Say Oui to We : A Longitudinal Analysis of Pronouns and Articles in French and English

Modern English only uses gender in personal, reflexive, and possessive third person singular pronouns. Modern English also does not use gendered articles, which extends to not assigning an arbitrary gender to inanimate objects. This study examines how recent this aspect of grammar is, and to what degree did cultural interaction with the French throughout history influence the use of gendered pronouns. Two written texts in British English (one in Old English, one in Modern English) and one written text in French are analyzed for elements of grammatical gender embedded within articles, pronouns, and possessive adjectives. The geopolitical influences on incorporating gender into language were also considered. This study found that gender is altogether more present in Old English and Modern French. Old English is found to have more gendered articles and pronouns than other later evolutions of English. Interactions between Norman pirates and Celtic Britons up through French words being fashionably borrowed by English nobles are evidence of geopolitical and international relations impacting the evolution of the English language

Evaluating Multilingual Gisting of Web Pages

We describe a prototype system for multilingual gisting of Web pages, and present an evaluation methodology based on the notion of gisting as decision support. This evaluation paradigm is straightforward, rigorous, permits fair comparison of alternative approaches, and should easily generalize to evaluation in other situations where the user is faced with decision-making on the basis of information in restricted or alternative form.Comment: 7 pages, uses psfig and aaai style

Detecting and Explaining Causes From Text For a Time Series Event

Explaining underlying causes or effects about events is a challenging but valuable task. We define a novel problem of generating explanations of a time series event by (1) searching cause and effect relationships of the time series with textual data and (2) constructing a connecting chain between them to generate an explanation. To detect causal features from text, we propose a novel method based on the Granger causality of time series between features extracted from text such as N-grams, topics, sentiments, and their composition. The generation of the sequence of causal entities requires a commonsense causative knowledge base with efficient reasoning. To ensure good interpretability and appropriate lexical usage we combine symbolic and neural representations, using a neural reasoning algorithm trained on commonsense causal tuples to predict the next cause step. Our quantitative and human analysis show empirical evidence that our method successfully extracts meaningful causality relationships between time series with textual features and generates appropriate explanation between them.Comment: Accepted at EMNLP 201

Where Would You Turn for Help? Older Adults’ Awareness of Community Support Services

Previous findings on older adults’ awareness of community support services (CSSs) have been inconsistent and marred by acquiescence or over-claiming bias. To address this issue, this study used a series of 12 vignettes to describe common situations faced by older adults for which CSSs might be appropriate. In telephone interviews, 1,152 adults aged 50 years and over were read a series of vignettes and asked if they were able to identify a community organization or agency that they may turn to in that situation. They were also asked about their most important sources of information about CSSs. The findings show that, using a vignette methodology, awareness of CSSs is much lower than previously thought. The most important sources of information about CSSs included information and referral sources, the telephone book, doctors’ offices, and word of mouth.aging, community support services, awareness, knowledge, acquiescence bias, vignette methodology

Where Would You Turn for Help? Older Adults’ Awareness of Community Health and Support Services for Dementia Care

Previous findings on older adults’ awareness of community support services (CSSs) have been inconsistent and marred by acquiescence or over-claiming bias. To address this issue, this study used a series of 12 vignettes to describe common situations faced by older adults for which CSSs might be appropriate. In telephone interviews, 1,152 adults aged 50 years and over were read a series of vignettes and asked if they were able to identify a community organization or agency that they may turn to in that situation. They were also asked about their most important sources of information about CSSs. The findings show that, using a vignette methodology, awareness of CSSs is much lower than previously thought. The most important sources of information about CSSs included information and referral sources, the telephone book, doctors’ offices, and word of mouth.aging, community support services, awareness, knowledge, acquiescence bias, vignette methodology

Special Libraries, March 1951

Volume 42, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1951/1002/thumbnail.jp