This collection examines the promise and limitations for computer-assisted language learning of emerging speech technologies: speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and acoustic visualization. Using pioneering research from contributors based in the US and Europe, this volume illustrates the uses of each technology for learning languages, the problems entailed in their use, and the solutions evolving in both technology and instructional design. To illuminate where these technologies stand on the path from research toward practice, the book chapters are organized to reflect five stages in the maturation of learning technologies: basic research, analysis of learners' needs, adaptation of technologies to meet needs, development of prototypes to incorporate adapted technologies, and evaluation of prototypes. The volume demonstrates the progress in employing each class of speech technology while pointing up the effort that remains for effective, reliable application to language learning.

Cultures in Contact deals with the complex cultural relations surrounding the translation and reception of Alessandro Manzoni's novel I promessi sposi (1827) in nineteenth-century England and a few years later in America. The critical and methodological perspective of this study rests on the most recent developments and final convergence of Translation Studies and Cultural Studies, and considers translation as a privileged locus of exchange and negotiation of values and ideologies. The book analyses the situation of the target and source literatures and cultures at the time of the early translations, focusing on the systemic factors determining the selection of texts for translation. Particular attention has been devoted to the receiving context, considering how and why in England and in America the impact of Manzoni's work was less significant than in France and Germany. A notable intra- and inter-linguistic interdependency of the English and French translations of I promessi sposi developed, and, in this perspective, the influence that the early French and English versions exercised on the definitive edition of I promessi sposi appears today critically relevant.

The development of smaller and more powerful computers and the introduction of new communication channels by the interlinking of computers, by the Internet and the World Wide Web, have caused great changes for linguistics. They affect the methods in the various disciplines of pure linguistics as well as the tools and ways of applied linguistics such as translation and interpretation, language teaching, learning, and testing. This volume presents general reflections and overview articles on these new developments by noted experts followed by reports on the concrete uses of information technologies for linguistic purposes in different European countries and at the European Parliament. A discussion of another important linguistic issue is added: the various uses of the highly symbolic term national language.

Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics consists of introductory level textbooks covering the core topics in Applied Linguistics, designed for those entering postgraduate studies and language professionals returning to academic study. The books take an innovative "practice to theory" approach, with a ?back to front? structure which takes the reader from real life problems and issues in the field, then enters into a discussion of intervention and how to engage with these concerns. The final section concludes by tying the practical issues to theoretical foundations. Additional features include tasks with commentaries, a glossary of key terms, and an annotated further reading section.

Corpus linguistics is a key area of applied linguistics and one of the most rapidly developing. Winnie Cheng's practical approach guides readers in acquiring the relevant knowledge and theories to enable the analysis, explanation and interpretation of language using corpus methods.

Throughout the book practical classroom examples, concordance based analyses and tasks such as designing and conducting mini-projects are used to connect and explain the conceptual and practical aspects of corpus linguistics.

Exploring Corpus Linguistics is an essential textbook for post-graduate/graduate students new to the field and for advanced undergraduates studying English Language and Applied Linguistics.

This book presents a theoretical study on aspect in Chinese, including both situation and viewpoint aspects. Unlike previous studies, which have largely classified linguistic units into different situation types, this study defines a set of ontological event types that are conceptually universal and on the basis of which different languages employ various linguistic devices to describe such events. To do so, it focuses on a particular component of events, namely the viewpoint aspect. It includes and discusses a wealth of examples to show how such ontological events are realized in Chinese. In addition, the study discusses how Chinese modal verbs and adverbs affect the distribution of viewpoint aspects associated with certain situation types. In turn, the book demonstrates how the proposed linguistic theory can be used in a computational context. Simply identifying events in terms of the verbs and their arguments is insufficient for real situations such as understanding the factivity and the logical/temporal relations between events. The proposed framework offers the possibility of analyzing events in Chinese text, yielding deep semantic information.

The growth experienced by Corpus Linguistics over the last two decades has complicated the definition of the discipline. There is at present no consensus as to what corpus linguistics exactly is. Is it a methodology, a theoretical framework, a research paradigm? The goal of this book is multi-purpose. It provides material for a discussion of the notion of "corpus linguistics", an overt discussion of the limits of this discipline and a comparison of some of the main approaches. And at the same time it offers a collection of selected papers representative of a range of approaches and applications associated with corpus research.

The book presents a wide range of recent research results about parsing schemata, introducing formal frameworks and theoretical results while keeping a constant focus on applicability to practical parsing problems. The first part includes a general introduction to the parsing schemata formalism that contains the basic notions needed to understand the rest of the parts. Thus, this compendium can be used as an introduction to natural language parsing, allowing postgraduate students not only to get a solid grasp of the fundamental concepts underlying parsing algorithms, but also an understanding of the latest developments and challenges in the field. Researchers in computational linguistics will find novel results where parsing schemata are applied to current problems that are being actively researched in the computational linguistics community (like dependency parsing, robust parsing, or the treatment of non-projective linguistics phenomena). This book not only explains these results in a more detailed, comprehensive and self-contained way, and highlights the relations between them, but also includes new contributions that have not been presented. Readership: Researchers, academics, professionals, postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in computational linguistics, theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

The articles collected in this volume present different aspects of the use of typed feature structures in theoretical and computational linguistics. It covers a wide range of linguistics theories (CCG, Construction Grammar, HPSG, LTAG), a wide range of linguistic phenomena (aspect, concord, idioms, passive), and a wide range of applications (parsing, question answering, semantic composition).

In the not so distant future, we can expect a world where humans and robots coexist and interact with each other. For this to occur, we need to understand human traits, such as seeing, hearing, thinking, speaking, etc., and institute these traits in robots. The most essential feature necessary for robots to achieve is that of integrative multimedia understanding (IMU) which occurs naturally in humans. It allows us to assimilate pieces of information expressed through different modes such as speech, pictures, gestures, etc. The book describes how robots acquire traits like natural language understanding (NLU) as the central part of IMU. Mental image directed semantic theory (MIDST) is its core, and is based on the hypothesis that NLU is essentially the processing of mental image associated with natural language expressions, namely, mental-image based understanding (MBU). MIDST is intended to model omnisensory mental image in human and to afford a knowledge representation system in order for integrative management of knowledge subjective to cognitive mechanisms of intelligent entities such as humans and robots based on a mental image model visualized as 'Loci in Attribute Spaces' and its description language Lmd (mental image description language) to be employed for predicate logic with a systematic scheme for symbol-grounding. This language works as an interlingua among various kinds of information media, and has been applied to several versions of the intelligent system interlingual understanding model aiming at general system (IMAGES). Its latest version, i.e. conversation management system (CMS) simulates MBU and comprehends the user's intention through dialogue to find and solve problems, and finally, provides a response in text or animation. The book is aimed at researchers and students interested in artificial intelligence, robotics, and cognitive science. Based on philosophical considerations, the methodology will also have an appeal in linguistics, psychology, ontology, geography, and cartography. Key Features: Describes the methodology to provide robots with human-like capability of natural language understanding (NLU) as the central part of IMU Uses methodology that also relates to linguistics, psychology, ontology, geography, and cartography Examines current trends in machine translation

Contents: Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk: PALC 2007: Where are we now? - Paul Rayson/Dawn Archer/Alistair Baron/Nicholas Smith: Travelling through time with corpus annotation software - Eugene H. Casad: Parsing texts and compiling a dictionary with shoebox - Belinda Maia/Rui Silva/Anabela Barreiro/Cecilia Frois: 'N-grams in search of theories' - Piotr Pezik/Jung-jae Kim/Dietrich Rebholz-Schuhmann: MedEvi - A permuted concordancer for the biomedical domain - Patrick Hanks: Why the "word sense disambiguation problem" can't be solved, and what should be done instead - Rafal

This book reviews ways to improve statistical machine speech translation between Polish and English. Research has been conducted mostly on dictionary-based, rule-based, and syntax-based, machine translation techniques. Most popular methodologies and tools are not well-suited for the Polish language and therefore require adaptation, and language resources are lacking in parallel and monolingual data. The main objective of this volume to develop an automatic and robust Polish-to-English translation system to meet specific translation requirements and to develop bilingual textual resources by mining comparable corpora.

This collection examines the promise and limitations for computer-assisted language learning of emerging speech technologies: speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and acoustic visualization. Using pioneering research from contributors based in the US and Europe, this volume illustrates the uses of each technology for learning languages, the problems entailed in their use, and the solutions evolving in both technology and instructional design. To illuminate where these technologies stand on the path from research toward practice, the book chapters are organized to reflect five stages in the maturation of learning technologies: basic research, analysis of learners' needs, adaptation of technologies to meet needs, development of prototypes to incorporate adapted technologies, and evaluation of prototypes. The volume demonstrates the progress in employing each class of speech technology while pointing up the effort that remains for effective, reliable application to language learning.

The rapid advancement in the theoretical understanding of statistical and machine learning methods for semisupervised learning has made it difficult for nonspecialists to keep up to date in the field. Providing a broad, accessible treatment of the theory as well as linguistic applications, Semisupervised Learning for Computational Linguistics offers self-contained coverage of semisupervised methods that includes background material on supervised and unsupervised learning. The book presents a brief history of semisupervised learning and its place in the spectrum of learning methods before moving on to discuss well-known natural language processing methods, such as self-training and co-training. It then centers on machine learning techniques, including the boundary-oriented methods of perceptrons, boosting, support vector machines (SVMs), and the null-category noise model. In addition, the book covers clustering, the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, related generative methods, and agreement methods. It concludes with the graph-based method of label propagation as well as a detailed discussion of spectral methods. Taking an intuitive approach to the material, this lucid book facilitates the application of semisupervised learning methods to natural language processing and provides the framework and motivation for a more systematic study of machine learning.

Information and communication technology (ICT) has dramatically altered the world's social and economic landscape and is now gaining momentum in the realm of language studies. Corpora and ICT in Language Studies attempts to signal and document this phenomenon by bringing together twenty-nine contributions authored by both seasoned researchers and newcomers to the field. The contributions range from more traditional corpus-based or corpus-driven studies to those incorporating ICT as an integral part of their methodology. The volume includes a selection of conference papers given at PALC 2005, the fifth conference in the biennial cycle of meetings organized by the Department of English Language at Lodź University, as well as a number of invited papers. The papers are grouped in three parts: corpora in empirical language studies, cognitive linguistics and e-learning.

Grammatical relatedness of Slavic languages could effectively be exploited in multilingual grammar engineering in order to achieve theoretically sound modularity that would also incorporate important insights from Slavic linguistics. In line with increasing interest in finegrained modular linguistic representations, this book investigates the plausibility of designing linguistically motivated shared grammatical resources for an interesting set of related languages in a grammar formalism that appears to be suited for this endeavour. Grammar is viewed as a repository of knowledge encoded in rich ontologies. Selected topics of Slavic morphosyntax illustrate the range of shared grammatical knowledge to be modelled.

This volume explores intercultural communication in specialist fields and its realisations in language for specific purposes. Special attention is given to legal, commercial, political and institutional discourse used in particular workplaces, analysed from an intercultural perspective. The contributions explore to what extent intercultural pressure leads to particular discourse patternings and lexico-grammatical/phonological realisations, and also the extent to which textual re-encoding and recontextualisation alter the pragmatic value of the texts taken into consideration.

This is the first book which brings together the fields of theoretical and empirical studies in syntax on the one hand and the methodology of quantitative linguistics on the other hand. The author provides the theoretical background for this enterprise on the basis of the philosophy of science and of linguistic considerations including a discussion of Chomsky's attitude against the application of statistical methods to syntactic phenomena. He gives a short introduction into the aims and methods of the quantitative approach to linguistics in general and to syntax in particular. The following chapters inform the reader about the measurement of syntactic properties, possibilities to acquire empirical data from syntactically annotated text corpora and the most common mathematical models and methods for the analysis of syntactic and syntagmatic material. Then, a number of prominent approaches and hypotheses about interrelations between properties of syntactic constructions are presented and evaluated on material from various languages and text kinds. Finally, the theory of synergetic linguistics and its application to syntax is introduced including the integration of such famous hypotheses as Yngve's depth hypothesis and Hawkins's "Early immediate constituent" principle. The book concludes with a number of perspectives with respect to follow-up studies and extensions to the presented models with interfaces to neighbouring disciplines.

This volume reflects the results of a workshop on the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective, held within the 15th European Symposium on Language for Special Purposes ('New Trends in Specialized Discourse', Bergamo 2005). The articles deal with developments from the late medieval period to the present day, and the book encompasses studies in which the long-established tradition of domain-specific English is highlighted. The fields of contributions range from scientific to legal to political and business discourse. Special attention is given to argumentation, in an attempt to assess the time-depth of typical rhetorical strategies. Some methodological innovations are introduced in corpus linguistics. Numerous contributions bring new materials to scholarly discussion, as recently released or in-progress 'second-generation' corpora are used as data. Recent changes in present-day legal and scientific writing are also discussed as they witness fast adaptation to new requirements, due to the advent and growing familiarity of new technologies, international law and changes in academia.

Corpus-based studies of diachronic English have been thriving over the last three decades to such an extent that the validity of corpora in the enrichment of historical linguistic research is now undeniable. The present book is a collection of papers illustrating the state of the art in corpus-based research on diachronic English, by means of case-study expositions, software presentations, and theoretical discussions on the topic. The majority of these papers were delivered at the

This book presents the first computer program, called KINSHIP, automating the task of componential analysis of kinship vocabularies. KINSHIP accepts as input the kin terms of a language with their attendant kin types and can produce all alternative componential models of a kinship system, including the most parsimonious one, using the minimum number of dimensions and components in a kin term definition. A further simplicity constraint ensures the coordination between kin term definitions. Inspecting previous practices of the method of componential analysis reveals two basic problems in published models: (1) the commonly occurring inconsistency of componential models (violating necessity or sufficiency conditions of kin term definitions), (2) the huge number of alternative componential models. The application of KINSHIP with its simplicity constraints successfully solves both these problems. The utility of the program is illustrated on complete data sets from more than a dozen languages from Indo-European and non-Indo-European origin.

This book presents established and state-of-the-art methods in Language Technology (including text mining, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing), and demonstrates how they can be applied by humanities scholars working with textual data. The landscape of humanities research has recently changed thanks to the proliferation of big data and large textual collections such as Google Books, Early English Books Online, and Project Gutenberg. These resources have yet to be fully explored by new generations of scholars, and the authors argue that Language Technology has a key role to play in the exploration of large-scale textual data. The authors use a series of illustrative examples from various humanistic disciplines (mainly but not exclusively from History, Classics, and Literary Studies) to demonstrate basic and more complex use-case scenarios. This book will be useful to graduate students and researchers in humanistic disciplines working with textual data, including History, Modern Languages, Literary studies, Classics, and Linguistics. This is also a very useful book for anyone teaching or learning Digital Humanities and interested in the basic concepts from computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, and natural language processing.

This volume, composed mainly of papers given at the 1999 conferences of the Forum for German Language Studies (FGLS) at Kent and the Conference of University Teachers of German (CUTG) at Keele, is devoted to differential yet synergetic treatments of the German language. It includes corpus-lexicographical, computational, rigorously phonological, historical/dialectal, comparative, semiotic, acquisitional and pedagogical contributions. In all, a variety of approaches from the rigorously 'pure' and formal to the applied, often feeding off each other to focus on various aspects of the German language.

This work combines interdisciplinary knowledge and experience from research fields of psychology, linguistics, audio-processing, machine learning, and computer science. The work systematically explores a novel research topic devoted to automated modeling of personality expression from speech. For this aim, it introduces a novel personality assessment questionnaire and presents the results of extensive labeling sessions to annotate the speech data with personality assessments. It provides estimates of the Big 5 personality traits, i.e. openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Based on a database built on the questionnaire, the book presents models to tell apart different personality types or classes from speech automatically.

Users of natural languages have many word orders with which to encode the same truth-conditional meaning. They choose contextually appropriate strings from these many ways with little conscious effort and with effective communicative results. Previous computational models of when English speakers produce non-canonical word orders, like topicalization, left-dislocation, and clefts, fail-either by overgenerating these statistically rare forms or by undergenerating. The primary goal of this book is to present a better model of when speakers choose to produce certain non-canonical word orders by incorporating the effects of discourse context and speaker goals on syntactic choice. The theoretical model is then used as a basis for building a probabilistic classifier that can select the most human-like word order based on the surrounding discourse context. The model of discourse context used is a methodological advance both from a theoretical and an engineering perspective. It is built up from individual linguistic features, ones more easily and reliably annotated than the direct annotation of a discourse or rhetorical structure for a text. This book makes extensive use of previously unexamined naturally occurring corpus data of non-canonical word order in English, both to illustrate the points of the theoretical model and to train the statistical model.