Information Access in a Multilingual World: Transitioning from Research to Real-World Applications

Multilingual Information Access (MLIA) is at a turning point wherein substantial real-world applications are being introduced after fifteen years of research into cross-language information retrieval, question answering, statistical machine translation and named entity recognition. Previous workshops on this topic have focused on research and small- scale applications. The focus of this workshop was on technology transfer from research to applications and on what future research needs to be done which facilitates MLIA in an increasingly connected multilingual world

Overview of the CLEF-2018 checkthat! lab on automatic identification and verification of political claims

We present an overview of the CLEF-2018 CheckThat! Lab on Automatic Identification and Verification of Political Claims. In its starting year, the lab featured two tasks. Task 1 asked to predict which (potential) claims in a political debate should be prioritized for fact-checking; in particular, given a debate or a political speech, the goal was to produce a ranked list of its sentences based on their worthiness for fact-checking. Task 2 asked to assess whether a given check-worthy claim made by a politician in the context of a debate/speech is factually true, half-true, or false. We offered both tasks in English and in Arabic. In terms of data, for both tasks, we focused on debates from the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, as well as on some speeches during and after the campaign (we also provided translations in Arabic), and we relied on comments and factuality judgments from factcheck.org and snopes.com, which we further refined manually. A total of 30 teams registered to participate in the lab, and 9 of them actually submitted runs. The evaluation results show that the most successful approaches used various neural networks (esp. for Task 1) and evidence retrieval from the Web (esp. for Task 2). We release all datasets, the evaluation scripts, and the submissions by the participants, which should enable further research in both check-worthiness estimation and automatic claim verification

Investigating the use of stance markers in Egyptian and American MA theses: A corpus-based study

This is a corpus-based study that investigates the use of stance markers in MA theses written by Egyptian and American graduate students. It is a descriptive and exploratory study, utilizing a quantitative and qualitative design. A compiled corpus of 15 Egyptian theses was examined and compared to that of 15 American theses in terms of the writers\u27 use of stance markers. The study explored the use of self-mention through utilizing first person pronouns I, my, and me, and the more impersonal “it…that” structures and detected the patterns of the frequency and function of their use in both corpora. The findings of the study suggest that Egyptian thesis writers tend to be more distant and cautious in their writings. They prefer to employ more detached linguistic strategies to express their stance. This is illustrated in their avoidance of the use of first person pronouns and their high frequency of utilizing the impersonal “it…that” structures, passive constructions, and doubt adverbs. Another finding is that Egyptian thesis writers display a great deal of linguistic competence in utilizing “it…that” structures; however, they show a lack of variety in their choice of lexical items and syntactic structures in this stance feature. Differences in the use of stance markers in both corpora were highlighted and patterns of the “it…that” use, represented in The American Thesis Corpus (ATC), were listed in order to help Egyptian thesis writers voice their views in a more confident manner so as to gain acceptance in their disciplinary communities

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Stance and Engagement Markers in English and Arabic Newspaper Opinion Articles in 2016

تبحث هذه الدراسة في استخدام علامات الموقفية والتعاشق في مقالات الرأي في الصحف الإنجليزية والعربية. تعتمد هذه الدراسة على فرضية أن النصوص المكتوبة بشتى صنوفها تمثل نوعًا من التفاعل بين الكتاب والقراء، حيث يتحقق هذا التفاعل بين منتجي النص ومتلقي النص من خلال استخدام علامات الموقفية والتعاشق. تعد هذه العلامات عاملاً رئيسا في بناء الحجج الناجحة في النصوص الإقناعية (مقالات رأي). وتمثل هذه العلامات الأدوات الرئيسة في نقل مواقف الكتاب حول ما يتم كتابته وتوجيه القراء في جميع أجزاء النصوص. أظهرت النتائج أن كتّاب مقالات الرأي الإنجليز والعرب يستخدمون علامات الموقفية والتعاشق في كتاباتهم الجدلية. من الناحية الكمية، تظهر هذه النتائج أن مجموع هذه العلامات في عينة اللغة الإنجليزية بلغ (210) و (211) في العينة العربية. وهذا يشير إلى أن هذه الموارد تستخدم بالتساوي في العينتين. ومع ذلك، فقد لوحظ تباين في توظيف الفئات الفرعية من علامات الموقفية والتعاشقبين العينتين.تهدف هذه الدراسة الى تحديد علامات الموقفية والتعاشق في مقالات الرأي في الصحف الإنجليزية والعربية ومقارنة استخدامها نوعيًا وكميًا. ولهذا الغرض، جرى تحليل عشرين مقالة رأي (عشرة باللغة الإنجليزية وعشرة باللغة العربية) باستخدام النموذج التحليلي لهيلاند (2005).The present study investigates the use of stance and engagement markers in English and Arabic newspaper opinion articles. This study is based on the assumption that written texts of any kind represent some kind of interaction between writers and their potential readers. Interaction between the text producers and text receivers is achieved by the employment of stance and engagement markers. These markers are considered as a main factor in constructing successful arguments for these persuasive texts (newspaper opinion articles). They are the main tools in conveying the writers' attitudes about what is being written and guiding the readers throughout the texts. The main objectives of this study are to identify stance and engagement markers in both English and Arabic opinion articles and to contrast their use bothqualitatively and quantitatively. To this effect, a total of twenty opinion articles (ten English and ten Arabic) are analyzed adopting the analytical model of Hyland. The results demonstrate that writers of both English and Arab opinion articlesemploy stance and engagement markers in their persuasive writing. Quantitatively speaking, the results show that the total tokens of these markers in the English datum are (210) and (211) in the Arabic datum. This indicates that these resources are used equally across the two sets of corpora. However, frequency variation is noticed in the employment of the sub-categories of stance and engagement markers across them

The speech act of offer in Jordanian arabic: a socio-pragmatic analysis

Offers are widely common speech acts ranging from everyday communications to commercials. They constitute a crucial role in Jordanian culture. However, Jordanian Arabic offers have not been examined in a complex way. In order to address these unanswered problems, the current research work takes a threefold (theoretical, empirical and comparative) perspective. First, the theoretical perspective of the research work focuses on the description of offers based on the former theoretical observations and the empirical research results, then outlines the potential arrangement of offer characteristics based on the two concepts 'salience' and 'performance' from a Jordanian Arabic perspective. The second perspective of the research work involves the empirical investigation of three corpora of Jordanian Arabic offers. In order to carry out the empirical research, data are collected from three different sources: 100 ads extracted from Facebook that were posted by Jordanian agencies of travel and tourism, 100 ads extracted from 'Open Market' website that were posted by individual owners or agents of real estates, and a DCT consisting of 10 situations distributed to 100 Jordanian Arabic citizens. The data composing of the three corpora are analyzed in a qualitative-quantitative method, so data are calculated and tabulated in order to help find all the nuances in the offer strategies along with their linguistic patterns as well as politeness modification strategies. Since the analysis of Jordanian Arabic offers is still very much in its infancy, two linguistic taxonomies are constructed in order to organize the process of the data analysis for both written and spoken offers. The results of the data analysis explore the notable role of the Jordanian culture not only in determining the offer strategy but also in choosing the politeness modification strategy. Direct offers were found to be the most frequently familiar offer strategy in the three corpora. On the one hand, politeness strategies in both corpora of Facebook and Open Market were used differently based on the platform of ads and the offered object. On the other hand, politeness modifications in the spoken corpus were microscopically examined and then detected that the preference of politeness modification strategy draws upon the offeree's socio-cultural variables as age, social status, and gender. As a consequence, the current research offers a challenge to the face-saving model of politeness proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) as it neglected two important variables regarding age and gender through which the degree of politeness can be assessed from a Jordanian Arabic perspective. The third perspective compares the findings concerning written offers to those of spoken offers. The results of the comparison between the three corpora have explored some similarities and differences between the three corpora, which in turn, contribute to arrive at the four principal conclusions of the work: Jordanian Arabic offers are face-enhancing as well as face-threatening acts that are realized either directly or indirectly, Jordanian Arabic direct offers are more popular in use than their indirect counterparts, and politeness in Jordanian Arabic offers is related to the phenomenon of persuasion

Writer-reader interaction: writer’s stance in English L1 and L2

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of Philosophy.Stance refers to the ways academics annotate their texts to comment on the possible accuracy or creditability of a claim, the extent they want to commit themselves to it, or the attitude they want to convey to an entity, a proposition or the reader. Stance concerns writer-oriented features of interaction which can be presented by four interpersonal categories. These categories are boosters, e.g. ‘clearly’, hedges, e.g. ‘may’, self-mentions, e.g. ‘I’ and attitude markers, e.g. ‘interesting’. A big number of corpus-based studies have been conducted to analyse stance markers in both L1 and L2 writer’s transcripts from the view that texts are independent of specific contexts and outside the personal experiences of authors and audience. This view does not go along with the idea that texts are instances of interaction between the writer and their audience. Therefore, the current study sought to fill this gap in research by adopting a more subjective view through stressing the actions and perceptions of the text writers to better understand them. The aim of this study is to have a more complete picture of the writer-reader interaction by investigating the three elements of interaction: The text, the text writers and the audience. Adopting Hyland’s (2005b) Model of Interaction, a corpus of 80 discussion chapters written by both MA postgraduate Egyptian students (English L2) at Egyptian universities and their British student peers (English L1) at UK universities, were searched both electronically using the Text Inspector tool and manually by two raters to identify more than 200 stance markers in students’ academic scripts. Moreover, the study explored the perceptions of twenty of the text writers’ (both Egyptian and British) about the functions of certain stance markers and the factors that could affect their understanding and use of these linguistic features. Characteristics of successful stance-taking were suggested after interviewing four expert writers. The quantitative results found no statistically significant differences in the total number of stance markers, boosters and self-mentions used by students in the two writer groups, but the L1 corpus contained statistically significant more hedges and attitude markers than the L2 one. Furthermore, the L1 texts included noticeably more types of stance markers than the L2 scripts. vi The discourse-based interviews conducted indicated that both L1 and L2 writers were aware of the functions of stance markers. However, some of the interviewees (both L1 and L2) had narrow or even faulty conceptions of certain stance markers, e.g. possibility versus probability devices and other attitude markers, e.g. ‘important’ and ‘significant’. These features of academic discourse had not been made more conspicuous to them, and this could have affected their employment of these linguistic features. The findings revealed that in addition to the lingua-cultural aspect, writer’s personal linguistic preferences, supervisor’s and other lecturers’ feedback, previous education and instruction, and the writer’s self-confidence were key factors that have played a considerable role in students’ lexical decision-making. For instance, L2 students might have used fewer types of stance markers than L1 students due to their lack of confidence and their reluctance to use certain types of devices that they did not master or practised enough. The study, also, suggested that the higher density of stance markers is not absolutely an indication of a better ability in writing or a feature of a well-written academic text. The epistemological stance of the study and the contextual factors do play a significant role in the quantity and type of the stance markers used