Lexical typology : a programmatic sketch

The present paper is an attempt to lay the foundation for Lexical Typology as a new kind of linguistic typology.1 The goal of Lexical Typology is to investigate crosslinguistically significant patterns of interaction between lexicon and grammar

Media literacy at all levels: making the humanities more inclusive

The decline of the humanities, combined with the arrival of students focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), represent an opportunity for the development of innovative approaches to teaching languages and literatures. Expanding the instructional focus from traditional humanities students, who are naturally more text-focused, to address the needs of more application-oriented STEM learners ensures that language instructors prepare all students to become analytical and critical consumers and producers of digital media. Training students to question motives both in their own and authentic media messages and to justify their own interpretations results in more sophisticated second language (L2) communication. Even where institutional structures impede comprehensive curriculum reform, individual instructors can integrate media literacy training into their own classes. Tis article demonstrates ways of reaching and retaining larger numbers of students at all levels—if necessary, one course at a time.Published versio

Connectionist natural language parsing

The key developments of two decades of connectionist parsing are reviewed. Connectionist parsers are assessed according to their ability to learn to represent syntactic structures from examples automatically, without being presented with symbolic grammar rules. This review also considers the extent to which connectionist parsers offer computational models of human sentence processing and provide plausible accounts of psycholinguistic data. In considering these issues, special attention is paid to the level of realism, the nature of the modularity, and the type of processing that is to be found in a wide range of parsers

Onebox: Free-Text Interfaces as an Alternative to Complex Web Forms

This paper investigates the problem of translating free-text\ud queries into key-value pairs as an alternative means for searching `behind' web forms. We introduce a novel specication language for specifying free-text interfaces, and report the results of a user study where we evaluated our prototype in a travel planner scenario. Our results show that users prefer this free-text interface over the original web form and that they are about 9% faster on average at completing their search tasks

The politics of alcohol policy in Nigeria: a critical analysis of how and why brewers use strategic ambiguity to supplant policy initiatives

The global call by the World Health Assembly (WHA) to control the rising alcohol-related problems caused by harmful consumption through policy became necessary in 2005 due to the recognition of the fact that many countries did not have alcohol policies. This gave rise to the adoption of a ten-point policy strategy by the World Health Organization (WHO) Member States in 2010. Against this backdrop, many countries adopted alcohol policies to reduce harmful alcohol consumption. Nigeria was one of the WHO Member Countries that adopted the resolution. Nigeria is among the 30 countries with the highest per capita consumption and alcohol-related problems, yet has not formulated alcohol policy to date. This paper draws on Eisenberg’s Strategic Ambiguity Model to explore the role of brewers in supplanting alcohol policy initiatives in Nigeria. It argues that the leading alcohol producers in Nigeria have been the main reason alcohol policies have not been formulated. The article focuses on why their campaigns for responsible drinking, promotions, sponsorships and ‘strategic social responsibilities’ may have increased since the WHA made the call and the WHO adopted the resolution in 2010. It concludes by arguing that there is an urgent need to formulate policies drawing from the WHO resolution to curtail the activities of these brewers and reduce harmful consumption

Simplifying knowledge creation and access for end-users on the SW

In this position paper, we argue that improved mechanisms for knowledge acquisition and access on the semantic web (SW) will be necessary before it will be adopted widely by end-users. In particular, we propose an investigation surrounding improved languages for knowledge exchange, better UI mechanisms for interaction, and potential help from user modeling to enable accurate, efficient, SW knowledge modeling for everyone

Is multilingualism linked to a higher tolerance of ambiguity?

The present study investigates the link between multilingualism and the personality trait Tolerance of Ambiguity (TA) among 2158 mono-, bi- and multilinguals. Monolinguals and bilinguals scored significantly lower on TA compared to multilinguals. A high level of global proficiency of various languages was linked to higher TA scores. A stay abroad of more than three months was also linked to higher TA although the effect levelled off after one year. Growing up in a multilingual family had no effect on TA. These findings show that a high level of multilingualism makes individuals more at ease in dealing with ambiguity, but we acknowledge that a higher level of TA can also strengthen an individual’s inclination to become multilingual