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Linguistics

Faculty Publications

2010

Articles 1 - 16 of 16

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Découvrir Le Pouvoir De Ses Mains : La Gestuelle Des Futurs Enseignants De Langue., Marion Tellier, Gale Stam Jun 2010

Découvrir Le Pouvoir De Ses Mains : La Gestuelle Des Futurs Enseignants De Langue., Marion Tellier, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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Principled Construction Of Elicited Imitation Tests, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen, Ross Hendrickson May 2010

Principled Construction Of Elicited Imitation Tests, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen, Ross Hendrickson

Faculty Publications

In this paper we discuss the methodology behind the construction of elicited imitation (EI) test items. First we examine varying uses for EI tests in research and in testing overall oral proficiency. We also mention criticisms of previous test items. Then we identify the factors that contribute to the difficulty of an EI item as shown in previous studies. Based on this discussion, we describe a way of automating the creation of test items in order to better evaluate language learners’ oral proficiency while improving item naturalness. We present a new item construction tool and the process that it implements …

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Speech And Gesture In Language Acquisition Studies, Gale Stam Mar 2010

Speech And Gesture In Language Acquisition Studies, Gale Stam

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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A Review Of Fieldworks Language Explorer, Chris Rogers Ph.D. Jan 2010

A Review Of Fieldworks Language Explorer, Chris Rogers Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

One of the most important goals in language documentation is to produce reference materials as well as to create long-lasting (i.e., archivable) materials for the languages. Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx) 3.0 is software for organizing and analyzing linguistic data and is produced for free download by SIL International (SIL)1 . This review has three goals: to show how the current version of FLEx addresses problems in earlier versions of the program, to highlight some of the more useful features of FLEx 3.0, and to indicate how it compares to other database programs.

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A Probabilistic Morphological Analyzer For Syriac, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Peter J. Mcclanahan, George Busby, Robbie A. Haertel, Kristian Heal, Kevin Seppi, Eric Ringger Jan 2010

A Probabilistic Morphological Analyzer For Syriac, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Peter J. Mcclanahan, George Busby, Robbie A. Haertel, Kristian Heal, Kevin Seppi, Eric Ringger

Faculty Publications

We define a probabilistic morphological analyzer using a data-driven approach for Syriac in order to facilitate the creation of an annotated corpus. Syriac is an under-resourced Semitic language for which there are no available language tools such as morphological analyzers. We introduce novel probabilistic models for segmentation, dictionary linkage, and morphological tagging and connect them in a pipeline to create a probabilistic morphological analyzer requiring only labeled data. We explore the performance of models with varying amounts of training data and find that with about 34,500 labeled tokens, we can outperform a reasonable baseline trained on over 99,000 tokens and …

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Argument Constructions And Language Processing: Evidence From A Priming Experiment And Pedagogical Implications, David Eddington, Francisco Ruiz De Mendoza Jan 2010

Argument Constructions And Language Processing: Evidence From A Priming Experiment And Pedagogical Implications, David Eddington, Francisco Ruiz De Mendoza

Faculty Publications

The notion of argument construction is widely accepted in Cognitive Linguistics circles as a highly explanatory theoretical construct. It has recently been incorporated into the Lexical-Constructional Model (LCM; Ruiz de Mendoza and Mairal 2007, 2008), a theoretical approach to meaning construction that integrates argument constructions into a broader model that incorporates meaning dimensions traditionally dealt with in the domain of pragmatics and discourse analysis. The LCM has an argument level of description, in the form of constructional templates, which are in general equivalent to the argument constructions postulated in Goldberg’s (1995, 2006) Construction Grammar, although there are crucial differences in …

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Contextualizing Corrective Feedback In L2 Writing Pedagogy, Norman W. Evans, K. James Hartshorn, Robb M. Mccollum, Mark Wolfersberger Jan 2010

Contextualizing Corrective Feedback In L2 Writing Pedagogy, Norman W. Evans, K. James Hartshorn, Robb M. Mccollum, Mark Wolfersberger

Faculty Publications

Although effective writing skills are vital to the success of university-level students, second language (L2) writers face unique challenges in developing these skills. This is particularly relevant to their ability to produce writing that is linguistically accurate. While many writing teachers feel a great commitment to these students, much of the research has either led to conflicting results or provided teachers with limited practical guidelines that can be utilized effectively in the classroom. This is especially true regarding written corrective feedback (WCF). Therefore, this article provides L2 writing teachers with a paradigm for understanding the WCF debate and interpreting the …

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A Probabilistic Morphological Analyzer For Syriac, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Peter J. Mcclanahan, George Busby, Robbie A. Haertel, Kristian Heal, Kevin Seppi, Eric K. Ringger Jan 2010

A Probabilistic Morphological Analyzer For Syriac, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Peter J. Mcclanahan, George Busby, Robbie A. Haertel, Kristian Heal, Kevin Seppi, Eric K. Ringger

Faculty Publications

We define a probabilistic morphological analyzer using a data-driven approach for Syriac in order to facilitate the creation of an annotated corpus. Syriac is an under-resourced Semitic language for which there are no available language tools such as morphological analyzers. We introduce novel probabilistic models for segmentation, dictionary linkage, and morphological tagging and connect them in a pipeline to create a probabilistic morphological analyzer requiring only labeled data. We explore the performance of models with varying amounts of training data and find that with about 34,500 labeled tokens, we can outperform a reasonable baseline trained on over 99,000 tokens and …

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Recovering And Updating Legacy Dictionary Data, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Dawn Bates Jan 2010

Recovering And Updating Legacy Dictionary Data, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Dawn Bates

Faculty Publications

Ongoing efforts to annotate and web-enable Lushootseed language resources involve displaying complex dictionary information in ways suitable for diverse users. In this paper we discuss how we have converted dictionary data from its legacy format into a best-practice, state-of-the-art XML format. We also describe how we have been able to further leverage this XML data by making it compatible with Kirrkirr, a new dictionary browser designed to display dictionary information for Australian aboriginal languages. We sketch the process in adapting the dictionary browser to make it a very workable visualization tool for Lushootseed data as well. We also explain and …

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Ontologies For Multilingual Extraction, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle Jan 2010

Ontologies For Multilingual Extraction, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle

Faculty Publications

In our global society, multilingual barriers sometimes prohibit and often discourage people from accessing a wider variety of goods and services. We propose multilingual extraction ontologies as an approach to resolving these issues. As envisioned, our ontologies provide a conceptual framework for a narrow domain of interest. Grounding narrow-domain ontologies linguistically enables them to map relevant utterances and text to meaningful concepts in the ontology. Our prior work includes leveraging large-scale lexicons and terminology resources for grounding and augmenting ontological content [12]. Linguistically grounding ontologies in multiple languages enables cross-language communication within the scope of the various ontologies’ domains. Technically, …

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Principled Construction Of Elicited Imitation Tests, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen, Ross Hendrickson Jan 2010

Principled Construction Of Elicited Imitation Tests, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Carl Chritensen, Ross Hendrickson

Faculty Publications

In this paper we discuss the methodology behind the construction of elicited imitation (EI) test items. First we examine varying uses for EI tests in research and in testing overall oral proficiency. We also mention criticisms of previous test items. Then we identify the factors that contribute to the difficulty of an EI item as shown in previous studies. Based on this discussion, we describe a way of automating the creation of test items in order to better evaluate language learners’ oral proficiency while improving item naturalness. We present a new item construction tool and the process that it implements …

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Kbb: A Knowledge-Bundle Builder For Research Studies, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Aaron Stewart, Cui Tao Jan 2010

Kbb: A Knowledge-Bundle Builder For Research Studies, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Aaron Stewart, Cui Tao

Faculty Publications

Researchers struggle to manage vast amounts of data coming from hundreds of sources in online repositories. To successfully conduct research studies, researchers need to find, retrieve, filter, extract, integrate, organize, and share information in a timely and high-precision manner. Active conceptual modeling for learning can give researchers the tools they need to perform their tasks in a more efficient, user-friendly, and computer-supported way. The idea is to create “knowledge bundles” (KBs), which are conceptual-model representations of organized information superimposed over a collection of source documents. A “knowledgebundle builder” (KBB) helps researchers develop KBs in a synergistic and incremental manner and …

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A Comparison Of Two Tools For Analyzing Linguistic Data: Logistic Regression And Decision Trees, David Eddington Jan 2010

A Comparison Of Two Tools For Analyzing Linguistic Data: Logistic Regression And Decision Trees, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The present paper compares logistic regression (referred to herein as its implementation in Varbrul) with another method for analyzing linguistic data-decision trees. Comparison of the two methods demonstrates that decision trees are able to find the same sorts of generalizations as Varbrul. However, decision trees provide more coarsely-grained output compared with Varbrul’s more informative factor weights. In addition, decision trees often mistakenly overgeneralize. Nevertheless, decision trees can be used in tandem with Varbrul. Because decision trees automatically calculate interactions, they suggest interaction terms that may be considered in subsequent Varbrul analyses. Decision trees also allow continuous variables in contrast to …

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Up To D[Eb]Ate On Raising And Control, Part 1: Properties And Analyses Of The Constructions, Susannah Kirby, William D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky Jan 2010

Up To D[Eb]Ate On Raising And Control, Part 1: Properties And Analyses Of The Constructions, Susannah Kirby, William D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

This is the first part of a two-part article that reviews a number of the current debates regarding raising and control constructions. The issues addressed in this part include the syntactic attributes governing their distribution; the characterization of the relevant silent elements; the empirical properties which may distinguish/unify two classes of constructions (on either syntactic or semantic grounds).

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Up To D[Eb]Ate On Raising And Control, Part 2: The Empirical Range Of The Constructions And Research On Their Acquistion, Susannah Kirby, William D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky Jan 2010

Up To D[Eb]Ate On Raising And Control, Part 2: The Empirical Range Of The Constructions And Research On Their Acquistion, Susannah Kirby, William D. Davies, Stanley William Dubinsky

Faculty Publications

This is the second part of a two-part article that reviews a number of the current debates regarding raising and control constructions. The issues addressed in this part include the spectrum of related raising (e.g. possessor raising, further raising) and control (partial, split, generic, super-equi) phenomena; cross-linguistic typology, including backward and copy constructions; and their acquisition in child language.

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Tag Dictionaries Accelerate Manual Annotation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Marc A. Carmen, Paul Felt, Robbie A. Haertel, Peter J. Mcclanahan, Eric K. Ringger, Kevin Seppi Jan 2010

Tag Dictionaries Accelerate Manual Annotation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Marc A. Carmen, Paul Felt, Robbie A. Haertel, Peter J. Mcclanahan, Eric K. Ringger, Kevin Seppi

Faculty Publications

Expert human input can contribute in various ways to facilitate automatic annotation of natural language text. For example, a part-of-speech tagger can be trained on labeled input provided offline by experts. In addition, expert input can be solicited by way of active learning to make the most of annotator expertise. However, hiring individuals to perform manual annotation is costly both in terms of money and time. This paper reports on a user study that was performed to determine the degree of effect that a part-of-speech dictionary has on a group of subjects performing the annotation task. The user study was …

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