Orientador: Ruth Elisabeth Vasconcellos Lopes / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-16T06:36:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Faria_Pablo_M.pdf: 1248984 bytes, checksum: 9609dfcb9ddec33250dfdefdb367fb5a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / Resumo: Nesta dissertação de mestrado, o objetivo principal é refletir sobre algumas propriedades da linguagem e do processo de aquisição, tomando como ponto de partida questões que surgiram durante o processo de implementação do modelo proposto em Berwick (1985). O quadro teórico geral em que esta pesquisa se situa é o da Gramática Gerativa - na linha chomskiana - e, em particular, o modelo implementado aqui tem como principal base teórica a Gramática Transformacional (Cf. CHOMSKY, 1965). Entre as propriedades da linguagem que discutimos estão: os traços distintivos dos itens lexicais, a assimetria entre especificadores e complementos, categorias vazias e o papel da informação temática na sintaxe. A idéia subjacente que permeia as reflexões é a busca por um olhar mais abstrato sobre o conhecimento gramatical, procurando rever ou até eliminar dispositivos que, em primeiro lugar, aparecem como obstáculos significativos para o analisador e, em segundo lugar, resistem à identificação de evidências para sua aquisição, do ponto de vista do aprendiz da língua. Para atingir estes objetivos, a primeira metade do trabalho faz uma breve discussão teórica, para em seguida trazer uma apresentação razoavelmente detalhada do modelo de Berwick, incluindo exemplos de funcionamento. A segunda metade inclui a discussão dos resultados juntamente com as reflexões sobre a linguagem, procurando apontar caminhos que não apenas possam tornar o modelo de aquisição mais robusto, mas que levantem questões para investigação em teoria gramatical. Neste sentido, este trabalho - por se situar numa área multidisciplinar, a saber, a lingüística computacional - procura tornar explícitas as contribuições que esse tipo de investigação pode fazer à teoria lingüística. / Abstract: The main goal of this MA thesis is to discuss some properties of language and its acquisition process, taking as a starting point some issues that emerged during the implementation of the acquisition model proposed by Berwick (1985). Our general theoretical framework is the Generative Grammar - as proposed in Chomsky's works - and, in particular, the Transformational Grammar model (Cf. CHOMSKY, 1965). Some of the language properties discussed here involve: the set of distinctive features for lexical items, the asymmetry between specifiers and complements, empty categories and the role of thematic information in syntax. The subjacent idea surrounding the reections on language is the search for a more abstract view of the grammatical knowledge such that some of the theoretical devices can be revised or even abandoned. Two main goals drive this effort: first, the elimination of some significant obstacles in the parser's task to analyze sentences. Second, the elimination of those devices for which we cannot find proper evidence for their acquisition, considering the learner's perspective. In order to pursue these goals, in the first part of this work we set out the theoretical background for the whole discussion and give a somewhat detailed presentation of Berwick's acquisition model and examples of its functioning. In the second part we include a discussion of the results upon which the reection is built, whereby we point out some ways not only to increase the robustness of the acquisition model, but also to raise questions for further research in grammatical theory. In this sense, this work - which pertains to an interdisciplinary field, i.e, computational linguistics - tries to make explicit the contributions that this kind of investigation can offer to linguistic theory. / Mestrado / Linguistica / Mestre em Linguística

Systems that attempt to process texts and acquire information from texts in English need to be particularly alert to noun phrases since they carry so much information. Systems, whether comprehensional or computational, may face particular difficulties when dealing with complex noun phrases. One of the decomposition patterns for noun phrases is left or right branching, which determines the semantic relations between the constituents of the combination.This degree project seeks to describe a processing model that the comprehension system employs to process difficulties. Since the minicorpus studied in this research consists of four of the peace agreements that were produced in English for Israeli and Palestinian sides of their conflicts to sign and implement, the comprehension models that were used by a non-native speaker of English are described, and then a computational model to enhance performing this task is suggested which includes using the frequencies of the combinations of the constituents in two major contemporary corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus, to help decide how to nest the noun phrases as either left or right branching structures, to resolve the ambiguity problem. Hyphening is also suggested as a potential strategy to avoid unwanted structural ambiguity in adjective + noun + noun combinations.

La thèse propose un début d’étude du champ sémantique de la santé en breton vannetais. Cette étude est basée sur un corpus de breton littéraire vannetais et un corpus de breton oral recueilli auprès de locuteurs traditionnels de la région de Pontivy. Le travail de description de lexies de ce champ sémantique est fait dans le cadre de la théorie linguistique Sens-Texte. Dans un premier temps sont données des explications sur le modèle linguistique proposé par la théorie Sens-Texte et sur la branche lexicologique de cette théorie, la Lexicologie Explicative et Combinatoire. La combinatoire lexicale et syntaxique des noms dénotant des troubles physiologiques, y compris ceux dénotant des maladies, est ensuite décrite. Cette description suppose un travail de lexémisation – c’est-à-dire de distinction des différentes acceptions d’un mot polysémique – de quelques vocables dont certaines acceptions sont des lexèmes de base de ce champ sémantique : les vocables DROUG ‘mal’, KLEÑVED ‘maladie’, KLAÑV ‘malade’, KLEÑVEDET lit. ‘maladié’ = ‘qui a une maladie’, YAC’H ‘en bonne santé’, YEC’HED ‘santé’ et AESAAT ‘guérir’. Il est proposé une description la plus complète possible de ces lexèmes. Il s’agit de la toute première tentative d’application au breton d’une méthodologie d’élaboration dictionnairique claire et cohérente, au fort pouvoir descriptif. En outre, ce travail de thèse débouche sur un corpus de breton oral d’environ un demi-million de mots, outil précieux pour les chercheurs sur la langue bretonne / The thesis offers a first-start study of the semantic field of health in the vannetais variety of Breton, based both on a corpus of literary Breton from the Vannes region and a corpus of oral Breton collected from traditional speakers in the Pontivy area. Lexicographic description of lexical units from that semantic field is embedded in the Meaning-Text linguistic theory. An overview of the theory, in particular it’s lexicological branch, the Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology is given, followed by a detailed description of the lexical and syntactic co-occurrence of nouns denoting physiological disorders, illnesses and diseases. Such a description has required lexemization of vocables (= discrimination of different word-senses of polysemous words) to which belong basic lexemes of this semantic field: DROUG ‘≈ physiological disorder’, KLEÑVED ‘disease’, KLAÑV ‘ill / sick’, KLEÑVEDET lit. ‘made.ill’ = ‘having an illness’, YAC’H ‘healthy’, YEC’HED ‘health’ and AESAAT ‘to cure / heal’. These lexemes have been given a detailed lexicographic description. The thesis represents the very first attempt at applying a clear, coherent and descriptively powerful lexicographic methodology to Breton data. In addition, it makes available to the scientific community a corpus of oral Breton of about a half million words

Syntactic Differences between Italiano Letterario and Italiano Neostandard This diploma thesis focuses on two usages of Italian language: Italiano Letterario and Italiano Neostandard, and syntactic differences between these too. The aim of the paper is to list these differences, describe them and prove them as vital via an analysis of several contemporary Italian texts. The thesis is divided into two basic parts. The first part is rather theory-focused and its aim is to define both terms Italiano Letterario and Italiano Neostandard, present the development of the language since the 1860, when Italiano Letterario was set, describe the main features of Neostandard (including the differences between written and spoken variations), briefly outline the changes of the literary language during the course of the 20th century and list and describe in detail the syntactic features of Neostandard. First we described the language situation at time of Italian unification. There was an urge for a single language to be appropriate for every communication situation. The Lombardian writer Alessandro Manzoni, who dedicated all his life to the question of language, came up with the solution he had also applied in the ultimate version of his masterpiece The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi). The novel was written in the...

La parution d’un certain nombre de travaux menés sur les « conjonctions de subordination », Deulofeu (1999a) sur que, Benzitoun (2006a) à propos de quand, Corminboeuf (2009) pour si, Debaisieux (2006) concernant parce que, quoique, puisque et bien que, etc., a permis de rendre justice à la pluralité des fonctionnements syntaxiques des structures ainsi introduites en faisant valoir le fait qu’elles ne peuvent être constamment ramenées à une relation de dépendance grammaticale. C’est dans cette même lignée que s’inscrit ce travail qui a pour objectif de recenser, sur la base de corpus de français parlé et écrit, les différents fonctionnements syntaxiques de la conjonction alors que en français contemporain. Il apparait que les séquences ainsi introduites relèvent de cinq principaux emplois, dont un seul est à considérer comme véritablement « subordonné ». Nous associerons par ailleurs un ou plusieurs effets de sens à chacun de ces emplois. / A number of recent studies dealing about the syntactic properties of French subordinating conjunctions such as que (which, who, that) (Deulofeu, 1999a), quand (when) (Benzitoun, 2006a), si (if) (Corminboeuf, 2009) or parce que, quoique, puisque and bien que (because, since, although) (Debaisieux, 2006) have brought an increased awareness of the various grammatical behaviors of such forms, which definitely cannot be reduced to a simple relation of syntactic dependency. Using this approach, the present dissertation will attempt to offer a precise account of the conjunction alors que (whereas) as it is used in spoken and written contemporary French. It will be demonstrated that the constructions introduced by alors que can be classified into five main syntactic types, only one of them presenting a truly “subordinating” effect. In addition to analyzing their specific syntactic structure, our different types will be described according to their particular semantic value.

Natural language is inherently ambiguous. For example, the word "bank" can mean a financial institution or a river shore. Finding the correct meaning of a word in a particular context is a task known as word sense disambiguation (WSD), which is essential for many natural language processing applications such as machine translation, information retrieval, and others. While most current WSD methods try to disambiguate a small number of words for which enough annotated examples are available, the method proposed in this thesis attempts to address all words in unrestricted text. The method is based on constraints imposed by syntactic dependencies and concept generalizations drawn from an external dictionary. The method was tested on standard benchmarks as used during the SENSEVAL-2 and SENSEVAL-3 WSD international evaluation exercises, and was found to be competitive.

Orientador: Maria Luiza Braga / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-04T00:47:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Carvalho_CristinadosSantos_D.pdf: 1949611 bytes, checksum: 878738ebe19c4154ae4c1b804878fae3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2004 / Resumo: Na presente tese, investigo as sentenças complexas portuguesas com verbos causativos e perceptivos em que se dá encaixamento de cláusulas completivas. Restrinjo minha análise, no primeiro grupo semântico, aos verbos mandar, deixar e fazer e, no segundo, a ver, ouvir e sentir, pelo fato de esses seis verbos terem sido mais freqüentes na amostra. Como referencial teórico, utilizo-me dos pressupostos do funcionalismo lingüístico, principalmente daqueles seguidos pela vertente americana (cf. Givón, 1990, 1995; Hopper e Traugott, 1993, dentre outros) e dos contidos em Lehmann (1988). Fundamento-me nas noções de iconicidade, integração sintática e gramaticalização para descrever e comparar o comportamento sintático e semântico das sentenças encaixadas em verbos causativos e perceptivos. Abordo, numa perspectiva pancrônica, os usos dessas cláusulas na língua portuguesa, com o intuito de verificar, nesses usos, a atuação do princípio de uniformitarismo (Labov, 1995). Para tanto, examino dados de diferentes fases do português, a arcaica e a contemporânea, com ênfase no estágio atual dessa língua. A amostra sincrônica consta de dados da modalidade falada do português brasileiro do século XX. A amostra diacrônica é composta de textos escritos do português do século XV: A Crônica de D. Pedro e A Carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha. Da perspectiva da metodologia adotada na pesquisa, utilizo os pressupostos metodológicos da Teoria da Variação Lingüística. Seguindo esses pressupostos, submeti os dados sincrônicos a um tratamento quantitativo através do programa de pacotes VARBRUL (mesmo sem estar operando com uma regra variável). Com base nas noções de iconicidade, integração sintática e gramaticalização, assumo como hipóteses principais desta tese as seguintes: (a) as cláusulas encaixadas em verbos causativos e perceptivos se distinguem não só por atributos semânticos mas também por atributos sintáticos e constituem diferentes níveis de integração sintática; (b) existem diferenças de níveis de integração sintática e gramaticalização entre os verbos de cada grupo semântico e entre as acepções de cada verbo. Visando à comprovação empírica dessas hipóteses, os graus de integração sintática e gramaticalização entre as completivas aqui analisadas e suas matrizes são medidos a partir de parâmetros sintáticos e semântico-pragmáticos. Neste trabalho, em relação a alguns desses parâmetros, os resultados quantitativos evidenciam que: (a) as sentenças encaixadas em verbos causativos e perceptivos exibem, no português brasileiro, um padrão distribucional divergente entre si e, portanto, remetem a distintos graus de integração sintática; (b) essas diferenças se explicam pela atuação do subprincípio da proximidade (Givón, 1990); (c) alguns usos dos verbos causativos e perceptivos representam diferentes estágios de gramaticalização; (d) nos grupos semânticos examinados, alguns verbos se destacam por possuírem mais usos integrados e/ou gramaticalizados / Abstract: In the present work I investigate Portuguese complex sentences which involve embedded clauses with causative and perception verbs. I examine causative verbs such as mandar ¿to order¿, deixar ¿to let¿ and fazer ¿to make¿ and perception verbs such as ver ¿to see¿, ouvir ¿to hear¿ and sentir ¿to feel¿, because they were the most frequent ones, of each semantic group, to appear in the sample. Some theoretical assumptions from the functionalist approach are used, mainly these ones adopted by Givón (1990, 1995), Hopper e Traugott (1993) and Lehmann (1988). The analysis is based on the notions of iconicity, syntactic integration and grammaticalization, since the aim is to confront the embedded clauses of causative and perception verbs as far as their syntactic and semantic properties are concerned. I also study the Portuguese usages of these clauses in a panchronic perspective to verify the action of the Uniformitarian Principle (Labov, 1995). Then, I examine data from two periods of Portuguese, the archaic and contemporary ones, emphasizing the latter. The synchronic sample consists of data of spoken Brazilian Portuguese from the XXth Century. The diachronic sample consists of written texts from the XVth Century: A Crônica de D. Pedro and A Carta de Pero Vaz de Caminha. Adopting the methodological principles from the Theory of Linguistic Variation, I make a quantitative analysis of the synchronic data through the VARBRUL, a package of statistical programs (although I am not studying a variable rule). Based on the claims about iconicity, syntactic integration and grammaticalization, it is assumed that: (a) the embedded clauses of causative verbs differ, semantically and syntactically, from the sentential complements of perception verbs because they exhibit different levels of syntactic integration; (b) there are distinct degrees of syntactic integration and grammaticalization among the verbs of each semantic group and among the meanings of each verb. In order to check these hypotheses, the degrees of syntactic integration and grammaticalization between the sentential complements and their matrixes are measured based on syntactic and semantic-pragmatic parameters. As far as these parameters are concerned, the results show that: (a) the embedded clauses of causative and perception verbs exhibit different distributional patterns and, therefore, they display different degrees of syntactic integration; (b) these differences are explained by the Proximity Subprinciple (Givón, 1990); (c) some usages of causative and perception verbs represent distinct stages of grammaticalization; (d) in the semantic groups examined, some verbs have more integrated and grammaticalized usages than others / Doutorado / Doutor em Linguística

In this thesis, we explore the potential benefits of leveraging eye-tracking information for dependency parsing on the English part of the Dundee corpus. To achieve this, we cast dependency parsing as a sequence labelling task and then augment the neural model for sequence labelling with eye-tracking features. We also augment a graph-based parser with eye-tracking features and parse the Dundee Corpus to corroborate our findings from the sequence labelling parser. We then experiment with a variety of parser setups ranging from parsing with all features to a delexicalized parser. Our experiments show that for a parser with all features, although the improvements are positive for the LAS score they are not significant whereas our delexicalized parser significantly outperforms the baseline we established. We also analyze the contribution of various eye-tracking features towards the different parser setups and find that eye-tracking features contain information which is complementary in nature, thus implying that augmenting the parser with various gaze features grouped together provides better performance than any individual gaze feature. 1

The thesis analyses syntactic complexity of monologic tasks of 10 B2 and 10 C1 speakers of English with Czech as their L1. The data derives from LINDSEI_CZ (Gráf 2017). The transcripts of the recordings were segmented into AS-units (Foster et al. 2000) and adapted for the purposes of the analysis. Syntactic complexity was calculated using following measures: mean length of AS-unit, mean length of clause, clauses / AS-unit. These were complemented by fine-grained indices of structural complexity, comprised of ratios of subordinate clause types and coordinate verb phrases per total number of clauses (Vercellotti & Packer 2016) and a weighted complexity scale designed by Vercellotti (2018). The results of the quantitative analysis showed no significant effect of proficiency on syntactic complexity of the speakers. In fact, all speakers irrespective of language proficiency level produced very similar complex structures as opposed to lower-proficiency structures. This indicates that more fine-grained indices should be incorporated into spoken complexity research. At the same time, scores of each measure varied considerably within groups, pointing at the importance of inter-speaker variability in this research. The thesis thus produced outcomes that are largely methodological, in that it has identified...

eHealth is an emerging area that boosts up with advancement in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Due to variety of eHealth solutions developed by different IT firms with no proper shared standards, interoperability issue is then raised. Blekinge County healthcare organizations use two different systems MAGNA CURA and SYStem Cross. The two systems work well in their own scope. But these systems often need to communicate and coordinate for exchange of patients’ information which leads to the problem of interoperability. The aim of this research study is to provide fast and reliable peer-to-peer solution for exchange of patient information so as to achieve interoperability among healthcare organizations. This proposed solution is tested as a middleware between MAGNA CURA and SYStem Cross currently used by Blekinge County healthcare organizations. A qualitative approach including in-depth literature review and a semi-structured face-to-face interview has been used for understanding the context of research problem. We have tested our approach through an executable prototype. The prototype is implemented using JXTA platform. We have learned that Blekinge healthcare is decentralized and heterogonous in nature. For such kind of environment, peer-to-peer communication approach is suggested. According to the test result, the suggested syntactic level interoperability between the two mentioned systems has been achieved.