This thesis approaches classroom interaction in association with Bakhtin and conversation analysis (CA). The four studies presented in this thesis seek to highlight different aspects of classroom interactional encounters between the students and teachers of a secondary school class. Through these studies, the thesis addresses the following challenges: How can analysts account for ‘multilingual’ communicative practices in a way which respects the views and orientations of the participants? How may dialogism be relevant for classroom interaction? How can we move beyond the representational (in)sufficiency of an oral language focus on (classroom) communication for analysis of human meaning making practices? The studies arise from ethnographic fieldwork at an independent secondary school with a ‘bilingual’ educational profile where data of everyday instructional life was generated through participant observation and video recordings. Methodologically, the studies have been enabled by Bakhtinian concepts and conversation analytic conventions amplified for analysis of the complex range of modalities composing classroom interaction. Study 1 examines the way participants’ use of two (or more) languages in a ‘foreign’ language classroom throw light on each other in processes of lexical orientation which challenge the privileging or the subordination of any one language in language learning. Study 2 demonstrates the consequences for understanding the participants’ sense-making efforts of making representationally (in)visible integral aspects of their multimodal cooperations. Study 3 focuses on whole-class task instructions as interactionally complex by showing some of the mutual orientations through which teacher and students coordinate each other’s stances and consequently craft instructions collaboratively. Study 4 examines the concept of languaging critically in the light of Bakhtin’s penetrating perception of the utterance and underscores that while we may be able to language when communicating, we are also languaged communicators. / <p>The research is a part of Swedish Research Council project LISA-21</p>

In this thesis I examine the placement of the dependent genitive relative to its head noun in Classical Latin prose. The corpus is drawn from the works of four first-century B.C. authors: Caesar, Cicero, Sallust and Varro. The thesis itself is split into two main sections, a qualitative analysis and a quantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis discusses a number of factors that may influence genitive position, drawn from literature on the subject as well as my pilot studies. These factors are information structure, the genitive’s grammatical function, discontinuity, lexical category, animacy, prepositions governing the head noun, reported speech, idioms, lexical items, and grammatical number of the genitive. This analysis examines individual instances of genitive position in context, providing examples and counter-examples of the ordering patterns found with each potential factor. The qualitative analysis suggests that a number of these factors have an effect on genitive position, particularly information structure. These results are tested by the quantitative analysis. By performing a multivariate statistical analysis using the programme GoldVarb, the combined effects of multiple factors are determined and the statistically significant factors ranked in order of importance and strength of effect. The statistics show that information structure is the most important of the factors. Other significant influences are the presence of prepositions, the function of the genitive and its lexical category. By combining the two types of analysis, qualitative and quantitative, this thesis shows in detail how the factors combine to influence word order, which of them are independent, which interact, which are important and which have little to no effect at all, resulting in a better understanding of the data and the way that the contextual factors work together to produce the variant orders of the dependent genitive.

This study attempted to investigate the effects of aphasia on word retrieval skills in a bilingual (Spanish-English) anomic patient. Two aspects of word finding difficulties were considered. First, an attempt was made to determine whether the patient exhibited the same degree of difficulty in both languages. Second, after the presentation of three different types of facilatory cues (initial syllable, sentence completion, translated word) the correct number of correct responses per cue were analyzed to determine whether or not the same kinds of cues were equally effective in English and in Spanish. Results indicated that word retrieval was affected to essentially the same degree in both languages, with performance in Spanish only slightly better than in English. Cue effectiveness also appeared to differ across languages.

People with some types of motor disabilities who wish to generate text using a computer can find the process both fatiguing and time-consuming. These problems can be alleviated by reducing the quantity of keystrokes they must make, and one approach is to allow the user to enter shortened, abbreviated input, which is then re-expanded for them, by a program ‘filling in the gaps’. Word Prediction is one approach, but comes with drawbacks, one of which is the requirement that generally the user must type the first letters of their intended word, regardless of how unrepresentative they may consider those letters to be. Abbreviation Expansion allows the user to type reduced forms of many words in a way they feel represents them more effectively. This can be done by the omission of one or more letters, or the replacement of letter sequences with other, usually shorter, sequences. For instance, the word ‘hyphenate might be shortened to ‘yfn8’, by leaving out some letters and replacing the ‘ph’ and ‘ate’ with the shorter but phonetically similar ‘f’ and ‘8’. ‘Fixed Abbreviation Expansion’ requires the user to memorise a set of correspondences between abbreviations and the full words which they represent. While this enables useful keystroke savings to be made, these come alongside an increased cognitive load and potential for error. Where a word is encountered for which there is no preset abbreviation, or for which the user cannot remember one, keystroke savings may be lost. ‘Flexible Abbreviation Expansion’ allows the user to leave out whichever letters they feel to be ‘less differentiating' and jump straight ahead to type those they feel are most ‘salient’ and most characterise the word, choosing abbreviations ‘on the fly’. The need to memorise sets of correspondences is removed, as the user can be offered all candidates for which the abbreviation might be a representation, usually in small sets on screen. For useful savings to be made, the intended word must regularly be in the first or second set for quick selection, or the system might attempt to place the intended word at the very top of its list as frequently as possible. Thus it is important to generate and rank the candidates effectively, so that high probability words can be offered in a shortlist. Lower-ranking candidates can be offered in secondary lists which are not immediately displayed. This can reduce both the cognitive load and keystrokes needed for selection. The thesis addresses the task of reducing the number of keystrokes needed for text creation with a large, expressive vocabulary, using a new approach to flexible abbreviation expansion. To inform the solution, two empirical studies were run to gather letter-level statistics on the abbreviation methods of twenty-nine people, under different degrees of constriction (that is, different restrictions on the numbers of characters by which to reduce). These studies showed that with a small amount of priming, people would abbreviate in regular ways, both shared between users, and repeated through the data from an individual. Analysis showed the most common strategies to be vowel deletion, phonetic replacement, loss of double letters, and word truncation. Participants reduced the number of letters in their texts by between 25% (judged to maintain a high degree of comprehensibility) up to 40% (judged to be a maximum degree of brevity whilst still retaining comprehensibility). Informed by these results, an individual-word-level algorithm was developed. For each input abbreviation, a set of candidates is produced, ranked in such a way as to potentially save substantial keystrokes when used across a whole text. A variety of statistical and linguistic techniques, often also used in spelling checking and correction, are used to rank them so that the most probable will be easiest to select, and with fewest keystrokes. The algorithm works at the level of the individual word, without looking at surrounding context. Evaluation of the algorithm demonstrated that it outperforms its nearest comparable alternative, of ranking word lists exclusively by word frequency. The evaluation was performed on the data from the second empirical study, using vocabulary sizes of 2-, 10-, 20- and 30-thousand words. The results show the algorithm to be of potential benefit for use as a component of a flexible abbreviation expansion system. Even with the overhead of selection of the intended word, useful keystroke savings could still be attained. It is envisaged that such a system could be implemented on many platforms, including as part of an AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) device, and an email system on a standard PC, thus making typed communication for the user group more comfortable and expansive.

Title: Text properties as a factor in solving word problems with the use of Venn diagrams Author: Bc. Daniela Návarová Department: Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Education Supervisor: doc. RNDr. Jarmila Novotná, CSc. Supervisor's e-mail address: Jarmila.Novotna@pedf.cuni.cz This diploma thesis deals with the word problems where Venn diagrams can be used. The word problems are studied as texts and their specific text properties are scrutinised in the first, theoretical, part of the thesis. The second part describes an experiment that focuses on the importance of text properties of word problems for the problem solvers. The main aims of this diploma thesis are to show the possibility of textual examination of the chosen texts and to unfold some connections between the mathematical and linguistic views on the area of word problems. Keywords: text, word problem, Venn diagram

Název práce: Quantifying Determiners from the Distributional Semantics View Autor: Maria Ximena Gutierrez Vasques Katedra: Ústav formální a aplikované lingvistiky Vedoucí diplomové práce: doc. RNDr. Markéta Lopatková, Ph.D. Abstrakt: Distribuční sémanika představuje moderní přístup k zachycení sémantiky přirozeného jazyka. Jedním z témat, kterým zatím v rámci tohoto přístupu nebyla věnována dostatečná pozornost, je možnost automatické detekce logických relací jako vyplývání. Tato diplomová práce navazuje na práci autorů Baroni, Bernar- di, Do and Shan (2012), kteří se zabývají relací vyplývání mezi kvantifikujícími výrazy. Citovaná práce využívá detekce pomocí SVN klasifikátorů natrénavaných na sémantických vektorech reprezentujících relaci vyplývání. Popisované exper- imenty se nezaměřovaly na nastaveni parametrů SVN klasifikátoru, proto se v této práci vracíme k původním experimentům popisujícím relaci vyplývání mezi kvantifikovanýmo jmennými konstrukcemi, navrhujeme nové konfigurace klasi- fikátoru a optimalizujeme nastavení parametrů. Dosaženou přesnost predikce porovnáváme s původními výsledky a ukazujeme, že SVM klasifikátor s kvadrat- ickým polynomiálním jádrem dosahuje lepších výsledků....

In recent years there has been an increased interest in domain adaptation techniques for statistical machine translation (SMT) to deal with the growing amount of data from different sources. Topic modelling techniques applied to SMT are closely related to the field of domain adaptation but more flexible in dealing with unstructured text. Topic models can capture latent structure in texts and are therefore particularly suitable for modelling structure in between and beyond corpus boundaries, which are often arbitrary. In this thesis, the main focus is on dynamic translation model adaptation to texts of unknown origin, which is a typical scenario for an online MT engine translating web documents. We introduce a new bilingual topic model for SMT that takes the entire document context into account and for the first time directly estimates topic-dependent phrase translation probabilities in a Bayesian fashion. We demonstrate our model’s ability to improve over several domain adaptation baselines and further provide evidence for the advantages of bilingual topic modelling for SMT over the more common monolingual topic modelling. We also show improved performance when deriving further adapted translation features from the same model which measure different aspects of topical relatedness. We introduce another new topic model for SMT which exploits the distributional nature of phrase pair meaning by modelling topic distributions over phrase pairs using their distributional profiles. Using this model, we explore combinations of local and global contextual information and demonstrate the usefulness of different levels of contextual information, which had not been previously examined for SMT. We also show that combining this model with a topic model trained at the document-level further improves performance. Our dynamic topic adaptation approach performs competitively in comparison with two supervised domain-adapted systems. Finally, we shed light on the relationship between domain adaptation and topic adaptation and propose to combine multi-domain adaptation and topic adaptation in a framework that entails automatic prediction of domain labels at the document level. We show that while each technique provides complementary benefits to the overall performance, there is an amount of overlap between domain and topic adaptation. This can be exploited to build systems that require less adaptation effort at runtime.

The hippocampus plays a critical role in binding together information into an integrated memory, and memory for these arbitrary associations is important when learning new words. Recent studies have investigated a learning mechanism called fast mapping (FM), showing that rapid acquisition of novel arbitrary associations can be learned independent of the hippocampus. In the current study we examine word-learning across two conditions more and less likely to require information integration via the hippocampus in typically developing children and individuals with hippocampal dysfunction (e.g., Down syndrome). Individuals with Down syndrome (DS) manifest hippocampal dysfunction and display memory and learning difficulties, hence could potentially benefit from alternative learning strategies. The current study found no benefit of the FM condition in either group. Both groups performed similarly and above chance level across the two conditions and over a week's delay, but a delay by group interaction suggested that the typically developing children showed improvement across all conditions after 1 week whereas performance in DS stayed consistent. Given evidence for sleep deficits in DS we examined how sleep disturbance related to delayed word retention. Sleep efficiency did not appear to be driving maintenance in either group. Future studies investigating when an individual with DS sleeps after learning, could provide a better understanding of how sleep can influence the word learning process. Additionally, future studies in an older group of children can also provide information on when the hippocampus and sleep dependent learning may develop in childhood.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:37:39Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Patricia Camelatto.pdf: 8467726 bytes, checksum: 50e44494c1c44296210049243fabf654 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-06-17 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The conversations, letters and images that compose this work are devices created to produce conditions for experimentation, in order to get detached from the policy of producing concepts, which is understood as a revelation of a supposed truth. The function of writing is clinical, driven by a desire of experimenting, expanding and creating new criteria for navigation and intervention in existence. The script passes through areas of epidermal interests that are interconnected. This is done to experience connections when released / As conversas, cartas e imagens que compõem este trabalho são dispositivos pensados para criar as condições para essa experimentação, no intuito de descolar-se da política de produção de conceitos entendida como revelação de uma suposta verdade. A própria escrita, aqui, é clínica; movida pelo desejo de experimentar e expandir, criar novos critérios de navegação e intervenção na existência. O roteiro percorre zonas epidérmicas de interesses interligados; trata-se de experimentar as conexões quando lançadas

Chin Ho Leung. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-58).