La reagrupación familiar de africanos y latinoamericanos en la España mediterránea: dinámicas y estructuras sociodemográficas

Los extranjeros autorizados en 2006-2009 a residir en España por motivos de reagrupación familiar, muestran la importancia que ha alcanzado esta forma de inmigración en el total de nuevos extranjeros empadronados. La investigación se basa en una encuesta específica a reagrupantes africanos y latinoamericanos, que también informan sobre sus familiares reagrupados, hayan utilizado, o no, las leyes de reagrupación. Africanos y latinoamericanos ofrecen dinámicas y estructuras sociodemográficas muy diferentes, a resultas, entre otras causas, de la antigüedad de sus flujos, su fecundidad, su dominio del idioma español, su nivel de instrucción, sus posibilidades de ingresos, su estructura por sexo y edad, tamaño de las familias reagrupadas, etc. Se ofrece información para los dos colectivos continentales y para los subgrupos familiares —reagrupantes, cónyuges, hijos, progenitores y otros familiares—, y se utilizan escalas del conjunto estudiado y de ámbitos territoriales —Cataluña litoral, Comunidad Valenciana, Murcia-Almería—. Los africanos concentran los aspectos estructurales más negativos —idioma español, instrucción, ingresos,…—, pero también son los que declaran intenciones más firmes y generalizadas de permanencia en España. Las conclusiones orientan sobre el futuro de estos flujos.

La integración social de las familias africanas y latinoamericanas reagrupadas en la España mediterránea

La investigación se basa en una encuesta específica realizada en 2009-2010 a 348 reagrupantes africanos y a 457 latinoamericanos, que residen con sus familias en las provincias litorales entre Girona y Almería. Los reagrupantes también informan sobre sus cónyuges y sus hijos. La información ahora utilizada se centra en factores de integración social relevantes para los grupos familiares; se utiliza la escala del conjunto territorial estudiado, y también de las tres subáreas: Cataluña litoral, Comunidad Valenciana y Murcia-Almería. Los factores de integración estudiados son el conocimiento del idioma español (para los africanos); las relaciones de convivencia; las parejas matrimoniales deseadas para los hijos/as; los deseos de permanencia en España; ingresos económicos y bienestar percibido; las relaciones de la familia con el país de origen, y la vivienda familiar en España. Africanos y latinoamericanos ofrecen respuestas diferentes a los factores de integración, más positivas entre los segundos, y dentro de los colectivos familiares, los hijos muestran actitudes más favorables para su integración.

PHORA: a system to solve the anaphora in Spanish

In this paper we present a whole Natural Language Processing (NLP) system for Spanish. The core of this system is the parser, which uses the grammatical formalism Lexical-Functional Grammars (LFG). Another important component of this system is the anaphora resolution module. To solve the anaphora, this module contains a method based on linguistic information (lexical, morphological, syntactic and semantic), structural information (anaphoric accessibility space in which the anaphor obtains the antecedent) and statistical information. This method is based on constraints and preferences and solves pronouns and definite descriptions. Moreover, this system fits dialogue and non-dialogue discourse features. The anaphora resolution module uses several resources, such as a lexical database (Spanish WordNet) to provide semantic information and a POS tagger providing the part of speech for each word and its root to make this resolution process easier.

A reassessment of traditional lexicographical tools in the light of new corpora: sports Anglicisms in Spanish

There is no question nowadays as to the international and powerful status of English at a global scale and, consequently, as to its presence in non-English speaking countries at different levels. Linguistically speaking, English is one of the languages which have mostly influenced Spanish throughout its history and especially from the late 1960s. In this study, the impact of English on Spanish is considered in the language of sports; particularly, sports Anglicisms and false Anglicisms are analysed. Due attention is paid to the different forms that an Anglicism may adopt and to which of those forms are more widely accepted or rejected by prescriptivists and speakers at large, in the light of a contrastive analysis of their appearance in the Nuevo diccionario de anglicismos, the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española and the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual.

Fénix: a flexible information exchange data model for natural language processing

In this paper we describe Fénix, a data model for exchanging information between Natural Language Processing applications. The format proposed is intended to be flexible enough to cover both current and future data structures employed in the field of Computational Linguistics. The Fénix architecture is divided into four separate layers: conceptual, logical, persistence and physical. This division provides a simple interface to abstract the users from low-level implementation details, such as programming languages and data storage employed, allowing them to focus in the concepts and processes to be modelled. The Fénix architecture is accompanied by a set of programming libraries to facilitate the access and manipulation of the structures created in this framework. We will also show how this architecture has been already successfully applied in different research projects.

The aid of machine learning to overcome the classification of real health discharge reports written in Spanish

Hospitals attached to the Spanish Ministry of Health are currently using the International Classification of Diseases 9 Clinical Modification (ICD9-CM) to classify health discharge records. Nowadays, this work is manually done by experts. This paper tackles the automatic classification of real Discharge Records in Spanish following the ICD9-CM standard. The challenge is that the Discharge Records are written in spontaneous language. We explore several machine learning techniques to deal with the classification problem. Random Forest resulted in the most competitive one, achieving an F-measure of 0.876.

An overview of the Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems

This introduction provides an overview of the state-of-the-art technology in Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems. Specifically, we analyze the need for such technologies to successfully address the new challenges of modern information systems, in which the exploitation of the Web as a main data source on business systems becomes a key requirement. It will also discuss the reasons why Human Language Technologies themselves have shifted their focus onto new areas of interest very directly linked to the development of technology for the treatment and understanding of Web 2.0. These new technologies are expected to be future interfaces for the new information systems to come. Moreover, we will review current topics of interest to this research community, and will present the selection of manuscripts that have been chosen by the program committee of the NLDB 2011 conference as representative cornerstone research works, especially highlighting their contribution to the advancement of such technologies.

Applying semantic knowledge to the automatic processing of temporal expressions and events in natural language

This paper addresses the problem of the automatic recognition and classification of temporal expressions and events in human language. Efficacy in these tasks is crucial if the broader task of temporal information processing is to be successfully performed. We analyze whether the application of semantic knowledge to these tasks improves the performance of current approaches. We therefore present and evaluate a data-driven approach as part of a system: TIPSem. Our approach uses lexical semantics and semantic roles as additional information to extend classical approaches which are principally based on morphosyntax. The results obtained for English show that semantic knowledge aids in temporal expression and event recognition, achieving an error reduction of 59% and 21%, while in classification the contribution is limited. From the analysis of the results it may be concluded that the application of semantic knowledge leads to more general models and aids in the recognition of temporal entities that are ambiguous at shallower language analysis levels. We also discovered that lexical semantics and semantic roles have complementary advantages, and that it is useful to combine them. Finally, we carried out the same analysis for Spanish. The results obtained show comparable advantages. This supports the hypothesis that applying the proposed semantic knowledge may be useful for different languages.

How to make a natural language interface to query databases accessible to everyone: An example

Natural Language Interfaces to Query Databases (NLIDBs) have been an active research field since the 1960s. However, they have not been widely adopted. This article explores some of the biggest challenges and approaches for building NLIDBs and proposes techniques to reduce implementation and adoption costs. The article describes {AskMe*}, a new system that leverages some of these approaches and adds an innovative feature: query-authoring services, which lower the entry barrier for end users. Advantages of these approaches are proven with experimentation. Results confirm that, even when {AskMe*} is automatically reconfigurable against multiple domains, its accuracy is comparable to domain-specific NLIDBs.

Tackling redundancy in text summarization through different levels of language analysis

One of the main challenges to be addressed in text summarization concerns the detection of redundant information. This paper presents a detailed analysis of three methods for achieving such goal. The proposed methods rely on different levels of language analysis: lexical, syntactic and semantic. Moreover, they are also analyzed for detecting relevance in texts. The results show that semantic-based methods are able to detect up to 90% of redundancy, compared to only the 19% of lexical-based ones. This is also reflected in the quality of the generated summaries, obtaining better summaries when employing syntactic- or semantic-based approaches to remove redundancy.

Building bridges… and properties aplenty: cultural problems in Spanish real estate marketing for prospective British buyers

N.B. reproduced with permission of Peter Lang Verlag. For citation, please, use the original reference, that is Campos Pardillos, M.A. and Balteiro Fernández, I. 2009. “Building bridges… and properties aplenty: cultural problems in Spanish real estate marketing for prospective British buyers”. In: Guillén-Nieto, V., C. Marimón-Llorca and C. Vargas-Sierra. Eds. Intercultural Business Communication and Simulation and Gaming Methodology. Bern: Peter Lang. Pp. 155-174.

Motivational profiles Spanish students of Compulsory Secondary Education: Differential analysis of academic self-attributions

Academic goals and academic self-attributions are relevant variables in school settings. The objective of this study is to identify whether there are combinations of multiple goals that lead to different motivational profiles and to determine whether there are significant differences between the groups obtained regarding causal attributions of success and failure (ability, effort, or external causes) in Mathematics and Language and Literature, and in overall academic performance. The Goal Achievement Tendencies Questionnaire (AGTQ) and the Sydney Attribution Scale (SAS) were administered to a sample of 2022 students of compulsory secondary education, ranging in age from 12 to 16 years (M = 13.81, SD = 1.35). Cluster analysis identified four motivational profiles: a group of students with a high generalized motivation profile, a group of students with low generalized motivation profile, a group of students with predominance of learning goals and achievement goals, and a final group of students with predominance of social reinforcement goals. Results revealed statistically significant differences between the profiles obtained in academic self-attributions.

Validation of a Spanish version of the Distance Education Learning Environments Survey (DELES) in Spain

The aim of this study was to examine the validity of the Spanish version of the Distance Education Learning Environments Survey (Sp-DELES). This instrument assesses students’ perceptions of virtual learning environments using six scales: Instructor Support, Student Interaction and Collaboration, Personal Relevance, Authentic Learning, Active Learning, and Autonomy. Further, the Sp-DELES includes an additional scale that assesses students’ Satisfaction with their classes. The original DELES has been used in at least 27 independent studies with strong reliability and validity. For this study, we sampled 265 students from the University of Alicante enrolled in various hybrid and distance education courses taught by the Department of Health Psychology. We analysed the Sp-DELES for validity using principal component factor analysis with varimax rotation, and for reliability using Cronbach’s alpha. The Sp-DELES exhibited good reliability (Cronbach’s alpha for the scales ranging from 0.86 to 0.97) and the original six-factor structure was replicated and accounted for 72.9 % of the total variance. Overall the results are consistent with those of the original English-language version of the instrument. The Sp-DELES has proven to be a reliable and valid instrument for assessing psychosocial learning environments in tertiary-level hybrid and distance-education settings.

Evaluation of the Implementation of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) Methodology in the Didactics of the English Language in Preschool Education Course Taught in the Preschool Education Teacher Undergraduate Program at the University of Alicante

Although it is known that the Spanish current Educative System promotes using the Communicate Approach to teach foreign languages in schools, other recently designed approaches are also used to help students improve their skills when communicating in a foreign language. One of these approaches is Content and Language Integrated Learning, also known as CLIL, which is used to teach content courses using the English language as the language of instruction. This approach improves the students’ skills in English as the same time as they learn content from other areas. The goal of this thesis is to present a research project carried out at the University of Alicante during the academic year 2011-2012. With this research we obtained results that provide quantitative and qualitative data which explains how the use of the CLIL methodology affects the English level of students in the “Didactics of the English Language in Preschool Education” course in Preschool Education Teacher Undergraduate Program as students acquire the contents of the course.

Transfer in third language phonology: Does L3 typological proximity play a role?

Les investigacions recents sobre la transferència i l'adquisició d’una L3 han indagat sobre les interferències lingüístiques quan hi ha més d'una font de transferència. Els participants en aquest estudi de cas van ser parlants d’espanyol i d’anglès, que apreninen una tercera llengua, el català, tipològicament més pròxima a l’espanyol. Aquest estudi va investigar la producció dels bilingües del català fosc /ɫ/, un segment que no és present en espanyol ja que tots els laterals es produeixen com una clara /l/, i que, tanmateix, es realitza en anglès en posició final després de vocal. Contràriament al model que planteja la proximitat d'idiomes prèviament adquirids com un dels factors determinants per a la transferència de competències, l’estudi va mostrar que la proximitat tipològica a un dels L1 no és determinista per a la transferència en el nivell fonològic en l’aprenentatge d’una L3, ja que els participants produeixen laterals catalanes similars a /ɫ/. En aquest estudi de cas es constata, d’acord amb el Model de Millora Acumulativa, com es transfereix aquest segment fonològic des de l’anglés al català.