There is hardly any aspect of verbal communication that has not been investigated using the analytical tools developed by corpus linguists. This is especially true in the case of English, which commands a vast international research community, and corpora are becoming increasingly specialised, as they account for areas of language use shaped by specific sociolectal (register, genre, variety) and speaker (gender, profession, status) variables. Corpus analysis is driven by a common interest in 'linguistic evidence', viewed as a source of insights into language phenomena or of lexical, semantic and contrastive data for subsequent applications. Among the latter, pedagogical settings are highly prominent, as corpora can be used to monitor classroom output, raise learner awareness and inform teaching materials. The eighteen chapters in this volume focus on contexts where English is employed by specialists in the professions or academia and debate some of the challenges arising from the complex relationship between linguistic theory, data-mining tools and statistical methods.

The tenth EFNIL conference investigated the different ways in which people in Europe access lexical information - both in their own language and in other languages - and how governments, language institutions, publishers, and others go about the business of compiling and disseminating this lexical information. In this volume, general reflections by several experts on the history, the present state and new developments of lexicography in Europe are presented, followed by reports on special lexicographic projects in several European countries. The Budapest Resolution of EFNIL on the Lexical Challenges in Multilingual Europe offered in the official languages of most of the member states of the European Union and other European countries concludes the book.

This book gathers, and makes available in English, with new introductions, previously out of print or otherwise difficult to access articles by Fr Roberto Busa S.J. (1913 - 2011). Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of Busa, an oral history interview with Busa's translator, and a substantial new chapter that evaluates Busa's contributions and intellectual legacies. The result is a groundbreaking book that is of interest to digital humanists and computational linguists as well as historians of science, technology and the humanities. As the application of computing to cultural heritage becomes ever more ubiquitous, new possibilities for transmitting, shaping, understanding, questioning and even imagining the human record are opening up. Busa is considered by many to be among the pioneers in this field, and his research on projects like the Index Thomisticus is one of the earliest known examples of a humanities project that incorporated automation; it continues to be widely cited and used today. Busa published more than 350 academic articles and shorter pieces in numerous languages, but despite the unquestionable importance of his early work for understanding the history and development of fields like humanities computing and computational linguistics, a large part of his canon and thinking remained inaccessible or difficult to access until this book.

Innovative examination of augmentation technologies in terms of technical, social, and ethical considerations Usable as a supplemental text for a variety of courses, and also of interest to researchers and professionals in fields including: technical communication, digital communication, UX design, information technology, informatics, human factors, artificial intelligence, ethics, philosophy of technology, and sociology of technology First major work to combine technological, ethical, social, and rhetorical perspectives on human augmentation Additional cases and research material available at the authors' Fabric of Digital Life research database at https://fabricofdigitallife.com/

The volume contains 15 papers by linguists from seven different European countries. The papers offer insights into the research results of a number of recent studies conducted in the field of applied linguistics covering topics such as specialized communication, foreign language teaching, terminology problems and the like. Dieser Band enthalt 15 Beitrage von 24 Sprachwissenschaftlern aus sieben europaischen Landern. In den Beitragen werden die neueren Forschungsergebnisse auf dem Gebiet der Angewandten Linguistik veroeffentlicht, in denen es unter anderem um die Themen Fachkommunikation, Fremdsprachenlernen und Terminologiefragen geht.

This book offers a timely report on key theories and applications of soft-computing. Written in honour of Professor Gaspar Mayor on his 70th birthday, it primarily focuses on areas related to his research, including fuzzy binary operators, aggregation functions, multi-distances, and fuzzy consensus/decision models. It also discusses a number of interesting applications such as the implementation of fuzzy mathematical morphology based on Mayor-Torrens t-norms. Importantly, the different chapters, authored by leading experts, present novel results and offer new perspectives on different aspects of Mayor's research. The book also includes an overview of evolutionary fuzzy systems, a topic that is not one of Mayor's main areas of interest, and a final chapter written by the Spanish pioneer in fuzzy logic, Professor E. Trillas. Computer and decision scientists, knowledge engineers and mathematicians alike will find here an authoritative overview of key soft-computing concepts and techniques.

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.

This volume presents the latest research of an international group of scholars, engaged in the analysis of academic discourse from a genre-oriented perspective. The area covered by this volume is a central one, as in the last few years important developments in research on academic discourse have not only concerned the more traditional genres, but, as well, generic innovations promoted by the new technologies, employed both in the presentation of research results and in their dissemination to a wider community by means of popularising and teaching activities. These innovations have not only favoured important changes in existing genres and the creation of new ones to meet emerging needs of the academic community, but have also promoted a serious discussion about the construct of genre itself. The various investigations gathered in this volume provide several examples of the complexity and flexibility of genres, which have shown to be subject to a continuous tension between stability and change as well as between convention and innovation.

This volume investigates identity traits in academic discourse. Its main purpose is to better understand how and to what extent language forms and functions are adapting to the globalisation of academic discourse. Key factors of verbal behaviour such as the affiliation of actors to one or more cultures have been found to interact, producing transversal identities that are independent of local traits, with a tendency to merge and hybridise in an intercultural sense. The volume consists of three main parts: The first deals with identity traits across languages and cultures, as the use of a given language affects the writing of a scholar, especially when it is not his/her native language. The second comprises investigations of identity features characterising specific disciplinary communities or marking a differentiation from other branches of knowledge. The third part of the volume deals with identity aspects emerging from genre and gender variation.

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.

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

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).

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.

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 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.

Language and Computers introduces students to the fundamentals of how computers are used to represent, process, and organize textual and spoken information. Concepts are grounded in real-world examples familiar to students experiences of using language and computers in everyday life. * A real-world introduction to the fundamentals of how computers process language, written specifically for the undergraduate audience, introducing key concepts from computational linguistics. * Offers a comprehensive explanation of the problems computers face in handling natural language * Covers a broad spectrum of language-related applications and issues, including major computer applications involving natural language and the social and ethical implications of these new developments * The book focuses on real-world examples with which students can identify, using these to explore the technology and how it works * Features under-the-hood sections that give greater detail on selected advanced topics, rendering the book appropriate for more advanced courses, or for independent study by the motivated reader.