On the Decline of Pleonastic that in Late Middle English and Early Modern English

The origin of pleonastic that can be traced back to Old English where it could appear in syntactic constructions consisting of a preposition + demonstrative pronoun (i.e. for þy þat, for þæm þe) or a subordinator (i.e. oþ þat). Its diffusion with other subordinators is considered an early Middle English development as a result of the standardization of this item as the general subordinator in the period, which motivated its use as a pleonastic word in combination with all kinds of conjunctions (i.e. now that, gif that, when that, etc.) and prepositions (i.e. before that, save that, in that) (Fischer 1992: 295). Its use considerably increased in late Middle English, reaching its climax in the 16th century. In the 17th century, however, its use rapidly declined, to such an extent that it was virtually obliterated at the end of that same century (Rissanen 1999: 303-304). The list of subordinating elements includes relativizers (i.e. this that), adverbial relatives (i.e. there that) and a number of subordinators (i.e. after, as, because, before, beside, for, if, since, sith, though, until, when, while, etc. The decline of pleonastic that, however, is not a simultaneous process with all these subordinators insofar as the subordinator for seems to have retained this pleonastic item longer than other conjunctive words. In the light of this, the present paper has been conceived with the following objectives: a) to analyse the use and distribution of pleonastic that in a corpus of early English medical writing (in the period 1375–1700); b) to classify the construction in terms of the two different varieties of medical texts, i.e. treatises and recipes; and c) to assess the decline of the construction with the different conjunctive words. The data used as sources of evidence come from The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, i.e. Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT for the period 1375–1500) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT for the period 1500–1700).Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING BASED GENERATOR OF TESTING INSTRUMENTS

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the field of study that focuses on the interactions between human language and computers. By “natural language” we mean a language that is used for everyday communication by humans. Different from programming languages, natural languages are hard to be defined with accurate rules. NLP is developing rapidly and it has been widely used in different industries. Technologies based on NLP are becoming increasingly widespread, for example, Siri or Alexa are intelligent personal assistants using NLP build in an algorithm to communicate with people. “Natural Language Processing Based Generator of Testing Instruments” is a stand-alone program that generates “plausible” multiple-choice selections by analyzing word sense disambiguation and calculating semantic similarity between two natural language entities. The core is Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), WSD is identifying which sense of a word is used in a sentence when the word has multiple meanings. WSD is considered as an AI-hard problem. The project presents several algorithms to resolve WSD problem and compute semantic similarity, along with experimental results demonstrating their effectiveness

A topological comparison of surface extraction algorithms

In many application areas, it is useful to convert the discrete information stored in the nodes of a regular grid into a continuous boundary model. Isosurface extraction algorithms di er on how the discrete information in the grid is generated, on what information does the grid store and on the properties of the output surface.Preprin

Sentiment Classification of Online Customer Reviews and Blogs Using Sentence-level Lexical Based Semantic Orientation Method

ABSTRACT Sentiment analysis is the process of extracting knowledge from the peoples‟ opinions, appraisals and emotions toward entities, events and their attributes. These opinions greatly impact on customers to ease their choices regarding online shopping, choosing events, products and entities. With the rapid growth of online resources, a vast amount of new data in the form of customer reviews and opinions are being generated progressively. Hence, sentiment analysis methods are desirable for developing efficient and effective analyses and classification of customer reviews, blogs and comments. The main inspiration for this thesis is to develop high performance domain independent sentiment classification method. This study focuses on sentiment analysis at the sentence level using lexical based method for different type data such as reviews and blogs. The proposed method is based on general lexicons i.e. WordNet, SentiWordNet and user defined lexical dictionaries for sentiment orientation. The relations and glosses of these dictionaries provide solution to the domain portability problem. The experiments are performed on various data sets such as customer reviews and blogs comments. The results show that the proposed method with sentence contextual information is effective for sentiment classification. The proposed method performs better than word and text level corpus based machine learning methods for semantic orientation. The results highlight that the proposed method achieves an average accuracy of 86% at sentence-level and 97% at feedback level for customer reviews. Similarly, it achieves an average accuracy of 83% at sentence level and 86% at feedback level for blog comment

"When that wounds are evil healed”: Revisiting pleonastic that in early English medical writing

The origin of pleonastic that can be traced back to Old English, where it could appear in syntactic constructions consisting of a preposition + a demonstrative pronoun (i.e., for þy þat, for þæm þe) or a subordinator (i.e., oþ þat). The diffusion of this pleonastic form is an Early Middle English development as a result of the standardization of that as the general subordinator in the period, which motivated its use as a pleonastic word in combination with many kinds of conjunctions (i.e., now that, if that, when that, etc.) and prepositions (i.e., before that, save that, in that) (Fischer 1992: 295). The phenomenon increased considerably in Late Middle English, declining rapidly in the 17th century to such an extent that it became virtually obliterated towards the end of that same century (Rissanen 1999: 303–304). The list of subordinating elements includes relativizers (i.e., this that), adverbial relatives (i.e., there that), and a number of subordinators (i.e., after, as, because, before, beside, for, if, since, sith, though, until, when, while, etc.). The present paper examines the status of pleonastic that in the history of English pursuing the following objectives: (a) to analyse its use and distribution in a corpus of early English medical writing (in the period 1375–1700); (b) to classify the construction in terms of genre, i.e., treatises and recipes; and (c) to assess its decline with the different conjunctive words. The data used as source of evidence come from The Corpus of Early English Medical Writing, i.e., Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT for the period 1375–1500) and Early Modern English Medical Texts (EMEMT for the period 1500–1700). The use of pleonastic that in medical writing allows us to reconsider the history of the construction in English, becoming in itself a Late Middle English phenomenon with its progressive decline throughout the 16th and 17th centuries.The present research has been funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (grant number FFI2014-57963-P), and by the Autonomous Government of Andalusia (grant number P11-HUM7597)