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Role Of Information Technology In Development Of Eritrean Language - ኣበርክቶ ቴክኖሎጂ ሓበሬታ ኣብ ምምዕባል ቋንቋታት ኤርትራ, Filmon Gebreyesus Ph.D

Symposium on Eritrean Literature

Information technology has been affecting us in every day of our lives, especially social media has been the main means of communication in our society. But, all the access to this current and ever-growing technology has always been limited to using it in English, Arab or other languages because our language didn’t come up to speed with the current technology.

Though there has been lots of efforts to develop Tigrigna or other languages application programs to help us use our language, there are still lots of gaps that could be filled to achieve the competence of our languages. In ...

Toward Linguistic Justice: Conceptual Schemes For Immigrants, Refugees, And Migrants, Zachary W. Taylor

Journal of Critical Thought and Praxis

This conceptual essay argues that many access and equity issues facing marginalized populations in higher education is owed to a postsecondary polyglossia, or, a penetrable, learned, set of unique language registers necessary for one to access and navigate institutions of higher education both inside and outside of their physical and metaphysical walls. Facilitating the transmission of this postsecondary polyglossia is Donald Davidson’s notion of the conceptual scheme, or, structures meant to interpret and transmit culture through language. Through Davidson and others, the postsecondary polyglossia is shown to permeate the totality of U.S. higher education, albeit inadvertently and through ...

The Walking Dead Genealogy: Unsubstantiated Criticisms Of Qualitative Data Analysis Software (Qdas) And The Failure To Put Them To Rest, Kristi Jackson, Trena Paulus, Nicholas H. Woolf

The Qualitative Report

The authors conduct an exposé on the deterministic denunciations of Qualitative Data Analysis Software (QDAS) and how citation errors keep these criticisms alive. They use a zombie metaphor to describe more than two decades of battling these seemingly mindless assessments of QDAS that keep coming –despite their decay – and simply will not die. Focusing exclusively on the criticism of separation/distancing, which alleges that the computer and the software interfere with the researcher’s familiarity with the data, the authors trace one current strand of this criticism through a literature genealogy. Three citation errors (half-truth, proxy, and hearsay) are identified ...

Reasoning With Pseudowords: How Properties Of Novel Verbal Stimuli Influence Item Difficulty And Linguistic-Group Score Differences On Cognitive Ability Assessments, Paul Agnello

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pseudowords (words that are not real but resemble real words in a language) have been used increasingly as a technique to reduce contamination due to construct-irrelevant variance in assessments of verbal fluid reasoning (Gf). However, despite pseudowords being researched heavily in other psychology sub-disciplines, they have received little attention in cognitive ability testing contexts. Thus, there has been an assumption that all pseudowords work equally and work equally well for all test-takers. The current research examined three objectives with the first being whether changes to the pseudoword properties of length and wordlikeness (how much a pseudoword resembles a typical or ...

Revisiting Lockhart: A Case For A Conditional Operator, Eric J. Tsai

All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents a case for a binary modal conditional operator compatible with both circumstantial and epistemic modal bases. Certain contexts involving might conditionals require might to take wide-scope over a conditional proposition. A restrictor-view analysis of conditionals is unable to derive both the intuitive meaning of the might conditional and the necessary conditional proposition without positing a covert circumstantial necessity modal. However, based on observations of the temporal orientation of conditionals, such a modal lacks independent motivation. On the other hand, a binary modal conditional operator not only provides the necessary conditional proposition but is also able to derive ...

Comparaison De Deux Critères De Rupture Thématique Pour L'Extraction D'Indices De Segmentation Et De Liage Dans Une Grande Collection De Textes., Yves Bestgen

Yves Bestgen

On The Classification Of Semantic Changes In Grammatical Metaphor, Bahram Kazemian, Chuhao Lu

Bahram Kazemian

“Listening With An Attitude”: The Role Of Attitude On Native And Non-Native Intergroup Communication, Aidah N. Aljuran

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

People tend to draw their own conclusions about similarities and differences between who they are and the “other.” Having perceptions of being similar to the in-group and being different from the out-group “satisfies psychological needs” (Robbins & Krueger, 2005). Based on this social perception, individuals show communication variations as a way of expressing their identities (Giles 1973). This study implements quantitative and qualitative methods in order to examine the attitude of native speakers (NSs), as well as the potential impact of these attitudes on their communication with non-native speakers (NNSs). The potential impact of NSs’ interactions on NNSs’ interactions was also ...

Preface: Scil 2018 Editors’ Note, Gaja Jarosz, Brendan O'Connor, Joe Pater

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

No abstract provided.

Statistical Learning Theory And Linguistic Typology: A Learnability Perspective On Ot’S Strict Domination, Émile Enguehard, Edward Flemming, Giorgio Magri

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This paper develops a learnability argument for strict domination by looking at the generalization error of learners trained on OT and HG target grammars. The argument is based on both a review of error bounds in the recent statistical learning literature and simulation results on realistic phonological test cases.

Detecting Language Impairments In Autism: A Computational Analysis Of Semi-Structured Conversations With Vector Semantics, Adam Goodkind, Michelle Lee, Gary E. Martin, Molly Losh, Klinton Bicknell

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Many of the most significant impairments faced by individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) relate to pragmatic (i.e. social) language. There is also evidence that pragmatic language differences may map to ASD-related genes. Therefore, quantifying the social-linguistic features of ASD has the potential to both improve clinical treatment and help identify gene-behavior relationships in ASD. Here, we apply vector semantics to transcripts of semi-structured interactions with children with both idiopathic and syndromic ASD. We find that children with ASD are less semantically similar to a gold standard derived from typically developing participants, and are more semantically variable. We show ...

Grammar Size And Quantitative Restrictions On Movement, Thomas Graf

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Recently is has been proved that every Minimalist grammar can be converted into a strongly equivalent single movement normal form such that every phrase moves at most once in every derivation. The normal form conversion greatly simplifies the formalism and reduces the complexity of movement dependencies, but it also runs the risk of greatly increasing the size of the grammar. I show that no such blow-up obtains with linguistically plausible grammars that respect common constraints on movement. This establishes not only the cost-free nature of this normal form for realistic grammars, but also that the known restrictions on movement greatly ...

Modeling The Decline In English Passivization, Liwen Hou, David Smith

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Evidence from the Hansard corpus shows that the passive voice in British English has declined in relative frequency over the last two centuries. We investigate which factors are predictive of whether transitive verb phrases are passivized. We show the increasing importance of the person-hierarchy effects observed by Bresnan et al. (2001), with increasing strength of the constraint against passivizing clauses with local agents, as well as the rising prevalence of such agents. Moreover, our ablation experiments on the Wall Street Journal and Hansard corpora provide support for the unmarked information structure of ‘given’ before ‘new’ noted by Halliday (1967).

Syntactic Category Learning As Iterative Prototype-Driven Clustering, Jordan Kodner

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

We lay out a model for minimally supervised syntactic category acquisition which combines concepts from standard NLP part-of-speech tagging applications with cognitively motivated distributional statistics. The model assumes a small set of seed words (Haghighi and Klein, 2006), an approach with motivation in (Pinker, 1984)’s semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, and repeatedly constructs hierarchical agglomerative clusterings over a growing lexicon. Clustering is performed on the basis of word-adjacent syntactic frames alone (Mintz, 2003) with no reference to word-internal features, which has been shown to yield qualitatively coherent POS clusters (Redington et al., 1998). A prototype-driven labeling process based on tree-distance yields ...

A Bidirectional Mapping Between English And Cnf-Based Reasoners, Steven Abney

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

If language is a transduction between sound and meaning, the target of semantic interpretation should be the meaning representation expected by general cognition. Automated reasoners provide the best available fully-explicit proxies for general cognition, and they commonly expect Clause Normal Form (CNF) as input. There is a well-known algorithm for converting from unrestricted predicate calculus to CNF, but it is not invertible, leaving us without a means to transduce CNF back to English. I present a solution, with possible repercussions for the overall framework of semantic interpretation.

Formal Restrictions On Multiple Tiers, Alena Aksenova, Sanket Deshmukh

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

In this paper, we use harmony systems with multiple feature spreadings as a litmus test for the possible configurations of items involved in certain dependence. The subregular language classes, and the class of tier-based strictly local (TSL) languages in particular, have shown themselves as a good fit for different aspects of natural language. It is also known that there are some patterns that cannot be captured by a single TSL grammar. However, no proposed limitations exist on tier alphabets of several cooperating TSL grammars. While theoretically possible relations among tier alphabets of several TSL grammars are containment, disjunction and intersection ...

Differentiating Phrase Structure Parsing And Memory Retrieval In The Brain, Shohini Bhattasali, John Hale, Christophe Pallier, Jonathan Brennan, Wen-Ming Luh, R. Nathan Spreng

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

On some level, human sentence comprehension must involve both memory retrieval and structural composition. This study differentiates these two processes using neuroimaging data collected during naturalistic listening. Retrieval is formalized in terms of "multiword expressions" while structure-building is formalized in terms of bottom-up parsing. The results most strongly implicate Anterior Temporal regions for structure-building and Precuneus Cortex for memory retrieval.

Modeling The Complexity And Descriptive Adequacy Of Construction Grammars, Jonathan Dunn

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

This paper uses the Minimum Description Length paradigm to model the complexity of CxGs (operationalized as the encoding size of a grammar) alongside their descriptive adequacy (operationalized as the encoding size of a corpus given a grammar). These two quantities are combined to measure the quality of potential CxGs against unannotated corpora, supporting discovery-device CxGs for English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. The results show (i) that these grammars provide significant generalizations as measured using compression and (ii) that more complex CxGs with access to multiple levels of representation provide greater generalizations than single-representation CxGs.

Decomposing Phonological Transformations In Serial Derivations, Andrew Lamont

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

While most phonological transformations have been shown to be subsequential, there are tonal processes that do not belong to any subregular class, thereby making it difficult to identify a tighter bound on the complexity of phonological processes than the regular languages. This paper argues that a tighter bound obtains from examining the way transformations are computed: when derived in serial, phonological processes can be decomposed into iterated subsequential maps.

Phonologically Informed Edit Distance Algorithms For Word Alignment With Low-Resource Languages, Richard T. Mccoy, Robert Frank

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

We present three methods for weighting edit distance algorithms based on linguistic information. These methods base their penalties on (i) phonological features, (ii) distributional character embeddings, or (iii) differences between cognate words. We also introduce a novel method for evaluating edit distance through the task of low-resource word alignment by using edit-distance neighbors in a high-resource pivot language to inform alignments from the low-resource language. At this task, the cognate-based scheme outperforms our other methods and the Levenshtein edit distance baseline, showing that NLP applications can benefit from information about cross-linguistic phonological patterns.