Linguistics Commons^™

The Science Of Singing, Reed Blaylock

Pedagogical Approaches to Laboratory Phonology

No abstract provided.

Research-Led Teaching Of State-Of-The-Art Laboratory Phonology: Intonation Atlases, Ingo Feldhausen

Pedagogical Approaches to Laboratory Phonology

At the end of this talk you…

• have an idea of how undergraduate students of linguistics experience learning through research and inquiry into laboratory phonology in my university classes

• got to know a definition of "research-led teaching" • know the goals and method(s) behind the Interactive Atlas of (Spanish) Intonation, on which I based my research-led teaching projects

• know the different steps of how I implemented my research-led teaching project in advanced linguistics classes

• know how the scientific results of these projects were made accessible to the international linguistic community and how they are taken up …

From Study Design To Conference Presentation In One Semester: Introducing Students To The Research Process In Laboratory Phonology, Caroline Smith

Pedagogical Approaches to Laboratory Phonology

The purpose of this presentation is todiscuss my experience of taking a class through the entireprocess of a laboratory phonology research study in a single semester, in fact, in about threemonths.

You Don’T Say... Linguistic Features In Sarcasm Detection, Martina Ducret, Lauren Kruse, Carlos Martinez, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We explore linguistic features that contribute to sarcasm detection. The linguistic features that we investigate are a combination of text and word complexity, stylistic and psychological features. We experiment with sarcastic tweets with and without context. The results of our experiments indicate that contextual information is crucial for sarcasm prediction. One important observation is that sarcastic tweets are typically incongruent with their context in terms of sentiment or emotional load.

Investigating The Relationship Between Individual Differences And Island Sensitivity, Catherine Pham, Lauren Covey, Alison Gabriele, Saad Aldosari, Robert Fiorentino

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

It is well-attested that native speakers tend to give low acceptability ratings to sentences that involve movement from within islands, yet the source of island effects remains an active debate. The grammatical account posits that island effects result from syntactic constraints on wh-movement, whereas the resource-limitation view posits that low ratings emerge due to processing-related constraints on the parser, such that islands themselves present processing bottlenecks. The current study addresses this debate by investigating the relationship between island sensitivity and individual differences in cognitive abilities, as it has been argued that the two views make distinct predictions regarding whether a …

Leveraging Nlp And Social Network Analytic Techniques To Detect Censored Keywords: System Design And Experiments, Christopher S. Leberknight, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Internet regulation in the form of online censorship and Internet shutdowns have been increasing over recent years. This paper presents a natural language processing (NLP) application for performing cross country probing that conceals the exact location of the originating request. A detailed discussion of the application aims to stimulate further investigation into new methods for measuring and quantifying Internet censorship practices around the world. In addition, results from two experiments involving search engine queries of banned keywords demonstrates censorship practices vary across different search engines. These results suggest opportunities for developing circumvention technologies that enable open and free access to …

Designing A Russian Idiom-Annotated Corpus, Katsiaryna Aharodnik, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper describes the development of an idiom-annotated corpus of Russian. The corpus is compiled from freely available resources online and contains texts of different genres. The idiom extraction, annotation procedure, and a pilot experiment using the new corpus are outlined in the paper. Considering the scarcity of publicly available Russian annotated corpora, the corpus is a much-needed resource that can be utilized for literary and linguistic studies, pedagogy as well as for various Natural Language Processing tasks.

Linguistic Characteristics Of Censorable Language On Sinaweibo, Kei Yin Ng, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng, Christopher Leberknight

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper investigates censorship from a linguistic perspective. We collect a corpus of censored and uncensored posts on a number of topics, build a classifier that predicts censorship decisions independent of discussion topics. Our investigation reveals that the strongest linguistic indicator of censored content of our corpus is its readability.

An Eye-Tracking Study Examining The Role Of Question-Answer Congruency In Children’S Comprehension Of Only: A Preliminary Report, Lauren Covey, Caitlin E. Coughlin, Utako Minai

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

‘Crain’s puzzle’ is a term that has been used to describe children’s difficulty comprehending the focus operator only when it is in subject position (subject-only), showing a tendency to interpret only as if it preceded the verb phrase instead. While some researchers attribute children’s difficulty to impoverished pragmatics in the discourse (Hackl et al., 2015), others argue that children’s grammar fundamentally differs from adults’ Notley et al. (2009), yielding a debate regarding whether children’s misinterpretation reflects a non-adult-like linguistic representation of only or some computational burden on their processing of meaning. This study addresses this debate by using eye-tracking to …

Automatic Idiom Recognition With Word Embeddings, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Expressions, such as add fuel to the fire, can be interpreted literally or idiomatically depending on the context they occur in. Many Natural Language Processing applications could improve their performance if idiom recognition were improved. Our approach is based on the idea that idioms and their literal counterparts do not appear in the same contexts. We propose two approaches: (1) Compute inner product of context word vectors with the vector representing a target expression. Since literal vectors predict well local contexts, their inner product with contexts should be larger than idiomatic ones, thereby telling apart literals from idioms; and (2) …

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., the comparative) is sensitive to the location of prosodic prominence. Machine learning algorithms (support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis) and human perception experiments are used to cross-validate the web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. Results con rm the theoretical predictions for location of prominence in comparative clauses and the advantages using both web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. The most robust …

Experiments In Idiom Recognition, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Some expressions can be ambiguous between idiomatic and literal interpretations depending on the context they occur in, e.g., sales hit the roof vs. hit the roof of the car. We present a novel method of classifying whether a given instance is literal or idiomatic, focusing on verb-noun constructions. We report state-of-the-art results on this task using an approach based on the hypothesis that the distributions of the contexts of the idiomatic phrases will be different from the contexts of the literal usages. We measure contexts by using projections of the words into vector space. For comparison, we implement Fazly et …

In God We Trust. All Others Must Bring Data. - W. Edwards Deming Using Word Embeddings To Recognize Idioms, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Expressions, such as add fuel to the fire, can be interpreted literally or idiomatically depending on the context they occur in. Many Natural Language Processing applications could improve their performance if idiom recognition were improved. Our approach is based on the idea that idioms violate cohesive ties in local contexts, while literal expressions do not. We propose two approaches: 1) Compute inner product of context word vectors with the vector representing a target expression. Since literal vectors predict well local contexts, their inner product with contexts should be larger than idiomatic ones, thereby telling apart literals from idioms; and (2) …

T. S. Eliot’S ‘Obscurity’ In The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock, Longxing Wei

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

T. S. Eliot’s earliest verse is composed of observations, detached, ironic, and alternatively disillusioned and nostalgic in tone. Eliot’s mingling of subtle observation with unexpected cliché represents a difficulty that is often magnified because too much ’obscurity’ is assumed. This paper aims at clarifying the ’obscurity’ by means of a stylistic analysis of the linguistic devices that the poet used to create "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and its intended meaning. Adopting the concept of style as ’foregrounding’, the idea that style is constituted by departures from linguistic norms, it analyzes the poem in terms of its lexical …

Classifying Idiomatic And Literal Expressions Using Vector Space Representations, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman, Hamza Jazmati

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We describe an algorithm for automatic classification of idiomatic and literal expressions. Our starting point is that idioms and literal expressions occur in different contexts. Idioms tend to violate cohesive ties in local contexts, while literals are expected to fit in. Our goal is to capture this intuition using a vector representation of words. We propose two approaches: (1) Compute inner product of context word vectors with the vector representing a target expression. Since literal vectors predict well local contexts, their inner product with contexts should be larger than idiomatic ones, thereby telling apart literals from idioms; and (2) Compute …

Evaluating And Automating The Annotation Of A Learner Corpus, Alexandr Rosen, Jirka Hana, Barbora Stindlova, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The paper describes a corpus of texts produced by non-native speakersof Czech. We discuss its annotation scheme, consisting of three interlinked tiers,designed to handle a wide range of error types present in the input. Each tier correctsdifferent types of errors; links between the tiers allow capturing errors in word orderand complex discontinuous expressions. Errors are not only corrected, but alsoclassified. The annotation scheme is tested on a data set including approx. 175,000words with fair inter-annotator agreement results. We also explore the possibility ofapplying automated linguistic annotation tools (taggers, spell checkers and grammarcheckers) to the learner text to support or even …

Classifying Idiomatic And Literal Expressions Using Topic Models And Intensity Of Emotions, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman, Ekaterina Vylomova

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We describe an algorithm for automatic classification of idiomatic and literal expressions. Our starting point is that words in a given text segment, such as a paragraph, that are highranking representatives of a common topic of discussion are less likely to be a part of an idiomatic expression. Our additional hypothesis is that contexts in which idioms occur, typically, are more affective and therefore, we incorporate a simple analysis of the intensity of the emotions expressed by the contexts. We investigate the bag of words topic representation of one to three paragraphs containing an expression that should be classified as …

Automatic Detection Of Idiomatic Clauses, Anna Feldman, Jing Peng

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We describe several experiments whose goal is to automatically identify idiomatic expressions in written text. We explore two approaches for the task: 1) idiom recognition as outlier detection; and 2) supervised classification of sentences. We apply principal component analysis for outlier detection. Detecting idioms as lexical outliers does not exploit class label information. So, in the following experiments, we use linear discriminant analysis to obtain a discriminant subspace and later use the three nearest neighbor classifier to obtain accuracy. We discuss pros and cons of each approach. All the approaches are more general than the previous algorithms for idiom detection …

Automatic Identification Of Learners’ Language Background Based On Their Writing In Czech, Katsiaryna Aharodnik, Marco Chang, Anna Feldman, Jirka Hana

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The goal of this study is to investigate whether learners’ written data in highly inflectional Czech can suggest a consistent set of clues for automatic identification of the learners’ L1 background. For our experiments, we use texts written by learners of Czech, which have been automatically and manually annotated for errors. We define two classes of learners: speakers of Indo-European languages and speakers of non-Indo-European languages. We use an SVM classifier to perform the binary classification. We show that non-content based features perform well on highly inflectional data. In particular, features reflecting errors in orthography are the most useful, yielding …

Theme: Mobile Language Learning, Glenn Stockwell, Susana Sotillo

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

There has been increased interest in portable technologies which allow learners to access tools for learning languages in virtually any time or place that suits them. The quickly developing functionalities of mobile phones, MP3 players, laptop and tablet computers, and other hand-held devices with touch screen technology mean that the range of possibilities for language learning has greatly diversified. GodwinJones (2011), for example, points out that iPhone and Android phones have ushered in a phenomenal expansion in the development of Apps for just about every topic under the sun, and educators have been exploring the value of Apps for learning …

Humor In Code-Mixed Airline Advertising, Maria Jose Garcia Vizcaino

Department of Spanish and Latino Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article examines how humor works in the code-mixed advertising campaigns of the Spanish airline company Vueling. Drawing on the fetishism approach to multilingual advertising (Kelly-Holmes, 2005) and the theory of incongruity (Raskin, 1985), this paper explores three main types of humorous deviations in Vueling campaigns: structural, phonetic, and visual. The analysis confirms that humor in Vueling ads is produced by deviations at the formal rather than semantic level of language, specifically through the insertion of foreign languages (mainly English and French) into Spanish colloquial expressions. These foreign elements are partially “domesticated” into local Spanish frames by creative code-mixing mechanisms …

Prosodylab-Aligner: A Tool For Forced Alignment Of Laboratory Speech, Kyle Gorman, Jonathan Howell, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The Penn Forced Aligner automates the alignment process using the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK). The core of Prosodylab-Aligner is align.py, a script which performs acoustic model training and alignment. This script automates calls to HTK and SoX, an open-source command-line tool which is capable of resampling audio. The included README file provides instructions for installing HTK and SoX on Linux and Mac OS X, and can also be run on Windows. During training, the model is initialized with flat-start monophones, which are then submitted to a single round of model estimation. Then, a tied-state 'small pause' model is inserted …

Semantic Enrichment Of Text Representation With Wikipedia For Text Classification, Hiroki Yamakawa, Jing Peng, Anna Feldman

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Text classification is a widely studied topic in the area of machine learning. A number of techniques have been developed to represent and classify text documents. Most of the techniques try to achieve good classification performance while taking a document only by its words (e.g. statistical analysis on word frequency and distribution patterns). One of the recent trends in text classification research is to incorporate more semantic interpretation in text classification, especially by using Wikipedia. This paper introduces a technique for incorporating the vast amount of human knowledge accumulated in Wikipedia into text representation and classification. The aim is to …

Challenges Of Cheap Resource Creation For Morphological Tagging, Jirka Hana, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We describe the challenges of resource creation for a resource-light system for morphological tagging of fusional languages (Feldman and Hana, 2010). The constraints on resources (time, expertise, and money) introduce challenges that are not present in development of morphological tools and corpora in the usual, resource intensive way.

A Positional Tagset For Russian, Jirka Hana, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Fusional languages have rich inflection. As a consequence, tagsets capturing their morphological features are necessarily large. A natural way to make a tagset manageable is to use a structured system. In this paper, we present a positional tagset for describing morphological properties of Russian. The tagset was inspired by the Czech positional system (Hajič, 2004). We have used preliminary versions of this tagset in our previous work (e.g., Hana et al. (2004, 2006); Feldman (2006); Feldman and Hana (2010)). Here, we both systematize and extend these preliminary versions (by adding information about animacy, aspect and reflexivity); give a more detailed …

Like Finding A Needle In A Haystack: Annotating The American National Corpus For Idiomatic Expressions, Laura Street, Nathan Michalov, Rachel Silverstein, Michael Reynolds, Lurdes Ruela, Felicia Flowers, Angela Talucci, Priscilla Pereira, Gabriella Morgon, Samantha Siegel, Marci Barousse, Antequa Anderson, Tashom Carroll, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper presents the details of a pilot study in which we tagged portions of the American National Corpus (ANC) for idioms composed of verb-noun constructions, prepositional phrases, and subordinate clauses. The three data sets we analyzed included 1, 500-sentence samples from the spoken, the non-fiction, and the fiction portions of the ANC. This paper provides the details of the tagset we developed, the motivation behind our choices, and the inter-annotator agreement measures we deemed appropriate for this task. In tagging the ANC for idiomatic expressions, our annotators achieved a high level of agreement (< .80) on the tags but a low level of agreement (>.00) on what constituted an …

Second Occurrence Focus And The Acoustics Of Prominence, Jonathan Howell

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Partee (1991) challenged the significance of the observation that certain adverbs (e.g., only) reliably associate with phonologically prominent words to truth‐conditional effect, noting second occurrence (i.e., repeated or given) focus (SOF) appears to lack a phonological realization. Rooth (1996), Bartels (2004), Beaver et al. (2004), Jaeger (2004), and Fry and Ishihara (2005) argued that, while not intonationally prominent, an SOF word can be marked by increased duration and/or increased rms intensity. An acoustic study of verb‐noun homophone pairs is reported. Three sophisticated speakers uttered five repetitions of the targets, embedded in discourses, in first occurrence (FOF), SOF, and unfocused (NF) …

The Composite Nature Of Interlanguage As A Developing System, Longxing Wei

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper explores the nature of interlanguage (IL) as a developing system with a focus on the abstract lexical structure underlying IL construction. The developing system of IL is assumed to be 'composite' in that in second language acquisition (SLA) several linguistic systems are in contact, each of which may contribute different amounts to the developing system. The lexical structure is assumed to be 'abstract' in that the mental lexicon contains abstract elements called 'lemmas', which contain information about individual lexemes, and lemmas in the bilingual mental lexicon are language-specific and are in contact in IL production. Based on the …

Arida: An Arabic Interlanguage Database And Its Applications: A Pilot Study, Anna Feldman, Ghazi Abuhakema, Eileen Fitzpatrick

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper describes a pilot study in which we collected a small learner corpus of Arabic, developed a tagset for error-annotation of Arabic learner data, tagged the data for error 1, and performed simple Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA).

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 …