No description available.

The 6th National Book Fair in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2003 saw a new publication in the field of Swahili literary studies that should draw the attention of Swahili scholars in and outside of East Africa: the first comprehensive literary dictionary in Swahili language. Kyallo Wadi Wamitila, who is currently Senior Lecturer for Swahili Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Nairobi, has committed more than a decade of meticulous research to compile this major work. It comprises roughly 1.300 entries, arranged alphabetically, ranging from adhidadi (antonym) to muhakati (mimesis), tashtiti (satire) and zila (tragic flaw).

The ultimate aim of this research is to design a Catalan>English bilingual electronic dictionary of somatic idioms. To do so, we undertake a semasiological characterisation of somatic idioms to determine their semantic value and morphosyntactic combinatorial possibilities going from language to abstraction, identifying the differences in conceptualisation between Catalan and English and their equivalence relationship on the basis of their occurrences in corpora. The methodology used for the description of these somatisms is based on lexicogrammar but in a bottom-up manner. The theory of lexicogrammar (M. Gross 1975, 1981) holds that every elementary phrase is constituted by at least one first order predicate that introduces its arguments, represented by nouns or phrases. For example, in the phrase 'Luc admire le courage de Léa', we can find the verbal predicate 'admirer' with its arguments 'Luc' and 'Léa', that are morphologically equivalent to 'Luc est admiratif (pour + devant) le courage de Léa', with an adjective predicate, and 'Luc a de l'admiration pour le courage de Léa', with a nominal predicate, since there is no change in the structure of arguments (Le Pesant & Mathieu-Colas 1998: 8). This entails a systematic description of the syntactic and semantic properties of verbs, predicate nouns and adjectives in the form of tables that represent a class of lexical elements –characterised in terms of syntactic-semantic features (such as human, animal, plant, concrete, abstract, locative and temporal)–which correspond to a certain syntactic category with a series of common distributional and transformational properties. However, this description is insufficient for the complete automatic treatment of language; this is why in 1992 G. Gross adds to lexicogrammar the notion of object classes: semantic groups defined by the syntactic relations they maintain with one or more classes of verbs, called appropriate predicates (Gross 2012: 101). This exhaustive description of the language has made it possible to consider certain linguistic phenomena like fixation for the automatic treatment of language. Considering that computerised corpora play a very prominent role in usage-based linguistics, a trend that considers grammar and use to be closely interrelated, lexicogrammar can represent a theoretical model particularly suitable for the detection and analysis of phraseological units (PhUs) in corpora. In particular, we focus on the description of the 50 most frequent idioms in Catalan containing one of the five most common anthropomorphic somatic lexemes in all languages: hand, head, heart, eye and ear (Mellado 2004). To identify which are these 50 most frequent idioms (10 per each lexeme), we retrieve all the occurrences for each of the five mentioned lexemes from the Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana (CTILC) (~ 52M words with texts from 1833-1988). Then we carry out a semi-automatic extraction of the different combinations of the most frequent bigrams (candidates for idioms of the dictionary) for each somatic lexeme using the software Metaconcor. For example, for mà (hand), we obtain: a mà (at hand), a mà (by hand), entre mans (on [one’s] hands), de mà en mà (from hand to hand), mà d’obra (labour force), mà dura (firm hand), picar de mans (to clap [one’s hands]), lligar de peus i mans (to tie [sb’s] hands and feet), a mans plenes (liberally) and rentar-se’n les mans (to wash [one’s] hands [of]). We also consider the most frequent verbal and nominal co-occurrences of each bigram. Once we have translated the Catalan idioms into English, we apply this step to the English equivalents based on their occurrences in the British National Corpus (BNC) (~ 100M words with texts from 1985-1994). In order to design the dictionary, we undertake a syntactic-semantic description of the Catalan idioms and their equivalents in English –indicating its argument structures and semantic values according to the object class to which we ascribe them (the one referring to the values of <somatisms>)–, based on the occurrences of these units offered by the CTILC for Catalan and the BNC for English. This analysis is expressed through a tagging recognised by automatic language processing systems, based on the one used by the Laboratoire de Linguistique Informatique (LLI) –current LDI (Lexiques, Dictionnaires, Informatique) from the Paris 13 University–, whose dictionaries follow the system of the Laboratoire d’Automatique Documentaire et Linguistique (LADL) (Paris 7) –founded by M. Gross in 1968– and incorporate the notion of G. Gross’ object classes (1992). Having identified the most frequent idioms and their English equivalents, as well as their distributional (syntagmatic relations) and transformational possibilities (paradigmatic relations), we give account of their semantic relations (for both languages): conceptual variations (polysemy), intersynonymic variants (relations of synonymy), their eventual relations of antonymy and hyperonymy and their paradigmatic variants (according to their occurrences in the corpora used). All this information is registered in the dictionary in the form of four coordinated files with fields of different nature (cf. 2): two files containing the arguments of the idioms (one file for Catalan and another file for English) and two files containing the predicates (i.e. the idioms as entries) (one file for Catalan and another one for English). Considering the relevance object classes may have in fixed expressions, our dictionary mostly contains idioms –predicates– that combine invariable (argument human nouns) and variable (anthropomorphic somatic lexemes) elements –arguments–: for example, to wash <one’s> hands (of)/C:<so-ma:elre>/G:v/N0:<hum>/N1:<so-ma:elre>/N3:<ina>/Ca:rentar-se les mans (d’) <alguna cosa>, where N0 refers to the subject (a human), and N1 to the first complement (direct object) in the argument structure of this idiom with the somatic lexeme (so) hand, which in this case has a semantic value of refusal of responsibility (elre) (in other cases this lexeme will be in idioms which may evoke, among others, proximity or facility [at hand], manual labour [by hand], activity [on (one’s) hands], severity [firm hand], itinerancy [from hand to hand], human resources [labour force], approval, enthusiasm or attention [to clap (one’s hands)], immobility or repression [to tie (sb’s) hands and feet] and abundance [liberally], which will be reflected in the argument file). N3 is the third complement, which here corresponds to a concrete inanimate object (<ina>)(e.g. “I’m entirely opposed to the er (pause) the idea that they should wash their hands of their (pause) er, obligations er, the nineteen sixty eight act (pause) as” [BNC]). In this case there is no N2 complement, which usually refers to an indirect object. Ca indicates the Catalan equivalent of the idiom. Opting for an electronic phraseological dictionary with a semasiological approach implies, on the one hand, finding the PhUs contained in it more easily, since instead of departing from specific concepts, it departs from the semantic values of the units (idioms) grouped in a linguistically well-defined object class. On the other, it offers the advantage of being suitable for Natural Language Processing, as it has a coding recognised by automatic language processing systems, incorporating numerous fields with information of morphological, syntactic-semantic (the most common distributional and transformational properties) and diasystematic nature (if applicable). It also contains a specific field referred to translations into other languages (bilingual or multilingual). Therefore, these repertoires have a dual function: decoding and encoding information. In fact, one of the main advantages offered by semasiological electronic dictionaries over more traditional ones is that they present in different entries each of the argument structures of a predicate, which allows it to be monosemised. Thus, each usage of a predicate is conceived as a lexical unit to which a description is assigned, a sine qua non for machine translation. This is particularly relevant to hybrid systems, which combine statistics with syntax and semantics (e.g. Systran and Sadaw). The eventual product derived from this thesis, as well as the linguistic data (methodology, examples, tagging and files), can be considered unprecedented. Until now, lexicogrammar had been implemented based on linguistic intuition, which could make the creation of object classes somehow biased by the linguist’s idiolect. Using a syntactic-semantic tagging based on the above-mentioned methodology enables precision and objectivity, starting from real language instances (occurrences of these idioms in corpora). All in all, the usability and replicability of the linguistic data provided in the research may offer a wide range of possibilities, since this tagging could be implemented into linguistic analysis tools (e.g. in the form of tags in the “part of speech” label if idioms are used) and the model could be replicated to expressions from other lexico-phraseological fields, different types of PhUs and other languages. / La present tesi doctoral ha rebut el finançament del contracte d’investigació predoctoral Ayudas para la Formación de Profesorado Universitario (Ref. FPU17/0032) concedit pel Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte d’Espanya (actual Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades). El projecte de tesi s’ha inscrit en el si de l’Institut Superior d’Investigació Cooperativa IVITRA [ISIC-IVITRA] (Programa per a la Constitució i Acreditació d’Instituts Superiors d’Investigació Cooperativa d’Excel∙lència de la Generalitat Valenciana, Ref. ISIC/012/042) i s’ha desenvolupat en el marc dels projectes, xarxes i grups de recerca següents: «Variación y cambio lingüístico en catalán. Una aproximación diacrónica según la Lingüística de Corpus» (MICINUN, Ref. PGC2018-099399-B-100371); (IEC, Ref. PRO2018-S04-MARTINES); Grup d’Investigació VIGROB-125 de la UA; Xarxa de recerca en innovació en docència universitària «Lingüística de Corpus i Mediterrània intercultural: investigació educativa per a l’aplicació de la Lingüística de Corpus en entorns multilingües diacrònics. Aplicacions del Metacorpus CIMTAC» (Institut de Ciències de l’Educació de la UA, Ref. 4581-2018), i Grup d’Investigació en Tecnologia Educativa en Història de la Cultura, Diacronia lingüística i Traducció (Universitat d’Alacant, Ref. GITE-09009-UA).

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第19117号 / 情博第563号 / 新制||情||99(附属図書館) / 32068 / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科社会情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 石田 亨, 教授 吉川 正俊, 教授 河原 達也 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

No description available.

This paper is intended to give a somewhat personal view of the new TUKI English-Swahili Dictionary (hereafter TUKI). This new dictionary is the work of many years and it`s publication is indeed to be heralded and welcomed. Both the TUKI dictionary and the publication of its earlier `companion` the Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu (KKS), which I have consulted in reviewing TUKI, are major publishing events and important contributions to Swahili lexicography. They establish the Institute of Kiswahili Research as an important, credible, and productive African research enterprise, and all of us involved in teaching Swahili owe the Institute our congratulations and support.

We show that a carefully crafted probabilistic morphological analyzer significantly outperforms a reasonable, naive baseline for Syriac. Syriac is an under-resourced Semitic language for which there are no available language tools such as morphological analyzers. Such tools are widely used to contribute to the process of annotating morphologically complex languages. We introduce and connect novel data-driven models for segmentation, dictionary linkage, and morphological tagging in a joint pipeline to create a probabilistic morphological analyzer requiring only labeled data. We explore the performance of this model with varying amounts of training data and find that with about 34,500 tokens, it can outperform the baseline trained on over 99,000 tokens and achieve an accuracy of just over 80%. When trained on all available training data, this joint model achieves 86.47% accuracy — a 29.7% reduction in error rate over the baseline.

Technology is changing education. Just 30 years ago, instructors were using slow, inefficient technology such as projectors and reels of film, whereas today they have instant access to video from anywhere in the world. This capability has the potential to change the way that language is being taught and learned. Instead of students relying solely on their teacher and textbook for linguistic input, they have access to the Internet which holds a seemingly endless amount of information. This study was inspired by the belief that it is possible to maximize the potential benefit from that availability by implementing the theory that people learn language best when they have access to comprehensible input (Buri, 2012; Crossley, Allen, & McNamara, 2012; Krashen, 1985; Shintani, 2012; Zarei & Rashvand 2011). It also implements the belief of some second-language acquisitions theorists that subtitled video provides language learners with more comprehensible input than non-subtitled video alone (Borrás & Lafayette, 1994; Chun & Plass, 1996; Danan, 2004; Di Carlo, 1994). Thus, this study used interactive subtitled video to investigate the effects of three word definition types on participants' vocabulary comprehension and involved the selection of 120 Russian (L2)words of equal difficulty that were randomly sorted into one of four groups -- three treatments and a control group. Each treatment group contained 30 Russian words with a different type of definition in English (L1): dictionary definitions, which provided the viewers with the definition they would find in the bilingual dictionary; glosses which provided the viewers with the exact meaning of the word only as it pertains to the given context; and annotations which provided an explanation to clarify a word's use in different contexts or its non-traditional uses. Participants totaled 53 men and women ages 18-30 from 4 countries, US, Canada, Germany, and Sweden, who were advanced L2 learners of Russian. To control for the possible effects of a pretest, some of the subjects took a vocabulary pretest, and then all subjects watched a film in Russian with Russian subtitles, which was immediately followed by a vocabulary posttest. Results showed that annotations were most conducive to vocabulary gains, followed by glosses, dictionary definitions, and no definition, respectively. Although this was not the case for all participants, this outcome did hold for the majority, and several possible reasons for this outcome are discussed.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have become increasingly prevalent in modern society, with multiple companies pursuing avenues to advance technology. Despite the promises of safer driving, mitigating accidents and reducing stress, mixed opinions exist on the reliability and trustworthiness of the technology. While many factors form opinions regarding AVs, the component of personal values in AV discourse has not been well-documented. This research focuses on understanding which personal values are most prominent in AV discourse and how individuals prioritize these personal values. We studied two AV-focused data sources to gain perspective: 24 TED Talk transcripts and 20,000 Reddit user posts. Next, we scored the prevalence of personal values using the Personal Values Dictionary (PVD). Our results found that self-direction, achievement, power, stimulation, and conformity had an overall positive inclination in AV discourse. However, we also found value conflicts between both data sets, indicating a potential dissonance between professional opinions and those of typical consumers. Our findings provide insight into values literature and issues consumers bring up when discussing or adopting AVs. Our research on value conflicts can also link to consumers' potential adoption of AVs. Thus, we provide potentially useful perspectives for companies to address these concerns directly in their AV production, advertising, and design philosophies.

The thesis presents semantic and pragmatic characteristics that must be taken into account in vocabulary recording of the status vocatives. An ideographic dictionary entry should reflect the word vocative function as communicative-pragmatic props. Word ideographic implementation is a contributing factor that influences the realization of the vocative function. The use of the ideographic dictionaries’ data helps to implement those word classes the lexicalized syntactic function of vocativity. Appeal to corpus data allows to follow the dynamics in use of vocative forms, and also to elicit special grammar aspects of lexical items that are being used as vocatives. It is important to include illustrative examples of vocative function realization into the dictionary entries for the learners of Russian as a foreign language. This thesis deals with the characteristic of macro- and microstructures of the description of status vocatives in a dictionary and with the bases of the ideographic approach to the vocatives. The ways of semantisation of vocatives in a dictionary are presented in an example of a dictionary entry. / В диссертации рассматриваются семантические и прагматические характеристики, которые необходимо учитывать при словарной фиксации статусных обращений. Способность слова употребляться в функции обращения рассматривается как коммуникативно-прагматическое свойство, которое должно получать отражение в словарной статье идеографического словаря. Принадлежность слова к определенной идеографической группе является одним из факторов, влияющих на реализацию словом вокативной функции. Использование данных идеографических словарей способствует выявлению тех классов слов, для которых синтаксическая функция обращения является лексикализованной. Обращение к данным корпуса позволяет отследить динамику в употреблении вокативных форм, а также установить некоторые грамматические особенности лексических единиц, используемых в качестве обращений. Включение в иллюстративный материал толкового словаря примеров реализации вокативной функции важно для изучающих русский язык как иностранный и неродной. В работе охарактеризована макро- и микроструктура словарного описания статусных обращений, обосновывается идеографический подход к обращениям, обсуждаются способы семантизации обращений в словаре и предлагается модель словарной статьи.