Predicting Native Language from Gaze

A fundamental question in language learning concerns the role of a speaker's first language in second language acquisition. We present a novel methodology for studying this question: analysis of eye-movement patterns in second language reading of free-form text. Using this methodology, we demonstrate for the first time that the native language of English learners can be predicted from their gaze fixations when reading English. We provide analysis of classifier uncertainty and learned features, which indicates that differences in English reading are likely to be rooted in linguistic divergences across native languages. The presented framework complements production studies and offers new ground for advancing research on multilingualism.Comment: ACL 201

Evaluation of Computational Grammar Formalisms for Indian Languages

Natural Language Parsing has been the most prominent research area since the genesis of Natural Language Processing. Probabilistic Parsers are being developed to make the process of parser development much easier, accurate and fast. In Indian context, identification of which Computational Grammar Formalism is to be used is still a question which needs to be answered. In this paper we focus on this problem and try to analyze different formalisms for Indian languages

Restructuring the English Working Class for Global Competitiveness

This paper considers the latest developments in an ongoing attempt to restructure the English working class. It divides this project into two distinct phases. The first is associated with destructive policies to undermine the political, social and institutional structures of the working class embedded in the post- War social democratic and compromise. The paper then goes on to show how New Labour initially sought to rebuild the working class in the image of global competitiveness, at the outset of the second phase to restructure the English working class. The paper argues that the present moment in policy development represents a watershed in this second-phase. The aim now is to contain and overcome some of the contradictions thrown up by New Labour’s early policies and to raise the raise the workforce in terms of its position in the Global Division of Labour. To do so, there is a need to move up those sections of the working class currently working in, and competing for, low-value and low paid ‘entry-level’ work, in order to create space for largely inactive elements of the latent workforce to move into. The project is pre-figured by a wholesale acceptance of the politics of global competitiveness. The discussion is undertaken via an analysis of three key sets of policy documents associated with the Harker Review of Child Poverty, the Leitch Review of Skills and the Freud Review of Welfare

Automatic extraction of paraphrastic phrases from medium size corpora

This paper presents a versatile system intended to acquire paraphrastic phrases from a representative corpus. In order to decrease the time spent on the elaboration of resources for NLP system (for example Information Extraction, IE hereafter), we suggest to use a machine learning system that helps defining new templates and associated resources. This knowledge is automatically derived from the text collection, in interaction with a large semantic network