St. Cloud State University
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College
Syracuse University
University of Connecticut - Storrs
Murray State University
Old Dominion University
Lingnan University
Kennesaw State University
Bowling Green State University
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal,
2023
American University in Cairo
The Fall And Rise Of Bengali Muslim Conciousness: Conceptualising The Identity Of The Bangla Universal, Habib Khan
Theses and Dissertations
The emergence of modern-nation states saw the end of the empirical era of exploitation and exercise of inherent racist tendencies towards the 'other'. However, the effect of that colonial system is still ever-present in the creation and governance of these newly independent states. While every new state aims to be 'modern', they adopt the international legal framework of the West as their own - a system they had initially wanted to escape. The concept of Muslim universality in the form of the ummah should have freed Pakistan from the shackles of its former colonial masters. Instead, this phenomenon was replaced …
Destined Failure,
2023
Rhode Island School of Design
Destined Failure, Chengjun Pan
Masters Theses
I attempt to examine the complex structure of human communication, explaining why it is bound to fail. By reproducing experienceable phenomena, I demonstrate how they can expose communication structure and reveal the limitations of our perception and symbolization.I divide the process of communication into six stages: input, detection, symbolization, dictionary, interpretation, and output. In this thesis, I examine the flaws and challenges that arise in the first five stages. I argue that reception acts as a filter and that understanding relies on a symbolic system that is full of redundancies. Therefore, every interpretation is destined to be a deviation.
Applying Linguistics To The Adult Esol Classroom: A Guide For Esol Teachers In Community Centers,
2023
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Applying Linguistics To The Adult Esol Classroom: A Guide For Esol Teachers In Community Centers, Lenore Costello
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Many community centers in urban areas of the United States offer English as a Second or Other Language (ESOL) classes to adults. This thesis is intended as a resource for teachers of those classes, so that they may make pedagogical decisions that are informed by Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research findings on how languages are learned. The thesis is designed for teachers with and without formal background in ESOL or linguistics. Each chapter introduces an SLA concept that pertains to instructed SLA: (1) the natural order hypothesis, (2) mental representation and interlanguage, (3) the role of input in acquisition, (4) …
Topics For He But Not For She: Quantifying And Classifying Gender Bias In The Media,
2023
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Topics For He But Not For She: Quantifying And Classifying Gender Bias In The Media, Tyler J. Lanni
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
In this study, we used computational techniques to analyze the language used in news articles to describe female and male politicians. Our corpus included 370 subtexts for male candidates and 374 subtexts for female candidates, gathered through the New York Times API. We conducted two experiments: an LDA topic analysis to explore the data, and a logistic regression to classify the subtexts as either male or female. Our analysis revealed some noteworthy findings that suggest the possibility of developing a gender bias classifier in the future. However, to create a more robust understanding of bias, additional research and data are …
Preface: Scil 2023 Editors’ Note,
2023
University of California, Los Angeles
Preface: Scil 2023 Editors’ Note, Tim Hunter, Brandon Prickett
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
This volume contains research presented at the sixth annual meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), held in Amherst, Massachusetts, June 15–17, 2023.
A Third Structure Building Operation For Minimalist Grammars,
2023
Universität Leipzig
A Third Structure Building Operation For Minimalist Grammars, Johannes Schneider
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
I propose a new structure-building operation for Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997) which allows the grammar formalism to grow trees with more than one root. I demonstrate that together with the assumption that this new long-distance dependency holds between nominal arguments and their selectors, one can generate Horn amalgams and parasitic gaps with a number of desired properties.
An Algebraic Characterization Of Total Input Strictly Local Functions,
2023
Universite Jean Monnet
An Algebraic Characterization Of Total Input Strictly Local Functions, Dakotah Lambert, Jeffrey Heinz
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
This paper provides an algebraic characteriza- tion of the total input strictly local functions. Simultaneous, noniterative rules of the form A→B/C D, common in phonology, are defin- able as functions in this class whenever CAD represents a finite set of strings. The algebraic characterization highlights a fundamental con- nection between input strictly local functions and the simple class of definite string languages, as well as connections to string functions stud- ied in the computer science literature, the def- inite functions and local functions. No effec- tive decision procedure for the input strictly local maps was previously available, but one arises …
Analogy In Contact: Modeling Maltese Plural Inflection,
2023
The Ohio State University
Analogy In Contact: Modeling Maltese Plural Inflection, Sara Court, Andrea D. Sims, Micha Elsner
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Maltese is often described as having a hybrid morphological system resulting from extensive contact between Semitic and Romance language varieties. Such a designation reflects an etymological divide as much as it does a larger tradition in the literature to consider concatenative and non-concatenative morphological patterns as distinct in the language architecture. Using a combination of computational modeling and information theoretic methods, we quantify the extent to which the phonology and etymology of a Maltese singular noun may predict the morphological process (affixal vs. templatic) as well as the specific plural allomorph (affix or template) relating a singular noun to its …
An Incremental Rsa Model For Adjective Ordering Preferences In Referential Visual Context,
2023
University of Tübingen
An Incremental Rsa Model For Adjective Ordering Preferences In Referential Visual Context, Fabian Schlotterbeck, Hening Wang
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
We report data from a preference rating experiment that tested for conflicting effects of subjectivity and discriminatory strength on adjective ordering preferences in referential visual context. Results indicate that, if the communicative efficiency of an adjective is low in a given context, it is preferred later in a multi-adjective expression. To account for qualitative aspects of these data, we propose a novel computational model of incremental processing in the Rational Speech Act framework. What sets the model apart from previous approaches is that it assumes fully incremental interpretation, without the need to anticipate possible sentence completions.
Language Models Can Learn Exceptions To Syntactic Rules,
2023
New York University
Language Models Can Learn Exceptions To Syntactic Rules, Cara Su-Yi Leong, Tal Linzen
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Artificial neural networks can generalize productively to novel contexts. Can they also learn exceptions to those productive rules? We explore this question using the case of restrictions on English passivization (e.g., the fact that ''The vacation lasted five days'' is grammatical, but ''*Five days was lasted by the vacation'' is not). We collect human acceptability judgments for passive sentences with a range of verbs, and show that the probability distribution defined by GPT-2, a language model, matches the human judgments with high correlation. We also show that the relative acceptability of a verb in the active vs. passive voice is …
An Mg Parsing View Into The Processing Of Subject And Object Relative Clauses In Basque,
2023
University of Utah
An Mg Parsing View Into The Processing Of Subject And Object Relative Clauses In Basque, Matteo Fiorini, Jillian Chang, Aniello De Santo
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Stabler (2013)'s top-down parser for Minimalist grammars has been used to account for a variety of off-line processing preferences, with measures of memory load sensitive to subtle structural details. This paper expands the model's empirical coverage to ergative languages by looking at the processing asymmetries reported for Basque relative clauses. Our results show that the model predicts a subject over object preference as identified in the relevant psycholinguistic literature.
Morpheme Combinatorics Of Compound Words Through Box Embeddings,
2023
(formerly at) University of Leipzig
Morpheme Combinatorics Of Compound Words Through Box Embeddings, Eric R. Rosen
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
In this study I probe the combinatoric properties of Japanese morphemes that participate in compounding. By representing morphemes through box embeddings (Vilnis et al., 2018; Patel et al., 2020; Li et al., 2019), a model learns preferences for one morpheme to combine with another in two-member compounds. These learned preferences are represented by the degree to which the box-hyperrectangles for two morphemes overlap in representational space. After learning, these representations are applied to test how well they encode a speaker’s knowledge of the properties of each morpheme that predict the plausibility of novel compounds in which they could occur.
Neural Networks Can Learn Patterns Of Island-Insensitivity In Norwegian,
2023
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Neural Networks Can Learn Patterns Of Island-Insensitivity In Norwegian, Anastasia Kobzeva, Suhas Arehalli, Tal Linzen, Dave Kush
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Recent research suggests that Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) can capture abstract generalizations about filler-gap dependencies (FGDs) in English and so-called island constraints on their distribution (Wilcox et al., 2018; 2021). These results have been interpreted as evidence that it is possible, in principle, to induce complex syntactic knowledge from the input without domain-specific learning biases. However, the English results alone do not establish that island constraints were induced from distributional properties of the training data instead of simply reflecting architectural limitations independent of the input to the models. We address this concern by investigating whether such models can learn the …
Noise-Tolerant Learning As Selection Among Deterministic Grammatical Hypotheses,
2023
University of California, Los Angeles
Noise-Tolerant Learning As Selection Among Deterministic Grammatical Hypotheses, Laurel Perkins, Tim Hunter
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Children acquire their language's canonical word order from data that contains a messy mixture of canonical and non-canonical clause types. We model this as noise-tolerant learning of grammars that deterministically produce a single word order. In simulations on English and French, our model successfully separates signal from the noise introduced by non-canonical clause types, in order to identify that both languages are SVO. No such preference for the target word order emerges from a comparison model which operates with a fully-gradient hypothesis space and an explicit numerical regularization bias. This provides an alternative general mechanism for regularization in various learning …
On The Spectra Of Syntactic Structures,
2023
Yale University
On The Spectra Of Syntactic Structures, Isabella Senturia, Robert Frank
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
This paper explores the application of spectral graph theory to the problem of characterizing linguistically significant classes of tree structures. As a case study, we focus on three classes of trees, binary, X-bar, and asymmetric c-command extensional, and show that the spectral properties of different matrix representations of these classes of trees provide insight into the properties that characterize these classes. More generally, our goal is to provide another route to understanding the structure of natural language, one that does not come from extensive definitions and rules taken by extrapolating from the syntactic structure, but instead is extracted directly from …
Parsing "Early English Books Online" For Linguistic Search,
2023
University of Pennsylvania
Parsing "Early English Books Online" For Linguistic Search, Seth Kulick, Neville Ryant, Beatrice Santorini
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
This work addresses the question of how to evaluate a state-of-the-art parser on Early English Books Online (EEBO), a 1.5-billion-word collection of unannotated text, for utility in linguistic research. Earlier work has trained and evaluated a parser on the 1.7-million-word Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME) and defined a query-based evaluation to score the retrieval of 6 specific sentence types of interest. However, significant differences between EEBO and the manually-annotated PPCEME make it inappropriate to assume that these results will generalize to EEBO. Fortunately, an overlap of source material in PPCEME and EEBO allows us to establish a …
Phonological Processes With Intersecting Tier Alphabets,
2023
Universität Leipzig
Phonological Processes With Intersecting Tier Alphabets, Johannes Schneider, Daniel Gleim
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Aksënova and Deshmukh (2018) conjecture that if the phonology of a language requires projection to multiple tiers, the tier alphabets of those tiers are either disjoint or stand in a subset/superset relation, but never form a nontrivial intersection. We provide three counterexamples to this claim.
Processing Advantages Of End-Weight,
2023
Universitat Leipzig
Processing Advantages Of End-Weight, Lei Liu
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Previous research has established that English end-weight configurations, where sentence components of greater grammatical complexity appear at the ends of sentences, demonstrate processing advantages over alternative word orders. To evaluate these processing advantages, I analyze how a Minimalist Grammar (MG) parser generates syntactic structures for different word orders. The parser's behavior suggests that end-weight configurations require fewer memory resources for parsing than alternative structures. This memory load difference accounts for the end-weight advantage in processing. The results highlight the validity of the MG processing approach as a linking theory connecting syntactic structures to behavioral observations. Additionally, the results have implications …
Rethinking Representations: A Log-Bilinear Model Of Phonotactics,
2023
Rutgers University
Rethinking Representations: A Log-Bilinear Model Of Phonotactics, Huteng Dai, Connor Mayer, Richard Futrell
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Models of phonotactics include subsegmental representations in order to generalize to unattested sequences. These representations can be encoded in at least two ways: as discrete, phonetically-based features, or as continuous, distribution-based representations induced from the statistical patterning of sounds. Because phonological theory typically assumes that representations are discrete, past work has reduced continuous representations to discrete ones, which eliminates potentially relevant information. In this paper we present a model of phonotactics that can use continuous representations directly, and show that this approach yields competitive performance on modeling experimental judgments of English sonority sequencing. The proposed model broadens the space of …
Subregular Tree Transductions, Movement, Copies, Traces, And The Ban On Improper Movement,
2023
Stony Brook University
Subregular Tree Transductions, Movement, Copies, Traces, And The Ban On Improper Movement, Thomas Graf
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics
Extending prior work in Graf (2018, 2020, 2022c), I show that movement is tier-based strictly local (TSL) even if one analyzes it as a transformation, i.e. a tree transduction from derivation trees to output trees. I define input strictly local (ISL) tree-to-tree transductions with (lexical) TSL tests as a tier-based extension of ISL tree-to-tree transductions. TSL tests allow us to attach each mover to all its landing sites. In general, this class of transductions fails to attach each mover to its final landing site to the exclusion of all its intermediate landing sites, which is crucial for producing output trees …
