Final Master\u27s Portfolio

The following portfolio project contains four separate pieces of writing produced during the author\u27s MA coursework

Trends in Usage-Based and Pragmatic Language Processing and Learning: A Bibliometric Analysis on Psycholinguistics and Second-Language Acquisition Studies

This chapter provides bibliometric analyses of novel trends in the research toward pragmatic aspects of language processing and learning in the studies of psycholinguistics and second-language acquisition. Growing interests in the relevant themes are shown with the analysis of the co-occurrence of keywords in a common literature and the bibliographic coupling between literatures. The emergence of novel experimental methodologies, including the application of neuroimaging and machine learning approaches to the psycholinguistic research, provides new opportunities of looking into the pragmatic aspects of language acquisition and invites new empirical research to validate the theories and extend the boundaries of second-language acquisition research in the real-world setting

Smart subtitles for vocabulary learning

Language learners often use subtitled videos to help them learn. However, standard subtitles are geared more towards comprehension than vocabulary learning, as translations are nonliteral and are provided only for phrases, not vocabulary. This paper presents Smart Subtitles, which are interactive subtitles tailored towards vocabulary learning. Smart Subtitles can be automatically generated from common video sources such as subtitled DVDs. They provide features such as vocabulary definitions on hover, and dialog-based video navigation. In our pilot study with intermediate learners studying Chinese, participants correctly defined over twice as many new words in a post-viewing vocabulary test when they used Smart Subtitles, compared to dual Chinese-English subtitles. Learners spent the same amount of time watching clips with each tool, and enjoyed viewing videos with Smart Subtitles as much as with dual subtitles. Learners understood videos equally well using either tool, as indicated by self-assessments and independent evaluations of their summaries

HASTAC Schedule

Full schedule of HASTAC 201

Abstracts: HASTAC 2017: The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities

The document contains abstracts for HASTAC 2017

Knowledge Expansion of a Statistical Machine Translation System using Morphological Resources

Translation capability of a Phrase-Based Statistical Machine Translation (PBSMT) system mostly depends on parallel data and phrases that are not present in the training data are not correctly translated. This paper describes a method that efficiently expands the existing knowledge of a PBSMT system without adding more parallel data but using external morphological resources. A set of new phrase associations is added to translation and reordering models; each of them corresponds to a morphological variation of the source/target/both phrases of an existing association. New associations are generated using a string similarity score based on morphosyntactic information. We tested our approach on En-Fr and Fr-En translations and results showed improvements of the performance in terms of automatic scores (BLEU and Meteor) and reduction of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. We believe that our knowledge expansion framework is generic and could be used to add different types of information to the model.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

A Case Study of Emergent Bilinguals Meaning-Making during Multimodal Science Lessons in a Bilingual Primary School

The learning of science presents difficulties to bi/multilingual learners (BMLs), mostly due to the demands of scientific language. However, when viewed through a contemporary language lens the language of science is multimodal and presents alternate meaning opportunities. This study attempts to address the BML's needs by reconceptualising their issue through a contemporary theoretical lens. The aim is to investigate and describe how the use of non-linguistic resources, plays a role in BML’s meaning-making in science

On semantic differences: a multivariate corpus-based study of the semantic field of inchoativity in translated and non-translated Dutch

This dissertation places the study of semantic differences in translation compared to non-translation at the centre of its concerns. To date, much research in Corpus-based Translation Studies has focused on lexical and grammatical phenomena in an attempt to reveal presumed general tendencies of translation. On the semantic level, these general tendencies have rarely been investigated. Therefore, the goal of this study is to explore whether universal tendencies of translation also exist on the semantic level, thereby connecting the framework of translation universals to semantics

Exploring the field of inchoativity

Although the notion of meaning has always been at the core of translation, the invariance of meaning has, partly due to practical constraints, rarely been challenged in Corpus-based Translation Studies. In answer to this, the aim of this book is to question the invariance of meaning in translated texts: if translation scholars agree on the fact that translated language is different from non-translated language with respect to a number of grammatical and lexical aspects, would it be possible to identify differences between translated and non-translated language on the semantic level too? More specifically, this books tries to formulate an answer to the following three questions: (i) how can semantic differences in translated vs non-translated language be investigated in a corpus-based study?, (ii) are there any differences on the semantic level between translated and non-translated language? and (iii) if there are differences on the semantic level, can we ascribe them to any of the (universal) tendencies of translation? In this book, I establish a way to visually explore semantic similarity on the basis of representations of translated and non-translated semantic fields. A technique for the comparison of semantic fields of translated and non-translated language called SMM++ (based on Helge Dyvik’s Semantic Mirrors method) is developed, yielding statistics-based visualizations of semantic fields. The SMM++ is presented via the case of inchoativity in Dutch (beginnen [to begin]). By comparing the visualizations of the semantic fields on different levels (translated Dutch with French as a source language, with English as a source language and non-translated Dutch) I further explore whether the differences between translated and non-translated fields of inchoativity in Dutch can be linked to any of the well-known universals of translation. The main results of this study are explained on the basis of two cognitively inspired frameworks: Halverson’s Gravitational Pull Hypothesis and Paradis’ neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism