Online Dictionary - Tool for Preservation of Language Heritage

The paper aims to represent a bilingual online dictionary as a useful tool helping preservation of the natural languages. The author focuses on the approach that was taken to develop compatible bilingual lexical database for the Bulgarian-Polish online dictionary. A formal model for the dictionary encoding is developed in accordance with the complex structures of the dictionary entries. These structures vary depending on the grammatical characteristics of Bulgarian headwords. The Web-application for presentation of the bilingual dictionary is also describred.

A rule-based approach to implicit emotion detection in text

Most research in the area of emotion detection in written text focused on detecting explicit expressions of emotions in text. In this paper, we present a rule-based pipeline approach for detecting implicit emotions in written text without emotion-bearing words based on the OCC Model. We have evaluated our approach on three different datasets with five emotion categories. Our results show that the proposed approach outperforms the lexicon matching method consistently across all the three datasets by a large margin of 17–30% in F-measure and gives competitive performance compared to a supervised classifier. In particular, when dealing with formal text which follows grammatical rules strictly, our approach gives an average F-measure of 82.7% on “Happy”, “Angry-Disgust” and “Sad”, even outperforming the supervised baseline by nearly 17% in F-measure. Our preliminary results show the feasibility of the approach for the task of implicit emotion detection in written text.

Analyzing lexical emergence in Modern American English online

This paper introduces a quantitative method for identifying newly emerging word forms in large time-stamped corpora of natural language and then describes an analysis of lexical emergence in American social media using this method based on a multi-billion word corpus of Tweets collected between October 2013 and November 2014. In total 29 emerging word forms, which represent various semantic classes, grammatical parts-of speech, and word formations processes, were identified through this analysis. These 29 forms are then examined from various perspectives in order to begin to better understand the process of lexical emergence.

Regional variation in written American English

The first study of its kind, Regional Variation in Written American English takes a corpus-based approach to map over a hundred grammatical alternation variables across the United States. A multivariate spatial analysis of these maps shows that grammatical alternation variables follow a relatively small number of common regional patterns in American English, which can be explained based on both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. Based on this rigorous analysis of extensive data, Grieve identifies five primary modern American dialect regions, demonstrating that regional variation is far more pervasive and complex in natural language than is generally assumed. The wealth of maps and data and the groundbreaking implications of this volume make it essential reading for students and researchers in linguistics, English language, geography, computer science, sociology and communication studies.

Discovering knowledge structures in mind maps of mental health risks

This thesis addressed the problem of risk analysis in mental healthcare, with respect to the GRiST project at Aston University. That project provides a risk-screening tool based on the knowledge of 46 experts, captured as mind maps that describe relationships between risks and patterns of behavioural cues. Mind mapping, though, fails to impose control over content, and is not considered to formally represent knowledge. In contrast, this thesis treated GRiSTs mind maps as a rich knowledge base in need of refinement; that process drew on existing techniques for designing databases and knowledge bases. Identifying well-defined mind map concepts, though, was hindered by spelling mistakes, and by ambiguity and lack of coverage in the tools used for researching words. A novel use of the Edit Distance overcame those problems, by assessing similarities between mind map texts, and between spelling mistakes and suggested corrections. That algorithm further identified stems, the shortest text string found in related word-forms. As opposed to existing approaches’ reliance on built-in linguistic knowledge, this thesis devised a novel, more flexible text-based technique. An additional tool, Correspondence Analysis, found patterns in word usage that allowed machines to determine likely intended meanings for ambiguous words. Correspondence Analysis further produced clusters of related concepts, which in turn drove the automatic generation of novel mind maps. Such maps underpinned adjuncts to the mind mapping software used by GRiST; one such new facility generated novel mind maps, to reflect the collected expert knowledge on any specified concept. Mind maps from GRiST are stored as XML, which suggested storing them in an XML database. In fact, the entire approach here is ”XML-centric”, in that all stages rely on XML as far as possible. A XML-based query language allows user to retrieve information from the mind map knowledge base. The approach, it was concluded, will prove valuable to mind mapping in general, and to detecting patterns in any type of digital information.

Effects of phonetic/phonics instruction on reading pronunciation (French level I)

Pronunciation training has been traditionally viewed as of limited importance in a communicatively oriented foreign language curriculum (Pennington & Richards, 1986). Many language instructors seemingly deny the usefulness of phonetic training and rely on a listen-and-repeat method with the use of audiotapes (Bate, 1989; Callamand & Pedoya, 1984; Jones, 1997). Beginners in French classes face the challenge of mastering a complex sound and grapheme-phoneme correspondence system without the benefit of specific instruction. Their pronunciation errors develop mostly from bad habits while decoding from print to sound (Dansereau, 1995). ^ The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of basic phonetic/phonics instruction on reading pronunciation accuracy in a French I language course. ^ The sample consisted of two groups of French I students from Florida International University, who received the same instruction in French language and culture during the fall semester of 1999. Only the experimental group received additional phonetic/phonics training. ^ The instrument consisted of three recorded reading tasks: isolated familiar words, isolated unfamiliar words, and dialogue. Research questions were analyzed using a one-way multivariate analysis of variance. Significant differences were found between the two groups on scores for each of the three sections of the instrument, and on the total scores. These findings support the hypothesis of the study and reveal the effectiveness of phonetic/phonics training for beginners of French. ^ The findings imply that beginning language students should receive the minimum knowledge they need to master the French phoneme-grapheme (sound-spelling) system. ^