Search results for "Language processing"
showing 10 items of 421 documents
Recensión: "Key terms in second language acquisition"
2011
Recensión: "Key terms in second language acquisition. Bill van Petten and Alessandro g. Benati. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010."
Function Words Constrain On-Line Recognition of Verbs and Nouns in French 18-Month-Olds
2013
In this experiment using the conditioned head-turn procedure, 18-month-old French-learning toddlers were trained to respond to either a target noun (“la balle”/the ball) or a target verb (“je mange”/I eat). They were then tested on target word recognition in two syntactic contexts: the target word was preceded either by a correct function word (“une balle”/a ball or “on mange”/they eat), or by an incorrect function word, signaling a word from the other category (*“on balle”/they ball or *“une mange”/a eat). We showed that 18-month-olds exploit the syntactic context on-line to recognize the target word: verbs were recognized when preceded by a personal pronoun but not when preceded by a dete…
Constructions-and-frames analysis of translations
2013
Translation can generally be seen as a task in which the meaning of the original should be preserved as far as possible. This paper formulates the preservation of meaning in terms of theprimacy of the framehypothesis: ideally, the frame of the original is matched by the frame of the translation. I investigate one factor overriding this principle in translations between English and German through the examination of two grammatical constructions, one in English, one in German, which are not commonly available in the other language. Picking a construction comparable in function in the target language leads to frame shifts. In addition to highlighting the interplay between construction and fram…
Optimal reciprocals in German Sign Language
2003
Unlike most spoken languages, German Sign Language (DGS) does not have a single means of reciprocal marking. Rather, different strategies are used, which crucially depend on phonological (one-handed sign vs. two-handed sign) and morphosyntactic (plain verb vs. agreement verb) properties of the underlying verb. Moreover, with plain verbs DGS shows dialectal variation. Altogether there are four different ways of realizing reciprocal marking in DGS. In this paper, we compare a rule-based analysis for the reciprocal data (based on Brentari’s 1998 feature hierarchy) to an optimality-theoretic analysis. We argue that an OT-account allows for a more straightforward explanation of the facts. In par…
Discovering prominence and its role in language processing: an individual (differences) approach
2015
Abstract It has been suggested that, during real time language comprehension, the human language processing system attempts to identify the argument primarily responsible for the state of affairs (the “actor”) as quickly and unambiguously as possible. However, previous work on a prominence (e.g. animacy, definiteness, case marking) based heuristic for actor identification has suffered from underspecification of the relationship between different cue hierarchies. Qualitative work has yielded a partial ordering of many features (e.g. MacWhinney et al. 1984), but a precise quantification has remained elusive due to difficulties in exploring the full feature space in a particular language. Feat…
Phrase Frames as an Exploratory Tool for Studying English-to-Polish Translation Patterns: A Descriptive Corpus-Based Study
2020
Designed as a proof-of-concept, this descriptive corpus-based study focuses on the concept of phrase frame, defined as a contiguous sequence of n words identical except for one (Fletcher 2002). Although phrase frames were already used as a means of exploring pattern variability across and within different text types or registers written in English, they have been rarely, if ever, employed so far as a unit of analysis in descriptive research on translation. In this study, we use the English‒Polish parallel corpus Paralela (Pęzik 2016) to identify and describe Polish translation patterns that emerge from two functionally-defined English phrase frames (it is * clear that, it is * difficult to ). …
MLU and IPSyn measuring absolute complexity
2009
This article compares the results of Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) with the structural complexity of spontaneous utterances produced by 30-month-old Finnish children in a semi-structured playing situation. The comparison was carried out in order to determine the aspects of structural complexity which can be detected with MLU and IPSyn. This research adopts the frameworks of absolute complexity together with a multidimensional view of utterance structure and, furthermore, applies it through Utterance Analysis (UA). The results of the comparison between the metrics and changes in structural complexity discovered by UA reveal that MLU and IPSyn do functi…
Semantic Word Error Rate for Sentence Similarity
2016
Sentence similarity measures have applications in several tasks, including: Machine Translation, Paraphrase Iden- tification, Speech Recognition, Question-answering and Text Summarization. However, measures designed for these tasks are aimed at assessing equivalence rather than resemblance, partly departing from human cognition of similarity. While this is reasonable for these activities, it hinders the applicability of sentence similarity measures to other tasks. We therefore propose a new sentence similarity measure specifically designed for resemblance evaluation, in order to cover these fields better. Experimental results are discussed.
Robust Neural Machine Translation: Modeling Orthographic and Interpunctual Variation
2020
Neural machine translation systems typically are trained on curated corpora and break when faced with non-standard orthography or punctuation. Resilience to spelling mistakes and typos, however, is crucial as machine translation systems are used to translate texts of informal origins, such as chat conversations, social media posts and web pages. We propose a simple generative noise model to generate adversarial examples of ten different types. We use these to augment machine translation systems’ training data and show that, when tested on noisy data, systems trained using adversarial examples perform almost as well as when translating clean data, while baseline systems’ performance drops by…
Source-Target Mapping Model of Streaming Data Flow for Machine Translation
2017
Streaming information flow allows identification of linguistic similarities between language pairs in real time as it relies on pattern recognition of grammar rules, semantics and pronunciation especially when analyzing so called international terms, syntax of the language family as well as tenses transitivity between the languages. Overall, it provides a backbone translation knowledge for building automatic translation system that facilitates processing any of various abstract entities which combine to specify underlying phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of linguistic forms and that act as the targets of linguistic rules and operations in a source language foll…