Lexical phrases in telecommunication blogs: a genre analysis

The study presented in this paper aims to provide a description of telecommunication blogs as a genre. Lexical phrases are analysed in order to reach conclusions regarding the nature of the language in these texts and the extent to which the results obtained are comparable with other written or conversational discourse types. Although the departing hypothesis is that the articles in blogs are basically transactional and their main objective is to transfer information, the conclusions point to interaction as a distinctive characteristic of this type of discourse and also to a more careful organization in the comments to the blogs entries than originally expected. RESUMEN. Este trabajo presenta una descripción de los blogs de Telecomunicación como género. A través del análisis de frases léxicas se llega a conclusiones sobre algunas de las características que definen la lengua que se usa en este tipo de textos y se comparan los resultados obtenidos con otros previos sobre el discurso escrito y el conversacional. Aunque la hipótesis de partida es que los artículos de los blogs son básicamente transaccionales, donde el principal objetivo es transmitir información, los resultados llevan a conclusiones sobre la importancia de la interacción en este tipo de discurso y también apuntan a una mayor organización de la esperable en las entradas de los comentarios al artículo principal del blog.

Metaphor and Genre: An Approach to improve the learning process of English for Aeronautics

This study suggests a theoretical framework for improving the teaching/ learning process of English employed in the Aeronautical discourse that brings together cognitive learning strategies, Genre Analysis and the Contemporary theory of Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993). It maintains that cognitive strategies such as imagery, deduction, inference and grouping can be enhanced by means of metaphor and genre awareness in the context of content based approach to language learning. A list of image metaphors and conceptual metaphors which comes from the terminological database METACITEC is provided. The metaphorical terms from the area of Aeronautics have been taken from specialised dictionaries and have been categorised according to the conceptual metaphors they respond to, by establishing the source domains and the target domains, as well as the semantic networks found. This information makes reference to the internal mappings underlying the discourse of aeronautics reflected in five aviation accident case studies which are related to accident reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and provides an important source for designing language teaching tasks. La Lingüística Cognitiva y el Análisis del Género han contribuido a la mejora de la enseñanza de segundas lenguas y, en particular, al desarrollo de la competencia lingüística de los alumnos de inglés para fines específicos. Este trabajo pretende perfeccionar los procesos de enseñanza y el aprendizaje del lenguaje empleado en el discurso aeronáutico por medio de la práctica de estrategias cognitivas y prestando atención a la Teoría del análisis del género y a la Teoría contemporánea de la metáfora (Lakoff y Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993). Con el propósito de crear recursos didácticos en los que se apliquen estrategias metafóricas, se ha elaborado un listado de metáforas de imagen y de metáforas conceptuales proveniente de la base de datos terminológica META-CITEC. Estos términos se han clasificado de acuerdo con las metáforas conceptuales y de imagen existentes en esta área de conocimiento. Para la enseñanza de este lenguaje de especialidad, se proponen las correspondencias y las proyecciones entre el dominio origen y el dominio meta que se han hallado en los informes de accidentes aéreos tomados de la Junta federal de la Seguridad en el Transporte (NTSB)

Applied genre analysis: the case of introductions in spanish teacher trainees curricular design documents

A host of studies over the years have been published on introductions to research articles across a variety of fields. However, much less attention has been paid to professional or workplace introductions as well as student written introductions. This study aims to redress this imbalance by studying the writing samples of four primary English teacher trainees’ introductions to curricular design i.e. the document candidates must present to an examination board in Spain. This genre can be considered occluded in that exemplars are private and confidential and not readily available to the aspiring candidate. Three recurrent moves were identified, namely, explaining the importance of curricular design, providing background and defining concepts. Instances of self-glorification (Bhatia 1996) were revealed. The implications of the findings can have a positive effect on students’ future writing. RESUMEN. Se han publicado varios estudios en los últimos años sobre las introducciones de los artículos de investigación en varios campos. Sin embargo, se ha prestado mucha menor atención a las introducciones en los ámbitos profesionales o las introducciones en el lugar de trabajo, así como a las introducciones escritas por estudiantes. Este estudio tiene por objeto corregir este desequilibrio mediante el análisis de cuatro introducciones redactadas por candidatos para las oposiciones públicas de profesores de inglés de primaria. Este género se puede considerar oculto puesto que las muestras de dichas introducciones no están publicadas. El análisis de estas introducciones muestra que hay tres movimientos recurrentes: una explicación de la importancia del diseño curricular, definición del contexto educativo y, por último, definición de conceptos. Hay ejemplos en este estudio empírico de auto-promoción (Bhatia 1996). Las implicaciones de los resultados pueden tener un efecto positivo en la escritura de estos estudiantes en el futuro.

Development of a genre-dependent TTS system with cross-speaker speaking-style transplantation

One of the biggest challenges in speech synthesis is the production of contextually-appropriate naturally sounding synthetic voices. This means that a Text-To-Speech system must be able to analyze a text beyond the sentence limits in order to select, or even modulate, the speaking style according to a broader context. Our current architecture is based on a two-step approach: text genre identification and speaking style synthesis according to the detected discourse genre. For the final implementation, a set of four genres and their corresponding speaking styles were considered: broadcast news, live sport commentaries, interviews and political speeches. In the final TTS evaluation, the four speaking styles were transplanted to the neutral voices of other speakers not included in the training database. When the transplanted styles were compared to the neutral voices, transplantation was significantly preferred and the similarity to the target speaker was as high as 78%.

Eits: Combinatorics, Potential and Genre

Eits is a work of fiction, a non-traditional novel whose structure is largely determined by an Oulipian-style constraint. The constraint in Eits is culled from the album names and song titles of the band Explosions in the Sky. Each album corresponds to a chapter in the novel, and the language of each album title must be used in some way as an introduction to each chapter. Within each chapter (album), song titles correspond to numbered sections where each title must appear as is in the first sentence of that section. This not only dictates, to some degree, the direction of the text that will follow, but, looking ahead, the title of the next section will dictate where this section must arrive. From this, a narrative naturally takes shape. Albums/chapters appear chronologically, according to each album's release date, and within each album/chapter, songs/sections appear in the order they do on the album. This is, perhaps, the most straightforward way of ordering the received language of the constraint, the possibilities beyond this exponential. Eits is a novel that shifts in form, providing a texture to the space and reading experience of the novel, all in hopes of creating a space in which content and form inform and push each other to new limits. Eits is never satisfied to settle on one form for too long, and it is in the movement between forms that the narrative develops in interesting ways. Eits demonstrates the combinatoric possibilities inherent in language, and this exploration of potential highlights the reciprocal relationship between writing and reading. As Eits builds upon a limited language set, it explores and exploits the combinatory possibilities that language allows for both writer and reader. It demonstrates that all combinatoric potentialities, visible or not, always co-exist in the same time and space, and in this infinite space, individuals are invited to be writers and readers in simultaneity.

Private (Brown) Eyes: Ethnicity, Genre and Gender in Crime Fiction in the Gloria Damasco novels and the Chicanos Comic Series

The representation of women in crime fiction has traditionally been a complicated one. Consistently forced into secondary characters (assistants, girlfriends, or damsels in distress) the most active role a female character could aspire to was that of the femme fatale, a pit of perdition, an unwelcome distraction for a man looking for truth and justice. This traditional approach to the genre has been challenged in the last decades by women acting as detectives, trusted with solving their cases in a hostile male world. Similarly, the traditional white male protagonist has been contested by fictions where ethnic minorities are not just consigned to the criminal world, but where detectives are members of ethnic groups, and can use their knowledge of the community to solve the case. This essay focuses on the crossroads of ethnic and women’s detective fiction, specifically the Gloria Damasco series by Chicana writer Lucha Corpi and the graphic novel Chicanos (Trillo and Risso, 1996). Both protagonists (Gloria Damasco, a Chicana clairvoyant detective, and “poor, ugly, and a detective” Alejandrina Yolanda Jalisco) must face both the dangers of investigating criminal cases and discrimination in their professional surroundings due to their gender and ethnicity. By contrasting these texts, the essay elucidates the importance of specific cultural products, their connection to (and defiance of) canonical forms of the genre, and their rejection of generic and gender expectations.

EmotiBlog: a model to learn subjective information detection in the new textual genres of the Web 2.0 -a multilingual and multi-genre approach-

Tesis doctoral con mención europea en procesamiento del lenguaje natural realizada en la Universidad de Alicante por Ester Boldrini bajo la dirección del Dr. Patricio Martínez-Barco. El acto de defensa de la tesis tuvo lugar en la Universidad de Alicante el 23 de enero de 2012 ante el tribunal formado por los doctores Manuel Palomar (Universidad de Alicante), Dr. Paloma Moreda (UA), Dr. Mariona Taulé (Universidad de Barcelona), Dr. Horacio Saggion (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) y Dr. Mike Thelwall (University of Wolverhampton). Calificación: Sobresaliente Cum Laude por unanimidad.

A multimodal genre recognition prototype

In this paper, a multimodal and interactive prototype to perform music genre classification is presented. The system is oriented to multi-part files in symbolic format but it can be adapted using a transcription system to transform audio content in music scores. This prototype uses different sources of information to give a possible answer to the user. It has been developed to allow a human expert to interact with the system to improve its results. In its current implementation, it offers a limited range of interaction and multimodality. Further development aimed at full interactivity and multimodal interactions is discussed.

Towards automatic tweet generation: A comparative study from the text summarization perspective in the journalism genre

In recent years, Twitter has become one of the most important microblogging services of the Web 2.0. Among the possible uses it allows, it can be employed for communicating and broadcasting information in real time. The goal of this research is to analyze the task of automatic tweet generation from a text summarization perspective in the context of the journalism genre. To achieve this, different state-of-the-art summarizers are selected and employed for producing multi-lingual tweets in two languages (English and Spanish). A wide experimental framework is proposed, comprising the creation of a new corpus, the generation of the automatic tweets, and their assessment through a quantitative and a qualitative evaluation, where informativeness, indicativeness and interest are key criteria that should be ensured in the proposed context. From the results obtained, it was observed that although the original tweets were considered as model tweets with respect to their informativeness, they were not among the most interesting ones from a human viewpoint. Therefore, relying only on these tweets may not be the ideal way to communicate news through Twitter, especially if a more personalized and catchy way of reporting news wants to be performed. In contrast, we showed that recent text summarization techniques may be more appropriate, reflecting a balance between indicativeness and interest, even if their content was different from the tweets delivered by the news providers.

Web mining for translators: automatic construction of comparable, genre-driven corpora

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the efficacy of the application WebBootCaT to create specialised corpora automatically, investigating the translation of articles of association from Italian into English. The first section reflects on the relevant literature and proposes the utility of corpora for translators. The second section discusses the methodology employed, and the third section analyses the results obtained and comments on how language professionals could possibly exploit the application to its full. The fourth section provides a few concrete usage examples of the thus built corpora, to then conclude that WebBootCaT is a genuinely powerful tool that could be implemented by professional translators in order to save time and improve their translations in the long term.

Le genre satirique dans la peinture flamande /

Bibliography: p. [386]-375.

École de dessin : cours élémentaire d'études de sujets de genre /

Includes lithographed plates by Becquet frères.

La capricieuse : morceau de genre : op. 17 /

Caption title.

Histoire naturelle du genre humain /

Mode of access: Internet.