5,888 research outputs found
Probing the topological properties of complex networks modeling short written texts
In recent years, graph theory has been widely employed to probe several
language properties. More specifically, the so-called word adjacency model has
been proven useful for tackling several practical problems, especially those
relying on textual stylistic analysis. The most common approach to treat texts
as networks has simply considered either large pieces of texts or entire books.
This approach has certainly worked well -- many informative discoveries have
been made this way -- but it raises an uncomfortable question: could there be
important topological patterns in small pieces of texts? To address this
problem, the topological properties of subtexts sampled from entire books was
probed. Statistical analyzes performed on a dataset comprising 50 novels
revealed that most of the traditional topological measurements are stable for
short subtexts. When the performance of the authorship recognition task was
analyzed, it was found that a proper sampling yields a discriminability similar
to the one found with full texts. Surprisingly, the support vector machine
classification based on the characterization of short texts outperformed the
one performed with entire books. These findings suggest that a local
topological analysis of large documents might improve its global
characterization. Most importantly, it was verified, as a proof of principle,
that short texts can be analyzed with the methods and concepts of complex
networks. As a consequence, the techniques described here can be extended in a
straightforward fashion to analyze texts as time-varying complex networks
Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers
Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections.
Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach
The Secret to Popular Chinese Web Novels: A Corpus-Driven Study
What is the secret to writing popular novels? The issue is an intriguing one among researchers from various fields. The goal of this study is to identify the linguistic features of several popular web novels as well as how the textual features found within and the overall tone interact with the genre and themes of each novel. Apart from writing style, non-textual information may also reveal details behind the success of web novels. Since web fiction has become a major industry with top writers making millions of dollars and their stories adapted into published books, determining essential elements of "publishable" novels is of importance. The present study further examines how non-textual information, namely, the number of hits, shares, favorites, and comments, may contribute to several features of the most popular published and unpublished web novels. Findings reveal that keywords, function words, and lexical diversity of a novel are highly related to its genres and writing style while dialogue proportion shows the narration voice of the story. In addition, relatively shorter sentences are found in these novels. The data also reveal that the number of favorites and comments serve as significant predictors for the number of shares and hits of unpublished web novels, respectively; however, the number of hits and shares of published web novels is more unpredictable
CEAI: CCM based Email Authorship Identification Model
In this paper we present a model for email authorship identification (EAI) by
employing a Cluster-based Classification (CCM) technique. Traditionally,
stylometric features have been successfully employed in various authorship
analysis tasks; we extend the traditional feature-set to include some more
interesting and effective features for email authorship identification (e.g.
the last punctuation mark used in an email, the tendency of an author to use
capitalization at the start of an email, or the punctuation after a greeting or
farewell). We also included Info Gain feature selection based content features.
It is observed that the use of such features in the authorship identification
process has a positive impact on the accuracy of the authorship identification
task. We performed experiments to justify our arguments and compared the
results with other base line models. Experimental results reveal that the
proposed CCM-based email authorship identification model, along with the
proposed feature set, outperforms the state-of-the-art support vector machine
(SVM)-based models, as well as the models proposed by Iqbal et al. [1, 2]. The
proposed model attains an accuracy rate of 94% for 10 authors, 89% for 25
authors, and 81% for 50 authors, respectively on Enron dataset, while 89.5%
accuracy has been achieved on authors' constructed real email dataset. The
results on Enron dataset have been achieved on quite a large number of authors
as compared to the models proposed by Iqbal et al. [1, 2]
Phraseology in Corpus-based transaltion studies : stylistic study of two contempoarary Chinese translation of Cervantes's Don Quijote
The present work sets out to investigate the stylistic profiles of two modern Chinese versions of Cervantes???s Don Quijote (I): by Yang Jiang (1978), the first direct translation from Castilian to Chinese, and by Liu Jingsheng (1995), which is one of the most commercially successful versions of the Castilian literary classic. This thesis focuses on a detailed linguistic analysis carried out with the help of the latest textual analytical tools, natural language processing applications and statistical packages. The type of linguistic phenomenon singled out for study is four-character expressions (FCEXs), which are a very typical category of Chinese phraseology. The work opens with the creation of a descriptive framework for the annotation of linguistic data extracted from the parallel corpus of Don Quijote. Subsequently, the classified and extracted data are put through several statistical tests. The results of these tests prove to be very revealing regarding the different use of FCEXs in the two Chinese translations. The computational modelling of the linguistic data would seem to indicate that among other findings, while Liu???s use of archaic idioms has followed the general patterns of the original and also of Yang???s work in the first half of Don Quijote I, noticeable variations begin to emerge in the second half of Liu???s more recent version. Such an idiosyncratic use of archaisms by Liu, which may be defined as style shifting or style variation, is then analyzed in quantitative terms through the application of the proposed context-motivated theory (CMT). The results of applying the CMT-derived statistical models show that the detected stylistic variation may well point to the internal consistency of the translator in rendering the second half of Part I of the novel, which reflects his freer, more creative and experimental style of translation. Through the introduction and testing of quantitative research methods adapted from corpus linguistics and textual statistics, this thesis has made a major contribution to methodological innovation in the study of style within the context of corpus-based translation studies.Imperial Users onl
Phraseology in Corpus-Based Translation Studies: A Stylistic Study of Two Contemporary Chinese Translations of Cervantes's Don Quijote
The present work sets out to investigate the stylistic profiles of two modern Chinese versions of
Cervantes’s Don Quijote (I): by Yang Jiang (1978), the first direct translation from Castilian to Chinese,
and by Liu Jingsheng (1995), which is one of the most commercially successful versions of the
Castilian literary classic. This thesis focuses on a detailed linguistic analysis carried out with the help
of the latest textual analytical tools, natural language processing applications and statistical packages.
The type of linguistic phenomenon singled out for study is four-character expressions (FCEXs), which
are a very typical category of Chinese phraseology. The work opens with the creation of a descriptive
framework for the annotation of linguistic data extracted from the parallel corpus of Don Quijote.
Subsequently, the classified and extracted data are put through several statistical tests. The results of
these tests prove to be very revealing regarding the different use of FCEXs in the two Chinese
translations. The computational modelling of the linguistic data would seem to indicate that among
other findings, while Liu’s use of archaic idioms has followed the general patterns of the original and
also of Yang’s work in the first half of Don Quijote I, noticeable variations begin to emerge in the
second half of Liu’s more recent version. Such an idiosyncratic use of archaisms by Liu, which may be
defined as style shifting or style variation, is then analyzed in quantitative terms through the application
of the proposed context-motivated theory (CMT). The results of applying the CMT-derived statistical
models show that the detected stylistic variation may well point to the internal consistency of the
translator in rendering the second half of Part I of the novel, which reflects his freer, more creative and
experimental style of translation. Through the introduction and testing of quantitative research methods
adapted from corpus linguistics and textual statistics, this thesis has made a major contribution to
methodological innovation in the study of style within the context of corpus-based translation studies
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