Representação computacional das construções de sujeito-predicado do português do Brasil

Este trabalho apresenta uma proposta para representar computacionalmente construções do Português Brasileiro, no âmbito do Constructicon da FrameNet Brasil. Dessa forma, demonstra de que maneira as teorias irmãs da Semântica de Frames e da Gramática das Construções podem ser implementadas computacionalmente com vias a sustentar aplicações em Compreensão de Língua Natural. </p

The Syntactic Bits of Nouns: How Prior Syntactic Distributions Affect Comprehension, Production, and Acquisition

Usage-based linguistic theory argues that experience is the fundamental organizing principle of language. Linguistic representations are extracted from – and continuously tuned by – probabilistic features of language use. Much psycholinguistic evidence supports this argument, particularly in the domain of lexical processing. For example, how a word is distributed across its various lexical and morphological contexts influences how quickly it is recognized and produced in isolation. Fewer studies have explored how syntactic distributions affect lexical processing, and of these, even fewer have adopted comprehensive, abstract measurements of syntax. In this dissertation, I present several new information-theoretic tools for measuring the syntactic distributions of words based on the Dependency Grammar formalism. This formalism allows me to contrast two independent dimensions of syntactic structure: hierarchical status and word order. Further, I provide a new method for teasing apart information bound to syntactic and lexical contexts. I compute these measures for nouns based on two large corpora of English.These measures are correlated with behavior in several contexts. First, I re-analyze the noun-based trials of two previously published databases of visual lexical decision response time data, one simple and the other primed. I then turn to production, reporting two picture-naming studies. In the first, participants produce nouns in isolation. This task consitutes a stong attack on the hypothesis that syntactic distributions affect noun production; at least on its face, it does not require participants to access syntactic information in order to successfully complete the task. In a follow up, participants were asked to name the images using a syntactic frame (the + NAME). This task should promote syntactic access, increasing the likelihood that prior syntactic distributions should play a role. Finally, I test whether children are senstive to these syntactic distributions (based on adult speech) as they begin to produce nouns in syntactic contexts for the first time using a large, densely sampled longitudinal corpus of child speech.Results show that isolated noun processing is affected by prior syntactic distributions in both comprehension and production. However, the specific nature of these effects differs across modalities, and in production, as a function of whether the nouns were produced in isolation or within a syntactic frame. The measures also predict the age at which nouns first emerge in the speech of children

Constructicografia multilíngue em ação: diretrizes linguístico-computacionais para o alinhamento de constructicons

This dissertation proposes linguistic-computational guidelines to the alignment of constructicons, having as the starting point the Brazilian Portuguese (BP) Constructicon, developed within FrameNet Brasil (FN-Br) at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. A constructicon is a syntactic resource, a repository of constructions, as defined by Fillmore et al. (2012). After the initial phase of the BP Constructicon implementation, the current moment of the resource development includes efforts in order to improve the relations among constructions, frames and their elements, increasing the generality and intern coherence of the analysis (ALMEIDA, 2016; LAGE, 2018). Besides that, considering the existence of constructicons for other languages currently under development – English, Swedish, German, Russian and Japanese –,one of the goals of the Brazilian project is to connect those resources in a single multilingual database. However, even with all the projects having the same theoretical basis and the same reference – namely the Construction Grammar and the English Constructicon – they have used different methodologies and approaches for the implementation of their resources. Because of those particularities, when thinking of a proposal of an alignment among constructicons, it’s important to seek a representation that allows them to be aligned despite their specificities and analytical biases. In this matter, this dissertation discusses which methodological procedures could be applied to the efforts of alignment employing a work methodology that is divided into three stages: 1) contrastive analysis of BP, Swedish and English constructions; 2) survey of possibilities of representation of the alignment of these resources; and 3) implementation of the alignment proposal. As a result of the three steps, constructions comparison criteria were elaborated that they can be used by future contrast researches between constructions of different languages, and UDs and framenets were used as intermediate representations for the alignment of constructions and constructicons, allowing other language projects perform constructional alignments towards a multilingual constructicon. Therefore, this work aims contributes to the alignment of constructicons of different languages in the computational and linguistic scope.Esta tese propõe diretrizes linguístico-computacionais para o alinhamento de constructicons, tendo como ponto de partida o Constructicon do português do Brasil (PB), desenvolvido juntamente a FrameNet Brasil (FN-Br) na Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora. Um constructicon e um recurso sintático, um repositório de construções, conforme descrevem Fillmore et al. (2012). Após a fase inicial de implementação do Constructicon do PB, o atual momento de desenvolvimento de tal recurso envolve esforços no sentido de ampliar relações entre construções, frames e seus elementos, aumentando a generalidade e a coerência interna das analises (ALMEIDA, 2016; LAGE, 2018). Ademais, considerando a existência de constructicons em desenvolvimento para outras línguas – inglês, sueco, alemão, russo e japonês –, uma das intenções do projeto brasileiro e conectar os demais recursos em uma base multilíngue. Entretanto, ainda que todos tenham como base teórica e como referencia a Gramatica das Construções e o Constructicon do ingles, foram adotadas diferentes metodologias e abordagens para a implementação desses recursos. Devido a essas particularidades, ao se pensar na proposição de um alinhamento entre constructicons, e fundamental buscar uma representação que permita alinha-los apesar das suas especificidades e enviezamentos analíticos Nesse sentido, esta tese discute quais procedimentos metodológicos poderiam ser aplicados aos esforços de alinhamento entre constructicons, empregando uma metodologia de trabalho que se divide em três etapas: 1) analise contrastiva de construções do PB, do sueco e do inglês; 2) levantamento de possibilidades de representação do alinhamento desses recursos; e 3) implementação da proposta de alinhamento. Como resultado das tres etapas, foram elaborados critérios de comparação de construções que podem ser utilizados por pesquisas futuras de contraste entre construções de línguas distintas e foram utilizadas UDs e framenets como representações intermediarias para o alinhamento de construções e constructicons, permitindo que outros projetos de línguas distintas realizem alinhamentos construcionais em direção a um constructicon multilíngue. Dessa maneira, este trabalho contribui para o alinhamento entre constructicons de línguas distintas no âmbito linguístico e computacional.CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superio

Cappadocian kinship

Cappadocian kinship systems are very interesting from a sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective because of the mixture of inherited Greek and borrowed Turkish kinship terms. Precisely because the number of Turkish kinship terms differs from one variety to another, it is necessary to talk about Cappadocian kinship systems in the plural rather than about the Cappadocian kinship system in the singular. Although reference will be made to other Cappadocian varieties, this paper will focus on the kinship systems of Mišotika and Aksenitika, the two Central Cappadocian dialects still spoken today in several communities in Greece. Particular attention will be given to the use of borrowed Turkish kinship terms, which sometimes seem to co-exist together with their inherited Greek counterparts, e.g. mána vs. néne ‘mother’, ailfó/aelfó vs. γardáš ‘brother’ etc. In the final part of the paper some kinship terms with obscure or hitherto unknown etymology will be discussed, e.g. káka ‘grandmother’, ižá ‘aunt’, lúva ‘uncle (father’s brother)’ etc

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018 : 10-12 December 2018, Torino

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges

Proceedings of the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2018

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference series is an initiative of the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics (AILC) which, after five years of activity, has clearly established itself as the premier national forum for research and development in the fields of Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, where leading researchers and practitioners from academia and industry meet to share their research results, experiences, and challenges