Universal complex structures in written language

Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf’s law of word frequencies. Zipf’s law appears to be universal, and may not even be unique to human language. However, there is ongoing controversy over whether Zipf’s law is a good indicator of complexity. Here we present an alternative approach that puts Zipf’s law in the context of critical phenomena (the cornerstone of complexity in physics) and establishes the presence of a large-scale “attraction” between successive repetitions of words. Moreover, this phenomenon is scale-invariant and universal – the pattern is independent of word frequency and is observed in texts by different authors and written in different languages. There is evidence, however, that the shape of the scaling relation changes for words that play a key role in the text, implying the existence of different “universality classes” in the repetition of words. These behaviours exhibit striking parallels with complex catastrophic phenomena.

On the origin and scope of the second language speech production disadvatage

Los hablantes bilingües tienen un acceso al léxico más lento y menos robusto que los monolingües, incluso cuando hablan en su lengua materna y dominante. Este fenómeno, comúnmente llamado “la desventaja bilingüe” también se observa en hablantes de una segunda lengua en comparación con hablantes de una primera lengua. Una causa que posiblemente contribuya a estas desventajas es el uso de control inhibitorio durante la producción del lenguaje: la inhibición de palabras coactivadas de la lengua actualmente no en uso puede prevenir intrusiones de dicha lengua, pero al mismo tiempo ralentizar la producción del lenguaje. El primer objetivo de los estudios descritos en este informe era testear esta hipótesis mediante diferentes predicciones generadas por teorías de control inhibitorio del lenguaje. Un segundo objetivo era investigar la extensión de la desventaja bilingüe dentro y fuera de la producción de palabras aisladas, así como avanzar en el conocimiento de las variables que la modulan. En lo atingente al primer objetivo, la evidencia obtenida es incompatible con un control inhibitorio global, desafiando la idea de mecanismos específicos en el hablante bilingüe utilizados para la selección léxica. Esto implica que una explicación común para el control de lenguaje y la desventaja bilingüe en el acceso al léxico es poco plausible. En cuanto al segundo objetivo, los resultados muestran que (a) la desventaja bilingüe no tiene un impacto al acceso a la memoria; (b) la desventaja bilingüe extiende a la producción del habla conectada; y (c) similitudes entre lenguas a diferentes niveles de representación así como la frecuencia de uso son factores que modulan la desventaja bilingüe.   

The analysis of the framing processes of the Basque peace movement: The way Lokarri and Gesto por la Paz changed society

During more than 20 years organisations like Gesto por la Paz and Lokarri had been trying to change the social approach to violence, instilling values of peace and dialogue. This working paper defends the idea that the work of these two organisations is key to understand the end of ETA violence and the lack of support that political violence has in the Basque Country. It develops the Basque peace frame generated by this movement and explains how this frame is present in the different levels of Basque society, changing the way political collective identities are negotiated in the Basque Country. Ultimately, their effort is to propose another way of doing politics, one where nationalism and violence are not intrinsically united, escaping from the polarization and confrontation that were in place during the 80s-90s.

NQL, Natural Query Language

Desarrollo de un sistema capaz de procesar consultas en lenguaje natural introducidas por el usuario mediante el teclado. El sistema es capaz de responder a consultas en castellano, relacionadas con un dominio de aplicación representado mediante una base de datos relacional.

Platform for Automatic, Normalized Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition of Language Resources for Human Language Technologies: PANACEA

El objetivo de PANACEA es engranar diferentes herramientas avanzadas para construir una fábrica de Recursos Lingüísticos (RL), una línea de producción que automatice los pasos implicados en la adquisición, producción, actualización y mantenimiento de los RL que la Traducción Automática y otras tecnologías lingüísticas, necesitan.

PANACEA (Platform for Automatic, Normalised Annotation and Cost-Effective Acquisition of Language Resources for Human Language Technologies)

The objective of PANACEA is to build a factory of LRs that automates the stages involved in the acquisition, production, updating and maintenance of LRs required by MT systems and by other applications based on language technologies, and simplifies eventual issues regarding intellectual property rights. This automation will cut down the cost, time and human effort significantly. These reductions of costs and time are the only way to guarantee the continuous supply of LRs that MT and other language technologies will be demanding in the multilingual Europe.

Towards the automatic merging of language resources

Language Resources are a critical component for Natural Language Processing applications. Throughout the years many resources were manually created for the same task, but with different granularity and coverage information. To create richer resources for a broad range of potential reuses, nformation from all resources has to be joined into one. The hight cost of comparing and merging different resources by hand has been a bottleneck for merging existing resources. With the objective of reducing human intervention, we present a new method for automating merging resources. We have addressed the merging of two verbs subcategorization frame (SCF) lexica for Spanish. The results achieved, a new lexicon with enriched information and conflicting information signalled, reinforce our idea that this approach can be applied for other task of NLP.

Towards a User-Friendly Platform for Building Language Resources based on Web Services

This paper presents the platform developed in the PANACEA project, a distributed factory that automates the stages involved in the acquisition, production, updating and maintenance of Language Resources required by Machine Translation and other Language Technologies. We adopt a set of tools that have been successfully used in the Bioinformatics field, they are adapted to the needs of our field and used to deploy web services, which can be combined to build more complex processing chains (workflows). This paper describes the platform and its different components (web services, registry, workflows, social network and interoperability). We demonstrate the scalability of the platform by carrying out a set of massive data experiments. Finally, a validation of the platform across a set of required criteria proves its usability for different types of users (non-technical users and providers).

From a pattern-language to a pattern ontology approach for CSCL script design

Collaborative activities, in which students actively interact with each other, have proved to provide significant learning benefits. In Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), these collaborative activities are assisted by technologies. However, the use of computers does not guarantee collaboration, as free collaboration does not necessary lead to fruitful learning. Therefore, practitioners need to design CSCL scripts that structure the collaborative settings so that they promote learning. However, not all teachers have the technical and pedagogical background needed to design such scripts. With the aim of assisting teachers in designing effective CSCL scripts, we propose a model to support the selection of reusable good practices (formulated as patterns) so that they can be used as a starting point for their own designs. This model is based on a pattern ontology that computationally represents the knowledge captured on a pattern language for the design of CSCL scripts. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach is provided with two examples based on a set of meaningful interrelated patters computationally represented with the pattern ontology, and a paper prototyping experience carried out with two teaches. The results offer interesting insights towards the implementation of the pattern ontology in software tools.

Secession and liberal democracy. The case of the Basque country

The academic debate about the secession of a territory which is part of a liberal democracy state displays an initial contrast. On the one hand, practical secessionist movements usually legitimize their position using nationalist arguments linked to the principle of national self- determination. On the other hand, we find in academia few defenders of a normative principle of national self-determination. Philosophers, political scientists and jurists usually defend the status quo. And even when they do not defend it, most of them tend to leave the question of that question and secession unresolved or confused. Regarding this issue, liberal-democratic theories show a tendency to be “conservative” in relation to the political borders, regardless the historical and empirical processes of creation of current States. Probably, this feature is not far away to the fact that, since its beginning, political liberalism has not been a theory of the nation, but a theory of the state.

The development of intercultural awareness and changes of beliefs: the effects of studying abroad on learners of English as a second language

The present study examines the development of interculturality and changes of beliefs, by analyzing 106 compositions produced by 53 advanced level university students of translation studies at a university in Spain before and shortly after a stay-abroad (SA) period. The study draws on data collected at two different times: before (T1) and after the SA (T3). In addition, we compared the results with the writings produced by a control group of 10 native English speakers on SA too. Data were collected by means of a composition which tried to elicit the learners’ opinion about cultural habits maintenance. The results reveal significant changes between T1 and T3 in the degree of better attitudes and intercultural acquisition.

8-month non-use of a language. A case tudy. A longitudinal study of the effects on non use of one of the languages (Spanish) of a German L1 multilingual

Under the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism multilinguals are especially vulnerable to language attrition. It was the aim of the present study to verify if this was the case and to observe whether the different linguistic skills (receptive vs. descriptive) and the different linguistic levels (syntactic, lexical, morphological, etc.) would be affected equally.Data were gathered longitudinally by means of a language test for the subject’s reading, writing, listening and speaking skills as well as her knowledge of grammar and vocabulary. Although the overall accuracy remained intact and no proof for attrition in the receptive skills was found, the productive skills - mainly fluency - were shown to have suffered from language attrition. This was demonstrated by an increase in the number of pauses, hesitations, repetitions and self-corrections among others and decrease in the percentage of error-free clauses and decrease in the clause length, in oral and written fluency respectively.

Late bloomer or language impaired? Screening the speech of a Spanish-English bilingual toddler for early signs of language impairment

This case study presents corpus data gathered from a Spanish-English bilingual child with expressive language delay. Longitudinal data on the child’s linguistic development was collected from the onset of productive speech at age 1;1 until age 4 over the course of 28 video-taped sessions with the child’s principal caregivers. A literature review focused on the relationship between language delay and persisting disorders—including a discussion of the frequent difficulty in distinguishing between the two at early stages of bilingual development—is followed by an analysis of the child’s productive development in 2 distinct phases. An attempt is made to assess the child’s speech at age 4 for preliminary signs of SLI and to consider techniques for identifying ‘at risk’ bilingual children (that is, those with productive language delay, poor oral fluency, and family history of language problems) based on samples of recorded and transcribed speech.

Language acquisition during a stay abroad period following formal instruction: temporal effects on oral fluency development

This study investigates the development of fluency in 30 advanced L2 learners of English over a period of 15 months. In order to measure fluency, several temporal variables and hesitation phenomena are analyzed and compared. Oral competence is assessed by means of an oral interview carried out by the learners. Data collection takes place at three different times: before (T1) and after (T2) a six-month period of FI (80 hours) in the home university, and after a three-month SA term (T3). The data is analyzed quantitatively. Developmental gains in fluency are measured for the whole period, adopting a view of complementarity between the two learning contexts. From these results, a group of high fluency speakers is identified. Correlations between fluency gains and individual and contextual variables are executed and a more qualitative analysis is performed for high fluency speakers' performance and behavior. Results show an overall development of students' oral fluency during a period of 15 months favored by the combination of a period of FI at home followed by a 3-months SA.

Nonparametric bounds on the returns to language skills

This paper applies the theoretical literature on nonparametric bounds ontreatment effects to the estimation of how limited English proficiency (LEP)affects wages and employment opportunities for Hispanic workers in theUnited States. I analyze the identifying power of several weak assumptionson treatment response and selection, and stress the interactions between LEPand education, occupation and immigration status. I show that thecombination of two weak but credible assumptions provides informative upperbounds on the returns to language skills for certain subgroups of thepopulation. Adding age at arrival as a monotone instrumental variable alsoprovides informative lower bounds.