Digital Commons Network^™

Computational Linguistics For Metadata Building: Aggregating Text Processing Technologies For Enhanced Image Access, Judith Klavans, Carolyn Sheffield, Eileen Abels, Joan E. Beaudoin, Laura Jenemann, Jimmy Lin, Tom Lippincott, Rebecca Passonneau, Tandeep Sidhu, Dagobert Soergel, Tae Yano

School of Information Sciences Faculty Research Publications

We present a system which applies text mining using computational linguistic techniques to automatically extract, categorize, disambiguate and filter metadata for image access. Candidate subject terms are identified through standard approaches; novel semantic categorization using machine learning and disambiguation using both WordNet and a domain specific thesaurus are applied. The resulting metadata can be manually edited by image catalogers or filtered by semi-automatic rules. We describe the implementation of this workbench created for, and evaluated by, image catalogers. We discuss the system's current functionality, developed under the Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building (CLiMB) research project. The CLiMB Toolkit has been …

Acoustic Correlates Of Fortis/Lenis In San Francisco Ozolotepec Zapotec, Anita J. Leander

Theses and Dissertations

Analyses of the Zapotec family of languages often divide consonants into categories of strong and weak consonants, more commonly known as fortis and lenis. These given categories usually correspond to voiceless and voiced, respectively. In San Francisco Ozolotepec Zapotec (SFOZ) and Santa Catarina Xanaguía Zapotec (SCXZ), prior analyses describe the fortis/lenis distinction in terms of duration, voicing, and articulatory force. This description parallels other impressionistic descriptions in Isthmus-Valley and Southern Zapotec variants. However, no study has objectively identified the acoustic patterns of the fortis/lenis contrast in SFOZ or in any Southern, Valley, or Isthmus Zapotec language. A previous instrumental study …

Metaphorical Singular Reference: The Role Of Enriched Composition In Reference Resolution, Anne L. Bezuidenhout

Faculty Publications

It is widely accepted that, in the course of interpreting a metaphorical utterance, both literal and metaphorical interpretations of the utterance are available to the interpreter, although there may be disagreement about the order in which these interpretations are accessed. I call this the dual availability assumption. I argue that it does not apply in cases of metaphorical singular reference. These are cases in which proper names, complex demonstratives or definite descriptions are used metaphorically; e.g., ‘That festering sore must go’, referring to a derelict house. We are forced to give up dual availability in these cases because a process …

An Examination Of The Tone System Of Fur And Its Function In Grammar, Georgianna Noel

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

This research into the tonal system of Fur and its grammatical functions began with several basic assumptions. These assumptions were based on the excellent prior research by Jakobi (1989), and Kutsch Lojenga and Waag(2000). These assumptions were: 1. Fur is a register tone language with two tones L and H. Contours on LH and HL are possible. 2. Tone makes lexical distinctions in Fur as exemplified by examples such as: 'desert' úrì 'sheep' úri 3. Tone also functions in the grammar of Fur. Tone is used to differentiate the nominative and locative forms of nouns and the attributive and predicate …

Verification And Implementation Of Language-Based Deception Indicators In Civil And Criminal Narratives, Joan Bachenko, Eileen Fitzpatrick, Michael Schonwetter

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Our goal is to use natural language processing to identify deceptive and non-deceptive passages in transcribed narratives. We begin by motivating an analysis of language-based deception that relies on specific linguistic indicators to discover deceptive statements. The indicator tags are assigned to a document using a mix of automated and manual methods. Once the tags are assigned, an interpreter automatically discriminates between deceptive and truthful statements based on tag densities. The texts used in our study come entirely from "real world" sources-criminal statements, police interrogations and legal testimony. The corpus was hand-tagged for the truth value of all propositions that …

Production Of Bangla Stops By Native English Speakers Learning Bangla: An Acoustic Analysis, Dustin D. Miller

Theses and Dissertations

Differences in the phonetic and phonological systems of Bangla and English result in negative transfer in the Bangla stop productions of native English speakers. The phonetic realizations of Voice and Aspiration and their interactions with each other are the key factors in this. A production study was carried out focusing on sixteen of the twenty Bangla stops that are distinguished by a four-way voice/aspiration contrast at four different places of articulation, providing a contrastive acoustic analysis of the pronunciation of L1 and L2 adult speakers. Data containing these stops in an intervocalic environment in word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions was …

Semantic Role Labeling With Analogical Modeling, Warren C. Casbeer

Theses and Dissertations

Semantic role labeling has become a popular natural language processing task in recent years. A number of conferences have addressed this task for the English language and many different approaches have been applied to the task. In particular, some have used a memory-based learning approach. This thesis further develops the memory-based learning approach to semantic role labeling through the use of analogical modeling of language. Data for this task were taken from a previous conference (CoNLL-2005) so that a direct comparison could be made with other algorithms that attempted to solve this task. It will be shown here that the …

Religious Networks As A Sociolinguistic Factor: The Case Of Cardston, Benjamin Joseph Chatterton

Theses and Dissertations

Religious affiliation and its inherent membership in an associated social network as a sociolinguistic factor is examined in the community of Latter-day Saints (LDS) in Cardston, Alberta. Building on Meechan's 1998 findings that the LDS community in the area used Canadian Raising in a different set of phonotactic environments than the surrounding non-LDS English speakers, the study aims to determine if the LDS community uses other Canadian speech features differently or less frequently and if any Utah features (defined as Utah English in the literature, being the language of LDS English speakers in Utah) have continued from the settling of …

The Effects Of Second Language Status On The Comprehension And Perception Of Direct And Indirect Speech In Written Teacher Feedback, Rachel E. Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores how native and nonnative English speakers understand and perceive directness types in written teacher feedback (WTF). Currently research suggests that indirect speech in WTF will encourage students to think and maintain politeness between teacher and student (Benkendorf, 2001; Riley, 2003; Thonus, 1999; Vassileva, 2000). However, research also indicates that indirect speech may be more difficult to interpret than direct speech (Champagne, 2001; Holtgraves, 1999), which suggests that indirect speech used in WTF may be difficult for students to interpret and use to improve their compositions (Ferris, 2007; Hyland & Hyland, 2001). This difficulty may be even more …

The Acoustic Correlates Of Atr Harmony In Seven- And Nine-Vowel African Languages: A Phonetic Inquiry Into Phonological Structure, Coleen Grace Anderson Starwalt

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study compares eleven Niger-Congo languages with [ATR] harmony and seeks to determine especially whether the acoustic properties of the "voice quality" differences associated with [ATR] in nine-vowel languages, such as Akan, are present or absent in all, some or none of the seven-vowel languages. Of particular interest is the nature of the height 2 and 3 vowels of the nine- and degree 2 vowels of seven-vowel systems. First, this study corroborates previous work on nine-vowel systems by demonstrating that height 2 vowels [-ATR] [? ?] frequently overlap with height 3 vowels [+ATR] [e o]. Next, it considers the question …

Just For The Hell Of It: A Comparison Of Two Taboo-Term Constructions, J. Hoeksema, Donna Jo Napoli

Linguistics Faculty Works

The two English constructions exemplified in Let's get the hell out of here (type G) and They beat the hell out of him (type B) differ both syntactically and semantically, but in both the taboo expression has the force of an intensifier. History (through a corpus investigation) reveals that the B-construction started as a literal exorcism (beat the devil out of someone), where the hell substituted for the devil, and semantic bleaching ultimately made the literal sense give way to simple emphasis, with any taboo term jumping in. The G-construction may have developed simultaneously, always as an intensifier--or, perhaps, later, …

Questions In American Sign Language: A Quantitative Analysis Of Raised And Lowered Eyebrows, Traci Patricia Weast

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

Although much of linguistic information in American Sign Language (ASL) is conveyed through nonmanual signals, the majority of more than 40 years of research focuses on manual signs. As a result, we are just beginning to understand the role of the face, head, and upper body in signed languages, including eyebrow movement. While researchers generally agree that eyebrows play a role in questions of examined sign languages, they disagree whether upper face nonmanuals are syntactic or prosodic and intonational. Wilbur 2000, 2003 widens the debate to suggest a layered combination in the upper face, where eyebrows represent syntax, and other …

Kangri In Context: An Areal Perspective, Robert D. Eaton

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study is a grammatical description and analysis of the dialect of Pahari known as Kangri, spoken in and around Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, India. It presents data for Phonology, Tone, Stress, Morphology, and Syntax and includes feature comparisons with several of the related regional and high domain languages (Hindi, Punjabi, and Dogri), particularly at points where they differ. Special focus is given to issues involving stress assignment and tone. These are shown to be sensitive to different morphological categories, for which the framework of Lexical Phonology is useful in accounting. Various tense/aspect grammatical categories are also discussed, among which there …

What’S In A Name? How Toponyms Connect Language And Society Through Place, Lisa Radding

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This is a study of place, meaning, society, and language, all of which interact through names. Although names are an essential part of human language, they remain on the periphery of linguistic studies. This study situates names in linguistics through an analysis of the meaning in a toponym, or place name.

According to lexical theory words are arbitrary. Yet we bestow names based on how they sound or what they have already come to represent; names are not arbitrary. Furthermore, a name becomes opaque when we can no longer see through its form to understand its meaning. Then it picks …

Annotating An Arabic Learner Corpus For Error, Ghazi Abuhakema, Reem Faraj, Anna Feldman, Eileen Fitzpatrick

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper describes an ongoing project in which we are collecting a learner corpus of Arabic, developing a tagset for error annotation and performing Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA) on the data. We adapted the French Interlanguage Database FRIDA tagset (Granger, 2003a) to the data. We chose FRIDA in order to follow a known standard and to see whether the changes needed to move from a French to an Arabic tagset would give us a measure of the distance between the two languages with respect to learner difficulty. The current collection of texts, which is constantly growing, contains intermediate and advanced-level …

Biliteracy And Skills Transfer: Literacy Skills Transfer From Arabic To English Focusing On Lexical Access, Henry J. Hauser

Theses and Dissertations

This research was designed to gain understanding of literacy skills transfer from a first language involving a particular writing system to a second language which uses another, divergent writing system. The author has worked in adult literacy in an area of the Sahara desert where the people's first language is Arabic and the majority of adults were illiterate. The present research utilized this setting to study literacy skills transfer from Arabic to English. Specific questions addressed in the research were: what skills transfer from L1 to L2, at what point should instruction in L2 begin, and can lexical access be …

Mariama Khain Interviews Yema Janga About Kim Language, George Tucker Childs

The Kim and Bom Languages of Sierra Leone

Audio file of Mariama Khain interviewing Yema Janga about the Kim language, and inquiring why Kim is no longer spoken by the people.

On The Topic Of Pseudoclefts, Ileana Paul

French Studies Publications

This paper presents arguments in favor of a pseudocleft analysis of a certain class of sentences in Malagasy, despite the lack of an overt wh-element. It is shown that voice morphology on the verb creates an operator-variable relationship much like the one created by wh-movement in free relatives in English and other languages. The bulk of the paper argues in favor of an inversion analysis of specificational pseudoclefts in Malagasy: a predicate DP is fronted to a topic position from within a small clause constituent. Moreover, it is shown that the same inversion occurs in equative and specificational sentences in …

Sounds Of Chinese Korean: A Variationist Approach, Wenhua Jin

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations - Archive

This study approaches the understudied Chinese Korean from a variationist perspective, with an aim to capture the variation patterns and potential changes in the sounds of Chinese Korean. More specifically, three variables were examined: the voice onset time (VOT) of stop consonants and front rounded vowels /y/ and /ø/. To discern any variation and change in these variables, 35 native speakers of Chinese Korean were interviewed in three different styles and digitally recorded in the Korean community of Shenyang, China. Results of the analysis reveal the existence of a diachronic VOT shift and the "incrementation" of VOT change in the …

The Language Of The University: A Systemic Functional Analysis, Erin Gonzales

Linguistics & TESOL Theses - Archive

This study examines the negotiation of interpersonal meaning in the language of university administrators in their communications with students. The three texts in this study were written by the president of a large university to the student body and concern a controversy which arose on campus. The study uses Systemic Functional Grammar to examine how the language of the texts constructs interpersonal relationships between administration and students, as well as the extent to which such language changes when significant contextual issues become a factor. Specifically, in this study data analysis reveals that the language used changes in different contexts in …

Language Death Within The Atlantic Group Of West Africa, George Tucker Childs

Applied Linguistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article presents an overview of the less widely spoken languages of the Atlantic Group (Niger-Congo), as representing the most seriously threatened language group in West Africa. Study of this group indicates that language endangerment is real and widespread. The basis for this claim comes from the literature on these languages, from personal research on the Atlantic languages dating back to 1984, and from recent and ongoing fieldwork on several highly endangered languages of Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Impact Of Language Immersion Programs On Foreign Language, Jean-Paul Chaussé

Theses and Dissertations

Communicating with other nations in their native language is an important and necessary aspect of a successful United States’ foreign policy. Critical to this success is the ability of military personnel to communicate clearly when in contact with foreign nationals, whether in peace-time or war. The Air Force has made great strides in the past 10 years to improve its foreign language capability, particularly through its application of the Language and Area Studies Immersion (LASI) program. The LASI program has significantly improved the foreign language capability of the Air Force, specifically those with previous language scores in the mid-tier range. …

Manual For The Motivational Interviewing Skill Code (Misc), Paul Amrhein, William R. Miller, Theresa Moyers, Denise Ernst

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Over years of using MISC 1 we have learned much about which categories were redundant or unreliable, and also about which processes are most important to the effectiveness of MI. The MISC has also helped us to clarify the points at which skill acquisition in MI is more challenging.

Based on this experience, we have developed Version 2.0, which is intended to improve on the original MISC in reliability, efficiency, and relevance to training and clinical practice. A disadvantage of revising an instrument, of course, is that one must start over in demonstrating its reliability and validity. Although many strong …

An Evaluation Of Text Classification Methods For Literary Study, Bei Yu

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This article presents an empirical evaluation of text classification methods in literary domain. This study compared the performance of two popular algorithms, naı¨ve Bayes and support vector machines (SVMs) in two literary text classification tasks: the eroticism classification of Dickinson’s poems and the sentimentalism classification of chapters in early American novels. The algorithms were also combined with three text pre-processing tools, namely stemming, stopword removal, and statistical feature selection, to study the impact of these tools on the classifiers’ performance in the literary setting. Existing studies outside the literary domain indicated that SVMs are generally better than naı¨ve Bayes classifiers. …

Colonialism And Language, Tony Crowley

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Marxism And Language, Tony Crowley

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Nationalism And Language, Tony Crowley

Scripps Faculty Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Directionality In Predications On Text Mining, Gondy Leroy, Marcelo Fiszman, Thomas C. Rindflesch

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The number of publications in biomedicine is increasing enormously each year. To help researchers digest the information in these documents, text mining tools are being developed that present co-occurrence relations between concepts. Statistical measures are used to mine interesting subsets of relations. We demonstrate how directionality of these relations affects interestingness. Support and confidence, simple data mining statistics, are used as proxies for interestingness metrics. We first built a test bed of 126,404 directional relations extracted from biomedical abstracts, which we represent as graphs containing a central starting concept and 2 rings of associated relations. We manipulated directionality in four …

Teaching Reading To Adults Where English Is Their Second Language, Judith Ann Powell

Theses Digitization Project

This project sought to identify methods that will work best for Second Language (ESL) adults and identify ways in which ESL can be taught to help facilitate learning for the older adult over 40 years of age. This project identified some of the problems caused by the nature of the English language and the grammatical issues older ESL students face when attempting to learn to speak and read English.

Self-Perceived Personality Shift On Non-Native English Speakers, Yalin Lee

Theses Digitization Project

This qualitative study is conducted to investigate how language learners are socialized into the target speech comunity, and also, whether they perceive the shift in personality when using the target language to interact with different social groups in different social contexts. A two-month case study was done to inspect the language socialization process of 10 out of 14 NNES (non-native English speaking) students enrolled in Level Three Composition Class in IEP (Intensive English Program) at CSUSB in 2006 Summary. The data for this current study was collected through audio taping, interviews, and the journals of the student participants.