to affect both information retrieval and term mapping when using PubMed and Ovid.

Combine CRF and MMSEG to Boost Chinese Word Segmentation in Social Media

OpenAIRE

Yushi, Yao; Zheng, Huang

2015-01-01

In this paper, we propose a joint algorithm for the word segmentation on Chinese social media. Previous work mainly focus on word segmentation for plain Chinese text, in order to develop a Chinese social media processing tool, we need to take the main features of social media into account, whose grammatical structure is not rigorous, and the tendency of using colloquial and Internet terms makes the existing Chinese-processing tools inefficient to obtain good performance on social media. In ou...

Divineness regarding the words of the Holy Qur'an

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sheibani Muhammad

2014-01-01

Full Text Available One of the many questions concerning the words of the Holy Qur'an is whether their content and meaning were truly a divine revelation or they were revealed to the Prophet from God and then transferred into the form of words. In this regard, there are two perspectives. First, as all Muslims believe, the words of the Qur'an are the result of a divine revelation, where­as the second viewpoint is that the words of the Qur'an are written by a human and not God. According to this latter perspective, the words of the Qur'an are sayings of the Prophet of which only the contents are based on a divine revelation. The theory of the words of the Qur'an not being a divine revelation has been an abandoned and rejected one throughout the Islamic history. This is the reason it has not been the subject of any pertinent discussions. How can the words of the Qur'an be created by Muhammad or Gabriel even though it is believed that the Qur'an is a miracle? This article first defines the concept of revelation and then analyzes various viewpoints and opinions regarding this topic in order to conclude (with evidence that the Qur'an is the word of God and not the word of the Prophet. If he had composed the words of the Qur'an and expressed the meaning of the revelation in his own words, then the Qur'an would not be the word of God. In this case, the term 'word of God' indicates that the concept of the 'word' should be considered. Thus, it is clear that the words of the Qur'an are divine and they can be referred and attributed to God.

AARP Word 2010 for dummies

CERN Document Server

Gookin, Dan

2011-01-01

It's a whole new Word - make the most of it! Here's exactly what you need to know to get going with Word 2010. From firing up Word, using the spell checker, and working with templates to formatting documents, adding images, and saving your stuff, you'll get the first and last word on Word 2010 with this fun and easy mini guide. So get ready to channel your inner writer and start creating Word files that wow! Open the book and find:Tips for navigating Word with the keyboard and mouseAdvice on using the RibbonHow to edit text and undo mistakesThings to know

Pre-activation negativity (PrAN in brain potentials to unfolding words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pelle Söderström

2016-10-01

Full Text Available We describe an ERP effect termed the ‘pre-activation negativity’ (PrAN, which is proposed to index the degree of pre-activation of upcoming word-internal morphemes in speech processing. Using lexical competition measures based on word-initial speech fragments (WIFs, as well as statistical analyses of ERP data from three experiments, it is shown that the PrAN is sensitive to lexical competition and that it reflects the degree of predictive certainty: the negativity is larger when there are fewer upcoming lexical competitors.

The Place of the Proclamation of the Word of God

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Jarosław Superson

2016-12-01

Full Text Available This article presents a chronological evolution of the place of the proclamation of the Word of God. On the basis of pericopes from the Old Testament, the places that God chose to speak with the man and then places chosen by Jesus Christ and the Church in its early centuries were indicated. Use of the term “ambo” (ἄμβων, which appeared in the Church probably at the end of the fourth century, became widespread, and over time it was adopted as the name of the place for the Liturgy of the Word and for the book.

Creating a medical dictionary using word alignment: The influence of sources and resources

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Åhlfeldt Hans

2007-11-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Automatic word alignment of parallel texts with the same content in different languages is among other things used to generate dictionaries for new translations. The quality of the generated word alignment depends on the quality of the input resources. In this paper we report on automatic word alignment of the English and Swedish versions of the medical terminology systems ICD-10, ICF, NCSP, KSH97-P and parts of MeSH and how the terminology systems and type of resources influence the quality. Methods We automatically word aligned the terminology systems using static resources, like dictionaries, statistical resources, like statistically derived dictionaries, and training resources, which were generated from manual word alignment. We varied which part of the terminology systems that we used to generate the resources, which parts that we word aligned and which types of resources we used in the alignment process to explore the influence the different terminology systems and resources have on the recall and precision. After the analysis, we used the best configuration of the automatic word alignment for generation of candidate term pairs. We then manually verified the candidate term pairs and included the correct pairs in an English-Swedish dictionary. Results The results indicate that more resources and resource types give better results but the size of the parts used to generate the resources only partly affects the quality. The most generally useful resources were generated from ICD-10 and resources generated from MeSH were not as general as other resources. Systematic inter-language differences in the structure of the terminology system rubrics make the rubrics harder to align. Manually created training resources give nearly as good results as a union of static resources, statistical resources and training resources and noticeably better results than a union of static resources and statistical resources. The verified English

The Distribution of the Informative Intensity of the Text in Terms of its Structure (On Materials of the English Texts in the Mining Sphere

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

Words, Words, Words: English, Vocabulary.

Science.gov (United States)

Lamb, Barbara

The Quinmester course on words gives the student the opportunity to increase his proficiency by investigating word origins, word histories, morphology, and phonology. The course includes the following: dictionary skills and familiarity with the "Oxford,""Webster's Third," and "American Heritage" dictionaries; word…

Text Induced Spelling Correction

NARCIS (Netherlands)

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

Using ontology network structure in text mining.

Science.gov (United States)

Berndt, Donald J; McCart, James A; Luther, Stephen L

2010-11-13

Statistical text mining treats documents as bags of words, with a focus on term frequencies within documents and across document collections. Unlike natural language processing (NLP) techniques that rely on an engineered vocabulary or a full-featured ontology, statistical approaches do not make use of domain-specific knowledge. The freedom from biases can be an advantage, but at the cost of ignoring potentially valuable knowledge. The approach proposed here investigates a hybrid strategy based on computing graph measures of term importance over an entire ontology and injecting the measures into the statistical text mining process. As a starting point, we adapt existing search engine algorithms such as PageRank and HITS to determine term importance within an ontology graph. The graph-theoretic approach is evaluated using a smoking data set from the i2b2 National Center for Biomedical Computing, cast as a simple binary classification task for categorizing smoking-related documents, demonstrating consistent improvements in accuracy.

Analysis Of Aspects Of Messages Hiding In Text Environments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Afanasyeva Olesya

2015-09-01

Full Text Available In the work are researched problems, which arise during hiding of messages in text environments, being transmitted by electronic communication channels and the Internet. The analysis of selection of places in text environment (TE, which can be replaced by word from the message is performed. Selection and replacement of words in the text environment is implemented basing on semantic analysis of text fragment, consisting of the inserted word, and its environment in TE. For implementation of such analysis is used concept of semantic parameters of words coordination and semantic value of separate word. Are used well-known methods of determination of values of these parameters. This allows moving from quality level to quantitative level analysis of text fragments semantics during their modification by word substitution. Invisibility of embedded messages is ensured by providing preset values of the semantic cooperation parameter deviations.

Prediction of Learning and Comprehension when Adolescents Read Multiple Texts: The Roles of Word-Level Processing, Strategic Approach, and Reading Motivation

Science.gov (United States)

Braten, Ivar; Ferguson, Leila E.; Anmarkrud, Oistein; Stromso, Helge I.

2013-01-01

Sixty-five Norwegian 10th graders used the software Read&Answer 2.0 (Vidal-Abarca et al., 2011) to read five different texts presenting conflicting views on the controversial scientific issue of sun exposure and health. Participants were administered a multiple-choice topic-knowledge measure before and after reading, a word recognition task,…

[Representation of letter position in visual word recognition process].

Science.gov (United States)

Makioka, S

1994-08-01

Two experiments investigated the representation of letter position in visual word recognition process. In Experiment 1, subjects (12 undergraduates and graduates) were asked to detect a target word in a briefly-presented probe. Probes consisted of two kanji words. The latters which formed targets (critical letters) were always contained in probes. (e.g. target: [symbol: see text] probe: [symbol: see text]) High false alarm rate was observed when critical letters occupied the same within-word relative position (left or right within the word) in the probe words as in the target word. In Experiment 2 (subject were ten undergraduates and graduates), spaces adjacent to probe words were replaced by randomly chosen hiragana letters (e.g. [symbol: see text]), because spaces are not used to separate words in regular Japanese sentences. In addition to the effect of within-word relative position as in Experiment 1, the effect of between-word relative position (left or right across the probe words) was observed. These results suggest that information about within-word relative position of a letter is used in word recognition process. The effect of within-word relative position was explained by a connectionist model of word recognition.

The Distribution of the Informative Intensity of the Text in Terms of its Structure (On Materials of the English Texts in the Mining Sphere)

Science.gov (United States)

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.

Shakespeare and the Words of Early Modern Physic: Between Academic and Popular Medicine. A Lexicographical Approach to the Plays

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Roberta Mullini

2013-03-01

Full Text Available The article aims at showing how Shakespeare relied on the medical vocabulary shared by his coeval society, which had, for centuries, been witnessing the continuous process of vernacularization of ancient and medieval scientific texts. After outlining the state of early modern medicine, the author presents and discusses the results of her search for relevant medical terms in nine plays by Shakespeare. In order to do this, a wide range of medical treatises has been analysed (either directly or through specific corpora such as Medieval English Medical Texts, MEMT 2005, and Early Modern English Medical Texts, EMEMT 2010, so as to verify the ancestry or the novelty of Shakespearean medical words. In addition to this, the author has also built a corpus of word types derived from seventeenth-century quack doctors’ handbills, with the purpose of creating a word list of medical terms connected to popular rather than university medicine, comparable with the list drawn out of the Shakespearean plays. The results most stressed in the article concern Shakespeare’s use of medical terminology already well known to his contemporary society (thus confuting the Oxfordian thesis about the impossibility for William Shakespeare the actor to master so many medical words and the playwright’s skill in transforming – rather than inventing – old popular terms. The article is accompanied by five tables that collect the results of the various lexicographical searches.

Scientific word, Version 1.0

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Semen Köksal

1993-01-01

Full Text Available Scientific Word is the first fully integrated mathematical word processor in the Windows 3.1 environment, which uses the TEX typesetting language for output. It runs as a Microsoft Windows application program and has two-way interface to TEX. The Scientific Word is an object-oriented WYSIWYG word processor for virtually all users who need typesetting scientific books, manuals and papers. It includes automatic equation numbering, spell checking, and LATEX and DVI previewer.

Newly-acquired words are more phonologically robust in verbal short-term memory when they have associated semantic representations.

Science.gov (United States)

Savill, Nicola; Ellis, Andrew W; Jefferies, Elizabeth

2017-04-01

Verbal short-term memory (STM) is a crucial cognitive function central to language learning, comprehension and reasoning, yet the processes that underlie this capacity are not fully understood. In particular, although STM primarily draws on a phonological code, interactions between long-term phonological and semantic representations might help to stabilise the phonological trace for words ("semantic binding hypothesis"). This idea was first proposed to explain the frequent phoneme recombination errors made by patients with semantic dementia when recalling words that are no longer fully understood. However, converging evidence in support of semantic binding is scant: it is unusual for studies of healthy participants to examine serial recall at the phoneme level and also it is difficult to separate the contribution of phonological-lexical knowledge from effects of word meaning. We used a new method to disentangle these influences in healthy individuals by training new 'words' with or without associated semantic information. We examined phonological coherence in immediate serial recall (ISR), both immediately and the day after training. Trained items were more likely to be recalled than novel nonwords, confirming the importance of phonological-lexical knowledge, and items with semantic associations were also produced more accurately than those with no meaning, at both time points. For semantically-trained items, there were fewer phoneme ordering and identity errors, and consequently more complete target items were produced in both correct and incorrect list positions. These data show that lexical-semantic knowledge improves the robustness of verbal STM at the sub-item level, even when the effect of phonological familiarity is taken into account. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Lexical Information in Memory for Text.

Science.gov (United States)

Hayes-Roth, Barbara

Cued-recall and two-alternative, forced-choice recognition measures were used to evaluate subjects' retention of the specific wordings of studied texts. Results obtained after 10-minute and 24 hour retention intervals suggest that the studied wordings of texts are functional components of their memory representations. Theories that assume…

AUTOMATIC RETRIEVAL AND THE FORMALIZATION OF MULTI WORDS EXPRESSIONS WITH F-WORDS IN THE CORPUS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ENGLISH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Prihantoro Prihantoro

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The research problems in this research are 1 how lexicogrammar takes role in determining polarity of F-Word1 and 2 how to formalize it for corpus processing. The data is obtained from the Contemporary American English Corpus (COCA. In this corpus, F-word is proven to be highest in frequency as compared to its distribution across corpora. Corpus methodology is applied by sending queries to retrieve F-Words to COCA interface. Tokens combination surrounding F-words resulted in the phrase and clause unit accompanying F-words, which are significant cues to determine F-word polarity. The polarity is later proven to be not necessarily negative. I also designed a computational resource to allow the retrieval of F-words offline so that users might apply it to any digital text collections.

Stemming of Slovenian library science texts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Polona Vilar

2002-01-01

Full Text Available The theme of the article is the preparation of a stemming algorithm for Slovenian library science texts. The procedure consisted of three phases: learning, testing and evaluation.The preparation of the optimal stemmer for Slovenian texts from the field of library science is presented, its testing and comparison with two other stemmers for the Slovenian language: the Popovič stemmer and the Generic stemmer. A corpus of 790.000 words from the field of library science was used for learning. Lists of stems, word endings and stop-words were built. In the testing phase, the component parts of the algorithm were tested on an additional corpus of 167.000 words. In the evaluation phase, a comparison of the three stemmers processing the same word corpus was made. The results of each stemmer were compared with an intellectually prepared control result of the stemming of the corpus. It consisted of groups of semantically connected words with no errors. Understemming was especially monitored – the number of stems for semantically connected words, produced by an algorithm. The results were statistically processed with the Kruskal-Wallis test. The Optimal stemmer produced the best results.It matched best with the reference results and also gave the smallest number of stems for one semantic meaning. The Popovič stemmer followed closely. The Generic stemmer proved to be the least accurate. The procedures described in the thesis can represent a platform for the development of the tools for automatic indexing and retrieval for library science texts in Slovenian language.

BioWord: A sequence manipulation suite for Microsoft Word

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anzaldi Laura J

2012-06-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The ability to manipulate, edit and process DNA and protein sequences has rapidly become a necessary skill for practicing biologists across a wide swath of disciplines. In spite of this, most everyday sequence manipulation tools are distributed across several programs and web servers, sometimes requiring installation and typically involving frequent switching between applications. To address this problem, here we have developed BioWord, a macro-enabled self-installing template for Microsoft Word documents that integrates an extensive suite of DNA and protein sequence manipulation tools. Results BioWord is distributed as a single macro-enabled template that self-installs with a single click. After installation, BioWord will open as a tab in the Office ribbon. Biologists can then easily manipulate DNA and protein sequences using a familiar interface and minimize the need to switch between applications. Beyond simple sequence manipulation, BioWord integrates functionality ranging from dyad search and consensus logos to motif discovery and pair-wise alignment. Written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA as an open source, object-oriented project, BioWord allows users with varying programming experience to expand and customize the program to better meet their own needs. Conclusions BioWord integrates a powerful set of tools for biological sequence manipulation within a handy, user-friendly tab in a widely used word processing software package. The use of a simple scripting language and an object-oriented scheme facilitates customization by users and provides a very accessible educational platform for introducing students to basic bioinformatics algorithms.

Long-term temporal tracking of speech rate affects spoken-word recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Baese-Berk, Melissa M; Heffner, Christopher C; Dilley, Laura C; Pitt, Mark A; Morrill, Tuuli H; McAuley, J Devin

2014-08-01

Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.g., an extended conversation). Results demonstrated that listeners tracked variation in the overall pace of speech over an extended duration (analogous to that of a conversation that listeners might have outside the lab) and that this global speech rate influenced which words listeners reported hearing. The effects of speech rate became stronger over time. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that neural entrainment by speech occurs on multiple timescales, some lasting more than an hour. © The Author(s) 2014.

PEDANT: Parallel Texts in Göteborg

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Daniel Ridings

2012-09-01

Full Text Available

The article presents the status of the PEDANT project with parallel corpora at the Language Bank at Göteborg University. The solutions for access to the corpus data are presented. Access is provided by way of the internet and standard applications and SGML-aware programming tools. The SGML format for encoding translation pairs is outlined together. The methods allow working with everything from plain text to texts densely encoded with linguistic information.

In hierdie artikel word 'n beskrywing gegee van die stand van die PEDANT-projek met parallelle korpora by die Taalbank by die Universiteit van Göteborg. Oplossings vir die verkryging van toegang tot die korpusdata word aangedui. Toegang word verskaf deur middel van die Internet en standaardtoepassings en SGML-sensitiewe programmeringshulpmiddels. Die SGML-formaat vir die enkodering van vertaalpare word gesamentlik geskets. Hierdie metodes laat toe dat gewerk kan word met enigiets vanaf suiwer teks tot tekste wat taalkundig dig geëtiketteer is.

Preschool Children’s Memory for Word Forms Remains Stable Over Several Days, but Gradually Decreases after Six Months

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Katherine Ruth Gordon

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Research on word learning has focused on children’s ability to identify a target object when given the word form after a minimal number of exposures to novel word-object pairings. However, relatively little research has focused on children’s ability to retrieve the word form when given the target object. The exceptions involve asking children to recall and produce forms, and children typically perform near floor on these measures. In the current study, 3- to 5-year-old children were administered a novel test of word form that allowed for recognition memory and manual responses. Specifically, when asked to label a previously trained object, children were given three forms to choose from: the target, a minimally different form, and a maximally different form. Children demonstrated memory for word forms at three post-training delays: 10 minutes (short-term, 2 to 3 days (long-term, and 6 months to 1 year (very long-term. However, children performed worse at the very long-term delay than the other time points, and the length of the very long-term delay was negatively related to performance. When in error, children were no more likely to select the minimally different form than the maximally different form at all time points. Overall, these results suggest that children remember word forms that are linked to objects over extended post-training intervals, but that their memory for the forms gradually decreases over time without further exposures. Furthermore, memory traces for word forms do not become less phonologically specific over time; rather children either identify the correct form, or they perform at chance.

New Computer Terms in Bloggers’ Language

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vilija Celiešienė

2012-06-01

Full Text Available The article presents an analysis of new words in computer terminology that make their way to blogs and analyzes how the official neologisms and computer terms, especially the equivalents to barbarisms, are employed in everyday use. The article also discusses the ways of including the new computer terms into texts. The blogs on topics of information technology are the objects of the research. The analysis of the aforementioned blogs allowed highlighting certain trends in the use of new computer terms. An observation was made that even though the authors of the blogs could freely choose their writing style, they were not bound by the standards of literary language. Thus, their language was full of non-standard vocabulary; however, self-control regarding the language used could still be noticed. An interest in novelties of computer terminology and the tendency to accept some of the suggested new Lithuanian and loaned computer terms were noticed. When using the new words the bloggers frequently employed specific graphical elements and (or comments. The graphical elements were often chosen by bloggers to express their feelings of doubt regarding the suitability of the use of the suggested loanword. Attempting to explain the meaning of the new word to the readers the bloggers tended to post comments about the new computer terms.

Word of Mouth Marketing in Mouth and Dental Health Centers towards Consumers

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aykut Ekiyor

2014-09-01

Full Text Available Influencing the shopping style of others by passing on the experiences of goods purchased or services received is a way of behavior that has its roots in history. The main objective of th is research is to analyze the effects of demographic factors within the scope of word of mouth marketing on the choices of mouth and dental health services. Consumers receiving service from mouth and dental health centers of the Turkish Republic Ministry o f Health constitute the environment of the research. The research conducted in order to determine the mouth and dental health center selection of consumers within the scope of word of mouth marketing. The research has been conducted in Ankara through simpl e random sampling. The sample size has been determined as 400. In terms of word of mouth marketing which has been determined as the third hypothesis of the study, as a result of the analysis of the statistical relationship between mouth and dental health c enter preference and demographic factor groups, it has been determined that there is a meaningful difference in terms of age, level of education, level of income and some dimensions of marital status and that no meaningful difference has been found in term s of gender. It has been attempted to determine the importance of word of mouth marketing in healthcare services

Handwriting segmentation of unconstrained Oriya text

Indian Academy of Sciences (India)

Based on vertical projection profiles and structural features of Oriya characters, text lines are segmented into words. For character segmentation, at first, the isolated and connected (touching) characters in a word are detected. Using structural, topological and water reservoir concept-based features, characters of the word ...

The effects of visual crowding, text size, and positional uncertainty on text legibility at a glance.

Science.gov (United States)

Dobres, Jonathan; Wolfe, Benjamin; Chahine, Nadine; Reimer, Bryan

2018-07-01

Reading at a glance, once a relatively infrequent mode of reading, is becoming common. Mobile interaction paradigms increasingly dominate the way in which users obtain information about the world, which often requires reading at a glance, whether from a smartphone, wearable device, or in-vehicle interface. Recent research in these areas has shown that a number of factors can affect text legibility when words are briefly presented in isolation. Here we expand upon this work by examining how legibility is affected by more crowded presentations. Word arrays were combined with a lexical decision task, in which the size of the text elements and the inter-line spacing (leading) between individual items were manipulated to gauge their relative impacts on text legibility. In addition, a single-word presentation condition that randomized the location of presentation was compared with previous work that held position constant. Results show that larger text was more legible than smaller text. Wider leading significantly enhanced legibility as well, but contrary to expectations, wider leading did not fully counteract decrements in legibility at smaller text sizes. Single-word stimuli presented with random positioning were more difficult to read than stationary counterparts from earlier studies. Finally, crowded displays required much greater processing time compared to single-word displays. These results have implications for modern interface design, which often present interactions in the form of scrollable and/or selectable lists. The present findings are of practical interest to the wide community of graphic designers and interface engineers responsible for developing our interfaces of daily use. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Monolingual accounting dictionaries for EFL text production

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Sandro

2006-01-01

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...... 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...... 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...

Monolingual Accounting Dictionaries for EFL Text Production

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nielsen, Sandro

2009-01-01

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...... 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...... 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...

The Effect of Sleep on Children’s Word Retention and Generalization

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Emma L. Axelsson

2016-08-01

Full Text Available In the first few years of life children spend a good proportion of time sleeping as well as acquiring the meanings of hundreds of words and their related associations. There is now ample evidence of the effects of sleep on memory in adults and the number of studies demonstrating the effects of napping and nocturnal sleep in children is also mounting. In particular, sleep appears to benefit children’s memory for recently-encountered novel words. The effect of sleep on children’s generalization of novel words across multiple items, however, is less clear. Given that sleep is polyphasic in the early years, made up of multiple episodes, and children’s word learning is gradual and strengthened slowly over time, it is highly plausible that sleep is a strong candidate in supporting children’s memory for novel words. Importantly, it appears that when children sleep shortly after exposure to novel word-object pairs retention is better than if sleep is delayed, suggesting that napping plays a vital role in long-term word retention for young children. Word learning is a complex, challenging and important part of development, thus the role that sleep plays in children’s retention of novel words is worthy of attention. As such, ensuring children get sufficient good quality sleep and regular opportunities to nap may be critical for strong language acquisition.

Whole-Word Phonological Representations of Disyllabic Words in the Chinese Lexicon: Data From Acquired Dyslexia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sam-Po Law

2005-01-01

Full Text Available This study addresses the issue of the existence of whole-word phonological representations of disyllabic and multisyllabic words in the Chinese mental lexicon. A Cantonese brain-injured dyslexic individual with semantic deficits, YKM, was assessed on his abilities to read aloud and to comprehend disyllabic words containing homographic heterophonous characters, the pronunciation of which can only be disambiguated in word context. Superior performance on reading to comprehension was found. YKM could produce the target phonological forms without understanding the words. The dissociation is taken as evidence for whole-word representations for these words at the phonological level. The claim is consistent with previous account for discrepancy of the frequencies of tonal errors between reading aloud and object naming in Cantonese reported of another case study of similar deficits. Theoretical arguments for whole-word form representations for all multisyllabic Chinese words are also discussed.

Decorporation: officially a word.

Science.gov (United States)

Fisher, D R

2000-05-01

This note is the brief history of a word. Decorporation is a scientific term known to health physicists who have an interest in the removal of internally deposited radionuclides from the body after an accidental or inadvertent intake. Although the word decorporation appears many times in the radiation protection literature, it was only recently accepted by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary as an entry for their latest edition.

Decorporation: Officially a word

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fisher, D.R.

2000-01-01

This note is the brief history of a word. Decorporation is a scientific term known to health physicists who have an interest in the removal of internally deposited radionuclides from the body after an accidental or inadvertent intake. Although the word decorporation appears many times in the radiation protection literature, it was only recently accepted by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary as an entry for their latest edition

Decorporation: Officially a word

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Fisher, D.R.

2000-05-01

This note is the brief history of a word. Decorporation is a scientific term known to health physicists who have an interest in the removal of internally deposited radionuclides from the body after an accidental or inadvertent intake. Although the word decorporation appears many times in the radiation protection literature, it was only recently accepted by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary as an entry for their latest edition.

Decorporation: Officially a word

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Fisher, Darrell R.

1999-01-01

This note is the brief history of a word. Decorporation is a scientific term known to health physicists who have an interest in the removal of internally deposited radionuclides from the body after an accidental or inadvertent intake. Although the word decorporation appears many times in the radiation protection literature, it was only recently accepted by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary as an entry for their latest edition

Word length, set size, and lexical factors: Re-examining what causes the word length effect.

Science.gov (United States)

Guitard, Dominic; Gabel, Andrew J; Saint-Aubin, Jean; Surprenant, Aimée M; Neath, Ian

2018-04-19

The word length effect, better recall of lists of short (fewer syllables) than long (more syllables) words has been termed a benchmark effect of working memory. Despite this, experiments on the word length effect can yield quite different results depending on set size and stimulus properties. Seven experiments are reported that address these 2 issues. Experiment 1 replicated the finding of a preserved word length effect under concurrent articulation for large stimulus sets, which contrasts with the abolition of the word length effect by concurrent articulation for small stimulus sets. Experiment 2, however, demonstrated that when the short and long words are equated on more dimensions, concurrent articulation abolishes the word length effect for large stimulus sets. Experiment 3 shows a standard word length effect when output time is equated, but Experiments 4-6 show no word length effect when short and long words are equated on increasingly more dimensions that previous demonstrations have overlooked. Finally, Experiment 7 compared recall of a small and large neighborhood words that were equated on all the dimensions used in Experiment 6 (except for those directly related to neighborhood size) and a neighborhood size effect was still observed. We conclude that lexical factors, rather than word length per se, are better predictors of when the word length effect will occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Powerful Vocabulary Acquisition through Texts Comparison

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mohammad Reza Hasannejad

2015-03-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to investigate if dual version reading comprehension had a positive effect on Intermediate EFL students’ general vocabulary acquisition, receptive and productive knowledge of vocabulary and students’ synonymous power of words. Two groups were selected - the experimental group and the control group. The study included: (1 four pretests (2 the dual version reading comprehension, and (3 four posttests. It was found that there was no significant difference between the two groups of students on the pretests. However there was a significant difference between the two groups of the students on the posttests. Overall, the dual version reading comprehension vocabulary-learning made the experimental group learners outperformed the control groups in terms of their performance on four types of vocabulary tests. This indicates that students following dual version reading comprehension were more successful in vocabulary acquisition, and developing their receptive knowledge of vocabulary, transferring their receptive knowledge in to the productive knowledge and enhancing the memorization of the synonymous words.

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...

The Effect of Known-and-Unknown Word Combinations on Intentional Vocabulary Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Kasahara, Kiwamu

2011-01-01

The purpose of this study is to examine whether learning a known-and-unknown word combination is superior in terms of retention and retrieval of meaning to learning a single unknown word. The term "combination" in this study means a two-word collocation of a familiar word and a word that is new to the participants. Following the results of…

Word form Encoding in Chinese Word Naming and Word Typing

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Jenn-Yeu; Li, Cheng-Yi

2011-01-01

The process of word form encoding was investigated in primed word naming and word typing with Chinese monosyllabic words. The target words shared or did not share the onset consonants with the prime words. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was 100 ms or 300 ms. Typing required the participants to enter the phonetic letters of the target word,…

The Weaknesses of Full-Text Searching

Science.gov (United States)

Beall, Jeffrey

2008-01-01

This paper provides a theoretical critique of the deficiencies of full-text searching in academic library databases. Because full-text searching relies on matching words in a search query with words in online resources, it is an inefficient method of finding information in a database. This matching fails to retrieve synonyms, and it also retrieves…

Learning to Read Words: Theory, Findings, and Issues

Science.gov (United States)

Ehri, Linnea C.

2005-01-01

Reading words may take several forms. Readers may utilize decoding, analogizing, or predicting to read unfamiliar words. Readers read familiar words by accessing them in memory, called sight word reading. With practice, all words come to be read automatically by sight, which is the most efficient, unobtrusive way to read words in text. The process…

Wine and Words: A Trilingual Wine Dictionary for South Africa

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Michelle F. van der Merwe

2011-10-01

Full Text Available

Abstract: The South African wine industry identified the need for a special-field on-line dictionary on viticulture and oenology in Afrikaans, English and isi-Xhosa. The dictionary provides information on wine terminology as well as linguistic information on the use of such terminology. The purpose of this article is to give a description of the project. The process of compiling the dictionary is described, from the co-operation between the wine industry and lexicographers to the intended target users and the choice of languages of the dictionary. Functions of the dictionary are discussed, with reference to specific user situations, namely text production, text reception and translation. A system of labels has been designed for the dictionary and its benefit for the user is explained. In assisting the user to make an informed choice of a term, the notion of proscriptiveness has been followed in the presentation of information in the wine dictionary.

Keywords: TRILINGUAL WINE DICTIONARY, SPECIALISED LEXICOGRAPHY, VITICULTUREAND OENOLOGY TERMS, ON-LINE DICTIONARY, TARGET USERS, USER SITUATIONS,FUNCTIONS, TEXT RECEPTION, TEXT PRODUCTION, TRANSLATION, LABELS, ENCYCLOPEDICKNOWLEDGE, LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE, PROSCRIPTION

Opsomming: Wyn en woorde: 'n Drietalige Wynwoordeboek vir Suid-Afrika. Die Suid-Afrikaanse wynbedryf het die behoefte aan 'n aanlynvakwoordeboek oor wynenwingerdkunde in Afrikaans, Engels en isiXhosa geïdentifiseer. Die woordeboek verskaf inligtingoor wynterminologie, sowel as taalkundige inligting oor die gebruik van sulke terminologie. Diedoel van hierdie artikel is om 'n beskrywing van die projek te gee. Die samestellingsproses van diewoordeboek word beskryf, vanaf die samewerking tussen die wynbedryf en die leksikograwe, totdie voorgestelde teikengebruikers en die keuse van die tale van die woordeboek. Funksies van diewoordeboek word bespreek, met verwysing na spesifieke gebruikersituasies, naamlik teksproduksie

ARABIC TEXT CLASSIFICATION USING NEW STEMMER FOR FEATURE SELECTION AND DECISION TREES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

SAID BAHASSINE

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Text classification is the process of assignment of unclassified text to appropriate classes based on their content. The most prevalent representation for text classification is the bag of words vector. In this representation, the words that appear in documents often have multiple morphological structures, grammatical forms. In most cases, this morphological variant of words belongs to the same category. In the first part of this paper, anew stemming algorithm was developed in which each term of a given document is represented by its root. In the second part, a comparative study is conducted of the impact of two stemming algorithms namely Khoja’s stemmer and our new stemmer (referred to hereafter by origin-stemmer on Arabic text classification. This investigation was carried out using chi-square as a feature of selection to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space and decision tree classifier. In order to evaluate the performance of the classifier, this study used a corpus that consists of 5070 documents independently classified into six categories: sport, entertainment, business, Middle East, switch and world on WEKA toolkit. The recall, f-measure and precision measures are used to compare the performance of the obtained models. The experimental results show that text classification using rout stemmer outperforms classification using Khoja’s stemmer. The f-measure was 92.9% in sport category and 89.1% in business category.

Multilingual text induced spelling correction

NARCIS (Netherlands)

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

SAW Classification Algorithm for Chinese Text Classification

OpenAIRE

Xiaoli Guo; Huiyu Sun; Tiehua Zhou; Ling Wang; Zhaoyang Qu; Jiannan Zang

2015-01-01

Considering the explosive growth of data, the increased amount of text data’s effect on the performance of text categorization forward the need for higher requirements, such that the existing classification method cannot be satisfied. Based on the study of existing text classification technology and semantics, this paper puts forward a kind of Chinese text classification oriented SAW (Structural Auxiliary Word) algorithm. The algorithm uses the special space effect of Chinese text where words...

Effect of Name Change of Schizophrenia on Mass Media Between 1985 and 2013 in Japan: A Text Data Mining Analysis.

Science.gov (United States)

Koike, Shinsuke; Yamaguchi, Sosei; Ojio, Yasutaka; Ohta, Kazusa; Ando, Shuntaro

2016-05-01

Mass media such as newspapers and TV news affect mental health-related stigma. In Japan, the name of schizophrenia was changed in 2002 for the purposes of stigma reduction; however, little has been known about the effect of name change of schizophrenia on mass media. Articles including old and new names of schizophrenia, depressive disorder, and diabetes mellitus (DM) in headlines and/or text were extracted from 23169092 articles in 4 major Japanese newspapers and 1 TV news program (1985-2013). The trajectory of the number of articles including each term was determined across years. Then, all text in news headlines was segmented as per part-of-speech level using text data mining. Segmented words were classified into 6 categories and in each category of extracted words by target term and period were also tested. Total 51789 and 1106 articles including target terms in newspaper articles and TV news segments were obtained, respectively. The number of articles including the target terms increased across years. Relative increase was observed in the articles published on schizophrenia since 2003 compared with those on DM and between 2000 and 2005 compared with those on depressive disorder. Word tendency used in headlines was equivalent before and after 2002 for the articles including each target term. Articles for schizophrenia contained more negative words than depressive disorder and DM (31.5%, 16.0%, and 8.2%, respectively). Name change of schizophrenia had a limited effect on the articles published and little effect on its contents. © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Hearing taboo words can result in early talker effects in word recognition for female listeners.

Science.gov (United States)

Tuft, Samantha E; MᶜLennan, Conor T; Krestar, Maura L

2018-02-01

Previous spoken word recognition research using the long-term repetition-priming paradigm found performance costs for stimuli mismatching in talker identity. That is, when words were repeated across the two blocks, and the identity of the talker changed reaction times (RTs) were slower than when the repeated words were spoken by the same talker. Such performance costs, or talker effects, followed a time course, occurring only when processing was relatively slow. More recent research suggests that increased explicit and implicit attention towards the talkers can result in talker effects even during relatively fast processing. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether word meaning would influence the pattern of talker effects in an easy lexical decision task and, if so, whether results would differ depending on whether the presentation of neutral and taboo words was mixed or blocked. Regardless of presentation, participants responded to taboo words faster than neutral words. Furthermore, talker effects for the female talker emerged when participants heard both taboo and neutral words (consistent with an attention-based hypothesis), but not for participants that heard only taboo or only neutral words (consistent with the time-course hypothesis). These findings have important implications for theoretical models of spoken word recognition.

Different Neural Correlates of Emotion-Label Words and Emotion-Laden Words: An ERP Study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Juan Zhang

2017-09-01

Full Text Available It is well-documented that both emotion-label words (e.g., sadness, happiness and emotion-laden words (e.g., death, wedding can induce emotion activation. However, the neural correlates of emotion-label words and emotion-laden words recognition have not been examined. The present study aimed to compare the underlying neural responses when processing the two kinds of words by employing event-related potential (ERP measurements. Fifteen Chinese native speakers were asked to perform a lexical decision task in which they should judge whether a two-character compound stimulus was a real word or not. Results showed that (1 emotion-label words and emotion-laden words elicited similar P100 at the posteriors sites, (2 larger N170 was found for emotion-label words than for emotion-laden words at the occipital sites on the right hemisphere, and (3 negative emotion-label words elicited larger Late Positivity Complex (LPC on the right hemisphere than on the left hemisphere while such effect was not found for emotion-laden words and positive emotion-label words. The results indicate that emotion-label words and emotion-laden words elicit different cortical responses at both early (N170 and late (LPC stages. In addition, right hemisphere advantage for emotion-label words over emotion-laden words can be observed in certain time windows (i.e., N170 and LPC while fails to be detected in some other time window (i.e., P100. The implications of the current findings for future emotion research were discussed.

Semantiz Structure of the Legal Term

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Екатерина Владимировна Кулевская

2016-12-01

Full Text Available The article examines the semantic structure of the legal term. Nowadays, with the rapid development of cross-cultural communication, people, while pursuing their professional career, learn specific languages, including the language of law, with terms being its important component. Terms can often impede the process of successful cross-cultural communication so teaching cross-cultural communication, according to many researchers, including P. Cranmer and K. Koskinen, is immensely important. The article aims to demonstrate that a legal term, a word or phrase used in legislation, is a generalized name for a legal concept that may lack a precise meaning in practice as it is polysemous. To proof this statement, the semantic structure of the legal term is studied from the cognitive point of view. The key terms (term, frame, lexico-semantic variant of a word, microframe (reference category are defined at the beginning of the article. The article also describes the classification of various semantic structures of terms developed by Prof. Belyayevskaya, based on an analysis of the cognitive foundations of the typology of semantic structures as well as on the classification of meanings. They are homogeneous semantic structures, with different lexico-semantic variants of a polysemous word representing different aspects of one microframe; these structures include monosemous terms, polysemous terms with a homogeneous semantic structure, and terms with the intermediate type of lexemes. Heterogeneous semantic structures are semantic structures, with a lexico-semantic variant of a word representing two or more reference categories rather than one category; these structures are considered to be “classical” polysemy. Two types of such structures are introduced in the article, with examples of the actualization of their lexical meaning in speech being analysed (there were used examples from the British and Russian National corpora; official legal documents and

Automatic generation of stop word lists for information retrieval and analysis

Science.gov (United States)

Rose, Stuart J

2013-01-08

Methods and systems for automatically generating lists of stop words for information retrieval and analysis. Generation of the stop words can include providing a corpus of documents and a plurality of keywords. From the corpus of documents, a term list of all terms is constructed and both a keyword adjacency frequency and a keyword frequency are determined. If a ratio of the keyword adjacency frequency to the keyword frequency for a particular term on the term list is less than a predetermined value, then that term is excluded from the term list. The resulting term list is truncated based on predetermined criteria to form a stop word list.

THE SPECIAL STATUS OF EXOGENOUS WORD-FORMATION WITHIN THE GERMAN WORD-FORMATION SYSTEM

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhilyuk Sergey Aleksandrovich

2014-06-01

Full Text Available The article presents the properties of exogenous word-formation system taking into account the existence of two word-formation systems in modern German. On the basis of foreign research which reveal modern trends in German word-formation connected with the internationalization and the development of new European Latin language. The author defines key features of exogenous word-formation, i.e. foreign origin of wordformation units, unmotivated units, unmotivated interchange in base and affixes as well as limited distribution rules in combination with German word-formation. The article analyzes various approaches to word-division, as well as motivated and unmotivated interchange of consonants in bases and in affixes. Unmotivated interchange showcases a special status of the exogenous word-formation within German. Another item covered by the article is the issue of confix. The article has opinions of researchers about correctness of its separation and a list of its features. The author presents his definition of confix: a confix is a bound exogenous word-formation unit with a certain lexical and semantic meaning and joining other units directly or indirectly (through linking morpheme -o-, which is able to make a base. Moreover, some confixes are able to participate at word-combination and have unlimited distribution. So far, confix showcases the integration of exogenous word-formation and traditional German word-formation. The research proves the special status of exogenous word-formation in German. Its results can be used as a base for further analysis of co-existing word-formation systems in German and determination of their characteristic features.

Non-word repetition in children with specific language impairment: a deficit in phonological working memory or in long-term verbal knowledge?

Science.gov (United States)

Casalini, Claudia; Brizzolara, Daniela; Chilosi, Anna; Cipriani, Paola; Marcolini, Stefania; Pecini, Chiara; Roncoli, Silvia; Burani, Cristina

2007-08-01

In this study we investigated the effects of long-term memory (LTM) verbal knowledge on short-term memory (STM) verbal recall in a sample of Italian children affected by different subtypes of specific language impairment (SLI). The aim of the study was to evaluate if phonological working memory (PWM) abilities of SLI children can be supported by LTM linguistic representations and if PWM performances can be differently affected in the various subtypes of SLI. We tested a sample of 54 children affected by Mixed Receptive-Expressive (RE), Expressive (Ex) and Phonological (Ph) SLI (DSM-IV - American Psychiatric Association, 1994) by means of a repetition task of words (W) and non-words (NW) differing in morphemic structure [morphological non-words (MNW), consisting of combinations of roots and affixes - and simple non-words - with no morphological constituency]. We evaluated the effects of lexical and morpho-lexical LTM representations on STM recall by comparing the repetition accuracy across the three types of stimuli. Results indicated that although SLI children, as a group, showed lower repetition scores than controls, their performance was affected similarly to controls by the type of stimulus and the experimental manipulation of the non-words (better repetition of W than MNW and NW, and of MNW than NW), confirming the recourse to LTM verbal representations to support STM recall. The influence of LTM verbal knowledge on STM recall in SLI improved with age and did not differ among the three types of SLI. However, the three types of SLI differed in the accuracy of their repetition performances (PMW abilities), with the Phonological group showing the best scores. The implications for SLI theory and practice are discussed.

Translation Memory and Computer Assisted Translation Tool for Medieval Texts

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Törcsvári Attila

2013-05-01

Full Text Available Translation memories (TMs, as part of Computer Assisted Translation (CAT tools, support translators reusing portions of formerly translated text. Fencing books are good candidates for using TMs due to the high number of repeated terms. Medieval texts suffer a number of drawbacks that make hard even “simple” rewording to the modern version of the same language. The analyzed difficulties are: lack of systematic spelling, unusual word orders and typos in the original. A hypothesis is made and verified that even simple modernization increases legibility and it is feasible, also it is worthwhile to apply translation memories due to the numerous and even extremely long repeated terms. Therefore, methods and algorithms are presented 1. for automated transcription of medieval texts (when a limited training set is available, and 2. collection of repeated patterns. The efficiency of the algorithms is analyzed for recall and precision.

Filaments of Meaning in Word Space

OpenAIRE

Karlgren, Jussi; Holst, Anders; Sahlgren, Magnus

2008-01-01

Word space models, in the sense of vector space models built on distributional data taken from texts, are used to model semantic relations between words. We argue that the high dimensionality of typical vector space models lead to unintuitive effects on modeling likeness of meaning and that the local structure of word spaces is where interesting semantic relations reside. We show that the local structure of word spaces has substantially different dimensionality and character than the global s...

Words and melody are intertwined in perception of sung words: EEG and behavioral evidence.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Reyna L Gordon

Full Text Available Language and music, two of the most unique human cognitive abilities, are combined in song, rendering it an ecological model for comparing speech and music cognition. The present study was designed to determine whether words and melodies in song are processed interactively or independently, and to examine the influence of attention on the processing of words and melodies in song. Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs and behavioral data were recorded while non-musicians listened to pairs of sung words (prime and target presented in four experimental conditions: same word, same melody; same word, different melody; different word, same melody; different word, different melody. Participants were asked to attend to either the words or the melody, and to perform a same/different task. In both attentional tasks, different word targets elicited an N400 component, as predicted based on previous results. Most interestingly, different melodies (sung with the same word elicited an N400 component followed by a late positive component. Finally, ERP and behavioral data converged in showing interactions between the linguistic and melodic dimensions of sung words. The finding that the N400 effect, a well-established marker of semantic processing, was modulated by musical melody in song suggests that variations in musical features affect word processing in sung language. Implications of the interactions between words and melody are discussed in light of evidence for shared neural processing resources between the phonological/semantic aspects of language and the melodic/harmonic aspects of music.

Exploring the word superiority effect using TVA

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Starrfelt, Randi

Words are made of letters, and yet sometimes it is easier to identify a word than a single letter. This word superiority effect (WSE) has been observed when written stimuli are presented very briefly or degraded by visual noise. It is unclear, however, if this is due to a lower threshold for perc...... simultaneously we find a different pattern: In a whole report experiment with six stimuli (letters or words), letters are perceived more easily than words, and this is reflected both in perceptual processing speed and short term memory capacity....... for perception of words, or a higher speed of processing for words than letters. We have investigated the WSE using methods based on a Theory of Visual Attention. In an experiment using single stimuli (words or letters) presented centrally, we show that the classical WSE is specifically reflected in perceptual...

ONTOGRABBING: Extracting Information from Texts Using Generative Ontologies

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Nilsson, Jørgen Fischer; Szymczak, Bartlomiej Antoni; Jensen, P.A.

2009-01-01

We describe principles for extracting information from texts using a so-called generative ontology in combination with syntactic analysis. Generative ontologies are introduced as semantic domains for natural language phrases. Generative ontologies extend ordinary finite ontologies with rules...... for producing recursively shaped terms representing the ontological content (ontological semantics) of NL noun phrases and other phrases. We focus here on achieving a robust, often only partial, ontology-driven parsing of and ascription of semantics to a sentence in the text corpus. The aim of the ontological...... analysis is primarily to identify paraphrases, thereby achieving a search functionality beyond mere keyword search with synsets. We further envisage use of the generative ontology as a phrase-based rather than word-based browser into text corpora....

Bread and Water as Metaphors for the Word of God in the Four Gospels

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dawid Ledwoń

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Bread and water are among the best-known Biblical metaphors for the Word of God. This article presents a study of their occurrence in the four Gospels against the backdrop of the Old Testament. However, an analysis of the explicit references to bread and water is not exhaustive with regards to the topic under discussion. Therefore, other terms that relate to them, such as food, spring, hunger, thirst, feeding, and drinking, are also of great interest. Studying the metaphors for the Word of God reveals both a continuation of the Biblical ideas within the four Gospels, as well as a total novelty in the expression of the Word that became flesh (Jn 1:14.

Similar words analysis based on POS-CBOW language model

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dongru RUAN

2015-10-01

Full Text Available Similar words analysis is one of the important aspects in the field of natural language processing, and it has important research and application values in text classification, machine translation and information recommendation. Focusing on the features of Sina Weibo's short text, this paper presents a language model named as POS-CBOW, which is a kind of continuous bag-of-words language model with the filtering layer and part-of-speech tagging layer. The proposed approach can adjust the word vectors' similarity according to the cosine similarity and the word vectors' part-of-speech metrics. It can also filter those similar words set on the base of the statistical analysis model. The experimental result shows that the similar words analysis algorithm based on the proposed POS-CBOW language model is better than that based on the traditional CBOW language model.

[Emotional valence of words in schizophrenia].

Science.gov (United States)

Jalenques, I; Enjolras, J; Izaute, M

2013-06-01

Emotion recognition is a domain in which deficits have been reported in schizophrenia. A number of emotion classification studies have indicated that emotion processing deficits in schizophrenia are more pronounced for negative affects. Given the difficulty of developing material suitable for the study of these emotional deficits, it would be interesting to examine whether patients suffering from schizophrenia are responsive to positively and negatively charged emotion-related words that could be used within the context of remediation strategies. The emotional perception of words was examined in a clinical experiment involving schizophrenia patients. This emotional perception was expressed by the patients in terms of the valence associated with the words. In the present study, we investigated whether schizophrenia patients would assign the same negative and positive valences to words as healthy individuals. Twenty volunteer, clinically stable, outpatients from the Psychiatric Service of the University Hospital of Clermont-Ferrand were recruited. Diagnoses were based on DSM-IV criteria. Global psychiatric symptoms were assessed using the Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS). The patients had to evaluate the emotional valence of a set of 300 words on a 5-point scale ranging from "very unpleasant" to "very pleasant". . The collected results were compared with those obtained by Bonin et al. (2003) [13] from 97 University students. Correlational analyses of the two studies revealed that the emotional valences were highly correlated, i.e. the schizophrenia patients estimated very similar emotional valences. More precisely, it was possible to examine three separate sets of 100 words each (positive words, neutral words and negative words). The positive words that were evaluated were the more positive words from the norms collected by Bonin et al. (2003) [13], and the negative words were the more negative examples taken from these norms. The neutral words

Recall of short word lists presented visually at fast rates: effects of phonological similarity and word length.

Science.gov (United States)

Coltheart, V; Langdon, R

1998-03-01

Phonological similarity of visually presented list items impairs short-term serial recall. Lists of long words are also recalled less accurately than are lists of short words. These results have been attributed to phonological recoding and rehearsal. If subjects articulate irrelevant words during list presentation, both phonological similarity and word length effects are abolished. Experiments 1 and 2 examined effects of phonological similarity and recall instructions on recall of lists shown at fast rates (from one item per 0.114-0.50 sec), which might not permit phonological encoding and rehearsal. In Experiment 3, recall instructions and word length were manipulated using fast presentation rates. Both phonological similarity and word length effects were observed, and they were not dependent on recall instructions. Experiments 4 and 5 investigated the effects of irrelevant concurrent articulation on lists shown at fast rates. Both phonological similarity and word length effects were removed by concurrent articulation, as they were with slow presentation rates.

Paraphrasensuche mittels word2vec und der Word Mover’s Distance im Altgriechischen

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marcus Pöckelmann

2017-12-01

Full Text Available To find receptions of Plato‘s work within the ancient Greek literature, automatic methods would be a useful assistance. Unfortunately, such methods are often knowledge-based and thus restricted to extensively annotated texts, which are not available to a sufficient extent for ancient Greek. In this article, we describe an approach that is based on the distributional hypotheses instead, to overcome the problem of missing annotations. This approach uses word2vec and the related Word Mover‘s Distance to determine phrases with similar meaning. Despite its experimental state, the method produces some meaningful results as shown in three examples.

Combining position weight matrices and document-term matrix for efficient extraction of associations of methylated genes and diseases from free text.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Arwa Bin Raies

Full Text Available BACKGROUND: In a number of diseases, certain genes are reported to be strongly methylated and thus can serve as diagnostic markers in many cases. Scientific literature in digital form is an important source of information about methylated genes implicated in particular diseases. The large volume of the electronic text makes it difficult and impractical to search for this information manually. METHODOLOGY: We developed a novel text mining methodology based on a new concept of position weight matrices (PWMs for text representation and feature generation. We applied PWMs in conjunction with the document-term matrix to extract with high accuracy associations between methylated genes and diseases from free text. The performance results are based on large manually-classified data. Additionally, we developed a web-tool, DEMGD, which automates extraction of these associations from free text. DEMGD presents the extracted associations in summary tables and full reports in addition to evidence tagging of text with respect to genes, diseases and methylation words. The methodology we developed in this study can be applied to similar association extraction problems from free text. CONCLUSION: The new methodology developed in this study allows for efficient identification of associations between concepts. Our method applied to methylated genes in different diseases is implemented as a Web-tool, DEMGD, which is freely available at http://www.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/demgd/. The data is available for online browsing and download.

KAJIAN LITERATUR: MANAKAH YANG LEBIH EFEKTIF? TRADITIONAL WORD OF MOUTH ATAU ELECTRONIC WORD OF MOUTH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Putu Adriani Prayustika

2016-12-01

Full Text Available Word of Mouth telah diakui sebagai salah satu strategi komunikasi yang paling efektif dalam transisi informasi perusahaan kepada konsumen. Perusahaan memanfaatkan komunikasi word of mouth untuk kepentingan pemasaran produk dan layanan. Namun, komunikasi WOM konvensional hanya efektif dalam batasan kontak sosial terbatas. Kemajuan teknologi informasi dan munculnya situs jaringan sosial online telah mengubah cara informasi ditransmisikan dan telah melampaui keterbatasan tradisional WOM. Komunikasi word of mouth dengan memanfaatkan teknologi ini sering disebut electronic word of mouth (eWOM, dimana komunikasi ini memanfaatkan media baru, seperti misalnya media sosial. Makalah ini akan membahas kajian literatur dari beberapa penelitian yang telah dilakukan sebelumnya dalam membandingkan efektivitas traditional word of mouth dan electronic word of mouth. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa secara umum dapat dikatakan dengan perkembangan teknologi seperti sekarang, eWOM jauh lebih efektif daripada traditional WOM.

Novel word retention in bilingual and monolingual speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Kan, Pui Fong; Sadagopan, Neeraja

2014-01-01

The goal of this research was to examine word retention in bilinguals and monolinguals. Long-term word retention is an essential part of vocabulary learning. Previous studies have documented that bilinguals outperform monolinguals in terms of retrieving newly-exposed words. Yet, little is known about whether or to what extent bilinguals are different from monolinguals in word retention. Participants were 30 English-speaking monolingual adults and 30 bilingual adults who speak Spanish as a home language and learned English as a second language during childhood. In a previous study (Kan et al., 2014), the participants were exposed to the target novel words in English, Spanish, and Cantonese. In this current study, word retention was measured a week after the fast mapping task. No exposures were given during the one-week interval. Results showed that bilinguals and monolinguals retain a similar number of words. However, participants produced more words in English than in either Spanish or Cantonese. Correlation analyses revealed that language knowledge plays a role in the relationships between fast mapping and word retention. Specifically, within- and across-language relationships between bilinguals' fast mapping and word retention were found in Spanish and English, by contrast, within-language relationships between monolinguals' fast mapping and word retention were found in English and across-language relationships between their fast mapping and word retention performance in English and Cantonese. Similarly, bilinguals differed from monolinguals in the relationships among the word retention scores in three languages. Significant correlations were found among bilinguals' retention scores. However, no such correlations were found among monolinguals' retention scores. The overall findings suggest that bilinguals' language experience and language knowledge most likely contribute to how they learn and retain new words.

50 CFR 600.910 - Definitions and word usage.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 50 Wildlife and Fisheries 8 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Definitions and word usage. 600.910..., Consultation, and Recommendations § 600.910 Definitions and word usage. (a) Definitions. In addition to the... undertaken by a state agency. (b) Word usage. The terms “must”, “shall”, “should”, “may”, “may not”, “will...

50 CFR 600.810 - Definitions and word usage.

Science.gov (United States)

2010-10-01

... 50 Wildlife and Fisheries 8 2010-10-01 2010-10-01 false Definitions and word usage. 600.810...) § 600.810 Definitions and word usage. (a) Definitions. In addition to the definitions in the Magnuson...-Stevens Act. (b) Word usage. The terms “must”, “shall”, “should”, “may”, “may not”, “will”, “could”, and...

Understanding the power of word-of-mouth.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Suzana Z. Gildin

2003-06-01

Full Text Available Word-of-mouth has been considered one of the most powerful forms of communication in the market today. Understanding what makes word-of-mouth such a persuasive and powerful communication tool is important to organizations that intend to build strong relationships with consumers. For this reason, organizations are concerned about promoting positive word-of-mouth and retarding negative word-of-mouth, which can be harmful to the image of the company or a brand. This work focuses on the major aspects involving word-of-mouth communication. Recommendations to generate positive word-of-mouth and retard negative word-of-mouth are also highlighted.

Language Model Adaptation Using Machine-Translated Text for Resource-Deficient Languages

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

When a text is translated does the complexity of its vocabulary change? Translations and target readerships.

Science.gov (United States)

Rêgo, Hênio Henrique Aragão; Braunstein, Lidia A; D'Agostino, Gregorio; Stanley, H Eugene; Miyazima, Sasuke

2014-01-01

In linguistic studies, the academic level of the vocabulary in a text can be described in terms of statistical physics by using a "temperature" concept related to the text's word-frequency distribution. We propose a "comparative thermo-linguistic" technique to analyze the vocabulary of a text to determine its academic level and its target readership in any given language. We apply this technique to a large number of books by several authors and examine how the vocabulary of a text changes when it is translated from one language to another. Unlike the uniform results produced using the Zipf law, using our "word energy" distribution technique we find variations in the power-law behavior. We also examine some common features that span across languages and identify some intriguing questions concerning how to determine when a text is suitable for its intended readership.

Term Familiarity to indicate Perceived and Actual Difficulty of Text in Medical Digital Libraries.

Science.gov (United States)

Leroy, Gondy; Endicott, James E

2011-10-01

With increasing text digitization, digital libraries can personalize materials for individuals with different education levels and language skills. To this end, documents need meta-information describing their difficulty level. Previous attempts at such labeling used readability formulas but the formulas have not been validated with modern texts and their outcome is seldom associated with actual difficulty. We focus on medical texts and are developing new, evidence-based meta-tags that are associated with perceived and actual text difficulty. This work describes a first tag, term familiarity , which is based on term frequency in the Google corpus. We evaluated its feasibility to serve as a tag by looking at a document corpus (N=1,073) and found that terms in blogs or journal articles displayed unexpected but significantly different scores. Term familiarity was then applied to texts and results from a previous user study (N=86) and could better explain differences for perceived and actual difficulty.

Modeling statistical properties of written text.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M Angeles Serrano

Full Text Available Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of human language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how our brains process information and how we, as a society, organize and share it. Among these regularities, only Zipf's law has been explored in depth. Other basic properties, such as the existence of bursts of rare words in specific documents, have only been studied independently of each other and mainly by descriptive models. As a consequence, there is a lack of understanding of linguistic processes as complex emergent phenomena. Beyond Zipf's law for word frequencies, here we focus on burstiness, Heaps' law describing the sublinear growth of vocabulary size with the length of a document, and the topicality of document collections, which encode correlations within and across documents absent in random null models. We introduce and validate a generative model that explains the simultaneous emergence of all these patterns from simple rules. As a result, we find a connection between the bursty nature of rare words and the topical organization of texts and identify dynamic word ranking and memory across documents as key mechanisms explaining the non trivial organization of written text. Our research can have broad implications and practical applications in computer science, cognitive science and linguistics.

Effects of Word Frequency and Transitional Probability on Word Reading Durations of Younger and Older Speakers.

Science.gov (United States)

Moers, Cornelia; Meyer, Antje; Janse, Esther

2017-06-01

High-frequency units are usually processed faster than low-frequency units in language comprehension and language production. Frequency effects have been shown for words as well as word combinations. Word co-occurrence effects can be operationalized in terms of transitional probability (TP). TPs reflect how probable a word is, conditioned by its right or left neighbouring word. This corpus study investigates whether three different age groups-younger children (8-12 years), adolescents (12-18 years) and older (62-95 years) Dutch speakers-show frequency and TP context effects on spoken word durations in reading aloud, and whether age groups differ in the size of these effects. Results show consistent effects of TP on word durations for all age groups. Thus, TP seems to influence the processing of words in context, beyond the well-established effect of word frequency, across the entire age range. However, the study also indicates that age groups differ in the size of TP effects, with older adults having smaller TP effects than adolescent readers. Our results show that probabilistic reduction effects in reading aloud may at least partly stem from contextual facilitation that leads to faster reading times in skilled readers, as well as in young language learners.

The Influence of Orthographic Neighborhood Density and Word Frequency on Visual Word Recognition: Insights from RT Distributional Analyses

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stephen Wee Hun eLim

2016-03-01

Full Text Available The effects of orthographic neighborhood density and word frequency in visual word recognition were investigated using distributional analyses of response latencies in visual lexical decision. Main effects of density and frequency were observed in mean latencies. Distributional analyses, in addition, revealed a density x frequency interaction: for low-frequency words, density effects were mediated predominantly by distributional shifting whereas for high-frequency words, density effects were absent except at the slower RTs, implicating distributional skewing. The present findings suggest that density effects in low-frequency words reflect processes involved in early lexical access, while the effects observed in high-frequency words reflect late postlexical checking processes.

Word segmentation in children’s literacy: a study about word awareness

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Débora Mattos Marques

2016-10-01

Full Text Available The present research aimed to investigate how linguistic awareness regarding the concept of “word” may influence some mistakes on segmenting words in children’s writing in the Elementary School. The observed data comprised those of hyper and hyposegmentation which were then related to word awareness. For the analysis of linguistic awareness data, the Representational Redescription, proposed by Karmillof-Smith (1986-1992, has been used. It postulates four levels where knowledge is redescribed in the human mind, becoming accessible for awareness and verbalization along with the time. The research methodology consisted of six tests, out of which four were applied in order to verify word awareness, and, the other two tests, to obtain samples of writing data. Thus, it was noticed that a great part of the segmentation mistakes identified in the collected writings are related to the informants' ability to distinguish between different words until the moment they were observed. As a result, the uncommon segmentation mistakes found in the analyzed data evidenced that not only are they motivated by prosodic or phonological matters, but they are also influenced by linguistic awareness issues involving the informants’ understanding of word.

Detecting causality from online psychiatric texts using inter-sentential language patterns

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

Toward an enhanced Arabic text classification using cosine similarity and Latent Semantic

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fawaz S. Al-Anzi

2017-04-01

Full Text Available Cosine similarity is one of the most popular distance measures in text classification problems. In this paper, we used this important measure to investigate the performance of Arabic language text classification. For textual features, vector space model (VSM is generally used as a model to represent textual information as numerical vectors. However, Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI is a better textual representation technique as it maintains semantic information between the words. Hence, we used the singular value decomposition (SVD method to extract textual features based on LSI. In our experiments, we conducted comparison between some of the well-known classification methods such as Naïve Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbors, Neural Network, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and classification tree. We used a corpus that contains 4,000 documents of ten topics (400 document for each topic. The corpus contains 2,127,197 words with about 139,168 unique words. The testing set contains 400 documents, 40 documents for each topics. As a weighing scheme, we used Term Frequency.Inverse Document Frequency (TF.IDF. This study reveals that the classification methods that use LSI features significantly outperform the TF.IDF-based methods. It also reveals that k-Nearest Neighbors (based on cosine measure and support vector machine are the best performing classifiers.

Combining Position Weight Matrices and Document-Term Matrix for Efficient Extraction of Associations of Methylated Genes and Diseases from Free Text

KAUST Repository

Bin Raies, Arwa

2013-10-16

Background:In a number of diseases, certain genes are reported to be strongly methylated and thus can serve as diagnostic markers in many cases. Scientific literature in digital form is an important source of information about methylated genes implicated in particular diseases. The large volume of the electronic text makes it difficult and impractical to search for this information manually.Methodology:We developed a novel text mining methodology based on a new concept of position weight matrices (PWMs) for text representation and feature generation. We applied PWMs in conjunction with the document-term matrix to extract with high accuracy associations between methylated genes and diseases from free text. The performance results are based on large manually-classified data. Additionally, we developed a web-tool, DEMGD, which automates extraction of these associations from free text. DEMGD presents the extracted associations in summary tables and full reports in addition to evidence tagging of text with respect to genes, diseases and methylation words. The methodology we developed in this study can be applied to similar association extraction problems from free text.Conclusion:The new methodology developed in this study allows for efficient identification of associations between concepts. Our method applied to methylated genes in different diseases is implemented as a Web-tool, DEMGD, which is freely available at http://www.cbrc.kaust.edu.sa/demgd/. The data is available for online browsing and download. © 2013 Bin Raies et al.

When a text is translated does the complexity of its vocabulary change? Translations and target readerships.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hênio Henrique Aragão Rêgo

Full Text Available In linguistic studies, the academic level of the vocabulary in a text can be described in terms of statistical physics by using a "temperature" concept related to the text's word-frequency distribution. We propose a "comparative thermo-linguistic" technique to analyze the vocabulary of a text to determine its academic level and its target readership in any given language. We apply this technique to a large number of books by several authors and examine how the vocabulary of a text changes when it is translated from one language to another. Unlike the uniform results produced using the Zipf law, using our "word energy" distribution technique we find variations in the power-law behavior. We also examine some common features that span across languages and identify some intriguing questions concerning how to determine when a text is suitable for its intended readership.

Short-term retention of a single word relies on retrieval from long-term memory when both rehearsal and refreshing are disrupted.

Science.gov (United States)

Rose, Nathan S; Buchsbaum, Bradley R; Craik, Fergus I M

2014-07-01

Many working memory (WM) models propose that the focus of attention (or primary memory) has a capacity limit of one to four items, and therefore, that performance on WM tasks involves retrieving some items from long-term (or secondary) memory (LTM). In the present study, we present evidence suggesting that recall of even one item on a WM task can involve retrieving it from LTM. The WM task required participants to make a deep (living/nonliving) or shallow ("e"/no "e") level-of-processing (LOP) judgment on one word and to recall the word after a 10-s delay on each trial. During the delay, participants either rehearsed the word or performed an easy or a hard math task. When the to-be-remembered item could be rehearsed, recall was fast and accurate. When it was followed by a math task, recall was slower, error-prone, and benefited from a deeper LOP at encoding, especially for the hard math condition. The authors suggest that a covert-retrieval mechanism may have refreshed the item during easy math, and that the hard math condition shows that even a single item cannot be reliably held in WM during a sufficiently distracting task--therefore, recalling the item involved retrieving it from LTM. Additionally, performance on a final free recall (LTM) test was better for items recalled following math than following rehearsal, suggesting that initial recall following math involved elaborative retrieval from LTM, whereas rehearsal did not. The authors suggest that the extent to which performance on WM tasks involves retrieval from LTM depends on the amounts of disruption to both rehearsal and covert-retrieval/refreshing maintenance mechanisms.

Examining the Effect of Interference on Short-term Memory Recall of Arabic Abstract and Concrete Words Using Free, Cued, and Serial Recall Paradigms

OpenAIRE

Ahmed Mohammed Saleh Alduais; Yasir Saad Almukhaizeem

2015-01-01

Purpose: To see if there is a correlation between interference and short-term memory recall and to examine interference as a factor affecting memory recalling of Arabic and abstract words through free, cued, and serial recall tasks. Method: Four groups of undergraduates in King Saud University, Saudi Arabia participated in this study. The first group consisted of 9 undergraduates who were trained to perform three types of recall for 20 Arabic abstract and concrete words. The second, third and...

Using Date Specific Searches on Google Books to Disconfirm Prior Origination Knowledge Claims for Particular Terms, Words, and Names

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Mike Sutton

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Back in 2004, Google Inc. (Menlo Park, CA, USA began digitizing full texts of magazines, journals, and books dating back centuries. At present, over 25 million books have been scanned and anyone can use the service (currently called Google Books to search for materials free of charge (including academics of any discipline. All the books have been scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition and stored in its digital database. The present paper describes a very precise six-stage Boolean date-specific research method on Google, referred to as Internet Date Detection (IDD for short. IDD can be used to examine countless alleged facts and myths in a systematic and verifiable way. Six examples of the IDD method in action are provided (the terms, words, and names ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, ‘Humpty Dumpty’, ‘living fossil’, ‘moral panic’, ‘boredom’, and ‘selfish gene’ and each of these examples is shown to disconfirm widely accepted expert knowledge belief claims about their history of coinage, conception, and published origin. The paper also notes that Google’s autonomous deep learning AI program RankBrain has possibly caused the IDD method to no longer work so well, addresses how it might be recovered, and how such problems might be avoided in the future.

Impact of reading purpose on incidental word learning from context

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Swanborn, MSL; de Glopper, Kees

Children read texts for various reasons. We examined how reading texts for different purposes affected amounts of incidental word learning. Grade 6 students were asked to read texts for fun, to learn about the topic of the text, and for text comprehension. Proportions of words learned incidentally

The blocked-random effect in pictures and words.

Science.gov (United States)

Toglia, M P; Hinman, P J; Dayton, B S; Catalano, J F

1997-06-01

Picture and word recall was examined in conjunction with list organization. 60 subjects studied a list of 30 items, either words or their pictorial equivalents. The 30 words/pictures, members of five conceptual categories, each represented by six exemplars, were presented either blocked by category or in a random order. While pictures were recalled better than words and a standard blocked-random effect was observed, the interaction indicated that the recall advantage of a blocked presentation was restricted to the word lists. A similar pattern emerged for clustering. These findings are discussed in terms of limitations upon the pictorial superiority effect.

The Spanish word tiempo: its omnipresence and conceptual, logical and lexical versatility

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Karlo Budor

2012-12-01

Full Text Available The common Spanish word tiempo corresponds to three English terms, each of them being a lexical equivalent based on a specific notion: (1 time – physical, astronomical, philosophical reference; (2 weather – geographical, climatological, meteorological reference; (3 tense: linguistic, lexical, grammatical reference. As far as universal and metalinguistic referential distinctions are concerned, all natural languages in fact present a considerable degree of variation ranging from inexistent or very vague to complete differentiation of these terms. In order to express these three types of specific references, some languages have a single word of general usage covering all its lexical acceptations. Therefore in such languages, Spanish included, different references can be distinguished only in part lexically. However, asemantic analysis of the Spanish word tiempo reveals its complexity as well as its conceptual, logical and lexical versatility. This is reflected in its capacity to combine in numerous lexical units, i.e. word compounds and/or phrases, endowed with different or specific semantic meanings. The repertory of these virtual and derived lexical forms appears to be practically unlimited, although their sphere of application and their boundaries are neither always very clear nor precise, which can be illustrated with the examples given in Spanish dictionaries.

nal Sesotho texts

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.

Actual Arabic loan-words of religious content (on the material of modern foreign words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Al Shammari Majid Jamil Ashur

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Application of thematic classification of actual vocabulary as a whole to the formation of loan words allows to see the uniqueness of seperate groups of the vocabulary. English loan words prevail relating to the sphere of economy, science and technology, loan words from Arabic dominate from the religious vocabulary. Application of field approach to the analysis of actual religious Arabisms revealed both nuclear and peripheral components of the field. At the core of the field there are such Arabisms as Allah and Islam, which can be characterized as key words. However, in unifying the features of these words vary at a number of parameters. The word Allah has zero derivation productivity and at lexicographical description (as opposed to functioning in the language of the media is free of connotations. Arabism, Islam, by contrast, has a high derivation productivity and derived words can express evaluation. Lexicographic description of the Arabism Islam is also quite diverse stylistically and in contents. The core of the field “Muslim religion” also includes a number of words fixed in most modern dictionaries of foreign words. At the periphery of the field there are Arabisms that do not have high levels of frequency, but at the same time as an indicator of dominant Arabisms of religious content among topical Arabisms.

Error-Free Text Typing Performance of an Inductive Intra-Oral Tongue Computer Interface for Severely Disabled Individuals.

Science.gov (United States)

Andreasen Struijk, Lotte N S; Bentsen, Bo; Gaihede, Michael; Lontis, Eugen R

2017-11-01

For severely paralyzed individuals, alternative computer interfaces are becoming increasingly essential for everyday life as social and vocational activities are facilitated by information technology and as the environment becomes more automatic and remotely controllable. Tongue computer interfaces have proven to be desirable by the users partly due to their high degree of aesthetic acceptability, but so far the mature systems have shown a relatively low error-free text typing efficiency. This paper evaluated the intra-oral inductive tongue computer interface (ITCI) in its intended use: Error-free text typing in a generally available text editing system, Word. Individuals with tetraplegia and able bodied individuals used the ITCI for typing using a MATLAB interface and for Word typing for 4 to 5 experimental days, and the results showed an average error-free text typing rate in Word of 11.6 correct characters/min across all participants and of 15.5 correct characters/min for participants familiar with tongue piercings. Improvements in typing rates between the sessions suggest that typing ratescan be improved further through long-term use of the ITCI.

Connected text reading and differences in text reading fluency in adult readers.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sebastian Wallot

Full Text Available The process of connected text reading has received very little attention in contemporary cognitive psychology. This lack of attention is in parts due to a research tradition that emphasizes the role of basic lexical constituents, which can be studied in isolated words or sentences. However, this lack of attention is in parts also due to the lack of statistical analysis techniques, which accommodate interdependent time series. In this study, we investigate text reading performance with traditional and nonlinear analysis techniques and show how outcomes from multiple analyses can used to create a more detailed picture of the process of text reading. Specifically, we investigate reading performance of groups of literate adult readers that differ in reading fluency during a self-paced text reading task. Our results indicate that classical metrics of reading (such as word frequency do not capture text reading very well, and that classical measures of reading fluency (such as average reading time distinguish relatively poorly between participant groups. Nonlinear analyses of distribution tails and reading time fluctuations provide more fine-grained information about the reading process and reading fluency.

Grounding word learning in space.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Larissa K Samuelson

Full Text Available Humans and objects, and thus social interactions about objects, exist within space. Words direct listeners' attention to specific regions of space. Thus, a strong correspondence exists between where one looks, one's bodily orientation, and what one sees. This leads to further correspondence with what one remembers. Here, we present data suggesting that children use associations between space and objects and space and words to link words and objects--space binds labels to their referents. We tested this claim in four experiments, showing that the spatial consistency of where objects are presented affects children's word learning. Next, we demonstrate that a process model that grounds word learning in the known neural dynamics of spatial attention, spatial memory, and associative learning can capture the suite of results reported here. This model also predicts that space is special, a prediction supported in a fifth experiment that shows children do not use color as a cue to bind words and objects. In a final experiment, we ask whether spatial consistency affects word learning in naturalistic word learning contexts. Children of parents who spontaneously keep objects in a consistent spatial location during naming interactions learn words more effectively. Together, the model and data show that space is a powerful tool that can effectively ground word learning in social contexts.

Biomedical word sense disambiguation with ontologies and metadata: automation meets accuracy

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hakenberg Jörg

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Ontology term labels can be ambiguous and have multiple senses. While this is no problem for human annotators, it is a challenge to automated methods, which identify ontology terms in text. Classical approaches to word sense disambiguation use co-occurring words or terms. However, most treat ontologies as simple terminologies, without making use of the ontology structure or the semantic similarity between terms. Another useful source of information for disambiguation are metadata. Here, we systematically compare three approaches to word sense disambiguation, which use ontologies and metadata, respectively. Results The 'Closest Sense' method assumes that the ontology defines multiple senses of the term. It computes the shortest path of co-occurring terms in the document to one of these senses. The 'Term Cooc' method defines a log-odds ratio for co-occurring terms including co-occurrences inferred from the ontology structure. The 'MetaData' approach trains a classifier on metadata. It does not require any ontology, but requires training data, which the other methods do not. To evaluate these approaches we defined a manually curated training corpus of 2600 documents for seven ambiguous terms from the Gene Ontology and MeSH. All approaches over all conditions achieve 80% success rate on average. The 'MetaData' approach performed best with 96%, when trained on high-quality data. Its performance deteriorates as quality of the training data decreases. The 'Term Cooc' approach performs better on Gene Ontology (92% success than on MeSH (73% success as MeSH is not a strict is-a/part-of, but rather a loose is-related-to hierarchy. The 'Closest Sense' approach achieves on average 80% success rate. Conclusion Metadata is valuable for disambiguation, but requires high quality training data. Closest Sense requires no training, but a large, consistently modelled ontology, which are two opposing conditions. Term Cooc achieves greater 90

A Word Count of Modern Arabic Prose.

Science.gov (United States)

Landau, Jacob M.

This book presents a word count of Arabic prose based on 60 twentieth-century Egyptian books. The text is divided into an alphabetical list and a word frequency list. This word count is intended as an aid in the: (1) writing of primers and the compilation of graded readers, (2) examination of the vocabulary selection of primers and readers…

Creating a medical dictionary using word alignment: the influence of sources and resources.

Science.gov (United States)

Nyström, Mikael; Merkel, Magnus; Petersson, Håkan; Ahlfeldt, Hans

2007-11-23

Automatic word alignment of parallel texts with the same content in different languages is among other things used to generate dictionaries for new translations. The quality of the generated word alignment depends on the quality of the input resources. In this paper we report on automatic word alignment of the English and Swedish versions of the medical terminology systems ICD-10, ICF, NCSP, KSH97-P and parts of MeSH and how the terminology systems and type of resources influence the quality. We automatically word aligned the terminology systems using static resources, like dictionaries, statistical resources, like statistically derived dictionaries, and training resources, which were generated from manual word alignment. We varied which part of the terminology systems that we used to generate the resources, which parts that we word aligned and which types of resources we used in the alignment process to explore the influence the different terminology systems and resources have on the recall and precision. After the analysis, we used the best configuration of the automatic word alignment for generation of candidate term pairs. We then manually verified the candidate term pairs and included the correct pairs in an English-Swedish dictionary. The results indicate that more resources and resource types give better results but the size of the parts used to generate the resources only partly affects the quality. The most generally useful resources were generated from ICD-10 and resources generated from MeSH were not as general as other resources. Systematic inter-language differences in the structure of the terminology system rubrics make the rubrics harder to align. Manually created training resources give nearly as good results as a union of static resources, statistical resources and training resources and noticeably better results than a union of static resources and statistical resources. The verified English-Swedish dictionary contains 24,000 term pairs in base

When a Text Is Translated Does the Complexity of Its Vocabulary Change? Translations and Target Readerships

Science.gov (United States)

Rêgo, Hênio Henrique Aragão; Braunstein, Lidia A.; D′Agostino, Gregorio; Stanley, H. Eugene; Miyazima, Sasuke

2014-01-01

In linguistic studies, the academic level of the vocabulary in a text can be described in terms of statistical physics by using a “temperature” concept related to the text's word-frequency distribution. We propose a “comparative thermo-linguistic” technique to analyze the vocabulary of a text to determine its academic level and its target readership in any given language. We apply this technique to a large number of books by several authors and examine how the vocabulary of a text changes when it is translated from one language to another. Unlike the uniform results produced using the Zipf law, using our “word energy” distribution technique we find variations in the power-law behavior. We also examine some common features that span across languages and identify some intriguing questions concerning how to determine when a text is suitable for its intended readership. PMID:25353343

Monolingual accounting dictionaries for EFL text production

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

The interaction of short-term and long-term memory in phonetic category formation

Science.gov (United States)

Harnsberger, James D.

2002-05-01

This study examined the role that short-term memory capacity plays in the relationship between novel stimuli (e.g., non-native speech sounds, native nonsense words) and phonetic categories in long-term memory. Thirty native speakers of American English were administered five tests: categorial AXB discrimination using nasal consonants from Malayalam; categorial identification, also using Malayalam nasals, which measured the influence of phonetic categories in long-term memory; digit span; nonword span, a short-term memory measure mediated by phonetic categories in long-term memory; and paired-associate word learning (word-word and word-nonword pairs). The results showed that almost all measures were significantly correlated with one another. The strongest predictor for the discrimination and word-nonword learning results was nonword (r=+0.62) and digit span (r=+0.51), respectively. When the identification test results were partialed out, only nonword span significantly correlated with discrimination. The results show a strong influence of short-term memory capacity on the encoding of phonetic detail within phonetic categories and suggest that long-term memory representations regulate the capacity of short-term memory to preserve information for subsequent encoding. The results of this study will also be discussed with regards to resolving the tension between episodic and abstract models of phonetic category structure.

Word Sense Disambiguation with LSTM : Do We Really Need 100 Billion Words?

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Le, Minh; Postma, Marten; Urbani, Jacopo

2017-01-01

Recently, Yuan et al. (2016) have shown the effectiveness of using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) for performing Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Their proposed technique outperformed the previous state-of-the-art with several benchmarks, but neither the training data nor the source code was

Word Processors: A Look at Four Popular Programs.

Science.gov (United States)

Press, Larry

1980-01-01

Described are types of programs used for processing text (editors, print formatters, and word processors), followed by the comparison of four word-processing packages: Auto Scribe, Electric Pencil, Magic Want and Word Star. With the exception of Auto Scribe, all programs reviewed are CP/M versions. (KC)

Phonological short-term memory impairment and the word length effect in children with intellectual disabilities.

Science.gov (United States)

Poloczek, Sebastian; Büttner, Gerhard; Hasselhorn, Marcus

2014-02-01

There is mounting evidence that children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities (ID) of nonspecific aetiology perform poorer on phonological short-term memory tasks than children matched for mental age indicating a structural deficit in a process contributing to short-term recall of verbal material. One explanation is that children with ID of nonspecific aetiology do not activate subvocal rehearsal to refresh degrading memory traces. However, existing research concerning this explanation is inconclusive since studies focussing on the word length effect (WLE) as indicator of rehearsal have revealed inconsistent results for samples with ID and because in several existing studies, it is unclear whether the WLE was caused by rehearsal or merely appeared during output of the responses. We assumed that in children with ID only output delays produce a small WLE while in typically developing 6- to 8-year-olds rehearsal and output contribute to the WLE. From this assumption we derived several predictions that were tested in an experiment including 34 children with mild or borderline ID and 34 typically developing children matched for mental age (MA). As predicted, results revealed a small but significant WLE for children with ID that was significantly smaller than the WLE in the control group. Additionally, for children with ID, a WLE was not found for the first word of each trial but the effect emerged only in later serial positions. The findings corroborate the notion that in children with ID subvocal rehearsal does not develop in line with their mental age and provide a potential explanation for the inconsistent results on the WLE in children with ID. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Relationships among Cognitive Correlates and Irregular Word, Non-Word, and Word Reading

Science.gov (United States)

Abu-Hamour, Bashir; University, Mu'tah; Urso, Annmarie; Mather, Nancy

2012-01-01

This study explored four hypotheses: (a) the relationships among rapid automatized naming (RAN) and processing speed (PS) to irregular word, non-word, and word reading; (b) the predictive power of various RAN and PS measures, (c) the cognitive correlates that best predicted irregular word, non-word, and word reading, and (d) reading performance of…

Effects of lexical competition on immediate memory span for spoken words.

Science.gov (United States)

Goh, Winston D; Pisoni, David B

2003-08-01

Current theories and models of the structural organization of verbal short-term memory are primarily based on evidence obtained from manipulations of features inherent in the short-term traces of the presented stimuli, such as phonological similarity. In the present study, we investigated whether properties of the stimuli that are not inherent in the short-term traces of spoken words would affect performance in an immediate memory span task. We studied the lexical neighbourhood properties of the stimulus items, which are based on the structure and organization of words in the mental lexicon. The experiments manipulated lexical competition by varying the phonological neighbourhood structure (i.e., neighbourhood density and neighbourhood frequency) of the words on a test list while controlling for word frequency and intra-set phonological similarity (family size). Immediate memory span for spoken words was measured under repeated and nonrepeated sampling procedures. The results demonstrated that lexical competition only emerged when a nonrepeated sampling procedure was used and the participants had to access new words from their lexicons. These findings were not dependent on individual differences in short-term memory capacity. Additional results showed that the lexical competition effects did not interact with proactive interference. Analyses of error patterns indicated that item-type errors, but not positional errors, were influenced by the lexical attributes of the stimulus items. These results complement and extend previous findings that have argued for separate contributions of long-term knowledge and short-term memory rehearsal processes in immediate verbal serial recall tasks.

Beyond word recognition: understanding pediatric oral health literacy.

Science.gov (United States)

Richman, Julia Anne; Huebner, Colleen E; Leggott, Penelope J; Mouradian, Wendy E; Mancl, Lloyd A

2011-01-01

Parental oral health literacy is proposed to be an indicator of children's oral health. The purpose of this study was to test if word recognition, commonly used to assess health literacy, is an adequate measure of pediatric oral health literacy. This study evaluated 3 aspects of oral health literacy and parent-reported child oral health. A 3-part pediatric oral health literacy inventory was created to assess parents' word recognition, vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension of 35 terms used in pediatric dentistry. The inventory was administered to 45 English-speaking parents of children enrolled in Head Start. Parents' ability to read dental terms was not associated with vocabulary knowledge (r=0.29, P.06) of the terms. Vocabulary knowledge was strongly associated with comprehension (r=0.80, PParent-reported child oral health status was not associated with word recognition, vocabulary knowledge, or comprehension; however parents reporting either excellent or fair/poor ratings had higher scores on all components of the inventory. Word recognition is an inadequate indicator of comprehension of pediatric oral health concepts; pediatric oral health literacy is a multifaceted construct. Parents with adequate reading ability may have difficulty understanding oral health information.

1001 most useful French words

CERN Document Server

McCoy, Heather

2012-01-01

Up-to-date entries cover technology terms, and sections on vocabulary and grammar offer helpful tips. Each word is accompanied by a brief definition, a sentence demonstrating proper usage, and a translation.

JAVANESE CULTURAL WORDS IN LOCAL NEWSPAPERS IN CENTRAL JAVA AS A LANGUAGE MAINTENANCE MODEL

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Deli Nirmala

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Javanese cultural words are the linguistic units which are very specific to Javanese culture and society. This article aims at describing what Javanese cultural words that are found in the local newspapers, what they represent, and why they are used in the local newspapers in Central Java. Non-participant observation is used to present the data for analysis, continued with page-filing and note-taking techniques. Referential, reflective-introspective, and abductive inferential methods are used to analyze the data. The result indicates that the Javanese cultural words found in the local newspapers represent festivals, rituals, Javanese ways of life, social activities, actions, feelings, thoughts, behavior, and experiences. The words become the indicators that the journalists of the local newspapers in Cental Java have positive attitudes toward Javanese words. This becomes a model for language maintenance of Javanese. This implies that the words are stored in the long-term memory, that become mental image, which are used when needed by the user for communication. The existence of the concepts residing in the mind will make the Javanese language maintenance possible, which is supported by the attitudes of the Javanese.

Indonesian Text-To-Speech System Using Diphone Concatenative Synthesis

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sutarman

2015-02-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we describe the design and develop a database of Indonesian diphone synthesis using speech segment of recorded voice to be converted from text to speech and save it as audio file like WAV or MP3. In designing and develop a database of Indonesian diphone there are several steps to follow; First, developed Diphone database includes: create a list of sample of words consisting of diphones organized by prioritizing looking diphone located in the middle of a word if not at the beginning or end; recording the samples of words by segmentation. ;create diphones made with a tool Diphone Studio 1.3. Second, develop system using Microsoft Visual Delphi 6.0, includes: the conversion system from the input of numbers, acronyms, words, and sentences into representations diphone. There are two kinds of conversion (process alleged in analyzing the Indonesian text-to-speech system. One is to convert the text to be sounded to phonem and two, to convert the phonem to speech. Method used in this research is called Diphone Concatenative synthesis, in which recorded sound segments are collected. Every segment consists of a diphone (2 phonems. This synthesizer may produce voice with high level of naturalness. The Indonesian Text to Speech system can differentiate special phonemes like in ‘Beda’ and ‘Bedak’ but sample of other spesific words is necessary to put into the system. This Indonesia TTS system can handle texts with abbreviation, there is the facility to add such words.

Combinatorics of compositions and words

CERN Document Server

Heubach, Silvia

2009-01-01

A One-Stop Source of Known Results, a Bibliography of Papers on the Subject, and Novel Research Directions Focusing on a very active area of research in the last decade, Combinatorics of Compositions and Words provides an introduction to the methods used in the combinatorics of pattern avoidance and pattern enumeration in compositions and words. It also presents various tools and approaches that are applicable to other areas of enumerative combinatorics. After a historical perspective on research in the area, the text introduces techniques to solve recurrence relations, including iteration and generating functions. It then focuses on enumeration of basic statistics for compositions. The text goes on to present results on pattern avoidance for subword, subsequence, and generalized patterns in compositions and then applies these results to words. The authors also cover automata, the ECO method, generating trees, and asymptotic results via random compositions and complex analysis. Highlighting both established a...

Automatic Prompt System in the Process of Mapping plWordNet on Princeton WordNet

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Paweł Kędzia

2015-06-01

Full Text Available Automatic Prompt System in the Process of Mapping plWordNet on Princeton WordNet The paper offers a critical evaluation of the power and usefulness of an automatic prompt system based on the extended Relaxation Labelling algorithm in the process of (manual mapping plWordNet on Princeton WordNet. To this end the results of manual mapping – that is inter-lingual relations between plWN and PWN synsets – are juxtaposed with the automatic prompts that were generated for the source language synsets to be mapped. We check the number and type of inter-lingual relations introduced on the basis of automatic prompts and the distance of the respective prompt synsets from the actual target language synsets.

Teach yourself visually Word 2013

CERN Document Server

Marmel, Elaine

2013-01-01

Get up to speed on the newest version of Word with visual instruction Microsoft Word is the standard for word processing programs, and the newest version offers additional functionality you'll want to use. Get up to speed quickly and easily with the step-by-step instructions and full-color screen shots in this popular guide! You'll see how to perform dozens of tasks, including how to set up and format documents and text; work with diagrams, charts, and pictures; use Mail Merge; post documents online; and much more. Easy-to-follow, two-page lessons make learning a snap.Full-

Fixed versus dynamic co-occurrence windows in TextRank term weights for information retrieval

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Lu, Wei; Cheng, Qikai; Lioma, Christina

2012-01-01

iteratively is a score for each vertex, i.e. a term weight, that can be used for information retrieval (IR) just like conventional term frequency based term weights. So far, when computing TextRank term weights over co-occurrence graphs, the window of term co-occurrence is always fixed. This work departs from...

Visual word learning in adults with dyslexia

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rosa Kit Wan Kwok

2014-05-01

Full Text Available We investigated word learning in university and college students with a diagnosis of dyslexia and in typically-reading controls. Participants read aloud short (4-letter and longer (7-letter nonwords as quickly as possible. The nonwords were repeated across 10 blocks, using a different random order in each block. Participants returned 7 days later and repeated the experiment. Accuracy was high in both groups. The dyslexics were substantially slower than the controls at reading the nonwords throughout the experiment. They also showed a larger length effect, indicating less effective decoding skills. Learning was demonstrated by faster reading of the nonwords across repeated presentations and by a reduction in the difference in reading speeds between shorter and longer nonwords. The dyslexics required more presentations of the nonwords before the length effect became non-significant, only showing convergence in reaction times between shorter and longer items in the second testing session where controls achieved convergence part-way through the first session. Participants also completed a psychological test battery assessing reading and spelling, vocabulary, phonological awareness, working memory, nonverbal ability and motor speed. The dyslexics performed at a similar level to the controls on nonverbal ability but significantly less well on all the other measures. Regression analyses found that decoding ability, measured as the speed of reading aloud nonwords when they were presented for the first time, was predicted by a composite of word reading and spelling scores (‘literacy’. Word learning was assessed in terms of the improvement in naming speeds over 10 blocks of training. Learning was predicted by vocabulary and working memory scores, but not by literacy, phonological awareness, nonverbal ability or motor speed. The results show that young dyslexic adults have problems both in pronouncing novel words and in learning new written words.

A Network Text Analysis of David Ayer’s Fury

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Starling David Hunter

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Network Text Analysis (NTA involves the creation of networks of words and/or concepts from linguistic data. Its key insight is that the position of words and concepts in a text network provides vital clues to the central and underlying themes of the text as a whole. Recent research has relied on inductive approaches to identify these themes. In this study we demonstrate a deductive approach that we apply to the screenplay of the 2014 World War II-era film Fury. Specifically, we first use genre expectations theory to establish prior expectations as to the key themes associated with war films. We then empirically test whether words and concepts associated with the most influentially-positioned nodes are consistent with themes common to the war-film genre. As predicted, we find that words and concepts associated with the least constrained nodes in the text network were significantly more likely to be associated with the war, action, and biography genres and significantly less likely to be associated with the mystery, science-fiction, fantasy, and film-noir genres. Keywords: content analysis, text analysis, network text analysis, semantic network analysis, film studies, screenplay, screenwriting, war movies, World War II, tanks

Word add-in for ontology recognition: semantic enrichment of scientific literature

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Naim Oscar

2010-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background In the current era of scientific research, efficient communication of information is paramount. As such, the nature of scholarly and scientific communication is changing; cyberinfrastructure is now absolutely necessary and new media are allowing information and knowledge to be more interactive and immediate. One approach to making knowledge more accessible is the addition of machine-readable semantic data to scholarly articles. Results The Word add-in presented here will assist authors in this effort by automatically recognizing and highlighting words or phrases that are likely information-rich, allowing authors to associate semantic data with those words or phrases, and to embed that data in the document as XML. The add-in and source code are publicly available at http://www.codeplex.com/UCSDBioLit. Conclusions The Word add-in for ontology term recognition makes it possible for an author to add semantic data to a document as it is being written and it encodes these data using XML tags that are effectively a standard in life sciences literature. Allowing authors to mark-up their own work will help increase the amount and quality of machine-readable literature metadata.

Sub-word based Arabic handwriting analysis for writer identification

Science.gov (United States)

Maliki, Makki; Al-Jawad, Naseer; Jassim, Sabah

2013-05-01

Analysing a text or part of it is key to handwriting identification. Generally, handwriting is learnt over time and people develop habits in the style of writing. These habits are embedded in special parts of handwritten text. In Arabic each word consists of one or more sub-word(s). The end of each sub-word is considered to be a connect stroke. The main hypothesis in this paper is that sub-words are essential reflection of Arabic writer's habits that could be exploited for writer identification. Testing this hypothesis will be based on experiments that evaluate writer's identification, mainly using K nearest neighbor from group of sub-words extracted from longer text. The experimental results show that using a group of sub-words could be used to identify the writer with a successful rate between 52.94 % to 82.35% when top1 is used, and it can go up to 100% when top5 is used based on K nearest neighbor. The results show that majority of writers are identified using 7 sub-words with a reliability confident of about 90% (i.e. 90% of the rejected templates have significantly larger distances to the tested example than the distance from the correctly identified template). However previous work, using a complete word, shows successful rate of at most 90% in top 10.

WORD OF MOUTH ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ana Raluca CHIOSA

2014-12-01

Full Text Available Through the access to information, the Internet has transformed people lifestyle, their preference for products, how they relate to brands. Perceived as an open space, without limitation, social media has become the main channel for expression of word-of-mouth, with both positive and negative effects. Thus The Internet has allowed the development of WOM, making it contemporary in our technological world. This paper examines the motives for adopting WOM behavior, forms of WOM, the WOM model and principles, directions of WOM research. Brand engagement has made consumers more powerful in terms of requirements and evaluation of product/brand, more demanding and impatient in brand communication and market response.

Word Variant Identification in Old French

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Peter Willett

1997-01-01

Full Text Available Increasing numbers of historical texts are available in machine-readable form, which retain the original spelling, which can be very different from the modern-day equivalents due to the natural evolution of a language, and because the concept of standardisation in spelling is comparatively modern. Among medieval vernacular writers, the same word could be spelled in different ways and the same author (or scribe might even use several alternative spellings in the same passage. Thus, we do not know,a priori, how many variant forms of a particular word there are in such texts, let alone what these variants might be. Searching on the modern equivalent, or even the commonest historical variant, of a particular word may thus fail to retrieve an appreciable number of occurrences unless the searcher already has an extensive knowledge of the language of the documents. Moreover, even specialist scholars may be unaware of some idiosyncratic variants. Here, we consider the use of computer methods to retrieve variant historical spellings.

LINGUISTIC DATABASE FOR AUTOMATIC GENERATION SYSTEM OF ENGLISH ADVERTISING TEXTS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

Short Vowels Versus Word Familiarity in the Reading Comprehension of Arab Readers: A Revisited Issue

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Abdullah M. SERAYE

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Arab readers, both beginning and advanced, are encouraged to read and accustomed to unvowelized and undiacriticized texts. Previous literature claimed that the presence of short vowels in the text would facilitate the reading comprehension of both beginning and advanced Arab readers. However, with a claimed strict controlling procedure, different results emerged, revealing that the only variable that affected the reading process of Arab adult skilled readers was word frequency, and its effect was limited to the time load of the reading process; this result raised the question of whether the neutral role of short vowels in the text reading process of experienced Arab readers would be maintained for less experienced readers, as represented by fourth graders, or whether word frequency would be the only variable that plays a role in their reading process. In experiment, 1,141 fourth-grade students were randomly assigned to 5 reading conditions: plain, only shaddah, short vowels plus shaddah, only short vowels, and finally the wrong short vowels plus shaddah. In experiment 2, 38 participants from the same population were assigned to a fully vowelized and diacriticized reading condition. Each participant was asked to read two texts, of high and low frequency words and then given recall and multiple-choice tests. In general, the multivariate analysis showed that the only manipulated variable that was found to affect their reading process in terms of reading time load and, to some degree, reading comprehension was word frequency, although its effect was marginal. Accordingly, pedagogical recommendations and future research were proposed.

Short vowels versus word familiarity in the reading comprehension of arab readers: A revisited issue

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Abdullah M. Seraye

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Arab readers, both beginning and advanced, are encouraged to read and accustomed to unvowelized and undiacriticized texts. Previous literature claimed that the presence of short vowels in the text would facilitate the reading comprehension of both beginning and advanced Arab readers. However, with a claimed strict controlling procedure, different results emerged, revealing that the only variable that affected the reading process of Arab adult skilled readers was word frequency, and its effect was limited to the time load of the reading process; this result raised the question of whether the neutral role of short vowels in the text reading process of experienced Arab readers would be maintained for less experienced readers, as represented by fourth graders, or whether word frequency would be the only variable that plays a role in their reading process. In experiment, 1,141 fourth-grade students were randomly assigned to 5 reading conditions: plain, only shaddah, short vowels plus shaddah, only short vowels, and finally the wrong short vowels plus shaddah. In experiment 2, 38 participants from the same population were assigned to a fully vowelized and diacriticized reading condition. Each participant was asked to read two texts, of high and low frequency words and then given recall and multiple-choice tests. In general, the multivariate analysis showed that the only manipulated variable that was found to affect their reading process in terms of reading time load and, to some degree, reading comprehension was word frequency, although its effect was marginal. Accordingly, pedagogical recommendations and future research were proposed.

Word translation entropy in translation

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Schaeffer, Moritz; Dragsted, Barbara; Hvelplund, Kristian Tangsgaard

2016-01-01

This study reports on an investigation into the relationship between the number of translation alternatives for a single word and eye movements on the source text. In addition, the effect of word order differences between source and target text on eye movements on the source text is studied....... In particular, the current study investigates the effect of these variables on early and late eye movement measures. Early eye movement measures are indicative of processes that are more automatic while late measures are more indicative of conscious processing. Most studies that found evidence of target...... language activation during source text reading in translation, i.e. co-activation of the two linguistic systems, employed late eye movement measures or reaction times. The current study therefore aims to investigate if and to what extent earlier eye movement measures in reading for translation show...

Age-Dependent Positivity-Bias in Children’s Processing of Emotion Terms

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Daniela Bahn

2017-07-01

Full Text Available Emotions play an important role in human communication, and the daily-life interactions of young children often include situations that require the verbalization of emotional states with verbal means, e.g., with emotion terms. Through them, one can express own emotional states and those of others. Thus, the acquisition of emotion terms allows children to participate more intensively in social contexts – a basic requirement for learning new words and for elaborating socio-emotional skills. However, little is known about how children acquire and process this specific word category, which is positioned between concrete and abstract words. In particular, the influence of valence on emotion word processing during childhood has not been sufficiently investigated. Previous research points to an advantage of positive words over negative and neutral words in word processing. While previous studies found valence effects to be influenced by factors such as arousal, frequency, concreteness, and task, it is still unclear if and how valence effects are also modified by age. The present study compares the performance of children aged from 5 to 12 years and adults in two experimental tasks: lexical decision (word or pseudoword and emotional categorization (positive or negative. Stimuli consisted of 48 German emotion terms (24 positive and 24 negative matched for arousal, concreteness, age of acquisition, word class, word length, morphological complexity, frequency, and neighborhood density. Results from both tasks reveal two developmental trends: First, with increasing age children responded faster and more correctly, suggesting that emotion vocabulary gradually becomes more stable and differentiated during middle childhood. Second, the influence of valence varied with age: younger children (5- and 6-year-olds showed significantly higher performance levels for positive emotion terms compared to negative emotion terms, whereas older children and adults did not

The Language Environment and Syntactic Word-Class Acquisition.

Science.gov (United States)

Zavrel, Jakub; Veenstra, Jorn

A study analyzed the distribution of words in a three-million-word corpus of text from the "Wall Street Journal," in order to test a theory of the acquisition of word categories. The theory, an alternative to the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, proposes that the child exploits multiple sources of cues (distributional, semantic, or…

The problem of polysemy in the first thousand words of the General Service List: A corpus study of secondary chemistry texts

Science.gov (United States)

Clemmons, Karina

Vocabulary in a second language is an indispensable building block of all comprehension (Folse, 2006; Nation, 2006). Teachers in content area classes such as science, math, and social studies frequently teach content specific vocabulary, but are not aware of the obstacles that can occur when students do not know the basic words. Word lists such as the General Service List (GSL) were created to assist students and teachers (West, 1953). The GSL does not adequately take into account the high level of polysemy of many common English words, nor has it been updated by genre to reflect specific content domains encountered by secondary science students in today's high stakes classes such as chemistry. This study examines how many words of the first 1000 words of the GSL occurred in the secondary chemistry textbooks sampled, how often the first 1000 words of the GSL were polysemous, and specifically which multiple meanings occurred. A discussion of results includes word tables that list multiple meanings present, example phrases that illustrate the context surrounding the target words, suggestions for a GSL that is genre specific to secondary chemistry textbooks and that is ranked by meaning as well as type, and implications for both vocabulary materials and classroom instruction for ELLs in secondary chemistry classes. Findings are essential to second language (L2) researchers, materials developers, publishers, and teachers.

Maximum Entropy, Word-Frequency, Chinese Characters, and Multiple Meanings

Science.gov (United States)

Yan, Xiaoyong; Minnhagen, Petter

2015-01-01

The word-frequency distribution of a text written by an author is well accounted for by a maximum entropy distribution, the RGF (random group formation)-prediction. The RGF-distribution is completely determined by the a priori values of the total number of words in the text (M), the number of distinct words (N) and the number of repetitions of the most common word (kmax). It is here shown that this maximum entropy prediction also describes a text written in Chinese characters. In particular it is shown that although the same Chinese text written in words and Chinese characters have quite differently shaped distributions, they are nevertheless both well predicted by their respective three a priori characteristic values. It is pointed out that this is analogous to the change in the shape of the distribution when translating a given text to another language. Another consequence of the RGF-prediction is that taking a part of a long text will change the input parameters (M, N, kmax) and consequently also the shape of the frequency distribution. This is explicitly confirmed for texts written in Chinese characters. Since the RGF-prediction has no system-specific information beyond the three a priori values (M, N, kmax), any specific language characteristic has to be sought in systematic deviations from the RGF-prediction and the measured frequencies. One such systematic deviation is identified and, through a statistical information theoretical argument and an extended RGF-model, it is proposed that this deviation is caused by multiple meanings of Chinese characters. The effect is stronger for Chinese characters than for Chinese words. The relation between Zipf’s law, the Simon-model for texts and the present results are discussed. PMID:25955175

Forehearing words: Pre-activation of word endings at word onset.

Science.gov (United States)

Roll, Mikael; Söderström, Pelle; Frid, Johan; Mannfolk, Peter; Horne, Merle

2017-09-29

Occurring at rates up to 6-7 syllables per second, speech perception and understanding involves rapid identification of speech sounds and pre-activation of morphemes and words. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we investigated the time-course and neural sources of pre-activation of word endings as participants heard the beginning of unfolding words. ERPs showed a pre-activation negativity (PrAN) for word beginnings (first two segmental phonemes) with few possible completions. PrAN increased gradually as the number of possible completions of word onsets decreased and the lexical frequency of the completions increased. The early brain potential effect for few possible word completions was associated with a blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) contrast increase in Broca's area (pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus) and angular gyrus of the left parietal lobe. We suggest early involvement of the left prefrontal cortex in inhibiting irrelevant left parietal activation during lexical selection. The results further our understanding of the importance of Broca's area in rapid online pre-activation of words. Copyright © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

WORD-ATTACK SKILLS FOR INDONESIAN LEARNERS

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joko Pranowo

2006-01-01

Full Text Available The typical drawbacks that affect most Indonesian learners studying English as the target language concern the strategies in dealing with new dictions. The rule of thumb is that the learners are usually tempted to directly look up the meaning in a dictionary when other ways such as guessing the meaning from the context or by dissecting the words into smaller units so that they are able to get a hint from the base word cannot be engineered. As a result of this activity then, they miss crucial points in the realm of word enrichment. This article will shed some light on how to deal with new words and claim that it is not the meaning of a new word that should be the first priority.

Text-Mining Applications for Creation of Biofilm Literature Database

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kanika Gupta

2017-10-01

So in the present research published corpora of 34306 documents for biofilm was collected from PubMed database along with non-indexed resources like books, conferences, newspaper articles, etc. and these were divided into five categories i.e. classification, growth and development, physiology, drug effects and radiation effects. These five categories were further individually divided into three parts i.e. Journal Title, Abstract Title, and Abstract Text to make indexing highly specific. Text-processing was done using the software Rapid Miner_v5.3, which tokenizes the entire text into words and provides the frequency of each word within the document. The obtained words were normalized using Remove Stop and Stem Word command of Rapid Miner_v5.3 which removes the stopping and stemming words. The obtained words were stored in MS-Excel 2007 and were sorted in decreasing order of frequency using Sort & Filter command of MS-Excel 2007. The words are visualization through networks obtained by Cytoscape_v2.7.0. Now the words obtained were highly specific for biofilms, generating a controlled biofilm vocabulary and this vocabulary could be used for indexing articles for biofilm (similar to MeSH database which indexes articles for PubMed. The obtained keywords information was stored in the relational database which is locally hosted using the WAMP_v2.4 (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP server. The available biofilm vocabulary will be significant for researchers studying biofilm literature, making their search easy and efficient.

DrugQuest - a text mining workflow for drug association discovery.

Science.gov (United States)

Papanikolaou, Nikolas; Pavlopoulos, Georgios A; Theodosiou, Theodosios; Vizirianakis, Ioannis S; Iliopoulos, Ioannis

2016-06-06

Text mining and data integration methods are gaining ground in the field of health sciences due to the exponential growth of bio-medical literature and information stored in biological databases. While such methods mostly try to extract bioentity associations from PubMed, very few of them are dedicated in mining other types of repositories such as chemical databases. Herein, we apply a text mining approach on the DrugBank database in order to explore drug associations based on the DrugBank "Description", "Indication", "Pharmacodynamics" and "Mechanism of Action" text fields. We apply Name Entity Recognition (NER) techniques on these fields to identify chemicals, proteins, genes, pathways, diseases, and we utilize the TextQuest algorithm to find additional biologically significant words. Using a plethora of similarity and partitional clustering techniques, we group the DrugBank records based on their common terms and investigate possible scenarios why these records are clustered together. Different views such as clustered chemicals based on their textual information, tag clouds consisting of Significant Terms along with the terms that were used for clustering are delivered to the user through a user-friendly web interface. DrugQuest is a text mining tool for knowledge discovery: it is designed to cluster DrugBank records based on text attributes in order to find new associations between drugs. The service is freely available at http://bioinformatics.med.uoc.gr/drugquest .

A new universality class in corpus of texts; A statistical physics study

Science.gov (United States)

Najafi, Elham; Darooneh, Amir H.

2018-05-01

Text can be regarded as a complex system. There are some methods in statistical physics which can be used to study this system. In this work, by means of statistical physics methods, we reveal new universal behaviors of texts associating with the fractality values of words in a text. The fractality measure indicates the importance of words in a text by considering distribution pattern of words throughout the text. We observed a power law relation between fractality of text and vocabulary size for texts and corpora. We also observed this behavior in studying biological data.

[Pilot study of domain-specific terminology adaptation for morphological analysis: research on unknown terms in national examination documents of radiological technologists].

Science.gov (United States)

Tsuji, Shintarou; Nishimoto, Naoki; Ogasawara, Katsuhiko

2008-07-20

Although large medical texts are stored in electronic format, they are seldom reused because of the difficulty of processing narrative texts by computer. Morphological analysis is a key technology for extracting medical terms correctly and automatically. This process parses a sentence into its smallest unit, the morpheme. Phrases consisting of two or more technical terms, however, cause morphological analysis software to fail in parsing the sentence and output unprocessed terms as "unknown words." The purpose of this study was to reduce the number of unknown words in medical narrative text processing. The results of parsing the text with additional dictionaries were compared with the analysis of the number of unknown words in the national examination for radiologists. The ratio of unknown words was reduced 1.0% to 0.36% by adding terminologies of radiological technology, MeSH, and ICD-10 labels. The terminology of radiological technology was the most effective resource, being reduced by 0.62%. This result clearly showed the necessity of additional dictionary selection and trends in unknown words. The potential for this investigation is to make available a large body of clinical information that would otherwise be inaccessible for applications other than manual health care review by personnel.

Evidence for Human Fronto-Central Gamma Activity during Long-Term Memory Encoding of Word Sequences

Science.gov (United States)

Meeuwissen, Esther Berendina; Takashima, Atsuko; Fernández, Guillén; Jensen, Ole

2011-01-01

Although human gamma activity (30–80 Hz) associated with visual processing is often reported, it is not clear to what extend gamma activity can be reliably detected non-invasively from frontal areas during complex cognitive tasks such as long term memory (LTM) formation. We conducted a memory experiment composed of 35 blocks each having three parts: LTM encoding, working memory (WM) maintenance and LTM retrieval. In the LTM encoding and WM maintenance parts, participants had to respectively encode or maintain the order of three sequentially presented words. During LTM retrieval subjects had to reproduce these sequences. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG) we identified significant differences in the gamma and beta activity. Robust gamma activity (55–65 Hz) in left BA6 (supplementary motor area (SMA)/pre-SMA) was stronger during LTM rehearsal than during WM maintenance. The gamma activity was sustained throughout the 3.4 s rehearsal period during which a fixation cross was presented. Importantly, the difference in gamma band activity correlated with memory performance over subjects. Further we observed a weak gamma power difference in left BA6 during the first half of the LTM rehearsal interval larger for successfully than unsuccessfully reproduced word triplets. In the beta band, we found a power decrease in left anterior regions during LTM rehearsal compared to WM maintenance. Also this suppression of beta power correlated with memory performance over subjects. Our findings show that an extended network of brain areas, characterized by oscillatory activity in different frequency bands, supports the encoding of word sequences in LTM. Gamma band activity in BA6 possibly reflects memory processes associated with language and timing, and suppression of beta activity at left frontal sensors is likely to reflect the release of inhibition directly associated with the engagement of language functions. PMID:21738641

Learning from Scientific Texts: Personalizing the Text Increases Transfer Performance and Task Involvement

Science.gov (United States)

Dutke, Stephan; Grefe, Anna Christina; Leopold, Claudia

2016-01-01

In an experiment with 65 high-school students, we tested the hypothesis that personalizing learning materials would increase students' learning performance and motivation to study the learning materials. Students studied either a 915-word standard text on the anatomy and functionality of the human eye or a personalized version of the same text in…

New baseline correction algorithm for text-line recognition with bidirectional recurrent neural networks

Science.gov (United States)

Morillot, Olivier; Likforman-Sulem, Laurence; Grosicki, Emmanuèle

2013-04-01

Many preprocessing techniques have been proposed for isolated word recognition. However, recently, recognition systems have dealt with text blocks and their compound text lines. In this paper, we propose a new preprocessing approach to efficiently correct baseline skew and fluctuations. Our approach is based on a sliding window within which the vertical position of the baseline is estimated. Segmentation of text lines into subparts is, thus, avoided. Experiments conducted on a large publicly available database (Rimes), with a BLSTM (bidirectional long short-term memory) recurrent neural network recognition system, show that our baseline correction approach highly improves performance.

Voice congruency facilitates word recognition.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Sandra Campeanu

Full Text Available Behavioral studies of spoken word memory have shown that context congruency facilitates both word and source recognition, though the level at which context exerts its influence remains equivocal. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs while participants performed both types of recognition task with words spoken in four voices. Two voice parameters (i.e., gender and accent varied between speakers, with the possibility that none, one or two of these parameters was congruent between study and test. Results indicated that reinstating the study voice at test facilitated both word and source recognition, compared to similar or no context congruency at test. Behavioral effects were paralleled by two ERP modulations. First, in the word recognition test, the left parietal old/new effect showed a positive deflection reflective of context congruency between study and test words. Namely, the same speaker condition provided the most positive deflection of all correctly identified old words. In the source recognition test, a right frontal positivity was found for the same speaker condition compared to the different speaker conditions, regardless of response success. Taken together, the results of this study suggest that the benefit of context congruency is reflected behaviorally and in ERP modulations traditionally associated with recognition memory.

The Functions Of Taboo Words And Their Translation In Subtitling: A Case Study In “The Help”

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Agus Darma Yoga Pratama

2016-10-01

Full Text Available Translating taboo words in subtitling especially translating them into Indonesian is quite difficult since most of the Indonesian people are not used to uttering taboo or offensive words publicly. In addition, watching movie is more of social activity compared to reading and that is why reading taboo expressions while watching might be embarrassing. This study tries to explore the functions of taboo words found in “The Help” movie and tries to find out how the translator translate the taboo words into the target language in order to produce the closest functions to the source language without ignoring the technical aspects of subtitling. This study also deals with the strategy used by the translator to translate the taboo words. The main theories applied here in are from Karamitroglou (1998, Ljung (2011, Toury (1995, and Gottlieb (1992. There are 70 taboo words found in the raw data and the functions of those taboo words are to express sympathy, surprise, disappointment, disbelief, fear, annoyance, metaphorical interpretation, reaction to mishap, to emphasize the associated item, function as adjectival intensifier, name-calling, anaphoric use of epithet, oath, curse, unfriendly suggestion, and four of the taboo words show non-swearing word or in dysphemism form. The strategies applied are omission (16, transfer (27, and euphemism (26. In terms of the technical aspect in subtitling, all of the subtitles in the target language are presented at the maximum of two lines at once. However, there are three lines of the subtitles which exceed the maximum numbers of characters being proposed. Since taboo word is not only used to offend someone, it is important for the translator to get the closest equivalence in the target language in order to maintain its function. The translator may choose whether he/she wants to follow the source language norms to produce adequate target text or follow the target language norms in order to produce acceptable

Prophetic sensing of Yahweh’s word

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wilhelm J. Wessels

2015-07-01

Full Text Available This article focuses on Jeremiah 23:18, which implies that the prophet stood in the council of Yahweh (sôd to see and hear the word of Yahweh. In this verse, it seems that the senses of the prophet played a role in receiving Yahweh’s words. Verse 18 forms part of 23:16–22 in which Jeremiah warned the people of Judah not to listen to prophets who mislead them with optimistic messages. In this article, attention is given to the question whether standing in the council of Yahweh is a deciding criterion for receiving true words from Yahweh. The motif of the divine council is also investigated. An argument is presented that ‘sensing’ should be understood in the double sense of the word, namely sensory experience as well as the intellectual activity of understanding. It is argued that both meanings of the word sensing are necessary to determine the truth of Yahweh’s word.

Efficacy of a Word- and Text-Based Intervention for Students With Significant Reading Difficulties.

Science.gov (United States)

Vaughn, Sharon; Roberts, Garrett J; Miciak, Jeremy; Taylor, Pat; Fletcher, Jack M

2018-05-01

We examine the efficacy of an intervention to improve word reading and reading comprehension in fourth- and fifth-grade students with significant reading problems. Using a randomized control trial design, we compare the fourth- and fifth-grade reading outcomes of students with severe reading difficulties who were provided a researcher-developed treatment with reading outcomes of students in a business-as-usual (BAU) comparison condition. A total of 280 fourth- and fifth-grade students were randomly assigned within school in a 1:1 ratio to either the BAU comparison condition ( n = 139) or the treatment condition ( n = 141). Treatment students were provided small-group tutoring for 30 to 45 minutes for an average of 68 lessons (mean hours of instruction = 44.4, SD = 11.2). Treatment students performed statistically significantly higher than BAU students on a word reading measure (effect size [ES] = 0. 58) and a measure of reading fluency (ES = 0.46). Though not statistically significant, effect sizes for students in the treatment condition were consistently higher than BAU students for decoding measures (ES = 0.06, 0.08), and mixed for comprehension (ES = -0.02, 0.14).

Appraisal of space words and allocation of emotion words in bodily space.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Fernando Marmolejo-Ramos

Full Text Available The body-specificity hypothesis (BSH predicts that right-handers and left-handers allocate positive and negative concepts differently on the horizontal plane, i.e., while left-handers allocate negative concepts on the right-hand side of their bodily space, right-handers allocate such concepts to the left-hand side. Similar research shows that people, in general, tend to allocate positive and negative concepts in upper and lower areas, respectively, in relation to the vertical plane. Further research shows a higher salience of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the performance of sensorimotor tasks. The aim of the paper is to examine whether there should be a dominance of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane, not only at a sensorimotor level but also at a conceptual level. In Experiment 1, various participants from diverse linguistic backgrounds were asked to rate the words "up", "down", "left", and "right". In Experiment 2, right-handed participants from two linguistic backgrounds were asked to allocate emotion words into a square grid divided into four boxes of equal areas. Results suggest that the vertical plane is more salient than the horizontal plane regarding the allocation of emotion words and positively-valenced words were placed in upper locations whereas negatively-valenced words were placed in lower locations. Together, the results lend support to the BSH while also suggesting a higher saliency of the vertical plane over the horizontal plane in the allocation of valenced words.

Knowledge-based biomedical word sense disambiguation: comparison of approaches

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Aronson Alan R

2010-11-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Word sense disambiguation (WSD algorithms attempt to select the proper sense of ambiguous terms in text. Resources like the UMLS provide a reference thesaurus to be used to annotate the biomedical literature. Statistical learning approaches have produced good results, but the size of the UMLS makes the production of training data infeasible to cover all the domain. Methods We present research on existing WSD approaches based on knowledge bases, which complement the studies performed on statistical learning. We compare four approaches which rely on the UMLS Metathesaurus as the source of knowledge. The first approach compares the overlap of the context of the ambiguous word to the candidate senses based on a representation built out of the definitions, synonyms and related terms. The second approach collects training data for each of the candidate senses to perform WSD based on queries built using monosemous synonyms and related terms. These queries are used to retrieve MEDLINE citations. Then, a machine learning approach is trained on this corpus. The third approach is a graph-based method which exploits the structure of the Metathesaurus network of relations to perform unsupervised WSD. This approach ranks nodes in the graph according to their relative structural importance. The last approach uses the semantic types assigned to the concepts in the Metathesaurus to perform WSD. The context of the ambiguous word and semantic types of the candidate concepts are mapped to Journal Descriptors. These mappings are compared to decide among the candidate concepts. Results are provided estimating accuracy of the different methods on the WSD test collection available from the NLM. Conclusions We have found that the last approach achieves better results compared to the other methods. The graph-based approach, using the structure of the Metathesaurus network to estimate the relevance of the Metathesaurus concepts, does not perform well

Blending Words Found In Social Media

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Giyatmi Giyatmi

2017-12-01

Full Text Available There are many new words from the social media such as Netizen, Trentop, and Delcon. Those words include in blending. Blending is one of word formations combining two clipped words to form a brand new word. The researchers are interested in analyzing blend words used in the social media such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Blackberry Messenger. This research aims at (1 finding blend words used in the social media (2 describing kinds of blend words used in social media (3 describing the process of blend word formation used in the social media. This research uses some theories dealing with definition of blending and kinds of blending. This research belongs to descriptive qualitative research. Data of the research are English blend words used in social media. Data sources of this research are websites consisting of some English words used in social media and some social media users as the informant. Techniques of data collecting in this research are observation and simak catat. Observation is by observing some websites consisting of some English words used in social media. Simak catat is done by taking some notes on the data and encoding in symbols such as No/Blend words/Kinds of Blending. The researchers use source triangulation to check the data from the researchers with the informant and theory triangulation to determine kinds of blending and blend word formation in social media. There are115 data of blend words. Those data consists of 65 data of Instagram, 47 data of Twitter, 1 datum of Facebook, and 2 data of Blackberry Messenger. There are 2 types of blending used in social media;108 data of blending with clipping and 7 data of blending with overlapping. There are 10 ways of blend word formation found in this research.

Word encoding during sleep is suggested by correlations between word-evoked up-states and post-sleep semantic priming

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Simon eRuch

2014-11-01

Full Text Available To test whether humans can encode words during sleep we played everyday words to men while they were napping and assessed priming from sleep-played words following waking. Words were presented during non-rapid eye movement (NREM sleep. Priming was assessed using a semantic and a perceptual priming test. These tests measured differences in the processing of words that had been or had not been played during sleep. Synonyms to sleep-played words were the targets in the semantic priming test that tapped the meaning of sleep-played words. All men responded to sleep-played words by producing up-states in their electroencephalogram. Up-states are NREM sleep-specific phases of briefly increased neuronal excitability. The word-evoked up-states might have promoted word processing during sleep. Yet, the mean performance in the priming tests administered following sleep was at chance level, which suggests that participants as a group failed to show priming following sleep. However, performance in the two priming tests was positively correlated to each other and to the magnitude of the word-evoked up-states. Hence, the larger a participant’s word-evoked up-states, the larger his perceptual and semantic priming. Those participants who scored high on all variables must have encoded words during sleep. We conclude that some humans are able to encode words during sleep, but more research is needed to pin down the factors that modulate this ability.

Infinite permutations vs. infinite words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anna E. Frid

2011-08-01

Full Text Available I am going to compare well-known properties of infinite words with those of infinite permutations, a new object studied since middle 2000s. Basically, it was Sergey Avgustinovich who invented this notion, although in an early study by Davis et al. permutations appear in a very similar framework as early as in 1977. I am going to tell about periodicity of permutations, their complexity according to several definitions and their automatic properties, that is, about usual parameters of words, now extended to permutations and behaving sometimes similarly to those for words, sometimes not. Another series of results concerns permutations generated by infinite words and their properties. Although this direction of research is young, many people, including two other speakers of this meeting, have participated in it, and I believe that several more topics for further study are really promising.

Terminology of the public relations field: corpus — automatic term recognition — terminology database

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nataša Logar Berginc

2013-12-01

Full Text Available The article describes an analysis of automatic term recognition results performed for single- and multi-word terms with the LUIZ term extraction system. The target application of the results is a terminology database of Public Relations and the main resource the KoRP Public Relations Corpus. Our analysis is focused on two segments: (a single-word noun term candidates, which we compare with the frequency list of nouns from KoRP and evaluate termhood on the basis of the judgements of two domain experts, and (b multi-word term candidates with verb and noun as headword. In order to better assess the performance of the system and the soundness of our approach we also performed an analysis of recall. Our results show that the terminological relevance of extracted nouns is indeed higher than that of merely frequent nouns, and that verbal phrases only rarely count as proper terms. The most productive patterns of multi-word terms with noun as a headword have the following structure: [adjective + noun], [adjective + and + adjective + noun] and [adjective + adjective + noun]. The analysis of recall shows low inter-annotator agreement, but nevertheless very satisfactory recall levels.

Privacy Preserving Similarity Based Text Retrieval through Blind Storage

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Pinki Kumari

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Cloud computing is improving rapidly due to their more advantage and more data owners give interest to outsource their data into cloud storage for centralize their data. As huge files stored in the cloud storage, there is need to implement the keyword based search process to data user. At the same time to protect the privacy of data, encryption techniques are used for sensitive data, that encryption is done before outsourcing data to cloud server. But it is critical to search results in encryption data. In this system we propose similarity text retrieval from the blind storage blocks with encryption format. This system provides more security because of blind storage system. In blind storage system data is stored randomly on cloud storage.  In Existing Data Owner cannot encrypt the document data as it was done only at server end. Everyone can access the data as there was no private key concept applied to maintained privacy of the data. But In our proposed system, Data Owner can encrypt the data himself using RSA algorithm.  RSA is a public key-cryptosystem and it is widely used for sensitive data storage over Internet. In our system we use Text mining process for identifying the index files of user documents. Before encryption we also use NLP (Nature Language Processing technique to identify the keyword synonyms of data owner document. Here text mining process examines text word by word and collect literal meaning beyond the words group that composes the sentence. Those words are examined in API of word net so that only equivalent words can be identified for index file use. Our proposed system provides more secure and authorized way of recover the text in cloud storage with access control. Finally, our experimental result shows that our system is better than existing.

Facilitating text reading in posterior cortical atrophy.

Science.gov (United States)

Yong, Keir X X; Rajdev, Kishan; Shakespeare, Timothy J; Leff, Alexander P; Crutch, Sebastian J

2015-07-28

We report (1) the quantitative investigation of text reading in posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), and (2) the effects of 2 novel software-based reading aids that result in dramatic improvements in the reading ability of patients with PCA. Reading performance, eye movements, and fixations were assessed in patients with PCA and typical Alzheimer disease and in healthy controls (experiment 1). Two reading aids (single- and double-word) were evaluated based on the notion that reducing the spatial and oculomotor demands of text reading might support reading in PCA (experiment 2). Mean reading accuracy in patients with PCA was significantly worse (57%) compared with both patients with typical Alzheimer disease (98%) and healthy controls (99%); spatial aspects of passages were the primary determinants of text reading ability in PCA. Both aids led to considerable gains in reading accuracy (PCA mean reading accuracy: single-word reading aid = 96%; individual patient improvement range: 6%-270%) and self-rated measures of reading. Data suggest a greater efficiency of fixations and eye movements under the single-word reading aid in patients with PCA. These findings demonstrate how neurologic characterization of a neurodegenerative syndrome (PCA) and detailed cognitive analysis of an important everyday skill (reading) can combine to yield aids capable of supporting important everyday functional abilities. This study provides Class III evidence that for patients with PCA, 2 software-based reading aids (single-word and double-word) improve reading accuracy. © 2015 American Academy of Neurology.

Facilitating text reading in posterior cortical atrophy

Science.gov (United States)

Rajdev, Kishan; Shakespeare, Timothy J.; Leff, Alexander P.; Crutch, Sebastian J.

2015-01-01

Objective: We report (1) the quantitative investigation of text reading in posterior cortical atrophy (PCA), and (2) the effects of 2 novel software-based reading aids that result in dramatic improvements in the reading ability of patients with PCA. Methods: Reading performance, eye movements, and fixations were assessed in patients with PCA and typical Alzheimer disease and in healthy controls (experiment 1). Two reading aids (single- and double-word) were evaluated based on the notion that reducing the spatial and oculomotor demands of text reading might support reading in PCA (experiment 2). Results: Mean reading accuracy in patients with PCA was significantly worse (57%) compared with both patients with typical Alzheimer disease (98%) and healthy controls (99%); spatial aspects of passages were the primary determinants of text reading ability in PCA. Both aids led to considerable gains in reading accuracy (PCA mean reading accuracy: single-word reading aid = 96%; individual patient improvement range: 6%–270%) and self-rated measures of reading. Data suggest a greater efficiency of fixations and eye movements under the single-word reading aid in patients with PCA. Conclusions: These findings demonstrate how neurologic characterization of a neurodegenerative syndrome (PCA) and detailed cognitive analysis of an important everyday skill (reading) can combine to yield aids capable of supporting important everyday functional abilities. Classification of evidence: This study provides Class III evidence that for patients with PCA, 2 software-based reading aids (single-word and double-word) improve reading accuracy. PMID:26138948

Analysis of Corporal Punishment of Children in the Family based on the Semantic Reading of Traditional Islamic Narratives including the Word “Dharb” [Hitting

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

حمیدرضا بصیری

2016-06-01

Full Text Available There are various traditional Islamic narratives in relation to treating children. The common understanding of these narratives allows for the corporal punishment of children in the family, although some narratives forbid parents from such behavior. With reference to traditional Islamic texts, the word “hitting” (Arabic: dharb is the main and most frequently used word implying the permissibility of corporal punishment. An investigation of the use of the term “dharb” (Arabic: ضرب in the Quran, traditional Islamic narratives and the Arabic language reveals different instances of a general sense of “occurence” which can denote “doing or carrying out”. On this basis, a wide range of usages for this word in absolute terms (without preposition is conceivable with the meanings of protecting, financially supporting, guiding and nurturing children. It seems that limiting the meaning of dharb to corporal punishment in all traditional Islamic narratives without considering the other meanings has led to incorrect interpretations of such narratives.

Theology of Jesus’ words from the cross

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bogdan Zbroja

2012-09-01

Full Text Available The article presents a theological message of the last words that Jesus spoke from the height of the cross. Layout content is conveyed in three kinds of Christ’s relations: the words addressed to God the Father; the words addressed to the good people standing by the cross; the so-called declarations that the Master had spoken to anyone but uttered them in general. All these words speak of the Master’s love. They express His full awareness of what is being done and of His decision voluntarily taken. Above all, it is revealed in the Lord’s statements His obedience to the will of God expressed in the inspired words of the Holy Scriptures. Jesus fulfills all the prophecies of the Old Testament by pronounced words and accomplished works that will become content of the New Testament.

Structured Semantic Knowledge Can Emerge Automatically from Predicting Word Sequences in Child-Directed Speech

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Philip A. Huebner

2018-02-01

Full Text Available Previous research has suggested that distributional learning mechanisms may contribute to the acquisition of semantic knowledge. However, distributional learning mechanisms, statistical learning, and contemporary “deep learning” approaches have been criticized for being incapable of learning the kind of abstract and structured knowledge that many think is required for acquisition of semantic knowledge. In this paper, we show that recurrent neural networks, trained on noisy naturalistic speech to children, do in fact learn what appears to be abstract and structured knowledge. We trained two types of recurrent neural networks (Simple Recurrent Network, and Long Short-Term Memory to predict word sequences in a 5-million-word corpus of speech directed to children ages 0–3 years old, and assessed what semantic knowledge they acquired. We found that learned internal representations are encoding various abstract grammatical and semantic features that are useful for predicting word sequences. Assessing the organization of semantic knowledge in terms of the similarity structure, we found evidence of emergent categorical and hierarchical structure in both models. We found that the Long Short-term Memory (LSTM and SRN are both learning very similar kinds of representations, but the LSTM achieved higher levels of performance on a quantitative evaluation. We also trained a non-recurrent neural network, Skip-gram, on the same input to compare our results to the state-of-the-art in machine learning. We found that Skip-gram achieves relatively similar performance to the LSTM, but is representing words more in terms of thematic compared to taxonomic relations, and we provide reasons why this might be the case. Our findings show that a learning system that derives abstract, distributed representations for the purpose of predicting sequential dependencies in naturalistic language may provide insight into emergence of many properties of the developing

Macrostructural Treatment of Multi-word Lexical Items

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alenka Vrbinc

2011-05-01

Full Text Available The paper discusses the macrostructural treatment of multi-word lexical items in mono- and bilingual dictionaries. First, the classification of multi-word lexical items is presented, and special attention is paid to the discussion of compounds – a specific group of multi-word lexical items that is most commonly afforded headword status but whose inclusion in the headword list may also depend on spelling. Then the inclusion of multi-word lexical items in monolingual dictionaries is dealt with in greater detail, while the results of a short survey on the inclusion of five randomly chosen multi-word lexical items in seven English monolingual dictionaries are presented. The proposals as to how to treat these five multi-word lexical items in bilingual dictionaries are presented in the section about the inclusion of multi-word lexical items in bilingual dictionaries. The conclusion is that it is most important to take the users’ needs into consideration and to make any dictionary as user friendly as possible.

Craftsmanship and Applied Arts. A few words from nowadays.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alberto Pratelli

2009-06-01

Full Text Available Within today’s Italian experience, we can see how as a society, we are adapting to a new world, in the fields of work, art and technical production, mainly following a virtual road, often fake and scenographic, often very far from the real contents. This approach is realized through the use of new words, and mainly through the use of old terms, intended for new stereotypes, in order to create a new world, more attractive and beautiful, but parallel, and at end of the day, nothing but useless. The paper focusses on these words - also trough the help of the enclosed drawings, just generally related to the topic, and takes into account their use, as they are really pervasive, but lacking of a real significance. Our aim is also that of asking to artists and technicians to rediscover a better connection between brain and hand, in order to give the development of new ideas through craftsmanship, a chance.

Estimation of Cross-Lingual News Similarities Using Text-Mining Methods

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

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.

Word Prosody and Intonation of Sgaw Karen

Science.gov (United States)

West, Luke Alexander

The prosodic, and specifically intonation, systems of Tibeto-Burman languages have received less attention in research than those of other families. This study investigates the word prosody and intonation of Sgaw Karen, a tonal Tibeto-Burman language of eastern Burma, and finds similarities to both closely related Tibeto-Burman languages and the more distant Sinitic languages like Mandarin. Sentences of varying lengths with controlled tonal environments were elicited from a total of 12 participants (5 male). In terms of word prosody, Sgaw Karen does not exhibit word stress cues, but does maintain a prosodic distinction between the more prominent major syllable and the phonologically reduced minor syllable. In terms of intonation, Sgaw Karen patterns like related Pwo Karen in its limited use of post-lexical tone, which is only present at Intonation Phrase (IP) boundaries. Unlike the intonation systems of Pwo Karen and Mandarin, however, Sgaw Karen exhibits downstep across its Accentual Phrases (AP), similarly to phenomena identified in Tibetan and Burmese.

Wording effects in moral judgments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ross E. O'Hara

2010-12-01

Full Text Available As the study of moral judgments grows, it becomes imperative to compare results across studies in order to create unified theories within the field. These efforts are potentially undermined, however, by variations in wording used by different researchers. The current study sought to determine whether, when, and how variations in wording influence moral judgments. Online participants responded to 15 different moral vignettes (e.g., the trolley problem using 1 of 4 adjectives: ``wrong'', ``inappropriate'', ``forbidden'', or ``blameworthy''. For half of the sample, these adjectives were preceded by the adverb ``morally''. Results indicated that people were more apt to judge an act as wrong or inappropriate than forbidden or blameworthy, and that disgusting acts were rated as more acceptable when ``morally'' was included. Although some wording differences emerged, effects sizes were small and suggest that studies of moral judgment with different wordings can legitimately be compared.

Journal of Clipped Words in Reader's Digest Magazine

OpenAIRE

Simanjuntak, Lestari

2012-01-01

This study deals with Clipped Words in the “Laughter, the Best Medicine” of Reader's Digest. The objectives of the study are to find out the types of clipped words which are used in the “Laughter, the Best Medicine” of Reader's Digest, to find out sthe dominantly used in the whole story and to reason the dominant clipped word use in the text. The study use descriptive qualitative method. The data were collected from seventeen selected Reader's Digest which contains the clipped word by applie...

Term Croatian considered in russian context

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Željka Čelić

2008-01-01

Full Text Available Term Croatian is considered in Russian context, i. e. context of Russian scientific material (which is comparable to the unwritten situation in universities. Russian scientific texts connect term Croatian, almost without an exception, with the term Serbian in words such as Serbo-Croatian. This point of view is politically approved in the period untill 1990’s, but it exists in the 21st century’s scientific material. The nature of the problem lays, at the same time, in politics, language and society; thus, the question is: what is the reason of such a context in which Croatian language is placed now? There are no arguments for it, especially if it is for Slovak language politically based and language approved to be an entity – in comparison to the Czech language; for Ukrainian (once Littlerussian – at least in principle, in comparison to the Russian, or, more convincable, Belorussian to Russian (the standard Belorussian language exists from 1905. The term Croatian is independently, even in new books, connected with terms of soil, state, nation, but not language. And though today, because of political reasons, exists an awareness of Croatian language without its Serbian mirror reflexion, the term Serbo-Croatian stays. Thus, this paper looks through the history concerning Croatian language in 19, 20 and 21st century’s Russian philology, including Juraj Križanić and Vatroslav Jagić – innovators of the Croatian word in Russia.

Using machine learning to disentangle homonyms in large text corpora.

Science.gov (United States)

Roll, Uri; Correia, Ricardo A; Berger-Tal, Oded

2018-06-01

Systematic reviews are an increasingly popular decision-making tool that provides an unbiased summary of evidence to support conservation action. These reviews bridge the gap between researchers and managers by presenting a comprehensive overview of all studies relating to a particular topic and identify specifically where and under which conditions an effect is present. However, several technical challenges can severely hinder the feasibility and applicability of systematic reviews, for example, homonyms (terms that share spelling but differ in meaning). Homonyms add noise to search results and cannot be easily identified or removed. We developed a semiautomated approach that can aid in the classification of homonyms among narratives. We used a combination of automated content analysis and artificial neural networks to quickly and accurately sift through large corpora of academic texts and classify them to distinct topics. As an example, we explored the use of the word reintroduction in academic texts. Reintroduction is used within the conservation context to indicate the release of organisms to their former native habitat; however, a Web of Science search for this word returned thousands of publications in which the term has other meanings and contexts. Using our method, we automatically classified a sample of 3000 of these publications with over 99% accuracy, relative to a manual classification. Our approach can be used easily with other homonyms and can greatly facilitate systematic reviews or similar work in which homonyms hinder the harnessing of large text corpora. Beyond homonyms we see great promise in combining automated content analysis and machine-learning methods to handle and screen big data for relevant information in conservation science. © 2017 Society for Conservation Biology.

DINAMIC ASPECTS OF INTERNATIONALIZATION IN MODERN MEDIA WORD CREATION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ratsiburskaya Larisa Viktorovna

2014-12-01

Full Text Available In the context of globalization at the turn of XX–XXI centuries there are various manifestations of internationalization in the Russian language notified by linguists. Internationalization in modern Russian word-formation reveals itself in derivational activity of loan morphemes and models, as well as in the borrowing of new derivational morphemes. In modern mass media word creation well-known derivational affixes (the prefixes anti-, contr-, pseudo-, quasi-, super-, hyper-, ultra-, ex-, as well as some new derivational elements (the prefix mega-, the suffix -ing, -land, -wood, suffixed -gate are noted, and the author puts forward arguments to substantiate their morphemic status. "Ameroglobalization", and in particular the influence of the English language on the semantics of prefixes, contributes to the growth of word-building activity and productivity of the prefixes which are of Greek-Latin origin. The appearance of new word-building affixes in the modern Russian language is affected by active usage of the corresponding foreign morphemes in the journalists' word creation, in media texts and on the internet forums. Activization of foreign derivation elements in the media word creation is conditioned by sociocultural factors. Advertisement and mass media encourage the trend of using angloamericanisms and facilitate growth of word-building productivity of new affixes and new word-building models.

Unsupervised Learning of Word-Sequence Representations from Scratch via Convolutional Tensor Decomposition

OpenAIRE

Huang, Furong; Anandkumar, Animashree

2016-01-01

Unsupervised text embeddings extraction is crucial for text understanding in machine learning. Word2Vec and its variants have received substantial success in mapping words with similar syntactic or semantic meaning to vectors close to each other. However, extracting context-aware word-sequence embedding remains a challenging task. Training over large corpus is difficult as labels are difficult to get. More importantly, it is challenging for pre-trained models to obtain word-...

Pronunciation modelling of foreign words for Sepedi ASR

CSIR Research Space (South Africa)

Modipa, T

2010-11-01

Full Text Available , specifically: (1) using language-specific letter-to-sound rules to predict the pronunciation of each word (based on the language of the word) and mapping foreign phonemes to Sepedi phonemes using linguistically motivated mappings, (2) experimenting with data...

Romanian Words of Arabic Origin: Scientific and Technical Vocabulary

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Georgeta Rata

2016-10-01

Full Text Available There are 141 Romanian words of Arabic origin acquired either directly from Arabic or else indirectly by passing from Arabic into other languages and then into Romanian. Most entered one or more of the Romance languages before entering Romanian. To qualify for this list, a word must be reported in etymology dictionaries as having descended from Arabic. Words associated with the Islamic religion are omitted. Archaic and rare words are also omitted. Given the nature of the journal in which the paper is to be published, the author selected for analysis only about 126 terms belonging to the scientific and technical vocabulary: Adobe, alambic, albatros, alcalin, alchimie, alcool, alfalfa, algebră, algoritm, alidadă, alizarină, amalgam, ambră, anil, antimoniu, azimuth, azur, benjoin, bezoar, bor, cafea, calibre, camfor, carat, carciofoi, caric, cârmâz, carob, chimie, cifru, coton, curcuma, cuşcuş, erg, falafel, fanfară, felucă, fenec, gazelă, gerbil, girafă, halva, hamada, humus, iasomie, jar, julep, kaliu, lac, lămâie, lazurit, liliac, lime, marcasit, masicot, mizenă, muson, nadir, natriu, papagal, rachetă, realgar, sabkha, safari, şah, sandarac, şaorma, şerbet, sirop, sodium, şofran, sorbet, spanac, sumac, tabac, tahân, taifun, talc, tamarin(d, tangerină, tar, tară, tarhon, tarif, tasă, ţechin, ton, varan, zahăr, zenith, zero, zircon, etc. Some of them are obsolescent, but a large number are in everyday use and have been so well assimilated into Romanian that they have produced other words through derivation and composition, or they have acquired new meanings.

Learning word order at birth: A NIRS study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Silvia Benavides-Varela

2017-06-01

Full Text Available In language, the relative order of words in sentences carries important grammatical functions. However, the developmental origins and the neural correlates of the ability to track word order are to date poorly understood. The current study therefore investigates the origins of infants’ ability to learn about the sequential order of words, using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS with newborn infants. We have conducted two experiments: one in which a word order change was implemented in 4-word sequences recorded with a list intonation (as if each word was a separate item in a list; list prosody condition, Experiment 1 and one in which the same 4-word sequences were recorded with a well-formed utterance-level prosodic contour (utterance prosody condition, Experiment 2. We found that newborns could detect the violation of the word order in the list prosody condition, but not in the utterance prosody condition. These results suggest that while newborns are already sensitive to word order in linguistic sequences, prosody appears to be a stronger cue than word order for the identification of linguistic units at birth.

Scaling laws and fluctuations in the statistics of word frequencies

Science.gov (United States)

Gerlach, Martin; Altmann, Eduardo G.

2014-11-01

In this paper, we combine statistical analysis of written texts and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. The average vocabulary of an ensemble of fixed-length texts is known to scale sublinearly with the total number of words (Heaps’ law). Analyzing the fluctuations around this average in three large databases (Google-ngram, English Wikipedia, and a collection of scientific articles), we find that the standard deviation scales linearly with the average (Taylor's law), in contrast to the prediction of decaying fluctuations obtained using simple sampling arguments. We explain both scaling laws (Heaps’ and Taylor) by modeling the usage of words using a Poisson process with a fat-tailed distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) and topic-dependent frequencies of individual words (as in topic models). Considering topical variations lead to quenched averages, turn the vocabulary size a non-self-averaging quantity, and explain the empirical observations. For the numerous practical applications relying on estimations of vocabulary size, our results show that uncertainties remain large even for long texts. We show how to account for these uncertainties in measurements of lexical richness of texts with different lengths.

Do handwritten words magnify lexical effects in visual word recognition?

Science.gov (United States)

Perea, Manuel; Gil-López, Cristina; Beléndez, Victoria; Carreiras, Manuel

2016-01-01

An examination of how the word recognition system is able to process handwritten words is fundamental to formulate a comprehensive model of visual word recognition. Previous research has revealed that the magnitude of lexical effects (e.g., the word-frequency effect) is greater with handwritten words than with printed words. In the present lexical decision experiments, we examined whether the quality of handwritten words moderates the recruitment of top-down feedback, as reflected in word-frequency effects. Results showed a reading cost for difficult-to-read and easy-to-read handwritten words relative to printed words. But the critical finding was that difficult-to-read handwritten words, but not easy-to-read handwritten words, showed a greater word-frequency effect than printed words. Therefore, the inherent physical variability of handwritten words does not necessarily boost the magnitude of lexical effects.

Word Sense Disambiguation Based on Large Scale Polish CLARIN Heterogeneous Lexical Resources

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Paweł Kędzia

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Word Sense Disambiguation Based on Large Scale Polish CLARIN Heterogeneous Lexical Resources Lexical resources can be applied in many different Natural Language Engineering tasks, but the most fundamental task is the recognition of word senses used in text contexts. The problem is difficult, not yet fully solved and different lexical resources provided varied support for it. Polish CLARIN lexical semantic resources are based on the plWordNet — a very large wordnet for Polish — as a central structure which is a basis for linking together several resources of different types. In this paper, several Word Sense Disambiguation (henceforth WSD methods developed for Polish that utilise plWordNet are discussed. Textual sense descriptions in the traditional lexicon can be compared with text contexts using Lesk’s algorithm in order to find best matching senses. In the case of a wordnet, lexico-semantic relations provide the main description of word senses. Thus, first, we adapted and applied to Polish a WSD method based on the Page Rank. According to it, text words are mapped on their senses in the plWordNet graph and Page Rank algorithm is run to find senses with the highest scores. The method presents results lower but comparable to those reported for English. The error analysis showed that the main problems are: fine grained sense distinctions in plWordNet and limited number of connections between words of different parts of speech. In the second approach plWordNet expanded with the mapping onto the SUMO ontology concepts was used. Two scenarios for WSD were investigated: two step disambiguation and disambiguation based on combined networks of plWordNet and SUMO. In the former scenario, words are first assigned SUMO concepts and next plWordNet senses are disambiguated. In latter, plWordNet and SUMO are combined in one large network used next for the disambiguation of senses. The additional knowledge sources used in WSD improved the performance

Connected text reading and differences in text reading fluency in adult readers

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Wallot, S.; Hollis, G.; Rooij, M. de

2013-01-01

The process of connected text reading has received very little attention in contemporary cognitive psychology. This lack of attention is in parts due to a research tradition that emphasizes the role of basic lexical constituents, which can be studied in isolated words or sentences. However, this

Flooding Vocabulary Gaps to Accelerate Word Learning

Science.gov (United States)

Brabham, Edna; Buskist, Connie; Henderson, Shannon Coman; Paleologos, Timon; Baugh, Nikki

2012-01-01

Students entering school with limited vocabularies are at a disadvantage compared to classmates with robust knowledge of words and meanings. Teaching a few unrelated words at a time is insufficient for catching these students up with peers and preparing them to comprehend texts they will encounter across the grades. This article presents…

Word of mouth komunikacija

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Žnideršić-Kovač Ružica

2009-01-01

Full Text Available Consumers' buying decision is very complex multistep process in which a lot of factors have significant impact. Traditional approach to the problem of communication between a company and its consumers, implies usage of marketing mix instruments, mostly promotion mix, in order to achieve positive purchase decision. Formal communication between company and consumers is dominant comparing to informal communication, and even in marketing literature there is not enough attention paid to this type of communication such as Word of Mouth. Numerous of research shows that consumers emphasize crucial impact of Word of Mouth on their buying decision. .

THE STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF AUTHENTIC TEXTS-BASED TRANSLATION

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rusiana .

2017-12-01

Full Text Available Translation requires lots of practice. As it is generally known, authentic texts provide fruitful experience for students to translate either Indonesian-English or vice versa. Authentic texts give many real uses of language in varied meaningful contexts The texts used were advertisement, abstract, local stories, tourist attraction, community service and project for money. This research is aimed at investigating whether the use of authentic texts benefits the students and describing the students’ perceptions toward the use of authentic texts in Translation class. It is a qualitative research. Questionnaires were used to obtain the students’ perceptions on the use of authentic texts in translation. The findings show that authentic texts-based translation benefits students in experiencing better translation. Advertisement was considered to be the most relevant text. On the contrary, they find it difficult to cope with authentic texts particularly dealing with words/terms/vocabulary, meanings, culture, and grammar. The recommendations are that the students have to be exposed to many authentic texts of varied topics in both English and Indonesian in order that they understand both the SL and TL well. For further researchers, it would be possible to research on the influence of authentic texts based translation on the students’ translation skill.

How Many Words Is a Picture Worth? Integrating Visual Literacy in Language Learning with Photographs

Science.gov (United States)

Baker, Lottie

2015-01-01

Cognitive research has shown that the human brain processes images quicker than it processes words, and images are more likely than text to remain in long-term memory. With the expansion of technology that allows people from all walks of life to create and share photographs with a few clicks, the world seems to value visual media more than ever…

Computer-Aided Qualitative Data Analysis with Word

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bruno Nideröst

2002-05-01

Full Text Available Despite some fragmentary references in the literature about qualitative methods, it is fairly unknown that Word can be successfully used for computer-aided Qualitative Data Analyses (QDA. Based on several Word standard operations, elementary QDA functions such as sorting data, code-and-retrieve and frequency counts can be realized. Word is particularly interesting for those users who wish to have first experiences with computer-aided analysis before investing time and money in a specialized QDA Program. The well-known standard software could also be an option for those qualitative researchers who usually work with word processing but have certain reservations towards computer-aided analysis. The following article deals with the most important requirements and options of Word for computer-aided QDA. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0202225

Chinese Unknown Word Recognition for PCFG-LA Parsing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Qiuping Huang

2014-01-01

Full Text Available This paper investigates the recognition of unknown words in Chinese parsing. Two methods are proposed to handle this problem. One is the modification of a character-based model. We model the emission probability of an unknown word using the first and last characters in the word. It aims to reduce the POS tag ambiguities of unknown words to improve the parsing performance. In addition, a novel method, using graph-based semisupervised learning (SSL, is proposed to improve the syntax parsing of unknown words. Its goal is to discover additional lexical knowledge from a large amount of unlabeled data to help the syntax parsing. The method is mainly to propagate lexical emission probabilities to unknown words by building the similarity graphs over the words of labeled and unlabeled data. The derived distributions are incorporated into the parsing process. The proposed methods are effective in dealing with the unknown words to improve the parsing. Empirical results for Penn Chinese Treebank and TCT Treebank revealed its effectiveness.

The Activation of Embedded Words in Spoken Word Recognition.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Xujin; Samuel, Arthur G

2015-01-01

The current study investigated how listeners understand English words that have shorter words embedded in them. A series of auditory-auditory priming experiments assessed the activation of six types of embedded words (2 embedded positions × 3 embedded proportions) under different listening conditions. Facilitation of lexical decision responses to targets (e.g., pig) associated with words embedded in primes (e.g., hamster ) indexed activation of the embedded words (e.g., ham ). When the listening conditions were optimal, isolated embedded words (e.g., ham ) primed their targets in all six conditions (Experiment 1a). Within carrier words (e.g., hamster ), the same set of embedded words produced priming only when they were at the beginning or comprised a large proportion of the carrier word (Experiment 1b). When the listening conditions were made suboptimal by expanding or compressing the primes, significant priming was found for isolated embedded words (Experiment 2a), but no priming was produced when the carrier words were compressed/expanded (Experiment 2b). Similarly, priming was eliminated when the carrier words were presented with one segment replaced by noise (Experiment 3). When cognitive load was imposed, priming for embedded words was again found when they were presented in isolation (Experiment 4a), but not when they were embedded in the carrier words (Experiment 4b). The results suggest that both embedded position and proportion play important roles in the activation of embedded words, but that such activation only occurs under unusually good listening conditions.

WORD LEVEL DISCRIMINATIVE TRAINING FOR HANDWRITTEN WORD RECOGNITION

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chen, W.; Gader, P.

2004-01-01

Word level training refers to the process of learning the parameters of a word recognition system based on word level criteria functions. Previously, researchers trained lexicon­driven handwritten word recognition systems at the character level individually. These systems generally use statistical

A text analysis of the poems of Sylvia Plath.

Science.gov (United States)

Lester, David; McSwain, Stephanie

2011-08-01

Changes in the words used in the poems of Sylvia Plath were examined using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, a computer program for analyzing the content of texts. Major changes in the content of her poems were observed over the course of Plath's career, as well as in the final year of her life. As the time of her suicide came closer, words expressing positive emotions became more frequent, while words concerned with causation and insight became less frequent.

Effects of music on memory for text.

Science.gov (United States)

Purnell-Webb, Patricia; Speelman, Craig P

2008-06-01

Previous research has suggested that the use of song can facilitate recall of text. This study examined the effect of repetition of a melody across verses, familiarity with the melody, rhythm, and other structural processing hypotheses to explain this phenomenon. Two experiments were conducted, each with 100 participants recruited from undergraduate Psychology programs (44 men, 156 women, M age = 28.5 yr., SD = 9.4). In Exp. 1, participants learned a four-verse ballad in one of five encoding conditions (familiar melody, unfamiliar melody, unknown rhythm, known rhythm, and spoken). Exp. 2 assessed the effect of familiarity in rhythm-only conditions and of pre-exposure with a previously unfamiliar melody. Measures taken were number of verbatim words recalled and number of lines produced with correct syllabic structure. Analysis indicated that rhythm, with or without musical accompaniment, can facilitate recall of text, suggesting that rhythm may provide a schematic frame to which text can be attached. Similarly, familiarity with the rhythm or melody facilitated recall. Findings are discussed in terms of integration and dual-processing theories.

An Algorithm for Morphological Segmentation of Esperanto Words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Guinard Theresa

2016-04-01

Full Text Available Morphological analysis (finding the component morphemes of a word and tagging morphemes with part-of-speech information is a useful preprocessing step in many natural language processing applications, especially for synthetic languages. Compound words from the constructed language Esperanto are formed by straightforward agglutination, but for many words, there is more than one possible sequence of component morphemes. However, one segmentation is usually more semantically probable than the others. This paper presents a modified n-gram Markov model that finds the most probable segmentation of any Esperanto word, where the model’s states represent morpheme part-of-speech and semantic classes. The overall segmentation accuracy was over 98% for a set of presegmented dictionary words.

Interactions between Digital Geometry and Combinatorics on Words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Srečko Brlek

2011-08-01

Full Text Available We review some recent results in digital geometry obtained by using a combinatorics on words approach to discrete geometry. Motivated on the one hand by the well-known theory of Sturmian words which model conveniently discrete lines in the plane, and on the other hand by the development of digital geometry, this study reveals strong links between the two fields. Discrete figures are identified with polyominoes encoded by words. The combinatorial tools lead to elegant descriptions of geometrical features and efficient algorithms. Among these, radix-trees are useful for efficiently detecting path intersection, Lyndon and Christoffel words appear as the main tools for describing digital convexity; equations on words allow to better understand tilings by translations.

The x-word and its usage : Taboo words and swearwords in general, and x-words in newspapers

OpenAIRE

Lindahl, Katarina

2008-01-01

All languages have words that are considered taboo – words that are not supposed to be said or used. Taboo words, or swearwords, can be used in many different ways and they can have different meanings depending on what context they appear in. Another aspect of taboo words is the euphemisms that are used in order to avoid obscene speech. This paper will focus on x-words, words like the f-word or the c-word, which replace the words fuck or cunt, but as the study will show they also have other m...

Mojibake - The rehearsal of word fragments in verbal recall.

Science.gov (United States)

Lange-Küttner, Christiane; Sykorova, Eva

2015-01-01

Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the 'grain size' of word units (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). In the current study, a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly remembered word structure. The amount of letters in the correct letter sequence as per cent of word length was calculated, disregarding missing or added letters. A forced rehearsal was tested by repeating each memory list four times. We tested low frequency (LF) English words versus geographical (UK) town names to control for content. We also tested unfamiliar international (INT) non-words and names of international (INT) European towns to control for familiarity. An immediate versus distributed repetition was tested with a between-subject design. Participants responded with word fragments in their written recall especially when they had to remember unfamiliar words. While memory of whole words was sensitive to content, presentation distribution and individual sex and language differences, recall of word fragments was not. There was no trade-off between memory of word fragments with whole word recall during the repetition, instead also word fragments significantly increased. Moreover, while whole word responses correlated with each other during repetition, and word fragment responses correlated with each other during repetition, these two types of word recall responses were not correlated with each other. Thus there may be a lower layer consisting of free, sparse word fragments and an upper layer that consists of language-specific, orthographically and semantically constrained words.

Contextual diversity facilitates learning new words in the classroom.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Eva Rosa

Full Text Available In the field of word recognition and reading, it is commonly assumed that frequently repeated words create more accessible memory traces than infrequently repeated words, thus capturing the word-frequency effect. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that a seemingly related factor, contextual diversity (defined as the number of different contexts [e.g., films] in which a word appears, is a better predictor than word-frequency in word recognition and sentence reading experiments. Recent research has shown that contextual diversity plays an important role when learning new words in a laboratory setting with adult readers. In the current experiment, we directly manipulated contextual diversity in a very ecological scenario: at school, when Grade 3 children were learning words in the classroom. The new words appeared in different contexts/topics (high-contextual diversity or only in one of them (low-contextual diversity. Results showed that words encountered in different contexts were learned and remembered more effectively than those presented in redundant contexts. We discuss the practical (educational [e.g., curriculum design] and theoretical (models of word recognition implications of these findings.

The Activation of Embedded Words in Spoken Word Recognition

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Xujin; Samuel, Arthur G.

2015-01-01

The current study investigated how listeners understand English words that have shorter words embedded in them. A series of auditory-auditory priming experiments assessed the activation of six types of embedded words (2 embedded positions × 3 embedded proportions) under different listening conditions. Facilitation of lexical decision responses to targets (e.g., pig) associated with words embedded in primes (e.g., hamster) indexed activation of the embedded words (e.g., ham). When the listening conditions were optimal, isolated embedded words (e.g., ham) primed their targets in all six conditions (Experiment 1a). Within carrier words (e.g., hamster), the same set of embedded words produced priming only when they were at the beginning or comprised a large proportion of the carrier word (Experiment 1b). When the listening conditions were made suboptimal by expanding or compressing the primes, significant priming was found for isolated embedded words (Experiment 2a), but no priming was produced when the carrier words were compressed/expanded (Experiment 2b). Similarly, priming was eliminated when the carrier words were presented with one segment replaced by noise (Experiment 3). When cognitive load was imposed, priming for embedded words was again found when they were presented in isolation (Experiment 4a), but not when they were embedded in the carrier words (Experiment 4b). The results suggest that both embedded position and proportion play important roles in the activation of embedded words, but that such activation only occurs under unusually good listening conditions. PMID:25593407

Word selection affects perceptions of synthetic biology

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tonidandel Scott

2011-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract Members of the synthetic biology community have discussed the significance of word selection when describing synthetic biology to the general public. In particular, many leaders proposed the word "create" was laden with negative connotations. We found that word choice and framing does affect public perception of synthetic biology. In a controlled experiment, participants perceived synthetic biology more negatively when "create" was used to describe the field compared to "construct" (p = 0.008. Contrary to popular opinion among synthetic biologists, however, low religiosity individuals were more influenced negatively by the framing manipulation than high religiosity people. Our results suggest that synthetic biologists directly influence public perception of their field through avoidance of the word "create".

Word posets, with applications to Coxeter groups

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Matthew J. Samuel

2011-08-01

Full Text Available We discuss the theory of certain partially ordered sets that capture the structure of commutation classes of words in monoids. As a first application, it follows readily that counting words in commutation classes is #P-complete. We then apply the partially ordered sets to Coxeter groups. Some results are a proof that enumerating the reduced words of elements of Coxeter groups is #P-complete, a recursive formula for computing the number of commutation classes of reduced words, as well as stronger bounds on the maximum number of commutation classes than were previously known. This also allows us to improve the known bounds on the number of primitive sorting networks.

Some words on Word

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Janssen, Maarten; Visser, A.

In many disciplines, the notion of a word is of central importance. For instance, morphology studies le mot comme tel, pris isol´ement (Mel’ˇcuk, 1993 [74]). In the philosophy of language the word was often considered to be the primary bearer of meaning. Lexicography has as its fundamental role

Word Similarity from Dictionaries: Inferring Fuzzy Measures from Fuzzy Graphs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vicenc Torra

2008-01-01

Full Text Available WORD SIMILARITY FROM DICTIONARIES: INFERRING FUZZY MEASURES FROM FUZZY GRAPHS The computation of similarities between words is a basic element of information retrieval systems, when retrieval is not solely based on word matching. In this work we consider a measure between words based on dictionaries. This is achieved assuming that a dictionary is formalized as a fuzzy graph. We show that the approach permits to compute measures not only for pairs of words but for sets of them.

SUBTLEX- AL: Albanian word frequencies based on film subtitles

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dr.Sc. Rrezarta Avdyli

2013-06-01

Full Text Available Recently several studies have shown that word frequency estimation based on subtitle files explains better the variance in word recognition performance than traditional words frequency estimates did. The present study aims to show this frequency estimate in Albanian from more than 2M words coming from film subtitles. Our results show high correlation between the RT from a LD study (120 stimuli and the SUBTLEX- AL, as well as, high correlation between this and the unique existing frequency list of a hundred more frequent Albanian words. These findings suggest that SUBTLEX-AL it is good frequency estimation, furthermore, this is the first database of frequency estimation in Albanian larger than 100 words.

WORD FORMATION ON DRAGON NEST CHAT LANGUAGE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Shavitri Cecillia Harsono

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Word formation is creation of new words, which sometimes changes a word’s meaning. Words can be formed from multi word phrases as well. In many cases vocabularies in language are formed from combination of words (Haspelmath 2010: 102. Word formation does not only involve changing physical form of the word itself, but also changing the meaning of said word. There are also instances where the physical form retain its original form while the meaning changes. The phenomenon is called semantic change (Stockwell-Minkova 2001:149. In this thesis the research proposed that the said phenomenon occur in virtual environment, such as in MMORPG. Multiplayer online games that feature fantasy setting virtual environment. For the purpose of this research, Dragon Nest South East Asia server was chosen as data source. The samples are taken from players perusing [World] communication channel. The result of the data analysis has shown that the phenomenon of word formation could occur in a virtual environment of MMORPG, specifcally in Dragon Nest SEA. There are two word formation processes found: processes that involve physical changes and processes that do not involve physical changes but rather innate meaning. It is done by both processing daily language vocabulary both physically and changing its innate meaning to create new words that suits the said virtual environment context. This fnding may influence future research on a fresh perspective and untilled feld.

Scaling laws and fluctuations in the statistics of word frequencies

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Gerlach, Martin; Altmann, Eduardo G

2014-01-01

In this paper, we combine statistical analysis of written texts and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. The average vocabulary of an ensemble of fixed-length texts is known to scale sublinearly with the total number of words (Heaps’ law). Analyzing the fluctuations around this average in three large databases (Google-ngram, English Wikipedia, and a collection of scientific articles), we find that the standard deviation scales linearly with the average (Taylor's law), in contrast to the prediction of decaying fluctuations obtained using simple sampling arguments. We explain both scaling laws (Heaps’ and Taylor) by modeling the usage of words using a Poisson process with a fat-tailed distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) and topic-dependent frequencies of individual words (as in topic models). Considering topical variations lead to quenched averages, turn the vocabulary size a non-self-averaging quantity, and explain the empirical observations. For the numerous practical applications relying on estimations of vocabulary size, our results show that uncertainties remain large even for long texts. We show how to account for these uncertainties in measurements of lexical richness of texts with different lengths. (paper)

Contextual Richness and Word Learning: Context Enhances Comprehension but Retrieval Enhances Retention

Science.gov (United States)

van den Broek, Gesa S. E.; Takashima, Atsuko; Segers, Eliane; Verhoeven, Ludo

2018-01-01

Learning new vocabulary from context typically requires multiple encounters during which word meaning can be retrieved from memory or inferred from context. We compared the effect of memory retrieval and context inferences on short- and long-term retention in three experiments. Participants studied novel words and then practiced the words either…

Verbal Reports of Proficient Readers In Coping With Unfamiliar Words

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kusumarasdyati Kusumarasdyati

2016-02-01

Full Text Available The present study reports the actual strategy use of good readers when they face hindrance in the form of unfamiliar words. Eight undergraduates majoring in English at Surabaya State University performed think-aloud while reading two texts to find out how they coped with such difficulties. The verbal protocol indicated that half of the participants mainly relied on a bilingual (English-Indonesian dictionary to attack unfamiliar words, and only one of them preferred to use a monolingual (English-English one. Two of them employed context cues to infer the meaning of the words, while one participant combined the use of context cues and a monolingual dictionary as the major strategy. All but one of the participants skipped some of lexical items whose meaning was unknown to them, especially when these words did not have a key contribution to the meaning of the whole text.

Understanding disciplinary vocabularies using a full-text enabled domain-independent term extraction approach.

Science.gov (United States)

Yan, Erjia; Williams, Jake; Chen, Zheng

2017-01-01

Publication metadata help deliver rich analyses of scholarly communication. However, research concepts and ideas are more effectively expressed through unstructured fields such as full texts. Thus, the goals of this paper are to employ a full-text enabled method to extract terms relevant to disciplinary vocabularies, and through them, to understand the relationships between disciplines. This paper uses an efficient, domain-independent term extraction method to extract disciplinary vocabularies from a large multidisciplinary corpus of PLoS ONE publications. It finds a power-law pattern in the frequency distributions of terms present in each discipline, indicating a semantic richness potentially sufficient for further study and advanced analysis. The salient relationships amongst these vocabularies become apparent in application of a principal component analysis. For example, Mathematics and Computer and Information Sciences were found to have similar vocabulary use patterns along with Engineering and Physics; while Chemistry and the Social Sciences were found to exhibit contrasting vocabulary use patterns along with the Earth Sciences and Chemistry. These results have implications to studies of scholarly communication as scholars attempt to identify the epistemological cultures of disciplines, and as a full text-based methodology could lead to machine learning applications in the automated classification of scholarly work according to disciplinary vocabularies.

Word Similarity From Dictionaries: Inferring Fuzzy Measures From Fuzzy Graphs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Torra

2008-01-01

Full Text Available The computation of similarities between words is a basic element of information retrieval systems, when retrieval is not solely based on word matching. In this work we consider a measure between words based on dictionaries. This is achieved assuming that a dictionary is formalized as a fuzzy graph. We show that the approach permits to compute measures not only for pairs of words but for sets of them.

Core Vocabulary: Its Morphological Content and Presence in Exemplar Texts

Science.gov (United States)

Hiebert, Elfrieda H.; Goodwin, Amanda P.; Cervetti, Gina N.

2018-01-01

This study addresses the distribution of words in texts at different points of schooling. The first aim was to identify a core vocabulary that accounts for the majority of the words in texts through the lens of morphological families. Results showed that 2,451 morphological families, averaging 4.61 members, make up the core vocabulary of school…

Finding words in a language that allows words without vowels.

Science.gov (United States)

El Aissati, Abder; McQueen, James M; Cutler, Anne

2012-07-01

Across many languages from unrelated families, spoken-word recognition is subject to a constraint whereby potential word candidates must contain a vowel. This constraint minimizes competition from embedded words (e.g., in English, disfavoring win in twin because t cannot be a word). However, the constraint would be counter-productive in certain languages that allow stand-alone vowelless open-class words. One such language is Berber (where t is indeed a word). Berber listeners here detected words affixed to nonsense contexts with or without vowels. Length effects seen in other languages replicated in Berber, but in contrast to prior findings, word detection was not hindered by vowelless contexts. When words can be vowelless, otherwise universal constraints disfavoring vowelless words do not feature in spoken-word recognition. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

WORD ORIGIN HELPS EXPAND LEARNERS’ VOCABULARY A VOCABULARY TEACHING APPROACH

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Li Jing

2012-12-01

Full Text Available Word origin (motivation deals with the connection between name and sense, explaining how a word originated. With the knowledge of how words are originated, learners can grasp a word easier and thus expand their vocabulary more quickly. The introduction to word origin (motivation by teachers can also help the learners gain interest in the process of learning and learn more about the cultural and historical background of the English-speaking countries. This paper tries to clarify this method of teaching from four aspects: onomatopoeia, word formation, cultural and historical background and cognitive linguistics.

Entity recognition from clinical texts via recurrent neural network.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Zengjian; Yang, Ming; Wang, Xiaolong; Chen, Qingcai; Tang, Buzhou; Wang, Zhe; Xu, Hua

2017-07-05

Entity recognition is one of the most primary steps for text analysis and has long attracted considerable attention from researchers. In the clinical domain, various types of entities, such as clinical entities and protected health information (PHI), widely exist in clinical texts. Recognizing these entities has become a hot topic in clinical natural language processing (NLP), and a large number of traditional machine learning methods, such as support vector machine and conditional random field, have been deployed to recognize entities from clinical texts in the past few years. In recent years, recurrent neural network (RNN), one of deep learning methods that has shown great potential on many problems including named entity recognition, also has been gradually used for entity recognition from clinical texts. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the performance of LSTM (long-short term memory), a representative variant of RNN, on clinical entity recognition and protected health information recognition. The LSTM model consists of three layers: input layer - generates representation of each word of a sentence; LSTM layer - outputs another word representation sequence that captures the context information of each word in this sentence; Inference layer - makes tagging decisions according to the output of LSTM layer, that is, outputting a label sequence. Experiments conducted on corpora of the 2010, 2012 and 2014 i2b2 NLP challenges show that LSTM achieves highest micro-average F1-scores of 85.81% on the 2010 i2b2 medical concept extraction, 92.29% on the 2012 i2b2 clinical event detection, and 94.37% on the 2014 i2b2 de-identification, which is considerably competitive with other state-of-the-art systems. LSTM that requires no hand-crafted feature has great potential on entity recognition from clinical texts. It outperforms traditional machine learning methods that suffer from fussy feature engineering. A possible future direction is how to integrate knowledge

Normative data for 148 Spanish emotional words in terms of attributions of humanity

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Armando Rodríguez-Pérez

2014-10-01

Full Text Available Research on outgroup infrahumanization is based on the subtle and not deliberate distinction of secondary emotions, an exclusively human emotion, and primary emotions, which are shared by animals and human beings. According to prior studies, people attribute more secondary emotions to the ingroup than to the outgroup which they deny or restrict the ability to experience them. This study presents normative measures for 148 emotional words viewed by Spanish people in seven dimensions related to humanity assessments. Two factors were revealed by the principal components analysis (PCA. The first component was loaded on dimensions that differentiate the emotions depending on the cognitive demands (cognition, moral quality and duration whereas the second one was loaded on their expressive profile (visibility, age at which they are acquired, universality and causal locus. These dimensions were analyzed in relation to desirability, familiarity and explicit humanity.

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.