Linguistics Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Designing And Evaluating A Russian Tagset, Serge Sharoff, Mikhail Kopotev, Tomaž Erjavec, Anna Feldman, Dagmar Divjak

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper reports the principles behind designing a tagset to cover Russian morphosyntactic phenomena, modifications of the core tagset, and its evaluation. The tagset and associated morphosyntactic specifications are based on the MULTEXT-East framework, while the decisions in designing it were aimed at achieving a balance between parameters important for linguists and the possibility to detect and disambiguate them automatically. The final tagset contains about 600 tags and achieves about 95% accuracy on the disambiguated portion of the Russian National Corpus. We have also produced a test set of tagging models and corpora that can be shared with other researchers.

Tagset Design, Inflected Languages, And N-Gram Tagging, Anna Feldman

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper explores the relationship between the tagset design and linguistic properties of inflected languages for the task of morphosyntactic tagging. Some information theoretic measures and statistics on these languages are reported which show, unsurprisingly, that the tagsets for morphologically rich languages are larger than tagsets for English and the average tag/token ambiguity is higher. The surprising outcome of the experiments is that for Catalan, Czech, Polish, Portuguese,and Russian – which are considered to be “word order” free languages (to various degrees) – the knowledge about the preceding tag reduces the uncertainty about the tag in question if the detailed …

Phonological Facilitation Through Translation In A Bilingual Picture-Naming Task, Paul Amrhein, Aimee Knupsky

Department of Psychology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a critical examination of phonological effects in a picture-word interference task. Using a methodology minimizing stimulus repetition, English/Spanish and Spanish/English bilinguals named pictures in either L1 or L2 (blocked contexts) or in both (mixed contexts) while ignoring word distractors in L1 or L2. Distractors were either phonologically related to the picture name (direct; FISH–fist), or related through translation to the picture name (TT; LEG–milk–leche), or they were unrelated (bear–peach). Results demonstrate robust activation of phonological representations by translation equivalents of word distractors. Although both direct and TT distractors facilitated naming, TT facilitation was more consistent in L2 naming …

A Cross-Language Approach To Rapid Creation Of New Morpho-Syntactically Annotated Resources, Anna Feldman, Jirka Hana, Chris Brew

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We take a novel approach to rapid, low-cost development of morpho-syntactically annotated resources without using parallel corpora or bilingual lexicons. The overall research question is how to exploit language resources and properties to facilitate and automate the creation of morphologically annotated corpora for new languages. This portability issue is especially relevant to minority languages, for which such resources are likely to remain unavailable in the foreseeable future. We compare the performance of our system on languages that belong to different language families (Romance vs. Slavic), as well as different language pairs within the same language family (Portuguese via Spanish vs. …

The Word Out : A Stylistic Analysis Of Rap Music, Claudia Coscarello

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Rap music is a particular socioculturally bound music phenomenon that was conceived on the streets and birthed within the African-American communities in the urban boroughs of New York City during the 1970's. It was developed as a particular kind of linguistic self expression in the form of music for African- American youth. Rap music is a display of ethnic creativity and cultural pride which gives expression to a speech community's voice as it declares the stark reality of urban life.

For close to three decades, rap music has maintained its position at the forefront of the youth culture across the …

Discourse Functions And Syntactic Complexity In Synchronous And Asynchronous Communication, Susana Sotillo

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The present study investigates discourse functions and syntactic complexity in English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learner output obtained via two different modes of computer-mediated communication (CMC): asynchronous and synchronous discussions. Two instructors and twenty-five students from two advanced ESL writing classes participated in this study. Answers were sought to the following questions: a) Are the discourse functions present in ESL learners' synchronous discussions of reading assignments quantitatively and qualitatively different from those found in asynchronous discussions? And, b) which mode of CMC shows more syntactically complex learner output? The results showed that the quantity and types of discourse functions present in synchronous discussions …