Linguistics Commons^™

Toward A Theory-Based Natural Language Capability In Robots And Other Embodied Agents : Evaluating Hausser's Slim Theory And Database Semantics, Robin Kowalchuk Burk

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Computational natural language understanding and generation have been a goal of artificial intelligence since McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester and Shannon first proposed to spend the summer of 1956 studying this and related problems. Although statistical approaches dominate current natural language applications, two current research trends bring renewed focus on this goal. The nascent field of artificial general intelligence (AGI) seeks to evolve intelligent agents whose multi-subagent architectures are motivated by neuroscience insights into the modular functional structure of the brain and by cognitive science insights into human learning processes. Rapid advances in cognitive robotics also entail multi-agent software architectures that attempt …

Qualitative Information In Annual Reports & The Detection Of Corporate Fraud : A Natural Language Processing Perspective, Sunita Goel

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

High profile cases of fraudulent financial reporting such as those that occurred at Enron and WorldCom have shaken public confidence in the U.S. financial reporting process and have raised serious concerns about the roles of auditors, regulators, and analysts in financial reporting. In order to address these concerns and restore public confidence, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 was enacted. However, SOX has not lived up to its promise. Numerous cases of fraudulent financial reporting have surfaced in the post-SOX era. So far, the major thrust of research has been on examining fraud that has already been discovered. This dissertation …

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 …

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. …

A Linguistic Analysis Of Chat Reference Conversations With 18–24-Year-Old College Students, Jack M. Maness

University Libraries: Faculty Scholarship

Thirty-one chat reference conversations were linguistically analyzed, compared to twenty-three instant messaging (IM) conversations held between students, and further correlated to students’ satisfaction with the reference interaction. Conversations between librarians and students in chat reference are more formal than those solely involving students, and the use of some linguistic patterns are correlated to user satisfaction.

Task-Based Mood Induction Procedures For The Elicitation Of Natural Emotional Responses., Brian Vaughan, Charlie Cullen, Spyros Kousidis, Yi Wang

Other resources

This paper details experimental procedures designed to elicit real emotional responses from participants within a controlled acoustic environment. The experiments use Mood Induction Procedures (MIP’s), specifically MIP 4, to implement a co-operative task using two participants. These cooperative tasks are designed to engender emotional responses of activation and evaluation from the participants who are situated in separate isolation booths, thus reducing unwanted noise in the signal, preventing the participants from being distracted and ensuring a cleanly recorded audio signal. The audio is recorded at a professional level of quality (24bit/192Khz). The emotional dimensions of each audio recording will be evaluated …

Certainty Identification In Texts: Categorization Model And Manual Tagging Results, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Victoria L. Rubin, Noriko Kando

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This chapter presents a theoretical framework and preliminary results for manual categorization of explicit certainty information in 32 English newspaper articles. Our contribution is in a proposed categorization model and analytical framework for certainty identification. Certainty is presented as a type of subjective information available in texts. Statements with explicit certainty markers were identified and categorized according to four hypothesized dimensions – level, perspective, focus, and time of certainty.

The preliminary results reveal an overall promising picture of the presence of certainty information in texts, and establish its susceptibility to manual identification within the proposed four-dimensional certainty categorization analytical framework. …

Quelques Remarques Sur Les Belgicismes Métalinguistiques, Jean-Nicolas De Surmont

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Of all Belgicisms, only a few have metalinguistic connotation and they have to be considered of special interest in this respect, even if the literature on French in Belgium has not addressed this issue specifically. This essay proposes some observations on these few important words, supported by recent lexicographical descriptions and data obtained through research undertaken in collaboration with Michel Francard of the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium).

Document Retrieval, Automatic, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Document Retrieval is the computerized process of producing a relevance ranked list of documents in response to an inquirer’s request by comparing their request to an automatically produced index of the documents in the system. Everyone uses such systems today in the form of web-based search engines. While evolving from a fairly small discipline in the 1940s, to a large, profitable industry today, the field has maintained a healthy research focus, supported by test collections and large-scale annual comparative tests of systems. A document retrieval system is comprised of three core modules: document processor, query analyzer, and matching function. There …

Hands-On Nlp For An Interdisciplinary Audience, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Nancy Mccracken

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The need for a single NLP offering for a diverse mix of graduate students (including computer scientists, information scientists, and linguists) has motivated us to develop a course that provides students with a breadth of understanding of the scope of real world applications, as well as depth of knowledge of the computational techniques on which to build in later experiences. We describe the three hands-on tasks for the course that have proven successful, namely: 1) in-class group simulations of computational processes; 2) team posters and public presentations on state-of-the-art commercial NLP applications, and; 3) team projects implementing various levels of …

Improved Document Representation For Classification Tasks For The Intelligence Community, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Ozgur Yilmazel, Svetlana Symonenko, Niranjan Balasubramanian

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This research addresses the question of whether the AI technologies of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) can be used to improve security within the Intelligence Community (IC).

Certainty Categorization Model, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Noriko Kando, Victoria L. Rubin

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We present a theoretical framework and preliminary results for manual categorization of explicit certainty information in 32 English newspaper articles. The explicit certainty markers were identified and categorized according to the four hypothesized dimensions – perspective, focus, timeline, and level of certainty. One hundred twenty one sentences from sample news stories contained a significantly lower frequency of markers per sentence (M=0.46, SD =0.04) than 564 sentences from sample editorials (M=0.6, SD =0.23), p= 0.0056, two-tailed heteroscedastic t-test. Within each dimension, editorials had most numerous markers per sentence in high level of certainty, writer’s point of view, and future and present …

Discerning Emotions In Texts, Victoria L. Rubin, Jeffrey M. Stanton, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We present an empirically verified model of discernable emotions, Watson and Tellegen’s Circumplex Theory of Affect from social and personality psychology, and suggest its usefulness in NLP as a potential model for an automation of an eight-fold categorization of emotions in written English texts. We developed a data collection tool based on the model, collected 287 responses from 110 non-expert informants based on 50 emotional excerpts (min=12, max=348, average=86 words), and analyzed the inter-coder agreement per category and per strength of ratings per sub-category. The respondents achieved an average 70.7% agreement in the most commonly identified emotion categories per text. …

Context-Based Question-Answering Evaluation, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Anne R. Diekema, Ozgur Yilmazel

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

In this poster, we will present the results of efforts we have undertaken to conduct evaluations of a QA system in a real world environment and to understand the nature of the dimensions on which users evaluate QA systems when given full reign to comment on whatever dimensions they deem important.

What Do You Mean? Finding Answers To Complex Questions, Anne R. Diekema, Ozgur Yilmazel, Jiangping Chen, Sarah Harwell, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Lan He

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

This paper illustrates ongoing research and issues faced when dealing with real-time questions in the domain of Reusable Launch Vehicles (aerospace engineering). The question- answering system described in this paper is used in a collaborative learning environment with real users and live questions. The paper describes an analysis of these more complex questions as well as research to include the user in the question-answering process by implementing a question negotiation module based on the traditional reference interview.

Transformation Based Learning For Specialization Of Generic Event Extractions, Mary D. Taffet, Nancy Mccracken, Eileen Allen, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

As part of our Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) project, we proposed to use Transformation Based Learning (TBL) to learn domain-specific specializations for generic event extractions. The primary goal of our learning task was to reduce the amount of human effort required for specializing generic event extractions to domains that are new and specific. Three initial annotation cycles and one annotation review and correction cycle involving a total of 70 documents were completed, with slightly over 32 hours required for the entire annotation effort; where possible, the annotation cycles started with bootstrapped files resulting from the application of TBL …

A Breadth Of Nlp Applications, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The Center for Natural Language Processing (CNLP) was founded in September 1999 in the School of Information Studies, the “Original Information School”, at Syracuse University. CNLP’s mission is to advance the development of human-like, language understanding software capabilities for government, commercial, and consumer applications. The Center conducts both basic and applied research, building on its recognized capabilities in Natural Language Processing. The Center’s seventeen employees are a mix of doctoral students in information science or computer engineering, software engineers, linguistic analysts, and research engineers.

Natural Language Processing, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the computerized approach to analyzing text that is based on both a set of theories and a set of technologies. And, being a very active area of research and development, there is not a single agreed-upon definition that would satisfy everyone, but there are some aspects, which would be part of any knowledgeable person’s definition.

Searching And Search Engines: When Is Current Research Going To Lead To Major Progress?, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

For many years, users of commercial search engines have been hearing how the latest in information and computer science research is going to improve the quality of the engines they rely on for fulfilling their daily information needs. However, despite what is heard, these promises have not been fulfilled. While the Internet has dramatically increased the amount of information to which users now have access, the key issue appears to be unresolved – the results for substantive queries are not improving. However, the past need not predict the future because sophisticated advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have, in fact, …

Dr-Link: A System Update For Trec-2, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Sung H. Myaeng

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

The theoretical goal underlying the DR-LINK System is to represent and match documents and queries at the various linguistic levels at which human language conveys meaning. Accordingly, we have developed a modular system which processes and represents text at the lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse levels of language. In concert, these levels of processing permit DR-LINK to achieve a level of intelligent retrieval beyond more traditional approaches. In addition, the rich annotations to text produced by DR-LINK are replete with much of the semantics necessary for document extraction. The system was planned and developed in a modular fashion and functional …

New Russian Books On The Pacific, 1982-1983, Patricia Polansky

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

New Russian Books On The Pacific, 1980-1981, Patricia Polansky

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Rubellite Kawena Johnson's Review Of Elizabeth Tatar's Nineteenth Century Hawaiian Chant, Rubellite Kawena Johnson

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

El Pueblo Guaymí Y Su Futuro, Milton R.A. Machuca-Gálvez, Daniel Holness Carrasco Sr.

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Esta publicación contiene las ponencias y documentos que se presentaron en el FORO SOBRE EL PUEBLO GUAYMÍ SU FUTURO, celebrado en la ciudad de Panamá del 23 al 27 de marzo de 1981. El material está dividido en cinco secciones: una introducción seguida de 1. La historia de los guaymíes; 2. Situación actual del pueblo guaymí; 3 Las luchas guaymíes; 4. Los grandes proyectos de desarrollo: ¿bendición o maldición?; y, 5. "Se hace el camino al andar": pasos en la lucha. Las secciones “guardan una estrecha relación temática con un eje central que aparece a lo largo de la publicación: …

Rubellite Kinney Johnson Review Of Bernice Judd, Janet E. Bell, And Clare G. Murdoch, Hawaiian Language Imprints, 1822–1899: A Bibliography, Rubellite Kinney Johnson

Pacific Studies

No abstract provided.

Books For Children, J A F Lawson

Journal of the Department of Agriculture, Western Australia, Series 4

F we think of a child entirely without books we think of him as very definitely deprived.

Why is that so? Why do we consider books to be a vital part of a child's life? In fact, why do children need books?