Search results for "Linguistics"
showing 10 items of 8097 documents
Pronunciation Learning Strategy Chains: A Qualitative Approach
2014
Language learning is a daunting process frequently enhanced by a number of factors, for example, language learning strategies deployed in an orchestrated manner (Oxford 1990). Similarly, pronunciation learning may be supported by effective strategies used either separately or in logically combined chains. However, little attention has been given so far to the strategies L2 learners employ when learning the target language pronunciation, not to mention pronunciation learning strategy chains. Hence, there have been a limited number of empirical investigations into pronunciation learning strategies (PLS) in general and in particular the ones following the qualitative design (cf. Bukowski 2004;…
ERP qualification exploiting waveform, spectral and time-frequency infomax
2008
The present contribution briefly introduces an event related potential (ERP) detector. The specified detector includes three kinds of features of ERP. They are the ERP waveform feature, ERP spectral feature and ERP time-frequency feature respectively. According to these characteristics, two parameters are defined to reflect the timing feature of ERP. The mismatch negativity (MMN) is taken as the example to design an exact qualification detector. The experiment validates that the computer can automatically detect the raw trace to reflect the quality of the dataset, qualify the filtered trace to test whether the artifacts have been filtered out, and select the ERP-like component to reject art…
A practical solution to the problem of automatic word sense induction
2004
Recent studies in word sense induction are based on clustering global co-occurrence vectors, i.e. vectors that reflect the overall behavior of a word in a corpus. If a word is semantically ambiguous, this means that these vectors are mixtures of all its senses. Inducing a word's senses therefore involves the difficult problem of recovering the sense vectors from the mixtures. In this paper we argue that the demixing problem can be avoided since the contextual behavior of the senses is directly observable in the form of the local contexts of a word. From human disambiguation performance we know that the context of a word is usually sufficient to determine its sense. Based on this observation…
Automatic identification of word translations from unrelated English and German corpora
1999
Algorithms for the alignment of words in translated texts are well established. However, only recently new approaches have been proposed to identify word translations from non-parallel or even unrelated texts. This task is more difficult, because most statistical clues useful in the processing of parallel texts cannot be applied to non-parallel texts. Whereas for parallel texts in some studies up to 99% of the word alignments have been shown to be correct, the accuracy for non-parallel texts has been around 30% up to now. The current study, which is based on the assumption that there is a correlation between the patterns of word co-occurrences in corpora of different languages, makes a sign…
MultiROMs and Online Applications Used for Teaching Phonetics in a Secondary School: A Critical Review
2012
The aim of the article is to evaluate the quality of the materials used to teach pronunciation in a Polish secondary school. Although the analysis covers all kinds of aids available for teachers, including a coursebook accompanied by a CD, the authors focus mainly on MultiROMs and online resources connected with a given book. The findings allow the authors to conclude which coursebook sets seem to be most effective in shaping students’ pronunciation and which exercises are most helpful, taking into consideration the level of students’ English. Additionally, the authors’ idea was to check whether these books take into consideration the aspects of pronunciation which prove to be especially di…
A Formal Semantics and a Client Synthesis for a BPEL Service
2008
A complex Web service described with languages like BPEL4WS, consists of an executable process and its observable behaviour (called an abstract process) based on the messages exchanged with the client. The abstract process behaviour is non deterministic due to the internal choices during the service execution. Furthermore the specification often includes timing constraints which must be taken into account by the client. Thus given a service specification, we identify the synthesis of a client as a key issue for the development of Web services. To this end, we propose an approach based on (dense) timed automata to first describe the observable service behaviour and then to build correct inte…
ChiLab4It system in the QA4FAQ competition
2017
ChiLab4It is the Question Answering system (QA) for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) developed by the Computer-Human Interaction Laboratory (ChiLab) at the University of Palermo for participating to the QA4FAQ task at EVALITA 2016 competition. The system is the versioning of the QuASIt framework developed by the same authors, which has been customized to address the particular task. This technical report describes the strategies that have been imported from QuASIt for implementing ChiLab4It, the actual system implementation, and the comparative evaluations with the results of the other participant tools, as provided by the organizers of the task. ChiLab4It was the only system whose score re…
Grammar is the heart of language : grammar and its role in language learning among Finnish university students
2015
This article presents and discusses views on grammar and its role in formal language learning amongst Finnish university students. The results are based on a questionnaire which was distributed to students at the University of Jyväskylä as part of institutional action research. The background to the project was a feeling amongst some teachers of increased divergence between student respectively language teacher understandings of the role of grammar in language teaching. This concern raised the need to find out how students view grammar. The knowledge about thoughts on grammar amongst students would then help teachers to adjust and adept the way grammar is used in language teaching. The main…
Systems thinking and its contribution to understanding future designer thinking
2017
Design is changing in a radical way. The object of design is transforming from tangible objects into services and furthermore, into systems. Increasingly, new insights arise from the interfaces between diverse disciplines – such as art, science and technology – which through various discourses and paradigms have been specialized and driven apart. This discussion paper pinpoints the so-called systems thinkers, hybrid-people, whose methods and habits of work are constituted by the reconciliation of different disciplines. The article aims to bring more understanding to the kind of thinking that is needed in the complex and dynamic environment in which we create and use design today. This discu…
Knowledge-based verification of concatenative programming patterns inspired by natural language for resource-constrained embedded devices
2020
We propose a methodology to verify applications developed following programming patterns inspired by natural language that interact with physical environments and run on resource-constrained interconnected devices. Natural language patterns allow for the reduction of intermediate abstraction layers to map physical domain concepts into executable code avoiding the recourse to ontologies, which would need to be shared, kept up to date, and synchronized across a set of devices. Moreover, the computational paradigm we use for effective distributed execution of symbolic code on resource-constrained devices encourages the adoption of such patterns. The methodology is supported by a rule-based sys…