Linguistics Commons^™

Questions To Be Asked & Answered On Nlp’S Role In Improving Semantic Annotation For Ir, Elizabeth D. Liddy

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

What was early information retrieval like? (before it was called search!)

How was NLP first applied to the task?

Which levels of language analysis were utilized?

Which were successful? Which were not?

Why were other levels not incorporated ?

Do we now see that the higher levels can and need to be included?

If they are, how might they change how we do IR, as well as what tasks we use it for?

Luciano Bianciardi’S Aprire Il Fuoco: On The Function Of Literature In Society, Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

This is the first article to assess the importance of Luciano Bianciardi’s last novel, Aprire il fuoco [Open Fire!](1969), a work often overlooked, that offers crucial insights into Bianciardi’s commitments to social causes. A so-called “irregular” of 20th-century Italian literary panorama, Luciano Bianciardi (1922-1971) in his Aprire il fuoco discusses his idea of literature as an activity that must aim at assuming the role of ethical guide in societies. In my article, I gloss the often obscure historical and literary references of the novel, and provide a critical assessment of its impact.

What’S In A Name? How Toponyms Connect Language And Society Through Place, Lisa Radding

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This is a study of place, meaning, society, and language, all of which interact through names. Although names are an essential part of human language, they remain on the periphery of linguistic studies. This study situates names in linguistics through an analysis of the meaning in a toponym, or place name.

According to lexical theory words are arbitrary. Yet we bestow names based on how they sound or what they have already come to represent; names are not arbitrary. Furthermore, a name becomes opaque when we can no longer see through its form to understand its meaning. Then it picks …

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. …

Interference Of L1 English In L2 French Lexical Processing, Sarah Kuhn

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This study examines the interference, if any, caused by a first language (specifically English) in the processing of lexical items in a second language (French). Participants performed a computer-based translation recognition task where they were asked whether a pair of words, one French and the other English, represented an acceptable translation. Six different types of critical pairs were randomly alternated with actual translation pairs and unrelated distractor pairs. Each of the different categories of critical pairs had a different relationship with the L1 word, the L2 word, or both. Participants’ scores on this task were then analyzed to determine the …

Hidden Sentiments, Unfinished Project: Pirandello’S Film La Nuova Colonia, Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

This article investigates the notion of the unfinished work. In Pirandello studies the word unfinished holds particular importance. Luigi Pirandello's last, and one of his major works, I giganti della montagna [The Mountain Giants] was not completed. The many years devoted to its making weaken the assumption that Pirandello was not capable of completing it in favor of his decision not to complete his work. I considered the overlapping of the writing of I giganti della montagna and of the attempts to produce the film La nuova colonia [The New Colony] an important, and insofar unnoticed, key element for understanding …

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. …

Acquisition Of Violations Of English Principle B By Native Speakers Of Japanese Or Chinese, Clarion C. Mendes

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This work focuses on Principles A and B of Binding Theory as applied to English. While English has a very strict interpretation of Binding Theory, it has a violation of Principle B with sentences with locative prepositional phrases and verb phrases of caused movement or perception.

In contrast, Chinese and Japanese have a very liberal interpretation of Binding Theory. The study is involved with investigating whether or not Japanese or Chinese speakers adapt to the English violation which is typically not taught in a classroom setting, but something acquired through natural exposure.

A custom survey was designed to see if …

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).

Un Nuovo Dato Per La Cronologia Della Versione Cinematografica Della Nuova Colonia Di Luigi Pirandello, Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) wrote numerous film-treatments inspired by his short-stories and plays that were not completed as films. Among the never completed films there is La Nuova Colonia. The history of the film-project La Nuova Colonia [The New Colony] is important for the further understanding of Pirandello’s poetics. Nestled in the plot of Pirandello’s novel Suo marito [Her Husband], La Nuova Colonia took on independent life in 1926 as the play of the same name that premiered in Rome in March 1928. The two dates indicated for the play are not the chronological limits for the La Nuova Colonia …

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.

Piero Chiara E La Tradizione, Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

Piero Chiara (Luino 1913- Varese 1986) wrote many novels and short stories that immediately met great public success. Critics devoted mixed attention to him but his works deserve a new critical assessment to analyze the rich and sophisticated web of cultural and literary references that permeate them. Through readings of Il piatto piange, “L’uovo al cianuro” and other novels and short stories, this paper analyses the complex textual relations Chiara entertains with Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal. Chiara investigates the themes of identity and the double. His narrative depicts an apparently lighthearted reality that in fact reveals despair. …

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.

Un’Agra Salita. Lettura Di ‘Autostrada Della Cisa’ Di Vittorio Sereni, Stefano Giannini

Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics - All Scholarship

Luciano Bianciardi (1922-1971) wants to open a dialogue with his friend Vittorio Sereni (1913-1983) through the pages of his best-selling novel La vita agra (1962). Sereni does not respond immediately, and the approach seems not to have received Sereni’s attention. The analysis of Sereni’s 1981 poem “Autostrada della Cisa” proves that he ultimately decided to reply to his friend’s irreverent, yet congenial, comments, albeit nearly 20 years later. This article underlines the existential crisis expressed by Sereni in his poem, accompanied by his willingness to enter into a dialogue with any reader, despite the nihilistic outcomes he foresees. His efforts …

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, …

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Eight), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

Robinson reviews the progress of punctuation between 1850 and 1900, showing how - admidst the ongoing (but increasingly sophisticated) contest between the demands of the eye and the ear, of grammar and rhetoric-writing in English reached new expressive heights in the work of Pater, Dickinson, and others.

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 …

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Seven), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

Though eighteenth-century grammarians had brought light to the profundities of our subject, their erudition and philosophical remove more often than not disqualified their ideas for popular application. Nineteenth-century scholars were a more practical breed. Their goal was to preserve the integrity of English in afar-flung and diversifying Empire. A standardized language was imperative for perspicuity in communication: for the lingua communis ofpoets and philosophers, as well asfor commerce, science, mass education, and government. In the drive for clarity and uniformity, discussions ofthe values ofthe stops and how they should be appliedformed apart of virtually every nineteenth-century grammar textbook.

The Punctator's World: A Discursion (Part Six), Gwen G. Robinson

The Courier

This, the sixth part of a historical survey of the career of punctuation, attempts to describe a few vibrant decades when the mutual influence of punctuation and language brought to light many new ideas. After the publication of Ephraim Chambers' encyclopaedia and Samuel Johnson's dictionary, a prevailing passion for 'truth' put to rout the age-old, commonplace linguistic theories. A tremendous energy came to be applied towards resolving not only the exalted mysteries of the universe and the human mind, but also more homely problems-how to set up a power-driven loom, or breed a Hampshire pig, or even, how properly to …

The Oldest Grammar Of Hindustani, Tej K. Bhatia

Syracuse Scholar (1979-1991)

The oldest grammar of Hindustani, written by a German in Dutch, was considered to have been lost by most modern scholars until 1931. This article is the first authentic treatment of that rare grammar since it was translated into Latin approximately two and a half centuries ago.