Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

From Sesame Street To Beyond: Multi-Domain Discourse Relation Classification With Pretrained Bert, Isaac R. Raff

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research efforts in transfer learning have gained massive popularity in recent years. Pretrained language models have demonstrated the most successful results in producing high quality neural networks capable of quality inference after training across domains via transfer learning. This study expands on the domain transfer introduced in \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} exploring neural methods for transfer learning of discourse parsing between a news source domain and a medical target domain. \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} specifically discuss transfer learning from news articles to PubMed medical journal articles. Experiments in transfer learning in the current work expand to include three domains: Wall Street Journal articles previously annotated with …

The International Academy Of Language And Culture: The Global (Pre)K-12 Charter School Network, Dree-El Simmons

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The International Academy of Language and Culture (IALC) is a charter school based on the original concept of charter schools by Ray Budde and Albert Shanker, as an academic environment dedicated and designed to improving the educational outcomes for its students through innovative pedagogy. Committed to American (and global) education reform, the IALC incorporates elements from higher education into the early childhood and adolescent settings. We accomplish this by utilizing an interdisciplinary approach in our language and culture-based program.

The IALC is a multilingual, full-immersion program. Food Studies (including culinary arts), the Arts, the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Martial Arts …

Linguistic Abstractions In Children’S Very Early Utterances, Qihui Xu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances; we use corpora to establish the development of multiword utterances and a probabilistic computational model to account for the quantitative change of early multiword utterances. We find that multiword utterances of different lengths appear early in acquisition and increase together, and the length growth pattern can be viewed as a probabilistic and dynamic process.

Chapter …

Towards Explaining Variation In Entrainment, Andreas Weise

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Entrainment refers to the tendency of human speakers to adapt to their interlocutors to become more similar to them. This affects various dimensions and occurs in many contexts, allowing for rich applications in human-computer interaction. However, it is not exhibited by every speaker in every conversation but varies widely across features, speakers, and contexts, hindering broad application. This variation, whose guiding principles are poorly understood even after decades of entrainment research, is the subject of this thesis. We begin with a comprehensive literature review that serves as the foundation of our own work and provides a reference to guide future …

Retrieval Practice Promotes Learning Of Turkish As A Foreign Language: A Computer-Assisted Language Learning Study, Maya C. Rose

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Adults generally find it difficult to learn a new language, yet exhibit remarkable individual differences in outcomes. Variation in second language (L2) learning is associated with input conditions (Morgan-Short et al., 2010) as well as learners’ aptitude (Dörnyei, 2005). Recent work has demonstrated benefits of retrieval practice in promoting L2 learning of grammatical patterns and vocabulary in both artificial and natural languages (Hopman & MacDonald, 2018; Keppenne et al., 2021). With that said, when retrieval practice is based on oral recall as opposed to a recognition test, it confounds potential benefits of repeated testing (Rowland, 2014) with those associated with …

Examining The Linguistic Ideology "Throaty Sounds Are Bad For Performers": The History Of Negative Attitudes Towards Glottal Stops And Laryngealization In English, Dayle M. Towarnicky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes explicit metadiscourse (Johnstone et al 2006) on throaty sounds, primarily focused on glottal segments and non-modal constricted voice quality in English. Authors contributing to this metadiscourse are argued to be an offshoot of the speech chain network which valorized and circulated the English accent known as RP or Received Pronunciation, studied by Agha (2003). The evaluated texts center on English-speaking elocution, singing training, voice, speech, and voice care. The analysis shows glottal and guttural articulations are framed negatively and often discouraged by appeals to both health and aesthetics. Many authors in this performance speech chain network …

The Relative Cost Of Codeswitching: An Electrophysiological Study Contrasting Language Switching Versus Lexical Predictability, Iris Strangmann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Neurophysiological sentence processing studies are inconsistent about the additional costs that language switching within sentences (i.e., codeswitching) may bring about (cf. Valdés Kroff et al., 2020; Yacovone et al., 2021). There is discussion about whether there are, in fact, additional costs and, if so, about the origins of those costs, since some findings are consistent with effortful processing when comprehending single-language (not switched) words observed in monolingual studies. Specifically, studies are divided on whether codeswitched words are more difficult to lexically access than single-language equivalents of similar semantic predictability, as indexed by an increased N400 effect. The same studies, however, …

La Voz De Los Sures: Etnografía Glotopolítica Del Activismo Comunitario, Lara Maria Alonso Pinero

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The relevance of the strategic use of language and communication in the consolidation and action of a political subject has not yet been sufficiently analyzed. Drawing on a glottopolitical perspective, this research project aims to incorporate the object of study of the political dimension of voice and point out the importance of mastering linguistic and discursive practices in community activism. Based on the case of the Latino community of Los Sures in Brooklyn, NY, in this dissertation I embark on a journey through the communicative practices through which a group of people begins to conceive of itself as a community, …

Predicting Stress In Russian Using Modern Machine-Learning Tools, John Schriner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the Russian language, stress on a word is determined via often complex patterns and rules. In this paper, after examining nearly a century of research in stress rules and methods in Russian, we turn to see if modern machine learning tools can aid in predicting stress. Using A.A. Zaliznyak’s dictionary grammar and over 300,000 word forms, we derived stress codes to aid in predicting which syllable primary stress falls on. We trained an LSTM neural network on the data and conducted eight experiments with added features such as lemma, part of speech, and morphology. While the model performed better …

Expanding The Pronominal Account Of Tense: A Reexamination Of The Double Access Reading In English, Brynne E. Wilkinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis I will argue that the double access reading in English is not limited to the present-under-past construction but is instead available in the present-under-future construction as well. Unlike the traditional present-under-past construction, however, the double access reading is not the only available reading in the present-under-future construction. I will present data that shows that any context which licenses the double access reading also necessarily licenses a simultaneous reading as a result of a Sequence of Tense rule. Additional data will show that, when interpreted de re, the embedded present tense in the present-under-future construction is constrained …

Methods In Reverse Transliteration Of English Loanwords In Japanese, Yuying Ren

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We introduce the problem of gairaigo hanran ‘loanwords flood’in Japanese and the difficulties of understanding the loanwords by English speakers who also communicate in Japanese and the necessity of converting the loanwords written in katakana back to English, the reverse transliteration. We analyze the issues for this task and propose using computational methods to solve them. We create our own katakana-English loanwords dictionary as the data and use three computational models --- pair n-gram, LSTM and transformer models to work on this reverse transliteration task. We also modify the three models with an English lexicon filter. The six models are …

Covert Determiners In Appalachian English Narrative Declarative Sentences, William Oliver

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I explore the syntax and semantics of covert determiners (Ds) in matrix subject determiner phrases (DPs) with definite specific interpretations. To conduct my investigation, I used the Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English (AAPCAppE), a million-word Penn Treebank corpus, and the software CorpusSearch, a Java program that searches Penn Treebank corpora. My research shows that Appalachian English contains a linguistic phenomenon where speakers drop the D, replacing overt Ds with covert Ds, in definite specific DPs. For example, where Standard English speakers say The doctor came by horseback, Appalachian speakers may use a covert D …

A Machine Learning Approach To Text-Based Sarcasm Detection, Lara I. Novic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sarcasm and indirect language are commonplace for humans to produce and recognize but difficult for machines to detect. While artificial intelligence can accurately analyze sentiment and emotion in speech and text, it may struggle with insincere and sardonic content, although it is possible to train a machine to identify uttered and written sarcasm. This paper aims to detect sarcasm using logistic regression and a support vector machine (SVM) and compare their results to a baseline.

The models are trained on headlines from a Kaggle dataset containing headlines from the satirical news website The Onion and serious news website Huffpost (formerly …

Incomplete Neutralization In Articulatory Phonology, Sejin Oh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous studies have found small but significant phonetic traces of underlying distinctions for phonologically “neutralized” contrasts. This phenomenon, often called incomplete neutralization, has been found for final devoicing in many languages, (e.g., German; Port, Robert F. & O’Dell, 1985), but has also been reported for other neutralizing phenomena, including flapping in American English (Herd et al., 2010), monomoraic lengthening in Japanese (Braver & Kawahara, 2016), vowel deletion in French (Fougeron & Steriade, 1997), vowel epenthesis in Levantine Arabic (Gouskova & Hall, 2009), among others.

In my dissertation, I explore the (in)completeness of Russian palatalization in the Articulatory Phonology framework, implementing …

Non-Argumental Clitics In Spanish And Galician: A Case Study Of The Distribution Of Solidarity And Ethical Clitics, Susana Huidobro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the properties of what traditional grammars call “superfluous elements” or non-arguments, so-called Ethical Dative Clitics (Bello 1954, Seco 1962 among others) and Solidarity Clitics (Álvarez, Rosario, X.L. Regueira & H. Monteaguedo 1986) in Spanish and Galician. This research fills an important gap in the existing formal literature on these forms, providing the first thorough syntactic and typological investigation of the latter phenomenon.

The study of non-argumental datives encounters difficulties at different levels: at a descriptive/empirical as well as at a theoretical level. From a descriptive point of view, there are no, so far in the literature, clear …

"A Fallen Woman": The Use Of Metaphor In Psychoanalysis, Matthew Schneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study sought to understand the use of a central metaphor in a psychoanalytic treatment and its relationship to the process of change for the analysand. In linguistics, a metaphor is a word, phrase or idea that stands in for another idea. In psychoanalysis the relationship between conscious and unconscious conflictual material can share similar metaphorical connections as conscious thoughts or behavior often stands in for an unconscious wishes. The presence of a word or phrase that appears in speech in the context of particular affective moments in an analysand’s experience could be understood to be linked to unconscious processes …

Gender-Informed Features Of Film Reviews: A Statistical Linguistic Analysis, Matthew Kadish

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project analyzes how language is used differently in movie reviews based on both the gender of the author of the review as well as the gender of the director of the reviewed film. In doing so, it aims to gain a better understanding of what contexts evoke a typically “masculine” use of language vs. a typically “feminine” use of language within the genre of film criticism, and what implications this has for the state of the film criticism with respect to gender. The results of this study seem to indicate that a critic’s language use takes on the characteristics …