Designing a model for a corpus-driven dictionary of academic English

University students encounter difficulties with academic English because of its vocabulary, phraseology, and variability, and also because academic English differs in many respects from general English, the language which they have experienced before starting their university studies. Although students have been provided with many dictionaries that contain some helpful information on words used in academic English, these dictionaries remain focused on the uses of words in general English. There is therefore a gap in the dictionary market for a dictionary for university students, and this thesis provides a proposal for such a dictionary (called the Dictionary of Academic English; DOAE) in the form of a model which depicts how the dictionary should be designed, compiled, and offered to students. The model draws on state-of-the-art techniques in lexicography, dictionary-use research, and corpus linguistics. The model demanded the creation of a completely new corpus of academic language (Corpus of Academic Journal Articles; CAJA). The main advantages of the corpus are its large size (83.5 million words) and balance. Having access to a large corpus of academic language was essential for a corpus-driven approach to data analysis. A good corpus balance in terms of domains enabled a detailed domain-labelling of senses, patterns, collocates, etc. in the dictionary database, which was then used to tailor the output according to the needs of different types of student. The model proposes an online dictionary that is designed as an online dictionary from the outset. The proposed dictionary is revolutionary in the way it addresses the needs of different types of student. It presents students with a dynamic dictionary whose contents can be customised according to the user's native language, subject of study, variant spelling preferences, and/or visual preferences (e.g. black and white).

Language change in young Panjabi/English children: implications for bilingual language assessment

This paper reports some of the more frequent language changes in Panjabi, the first language of bilingual Panjabi/English children in the West Midlands, UK. Spontaneous spoken data were collected in schools across both languages in three formatted elicitation procedures from 50 bilingual Panjabi/English-speaking children, aged 6–7 years old. Panjabi data from the children is analysed for lexical borrowings and code-switching with English. Several changes of vocabulary and word grammar patterns in Panjabi are identified, many due to interaction with English, and some due to developmental features of Panjabi. There is also evidence of pervasive changes of word order, suggesting a shift in Panjabi word order to that of English. Lexical choice is discussed in terms of language change rather than language deficit. The implications of a normative framework for comparison are explored. A psycholinguistic model interprets grammatical changes in Panjabi.

"Ignorance was bliss, now I'm ignorant and that is far more difficult":transdisciplinary learning and reflexivity in responsible management education

Purpose – The collapse of world economic systems brought the interconnectedness between business and global events sharply into focus. As Starkey points out: “leading business schools need to overcome their fascination with a particular form of finance and economics […] to broaden their intellectual horizons […] (and to) look at the lessons of history and other disciplines”. The purpose of this paper is to provide evidence from three years of research on the Aston MBA suggesting that an emphasis on developing capabilities within a far broader, connected and reflexive business curriculum is what business students and practitioners now recognise as an essential way forward for responsible management education. Design/methodology/approach – This research paper examines the reflective accounts of 300 MBA students undertaking a transdisciplinary Business Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability core module. Findings – As Klein argues, transdisciplinarity is simultaneously an attitude and a form of action. The student reflections provide powerful discourses of individual learning and report a range of outcomes from finding “the vocabulary or the confidence” to raise issues to acting as “change agents” in the workplace. Originality/value – As responsibility and sustainability requires learners, researchers and educators to engage with real world complexity, uncertainty and risk, conventional disciplinary study, especially within business, often proves inadequate and partial. This paper demonstrates that creative and exploratory frames need to be developed to facilitate the development of more connected knowledge – informed by multiple stakeholders, able to contribute heterogeneous skills, perspectives and expertise.

Separating the influences of prereading skills on early word and nonword reading

The essential first step for a beginning reader is to learn to match printed forms to phonological representations. For a new word, this is an effortful process where each grapheme must be translated individually (serial decoding). The role of phonological awareness in developing a decoding strategy is well known. We examined whether beginner readers recruit different skills depending on the nature of the words being read (familiar words vs. nonwords). Print knowledge, phoneme and rhyme awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), phonological short term memory (STM), nonverbal reasoning, vocabulary, auditory skills and visual attention were measured in 392 pre-readers aged 4 to 5 years. Word and nonword reading were measured 9 months later. We used structural equation modeling to examine the skills-reading relationship and modeled correlations between our two reading outcomes and among all pre-reading skills. We found that a broad range of skills were associated with reading outcomes: early print knowledge, phonological STM, phoneme awareness and RAN. Whereas all these skills were directly predictive of nonword reading, early print knowledge was the only direct predictor of word reading. Our findings suggest that beginner readers draw most heavily on their existing print knowledge to read familiar words.

Issues in learning an ontology from text

Ontology construction for any domain is a labour intensive and complex process. Any methodology that can reduce the cost and increase efficiency has the potential to make a major impact in the life sciences. This paper describes an experiment in ontology construction from text for the animal behaviour domain. Our objective was to see how much could be done in a simple and relatively rapid manner using a corpus of journal papers. We used a sequence of pre-existing text processing steps, and here describe the different choices made to clean the input, to derive a set of terms and to structure those terms in a number of hierarchies. We describe some of the challenges, especially that of focusing the ontology appropriately given a starting point of a heterogeneous corpus. Results - Using mainly automated techniques, we were able to construct an 18055 term ontology-like structure with 73% recall of animal behaviour terms, but a precision of only 26%. We were able to clean unwanted terms from the nascent ontology using lexico-syntactic patterns that tested the validity of term inclusion within the ontology. We used the same technique to test for subsumption relationships between the remaining terms to add structure to the initially broad and shallow structure we generated. All outputs are available at http://thirlmere.aston.ac.uk/~kiffer/animalbehaviour/ webcite. Conclusion - We present a systematic method for the initial steps of ontology or structured vocabulary construction for scientific domains that requires limited human effort and can make a contribution both to ontology learning and maintenance. The method is useful both for the exploration of a scientific domain and as a stepping stone towards formally rigourous ontologies. The filtering of recognised terms from a heterogeneous corpus to focus upon those that are the topic of the ontology is identified to be one of the main challenges for research in ontology learning.

Corpus linguistics

Corpora—large collections of written and/or spoken text stored and accessed electronically—provide the means of investigating language that is of growing importance academically and professionally. Corpora are now routinely used in the following fields: The production of dictionaries and other reference materials; The development of aids to translation; Language teaching materials; The investigation of ideologies and cultural assumptions; Natural language processing; and The investigation of all aspects of linguistic behaviour, including vocabulary, grammar and pragmatics.

An Ontology- Content-based Filtering Method

Traditional content-based filtering methods usually utilize text extraction and classification techniques for building user profiles as well as for representations of contents, i.e. item profiles. These methods have some disadvantages e.g. mismatch between user profile terms and item profile terms, leading to low performance. Some of the disadvantages can be overcome by incorporating a common ontology which enables representing both the users' and the items' profiles with concepts taken from the same vocabulary. We propose a new content-based method for filtering and ranking the relevancy of items for users, which utilizes a hierarchical ontology. The method measures the similarity of the user's profile to the items' profiles, considering the existing of mutual concepts in the two profiles, as well as the existence of "related" concepts, according to their position in the ontology. The proposed filtering algorithm computes the similarity between the users' profiles and the items' profiles, and rank-orders the relevant items according to their relevancy to each user. The method is being implemented in ePaper, a personalized electronic newspaper project, utilizing a hierarchical ontology designed specifically for classification of News items. It can, however, be utilized in other domains and extended to other ontologies.

Institute for Bulgarian Language, BAS

The paper presents the history, structure and ongoing activities of the Institute for Bulgarian Language of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Types and Annotations for CIDOC CRM Properties

The CIDOC CRM provides an extensive ontology for describing entities and properties appearing in cultural heritage (CH) documentation, history and archeology. CRM provides some means for describing information about properties (property types, attribute assignment, and "long-cuts") and guidelines for extending the vocabulary. However, these means are far from complete, and in some cases there is little guidance how to "implement" them in RDF. In this article we outline the problems, relate them to established RDF patterns and mechanisms, and describe several implementation alternatives.

A Bayesian Model for Learning Using Flashcards

Report published in the Proceedings of the National Conference on "Education and Research in the Information Society", Plovdiv, May, 2015

OntoPedigree:modelling pedigrees for traceability in supply chains

The sharing of product and process information plays a central role in coordinating supply chains operations and is a key driver for their success. "Linked pedigrees" - linked datasets, that encapsulate event based traceability information of artifacts as they move along the supply chain, provide a scalable mechanism to record and facilitate the sharing of track and trace knowledge among supply chain partners. In this paper we present "OntoPedigree" a content ontology design pattern for the representation of linked pedigrees, that can be specialised and extended to define domain specific traceability ontologies. Events captured within the pedigrees are specified using EPCIS - a GS1 standard for the specification of traceability information within and across enterprises, while certification information is described using PROV - a vocabulary for modelling provenance of resources. We exemplify the utility of OntoPedigree in linked pedigrees generated for supply chains within the perishable goods and pharmaceuticals sectors.

Black churchgoers, environmental activism, and the preservation of nature in Miami, Florida

The goal of this project was to explore activism, attitudes, and imagery connecting Black churchgoers in Miami, Florida and the natural environment. The research approach was qualitative, began as exploratory research, and used the techniques of snowball sampling, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews. Three case studies representing various socio-economic levels, denominations, participant education levels, and environmental facets were chosen for in-depth ethnographic research. There are three major findings in the research. First, there is a link between the preservation of Black history and the preservation of the environment among Black churchgoers, who feel strong connections to a sense of place, rural life, and the past. However their work is strongly directed to bring about benefits for people and the environment in the present and the future. Second, public access to public lands is a basic and important right espoused by these Black churchgoing activists. Third, the vocabulary used by Black churchgoing activists regarding the natural environment differs from today's “mainstream” environmentalists. The concept of “beauty” is pivotal to Black appreciation of and activism toward the environment and is reminiscent of the early environmental protection movement in the United States and conservationists such as John Muir. These findings concerning how Black spirituality relates to the environment adds to the sparse literature on the subject, and provides for potential linkages between Blacks and “mainstream” environmental groups to benefit both parties. An understanding of the connections between Black spirituality and perceptions of the environment should facilitate the development of better programs to improve and protect the environment. Environmental projects may also address the social and economic needs of Black communities, churches, and congregations, as well as the ecosystem. ^

An analysis of the themes of environmental sustainability in the United States curriculum science content standards

This study examined how the themes of environmental sustainability are evident in the national, state and local standards that guide k–12 science curriculum. The study applied the principles of content analysis within the framework of an ecological paradigm. In education, an ecological paradigm focuses on students' use of a holistic lens to view and understand material. The intent of this study was to analyze the seventh grade science content standards at the national, state, and local textbook levels to determine how and the extent to which each of the five themes of environmental sustainability are presented in the language of each text. The themes are: (a) Climate Change Indicators, (b) Biodiversity, (c) Human Population Density, (d) Impact and Presence of Environmental Pollution, (e) Earth as a Closed System. The research study offers practical insight on using a method of content analysis to locate keywords of environmental sustainability in the three texts and determine if the context of each term relates to this ecological paradigm. Using a concordance program, the researcher identified the frequency and context of each vocabulary item associated with these themes. Nine chi squares were run to determine if there were differences in content between the national and state standards and the textbook. Within each level chi squares were also run to determine if there were differences between the appearance of content knowledge and skill words. Results indicate that there is a lack of agreement between levels that is significant p < .01. A discussion of these results in relation to curriculum development and standardized assessments followed. The study found that at the national and state levels, there is a lack of articulation of the goals of environmental sustainability or an ecological paradigm. With respect to the science textbook, a greater number of keywords were present; however, the context of many of these keywords did not align with the discourse of an ecological paradigm. Further, the environmental sustainability themes present in the textbook were limited to the last four chapters of the text. Additional research is recommended to determine whether this situation also exists in other settings.

The effects of using rap music on the fluency skills of 2nd grade African American students

A concern for both educators and policy makers is how to increase the reading achievement of African American students. Studies have shown that rap music, which has its roots in the African American community, can be used as a tool to facilitate this increase, specifically how using rap songs in reading lessons can improve a child's reading motivation, information recall, and vocabulary development. There are also studies on how repeated reading of a text can help improve a child's reading fluency. Yet, there are no studies that combine rap music and repeated reading of a text. This study describes the effects of using a culturally responsive reading strategy on the fluency, decoding, and comprehension skills of African American students. ^ The sample consisted of 105 African American students within eight, second grade classrooms at two different elementary schools. The classes were randomly selected and assigned to the rap group or the control group. Students received eight half-hour sessions using either a rap text or a traditional text in a repeated reading lesson. All of the students were pre-tested and post-tested on the Oral Reading Fluency and the Nonsense Word Fluency portions of the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills Test. Additionally, a researcher constructed comprehension quiz was given to the students at the beginning, middle, and end of the study. Research questions were analyzed using ANOVAs and t tests. ^ The hypotheses were not supported but there was some evidence that rap music in a reading lesson helped improve the fluency skills of African American students at one of the schools. The results also revealed that rap music used in a reading lesson initially improved the comprehension skills of African American students. The rap treatment may not have worked best overall because of the lack of intensity of the treatment. ^ The study has shown some evidence to support using culturally appropriate materials such as rap with students. There needs to be more research on the interaction between teaching methods, materials, and students. ^

The Mismatch of the Language of Textbooks and Language of ESL Students in Content Classrooms

Debate concerning bilingual education effectiveness may focus around the definition of academic language. Two aspects of such-vocabulary and grammar-were examined in 4th and 8th grade textbooks. Results showed substantial increases in the number of abstract words and complex sentences, suggesting more daunting language demands for older non-English-speaking students.