Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

On the equivalence, containment, and covering problems for the regular and context-free languages

We consider the complexity of the equivalence and containment problems for regular expressions and context-free grammars, concentrating on the relationship between complexity and various language properties. Finiteness and boundedness of languages are shown to play important roles in the complexity of these problems. An encoding into grammars of Turing machine computations exponential in the size of the grammar is used to prove several exponential lower bounds. These lower bounds include exponential time for testing equivalence of grammars generating finite sets, and exponential space for testing equivalence of non-self-embedding grammars. Several problems which might be complex because of this encoding are shown to simplify for linear grammars. Other problems considered include grammatical covering and structural equivalence for right-linear, linear, and arbitrary grammars

Rahul Sankrityayan, Tsetan Phuntsog and Tibetan Textbooks for Ladakh in 1933

In 1933 the Indian scholar and social activist Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963) compiled a set of four Tibetan-language readers and a grammar for use in Ladakhi schools, together with his Ladakhi colleague Tsetan Phuntsog. The readers contain a mix of material from Western, Indian, Ladakhi and Tibetan sources. This includes simple essays about ‘air’ and ‘water’, selections from Aesop’s fables, Indian folk stories, biographies of famous people in Ladakhi and Tibetan history, poems by Ladakhi authors, and extracts from the Treasury of Elegant Sayings by Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (1182-1251). This essay begins with a review of earlier Tibetan-language schoolbooks published in British India, and then discusses the circumstances that led to Sankrityayan’s involvement in the Ladakh project. The second part of the essay examines the contents of the readers and the grammar, including—where possible—the authorship of particular sections. Finally, the essay briefly reviews linguistic developments in Ladakh since the publication of the textbooks

An introduction to English stylistics

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1336595*es

The Relevance of Pragmalinguistic Failure to Language Teaching

Pragmatic competence refers to the capacity to use a language effectively in order to fulfill a certain goal and to understand language in context. When people are unable to understand what is meant by what is said, the result is communication will breakdown, and so called pragmatic failure. Some factors cause pragmatic failure; firstly, failure to express or interpret speaker-meaning in which communication breaks down if either level of meanings (sense and reference) or (force or value) is not successfully produced or interpreted. Secondly, failure to observe cultural values in which social conditions on language in use are different and utterer or the interpreter fails to observe the cultural values. Thirdly, culture-specific pragmatic features; mental sets: a frame of mind involving an existing disposition to think of a problem or a situation in a particular way. The implications of pragmalinguistic failure to teaching second and foreign language teaching are that first, learners need to understand why such conventions are accepted. Second, language learners need to understand what native speakers mean when they use the language. Third, teacher is expanding students' knowledge and understanding of L2 pragmatic features regarding positive/negative pragmatic transfer from their first language (L1). Next, adult learners rely heavily on universal or L1 based pragmatic knowledge. Finally, teachers must be sufficiently socialized to L2 pragmatic practices, so that they can comfortably draw on those practices as part of their communicative and cultural repertoire

The Effectiveness of Draw Label Caption Strategy in Teaching Writing for EFL Students

Abstract This research was aimed to find out whether or not the Draw Label Caption is effective toward students’ writing skill. The research was experimental research and the design used was pre-experimental with pretest-posttest design. The population of the study was the second year students of SMA Hang Tuah Mataram which consisted of one class (28 students). One class was chosen by using simple sampling technique and the result of test was distributed obtain the research data. In analyzing the data was used t-test formula. The findings showed that t-test was (4.875) > t-table (2.052) at the significant level = 0,05 (95%) and N=28 students. It means that, Alternative hypothesis (Ha) is using Draw Label Caption toward students’ writing skill at the second year students of SMA Hang Tuah Mataram in academic year 2019/2020 was accepted. It could be concluded that there was significant effect of Draw Label Caption toward student’s writing skill at second year student of SMA Hang Tuah Mataram

On Folding and Twisting (and whatknot): towards a characterization of workspaces in syntax

Syntactic theory has traditionally adopted a constructivist approach, in which a set of atomic elements are manipulated by combinatory operations to yield derived, complex elements. Syntactic structure is thus seen as the result or discrete recursive combinatorics over lexical items which get assembled into phrases, which are themselves combined to form sentences. This view is common to European and American structuralism (e.g., Benveniste, 1971; Hockett, 1958) and different incarnations of generative grammar, transformational and non-transformational (Chomsky, 1956, 1995; and Kaplan & Bresnan, 1982; Gazdar, 1982). Since at least Uriagereka (2002), there has been some attention paid to the fact that syntactic operations must apply somewhere, particularly when copying and movement operations are considered. Contemporary syntactic theory has thus somewhat acknowledged the importance of formalizing aspects of the spaces in which elements are manipulated, but it is still a vastly underexplored area. In this paper we explore the consequences of conceptualizing syntax as a set of topological operations applying over spaces rather than over discrete elements. We argue that there are empirical advantages in such a view for the treatment of long-distance dependencies and cross-derivational dependencies: constraints on possible configurations emerge from the dynamics of the system.Comment: Manuscript. Do not cite without permission. Comments welcom