A Multi-Modal Analysis of Anaphora and Ellipsis

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An examination of errors of coherence in adolescent sentence combining

Young adolescents should be able to write organized multi-paragraph compositions that develop a central idea and unfold in logical and sequential order, unified through the use of transitional words and phrases. In other words, the compositions should not just consist of a string of related sentences, but represent a dynamic text that has coherence. It is important that speech-language pathologists develop quick and reliable methods for assessing coherence to aid in making data driven decisions and progress monitoring consistent with principles of Responsiveness to Intervention. Yet, the holistic quality of coherence makes it difficult to assess, both within a composition and developmentally. The purpose of this study was to determine a) the ability of students to produce sentences that maintain coherence across the continuum of grade levels, and b) whether or not adolescents would produce fewer errors of coherence on sentence combining exercises following six weeks of Embedded Language Lessons (ELL) instruction as compared to Discrete Language Lessons (DLL) instruction. First, 115 students in grades 4-7 completed the Sentence Combining subtest of the Test of Written Language, Third Edition (Hammill & Larsen, 1996). Four of the test items required adherence to three different coherence relations using Kehler’s (2002) classifications. Those subtest items were examined to assess the students’ ability to create sentences that maintain coherence across the continuum of grade levels. Second, the two grade levels for which posttest data was returned were then examined for changes in coherence following a six-week classroom-based intervention designed to increase meta-awareness of coherence in text structure. Results of this study revealed evidence of a developmental progression in the ability to represent these coherence relations in written language, with the youngest students indicating the correct coherence relation in 25 to 45% of their responses and the oldest students in 41 to 79% of their responses. Only one significant group difference was found at posttest when the individual relations were considered. A significant improvement in contiguity was observed for the fifth-graders in the ELL group. No group differences were observed with respect to the cause-effect relation or with parallel structure

Contrast in concept-to-speech generation

In concept-to-speech systems, spoken output is generated on the basis of a text that has been produced by the system itself. In such systems, linguistic information from the text generation component may be exploited to achieve a higher prosodic quality of the speech output than can be obtained in a plain text-to-speech system. In this paper we discuss how information from natural language generation can be used to compute prosody in a concept-to-speech system, focusing on the automatic marking of contrastive accents on the basis of information about the preceding discourse. We discuss and compare some formal approaches to this problem and present the results of a small perception experiment that was carried out to test which discourse contexts trigger a preference for contrastive accent, and which do not. Finally, we describe a method for marking contrastive accent in a generic concept-to-speech system called D2S. In D2S, contrastive accent is assigned to generated phrases expressing different aspects of similar events. Unlike in previous approaches, there is no restriction on the kind of entities that may be considered contrastive. This is in line with the observation that, given the ‘right' context, any two items may stand in contrast to each other

Anaphora resolution for Arabic machine translation :a case study of nafs

PhD ThesisIn the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.Egyptian Government

Anaphora Resolution and Text Retrieval

Empirical approaches based on qualitative or quantitative methods of corpus linguistics have become a central paradigm within linguistics. The series takes account of this fact and provides a platform for approaches within synchronous linguistics as well as interdisciplinary works with a linguistic focus which devise new ways of working empirically and develop new data-based methods and theoretical models for empirical linguistic analyses

Anaphora Resolution and Text Retrieval

Empirical approaches based on qualitative or quantitative methods of corpus linguistics have become a central paradigm within linguistics. The series takes account of this fact and provides a platform for approaches within synchronous linguistics as well as interdisciplinary works with a linguistic focus which devise new ways of working empirically and develop new data-based methods and theoretical models for empirical linguistic analyses