COMPENDIUM: una herramienta de generación de resúmenes modular

En este artículo presentamos COMPENDIUM, una herramienta de generación de resúmenes de textos modular. Esta herramienta se compone de un módulo central con cinco etapas bien diferenciadas: i) análisis lingüístico; ii) detección de redundancia; iii) identificación del tópico; iv) detección de relevancia; y v) generación del resumen, y una serie de módulos adicionales que permiten incrementar las funcionalidades de la herramienta permitiendo la generación de distintos tipos de resúmenes, como por ejemplo orientados a un tema concreto. Realizamos una evaluación exhaustiva en dos dominios distintos (noticias de prensa y documentos sobre lugares turísticos) y analizamos diferentes tipos de resúmenes generados con COMPENDIUM (mono-documento, multi-documento, genéricos y orientados a un tema). Además, comparamos nuestro sistema con otros sistemas de generación de resúmenes actuales. Los resultados que se obtienen demuestran que la herramienta COMPENDIUM es capaz de generar resúmenes competitivos para los distintos tipos de resúmenes propuestos.

Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber : Teaching, Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement /

The international perspectives on these issues are especially valuable in an increasingly connected, but still institutionally and administratively diverse world. The research addressed in several chapters in this volume includes issues around technical standards bodies like EpiDoc and the TEI, engaging with ways these standards are implemented, documented, taught, used in the process of transcribing and annotating texts, and used to generate publications and as the basis for advanced textual or corpus research. Other chapters focus on various aspects of philological research and content creation, including collaborative or community driven efforts, and the issues surrounding editorial oversight, curation, maintenance and sustainability of these resources. Research into the ancient languages and linguistics, in particular Greek, and the language teaching that is a staple of our discipline, are also discussed in several chapters, in particular for ways in which advanced research methods can lead into language technologies and vice versa and ways in which the skills around teaching can be used for public engagement, and vice versa. A common thread through much of the volume is the importance of open access publication or open source development and distribution of texts, materials, tools and standards, both because of the public good provided by such models (circulating materials often already paid for out of the public purse), and the ability to reach non-standard audiences, those who cannot access rich university libraries or afford expensive print volumes. Linked Open Data is another technology that results in wide and free distribution of structured information both within and outside academic circles, and several chapters present academic work that includes ontologies and RDF, either as a direct research output or as essential part of the communication and knowledge representation. Several chapters focus not on the literary and philological side of classics, but on the study of cultural heritage, archaeology, and the material supports on which original textual and artistic material are engraved or otherwise inscribed, addressing both the capture and analysis of artefacts in both 2D and 3D, the representation of data through archaeological standards, and the importance of sharing information and expertise between the several domains both within and without academia that study, record and conserve ancient objects. Almost without exception, the authors reflect on the issues of interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the relationship between their research practice and teaching and/or communication with a wider public, and the importance of the role of the academic researcher in contemporary society and in the context of cutting edge technologies. How research is communicated in a world of instant- access blogging and 140-character micromessaging, and how our expectations of the media affect not only how we publish but how we conduct our research, are questions about which all scholars need to be aware and self-critical.

An investigation into formal and functional characteristics of qualifications in legislative writing and its application to English for academic legal purposes.

The present investigation is based on a linguistic analysis of the 'Housing Act 1980' and attempts to examine the role of qualifications in the structuring of the legislative statement. The introductory chapter isolates legislative writing as a "sub-variety “of legal language and provides an overview of the controversies surrounding the way it is written and the problems it poses to its readers. Chapter two emphasizes the limitations of the available work on the description of language-varieties for the analysis of legislative writing and outlines the approach adopted for the present analysis. This chapter also gives some idea of the information-structuring of legislative provisions and establishes qualification as a key element in their textualisation. The next three chapters offer a detailed account of the ten major qualification-types identified in the corpus, concentrating on the surface form they take, the features of legislative statements they textualize and the syntactic positions to which they are generally assigned in the statement of legislative provisions. The emerging hypotheses in these chapters have often been verified through a specialist reaction from a Parliamentary Counsel, largely responsible for the writing of the ‘Housing Act 1980’• The findings suggest useful correlations between a number of qualificational initiators and the various aspects of the legislative statement. They also reveal that many of these qualifications typically occur in those clause-medial syntactic positions which are sparingly used in other specialist discourse, thus creating syntactic discontinuity in the legislative sentence. Such syntactic discontinuities, on the evidence from psycholinguistic experiments reported in chapter six, create special problems in the processing and comprehension of legislative statements. The final chapter converts the main linguistic findings into a series of pedagogical generalizations, offers indications of how this may be applied in EALP situations and concludes with other considerations of possible applications.

Organizational and textual structuring of radio news discourse in English and Arabic.

The present work studies the overall structuring of radio news discourse via investigating three metatextual/interactive functions: (1) Discourse Organizing Elements (DOEs), (2) Attribution and (3) Sentential and Nominal Background Information (SBI & NBI). An extended corpus of about 73,000 words from BBC and Radio Damascus news is used to study DOEs and a restricted corpus of 38,000 words for Attribution and S & NBI. A situational approach is adopted to assess the influence of factors such as medium and audience on these functions and their frequence. It is found that: (1) DOEs are organizational and their frequency is determined by length of text; (2) Attribution Function in accordance with the editor's strategy and its frequency is audience sensitive; and (3) BI provides background information and is determined by audience and news topics. Secondly, the salient grammatical elements in DOEs are discourse deictic demonstratives, address pronouns and nouns referring to `the news'. Attribution is realized in reporting/reported clauses, and BI in a sentence, a clause or a nominal group. Thirdly, DOEs establish a hierarchy of (1) news, (2) summary/expansion and (3) item: including topic introduction and details. While Attribution is generally, and SBI solely, a function of detailing, NBI and proper names are generally a function of summary and topic introduction. Being primarily addressed to audience and referring metatextually, the functions investigated support Sinclair's interactive and autonomous planes of discourse. They also shed light on the part(s) of the linguistic system which realize the metatextual/interactive function. Strictly, `discourse structure' inevitably involves a rank-scale; but news discourse also shows a convention of item `listing'. Hence only within the boundary of variety (ultimately interpreted across language and in its situation) can textual functions and discourse structure be studied. Finally, interlingual variety study provides invaluable insights into a level of translation that goes beyond matching grammatical systems or situational factors, an interpretive level which has to be described in linguistic analysis of translation data.

Detecting plagiarism in the forensic linguistics turn

This study investigates plagiarism detection, with an application in forensic contexts. Two types of data were collected for the purposes of this study. Data in the form of written texts were obtained from two Portuguese Universities and from a Portuguese newspaper. These data are analysed linguistically to identify instances of verbatim, morpho-syntactical, lexical and discursive overlap. Data in the form of survey were obtained from two higher education institutions in Portugal, and another two in the United Kingdom. These data are analysed using a 2 by 2 between-groups Univariate Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), to reveal cross-cultural divergences in the perceptions of plagiarism. The study discusses the legal and social circumstances that may contribute to adopting a punitive approach to plagiarism, or, conversely, reject the punishment. The research adopts a critical approach to plagiarism detection. On the one hand, it describes the linguistic strategies adopted by plagiarists when borrowing from other sources, and, on the other hand, it discusses the relationship between these instances of plagiarism and the context in which they appear. A focus of this study is whether plagiarism involves an intention to deceive, and, in this case, whether forensic linguistic evidence can provide clues to this intentionality. It also evaluates current computational approaches to plagiarism detection, and identifies strategies that these systems fail to detect. Specifically, a method is proposed to translingual plagiarism. The findings indicate that, although cross-cultural aspects influence the different perceptions of plagiarism, a distinction needs to be made between intentional and unintentional plagiarism. The linguistic analysis demonstrates that linguistic elements can contribute to finding clues for the plagiarist’s intentionality. Furthermore, the findings show that translingual plagiarism can be detected by using the method proposed, and that plagiarism detection software can be improved using existing computer tools.

Guilty as charged? The effect of interpreting on interviews with suspects

The ways in which an interpreter affects the processes and, possibly, the outcomes of legal proceedings has formed the focus of much recent research, most of it centred upon courtroom discourse. However comparatively little research has been carried out into the effect of interpreting on the interview with a suspect, despite its 'upstream' position in the legal process and vital importance as evidence. As a speech event in the judicial system, the interview differs radically from that which takes place 'downstream', that is, in court. The interview with suspect represents an entirely different construct, in which a range of registers is apparent, and participants use distinctive means to achieve their institutional goals. When a transcript of an interpreter-mediated interview is read out in court, it is assumed that this is a representation of an event, which is essentially identical to a monolingual interview. This thesis challenges that assumption. Using conservation analytic techniques, it examines data from a corpus of monolingual and interpreter-mediated, taped interviews with suspects, in order to identify potentially significant interactional differences and describe ways in which the interpreter affects the processes and may affect the outcomes of the interview. It is argued that although individually, the interactional differences may appear slight, their cumulative effect is significant, particularly since the primary participants in the event are unaware of the full force of the interpreting effect. Finally, the thesis suggests that the insights provided by linguistic analysis of the interpreting on interviews may provide the basis for training, both for interpreters themselves, and for officers in techniques for interpreter-mediated interviews.

Learning from a deceptively spacious policy discourse

Networked Learning, e-Learning and Technology Enhanced Learning have each been defined in different ways, as people's understanding about technology in education has developed. Yet each could also be considered as a terminology competing for a contested conceptual space. Theoretically this can be a ‘fertile trans-disciplinary ground for represented disciplines to affect and potentially be re-orientated by others’ (Parchoma and Keefer, 2012), as differing perspectives on terminology and subject disciplines yield new understandings. Yet when used in government policy texts to describe connections between humans, learning and technology, terms tend to become fixed in less fertile positions linguistically. A deceptively spacious policy discourse that suggests people are free to make choices conceals an economically-based assumption that implementing new technologies, in themselves, determines learning. Yet it actually narrows choices open to people as one route is repeatedly in the foreground and humans are not visibly involved in it. An impression that the effective use of technology for endless improvement is inevitable cuts off critical social interactions and new knowledge for multiple understandings of technology in people's lives. This paper explores some findings from a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of UK policy for educational technology during the last 15 years, to help to illuminate the choices made. This is important when through political economy, hierarchical or dominant neoliberal logic promotes a single ‘universal model’ of technology in education, without reference to a wider social context (Rustin, 2013). Discourse matters, because it can ‘mould identities’ (Massey, 2013) in narrow, objective economically-based terms which 'colonise discourses of democracy and student-centredness' (Greener and Perriton, 2005:67). This undermines subjective social, political, material and relational (Jones, 2012: 3) contexts for those learning when humans are omitted. Critically confronting these structures is not considered a negative activity. Whilst deterministic discourse for educational technology may leave people unconsciously restricted, I argue that, through a close analysis, it offers a deceptively spacious theoretical tool for debate about the wider social and economic context of educational technology. Methodologically it provides insights about ways technology, language and learning intersect across disciplinary borders (Giroux, 1992), as powerful, mutually constitutive elements, ever-present in networked learning situations. In sharing a replicable approach for linguistic analysis of policy discourse I hope to contribute to visions others have for a broader theoretical underpinning for educational technology, as a developing field of networked knowledge and research (Conole and Oliver, 2002; Andrews, 2011).

Percent in a Nutshell …

Ironically, the “learning of percent” is one of the most problematic aspects of school mathematics. In our view, these difficulties are not associated with the arithmetic aspects of the “percent problems”, but mostly with two methodological issues: firstly, providing students with a simple and accurate understanding of the rationale behind the use of percent, and secondly - overcoming the psychological complexities of the fluent and comprehensive understanding by the students of the sometimes specific wordings of “percent problems”. Before we talk about percent, it is necessary to acquaint students with a much more fundamental and important (regrettably, not covered by the school syllabus) classical concepts of quantitative and qualitative comparison of values, to give students the opportunity to learn the relevant standard terminology and become accustomed to conventional turns of speech. Further, it makes sense to briefly touch on the issue (important in its own right) of different representations of numbers. Percent is just one of the technical, but common forms of data representation: p% = p × % = p × 0.01 = p × 1/100 = p/100 = p × 10-2 "Percent problems” are involved in just two cases: I. The ratio of a variation m to the standard M II. The relative deviation of a variation m from the standard M The hardest and most essential in each specific "percent problem” is not the routine arithmetic actions involved, but the ability to figure out, to clearly understand which of the variables involved in the problem instructions is the standard and which is the variation. And in the first place, this is what teachers need to patiently and persistently teach their students. As a matter of fact, most primary school pupils are not yet quite ready for the lexical specificity of “percent problems”. ....Math teachers should closely, hand in hand with their students, carry out a linguistic analysis of the wording of each problem ... Schoolchildren must firmly understand that a comparison of objects is only meaningful when we speak about properties which can be objectively expressed in terms of actual numerical characteristics. In our opinion, an adequate acquisition of the teaching unit on percent cannot be achieved in primary school due to objective psychological specificities related to this age and because of the level of general training of students. Yet, if we want to make this topic truly accessible and practically useful, it should be taught in high school. A final question to the reader (quickly, please): What is greater: % of e or e% of Pi

Assuming identities online:experimental linguistics applied to the policing of online paedophile activity

This article uses a research project into the online conversations of sex offenders and the children they abuse to further the arguments for the acceptability of experimental work as a research tool for linguists. The research reported here contributes to the growing body of work within linguistics that has found experimental methods to be useful in answering questions about representation and constraints on linguistic expression (Hemforth 2013). The wider project examines online identity assumption in online paedophile activity and the policing of such activity, and involves dealing with the linguistic analysis of highly sensitive sexual grooming transcripts. Within the linguistics portion of the project, we examine theories of idiolect and identity through analysis of the ‘talk’ of perpetrators of online sexual abuse, and of the undercover officers that must assume alternative identities in order to investigate such crimes. The essential linguistic question in this article is methodological and concerns the applicability of experimental work to exploration of online identity and identity disguise. Although we touch on empirical questions, such as the sufficiency of linguistic description that will enable convincing identity disguise, we do not explore the experimental results in detail. In spite of the preference within a range of discourse analytical paradigms for ‘naturally occurring’ data, we argue that not only does the term prove conceptually problematic, but in certain contexts, and particularly in the applied forensic context described, a rejection of experimentally elicited data would limit the possible types and extent of analyses. Thus, it would restrict the contribution that academic linguistics can make in addressing a serious social problem.

The political discourse and material practice of technology enhanced learning

Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them (Marx, 1990: 372) My thesis is a Sociological analysis of UK policy discourse for educational technology during the last 15 years. My framework is a dialogue between the Marxist-based critical social theory of Lieras and a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of UK policy for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) in higher education. Embedded in TEL is a presupposition: a deterministic assumption that technology has enhanced learning. This conceals a necessary debate that reminds us it is humans that design learning, not technology. By omitting people, TEL provides a vehicle for strong hierarchical or neoliberal, agendas to make simplified claims politically, in the name of technology. My research has two main aims: firstly, I share a replicable, mixed methodological approach for linguistic analysis of the political discourse of TEL. Quantitatively, I examine patterns in my corpus to question forms of ‘use’ around technology that structure a rigid basic argument which ‘enframes’ educational technology (Heidegger, 1977: 38). In a qualitative analysis of findings, I ask to what extent policy discourse evaluates technology in one way, to support a Knowledge Based Economy (KBE) in a political economy of neoliberalism (Jessop 2004, Fairclough 2006). If technology is commodified as an external enhancement, it is expected to provide an ‘exchange value’ for learners (Marx, 1867). I therefore examine more closely what is prioritised and devalued in these texts. Secondly, I disclose a form of austerity in the discourse where technology, as an abstract force, undertakes tasks usually ascribed to humans (Lieras, 1996, Brey, 2003:2). This risks desubjectivisation, loss of power and limits people’s relationships with technology and with each other. A view of technology in political discourse as complete without people closes possibilities for broader dialectical (Fairclough, 2001, 2007) and ‘convivial’ (Illich, 1973) understandings of the intimate, material practice of engaging with technology in education. In opening the ‘black box’ of TEL via CDA I reveal talking points that are otherwise concealed. This allows me as to be reflexive and self-critical through praxis, to confront my own assumptions about what the discourse conceals and what forms of resistance might be required. In so doing, I contribute to ongoing debates about networked learning, providing a context to explore educational technology as a technology, language and learning nexus.

A responsabilidade enunciativa na sentença judicial condenatória

The Textual Analysis of Discourse has its origin in Text Linguistics and it aims at studying the co(n)text meaning production based on the analysis of concrete texts by offering elements to the understanding of the text as a discourse practice throughout the plans or levels of linguistic analysis. In this perspective, we intend to investigate the enunciative responsibility phenomenon in the sentencing court judgment. To do so, we review the theoretical contributions of Textual Analysis of Discourse (ADAM, 2011) and the Enunciative Linguistics from various authors, among them, Rabatel (1998, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010), Nølke (2001, 2005, 2009, 2013), Nølke, Fløttum and Norén (2004), Guentchéva (1994, 1996) and Guentchéva et al. (1994). In this direction, we investigate the enunciative responsibility through a range that comprises the phenomenon from four gradations, each one with a kind of point of view (PoV) and with links that may mark the assumption or the distance from the point of view. Regarding the legal approach of the thesis, our theoretical anchoring follows several authors, among them, Petri (1994), Soto (2001), Alvarez (2002), Alves (2003), Cornu (2005), Albi (2007), Bittar (2010), Asensio and Polanco (2011), López Samaniego (2006), López Montolío and Samaniego (2008), Montolío (2002, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013), Sterling (2010), Prieto (2013), Lawrence and Rodrigues (2013) and Rodrigues, Passeggi and Silva Neto (2014). Our corpus is composed of 13 sentences from criminal cases arising from the district of Currais Novos-RN, completed in 2012. The results reveal how the judge, from various enunciative instances, builds the court decision, which allowed us to understand the configuration of (non) assumption of enunciative responsibility in the sentencing court judgment discourse genre. In conclusion, we perceive that the discourse units are envisaged or through the assumption, or the non assumption of PoV by the enunciative instances, what guides the producer organization argumentative text and his (her) communicative purposes. With that, the judge creates and/or modifies values and beliefs, induces and/or guides his (her) interlocutor by being able to demonstrate objectivity and/or preventing his (her) face through the mediated constructions or engage through the assumption of the enunciative responsibility of the propositional content of an utterance. In short, we reaffirm our belief that the (non) assumption of the enunciative responsibility configures as an argumentative mechanism strongly marked by the producer of the text with a view to their communicative purposes. The sentence, therefore, is constructed in this game of taking and/or not taking of statements according to argumentative orientation and the objectives of the text producer.

A injunção em livros didáticos de língua portuguesa do 4º e 5º anos do ensino fundamental

This investigation aims at identifying, describing, analyzing and interpreting how textbooks on Portuguese Language approach, beginning with the linguistic material, the effects of sense in texts that predominately employ injunctives. The corpus of this study is comprised of six collections of textbooks on Portuguese Language, which are part of the National Program Guide for Textbooks (PNLD) from 2010, adopted by the public schools in the city of Natal and the object of study for the Read/Tell Project of the Educational Observatory of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN). Textbooks from the 4th and 5th grades, Elementary School, were analyzed – 12 copies total. For the analysis, we selected 16 writing proposals of injunctive texts. Our study is based on theoretical discussions by Adam (2001a, 2001b) with regard to the genre of: inciting to action. In addition, we consider the work of Koch and Fávero (1987), Koch and Elias (2009), Marcuschi (2003, 2008) Pery-Woodly (2001), Rodrigues (2013), Travaglia (1992, 2007) and Rosa (2007). With respect to discussions on textbooks, we refer to Choppin (2004, 2009), Batista (2003, 2009), Rojo e Batista (2005), and with regard to Portuguese Language textbooks specifically, we consider Soares (1998, 2001, 2004) and Bunzen and Rojo (2005). The proposals for writing in injunctive texts, in the collections analyzed, are tips/recommendations, instructions on making toys and/or games, travel itineraries and cooking recipes, such that 69% of them appear in the 4 th grade textbooks and only 31% appear in the 5th grade textbooks. With respect to the linguistic elements responsible for the construction of directive speech acts and the effects on sense produced by them, the data shows that 50% of the writing proposals do not exploit linguistic categories that implicate the effects on sense using injunctives, or rather, there is no work done dealing with linguistic analysis, while 33% mention the imperative mode and 17% investigate infinitive verbs. In this dissertation, the textual plans of incitation to act genres were studied and in them the linguistic materiality that vehicles injunction. This study might contribute to the improvement of Portuguese language teaching in what concerns the articulation of grammatical studies to textual sequences/types, mainly in the case of Portuguese language textbooks for the 4th and 5th grades of Elementary School.

Producing turbulent speech sounds in the context of cleft palate.

Aims and Scope: No sound class requires so much basic knowledge of phonology, acoustics, aerodynamics, and speech production as obstruents (turbulent sounds) do. This book is intended to bridge a gap by introducing the reader to the world of obstruents from a multidisciplinary perspective. It starts with a review of typological processes, continues with various contributions to the phonetics-phonology interface, explains the realization of specific turbulent sounds in endangered languages, and finishes with surveys of obstruents from a sociophonetic, physical and pathological perspective.

The many voices of Piedmont: language, identity and alterity in the works of modern and contemporary Piedmontese writers

The aim of this project is to carry out a linguistic analysis of a group of modern and contemporary narratives written by authors from the same Italian region: Piedmont. The novels and short stories examined stand out for the intriguing ways in which they move between a variety of idioms – Italian, Piedmontese dialects, English and pastiches, with some rare excursions into French. A sociolinguistic study and an overview of political changes that Piedmont underwent from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries are provided, with the purpose of outlining the region’s sociogeographical and historical background which can be seen to have fostered multilingualism in a group of writers. With the support of linguistic studies and philosophical theories on the relation between identity, alterity and language (such as Edwards’s Language and Identity and Bakhtin’s reflections on language), I then elucidate the presence of diverse linguistic varieties in selected narratives by Cesare Pavese, Beppe Fenoglio, Primo Levi, Nanni Balestrini, Fruttero & Lucentini, Benito Mazzi and Younis Tawfik. In other words, my purpose is to explain the reasons for multilingualism in each writer, as well as to underscore the ideological positions which lie behind the linguistic strategies of the authors. With this study I attempt to fill a gap and cast new light on Piedmontese literature. Although some critical studies on the use of dialect or English exist on individual authors and works (e.g. Meddemmem on Fenoglio’s use of English and Beccaria on Pavese’s inclusion of Piedmontese dialect), and some important contributions to the history of Piedmontese literature have appeared in print, to date no current, systematic study that compares different Piedmontese writers under the language/identity theme has been published. The study concludes with a summary of the evolution of plurilingualism in Piedmont and highlights the common trends in the use of multiple linguistic varieties as tools for both social demarcation and an opening up to alternative, marginalised andforeign cultures.

Metaphysics of love in the religious philosophy of Pável Florensky

This article focuses on the analysis of the concept of love in the religious philosophy of Pavel Florensky, who shares the ontological approach to the consideration of love with other representatives of Russian religious philosophy (N. berdyaev and S. bulgakov). We pay more careful attention to the understanding of love-άγαπαν by Florensky. We have drawn the conclusion that, in the philosophy of P. Florensky, Love, closely connected with truth and beauty, is considered an ontological basis existence of personality. We develop the ideas of Pavel Florensky, and accordingly assume that it is possible to synthesise love-agape and love-eros around the idea of sacrificial love. Agapelogical and erotical ‘bezels’ of one jewel of love is aspects of united love, which is given by God. this gift of God, the gift of united love, is kept by humans through prayer and deeds of love.