Irish dependency treebanking and parsing

Despite enjoying the status of an official EU language, Irish is considered a minority language. As with most minority languages, it is a `low-density' language, which means it lacks important linguistic and Natural Language Processing (NLP) resources. Relative to better-resourced languages such as English or French, for example, little research has been carried out on computational analysis or processing of Irish. Parsing is the method of analysing the linguistic structure of text, and it is an invaluable processing step that is required for many different types of language technology applications. As a verb-initial language, Irish has several features that are uncharacteristic of many languages previously studied in parsing research. Our work broadens the application of NLP methods to less studied language structures and provides a basis on which future work in Irish NLP is possible. We report on the development of a dependency treebank that serves as training data for the first full Irish dependency parser. We discuss the linguistic structures of Irish, and the motivation behind the design of our annotation scheme. Our work also examines various methods of employing semi-automated approaches to treebank development. We overcome the relatively small pool of linguistic and technological resources available for the Irish language with these approaches, and show that even in early stages of development, parsing results for Irish are promising. What counts as a sufficient number of trees for training a parser varies according to languages. Through empirical methods, we explore the impact our treebank's size and content has on parsing accuracy for Irish. We also discuss our work in crosslingual studies through converting our treebank to a universal annotation scheme. Finally we extend our Irish NLP work to the unstructured user-generated text of Irish tweets. We report on the creation of a POS-tagged corpus of Irish tweets and the training of statistical POS-tagging models. We show how existing resources can be leveraged for this domain-adapted resource development

The history of Orkney literature

The history of Orkney literature is the first full survey of the literature of the Orkney Islands. It examines fiction, non-fiction and poetry that is uncomplicatedly Orcadian, as well as that which has been written about Orkney by authors from outside the islands. Necessarily, the work begins with the great Icelandic chronicle Orkneyinga Saga. Literary aspects of the saga are examined, as well as its place within the wider sphere of saga writing. Most significantly, this study examines how the saga imposes itself on the work of subsequent writers. The book goes on to focua on the significance of Orkney and Orkney history in the work of a number of key nineteenth- and twentieth-century figures, including Sir Walter Scott, Edwin Muir, Eric Linklater, Robert Rendall and George Mackay Brown. The Victorian folklorist and short story writer Walter Traill Dennison is re-evaluated: The History of Orkney Literature demonstrates his central significance to the Orcadian tradition and argues for the relevance of his work to the wider Scottish canon. A fixation with Orkney history is common to all the writers considered herein. This preoccupation necessitates a detailed consideration of the core historiography of J. Storer Clouston. Other non-fiction works which are significant in the creation of this distinctly Orcadian literary identity include Samuel Laing's translation of Heimskringla; the polemical writings of David Balfour; and the historical and folklore studies of Ernest Walker Marwick. The study welcomes many writers into the fold, seeking to map and define a distinctly Orcadian tradition. This tradition can be considered a cousin of Scottish Literature. Although the writing of Orkney is a significant component of Scottish Literature at various historical stages, it nevertheless follows a divergent course. Both the eighteenth century Vernacular Revival and the twentieth century Literary Renaissance facilitate literary work in the islands which nevertheless remains distinctly independent in character. Indigenous Orcadian writers consider themselves to be Orcadians first and Scots or Britons second. Regardless of what they view as their national or political identity, their sense of insular cultural belonging is uniformly and pervasively Orcadian. What emerges is a robust, distinctive and very tight-knit minor literature

A Schrift to Fest Kyle Johnson

This volume of forty-three papers celebrates Kyle Johnson\u27s contribution to linguistics. Written by Johnson’s colleagues and former students, the papers touch upon topics that have defined Johnson’s career, including verb movement, ellipsis, gapping, Germanic, extraposition, quantifiers and determiners, object positions, among others.https://scholarworks.umass.edu/linguist_oapubs/1000/thumbnail.jp