Empirical Verification of Meaning-Game-based Generalization of Centering Theory with Large Japanese Corpus

PACLIC 19 / Taipei, taiwan / December 1-3, 200

Anaphora resolution for Arabic machine translation :a case study of nafs

PhD ThesisIn the age of the internet, email, and social media there is an increasing need for processing online information, for example, to support education and business. This has led to the rapid development of natural language processing technologies such as computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data mining. As a branch of computational linguistics, anaphora resolution has attracted much interest. This is reflected in the large number of papers on the topic published in journals such as Computational Linguistics. Mitkov (2002) and Ji et al. (2005) have argued that the overall quality of anaphora resolution systems remains low, despite practical advances in the area, and that major challenges include dealing with real-world knowledge and accurate parsing. This thesis investigates the following research question: can an algorithm be found for the resolution of the anaphor nafs in Arabic text which is accurate to at least 90%, scales linearly with text size, and requires a minimum of knowledge resources? A resolution algorithm intended to satisfy these criteria is proposed. Testing on a corpus of contemporary Arabic shows that it does indeed satisfy the criteria.Egyptian Government

Proceedings of the Conference on Natural Language Processing 2010

This book contains state-of-the-art contributions to the 10th conference on Natural Language Processing, KONVENS 2010 (Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache), with a focus on semantic processing. The KONVENS in general aims at offering a broad perspective on current research and developments within the interdisciplinary field of natural language processing. The central theme draws specific attention towards addressing linguistic aspects ofmeaning, covering deep as well as shallow approaches to semantic processing. The contributions address both knowledgebased and data-driven methods for modelling and acquiring semantic information, and discuss the role of semantic information in applications of language technology. The articles demonstrate the importance of semantic processing, and present novel and creative approaches to natural language processing in general. Some contributions put their focus on developing and improving NLP systems for tasks like Named Entity Recognition or Word Sense Disambiguation, or focus on semantic knowledge acquisition and exploitation with respect to collaboratively built ressources, or harvesting semantic information in virtual games. Others are set within the context of real-world applications, such as Authoring Aids, Text Summarisation and Information Retrieval. The collection highlights the importance of semantic processing for different areas and applications in Natural Language Processing, and provides the reader with an overview of current research in this field

Proceedings of the Conference "sub8 - Sinn und Bedeutung" : 8th annual meeting of the Gesellschaft für Semantik

The volume is a collection of papers given at the conference “sub8 -- Sinn und Bedeutung”, the eighth annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, held at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt (Germany) in September 2003. During this conference, experts presented ­ and discussed ­ various aspects of semantics. The very different topics included in this book provide insight into fields of ongoing Semantics research.Mit dem vorliegenden Band halten Sie eine Sammlung von Aufsätzen in Händen, die bei "Sinn und Bedeutung VIII", der Jahrestagung der "Gesellschaft für Semantik" in der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt/Main, im September 2003 vorgestellt worden sind. Die Beiträge umfassen verschiedenste Aspekte aktueller Semantik-Forschung und lassen sich inhaltlich den folgenden Kategorien zuordnen: (i) Semantik von Topic und Focus [Ebert / Endriss, Gyuris, Kaiser / Trueswell, Lee, Umbach, Wedgewood]; (ii) Semantik und Pragmatik von Fragen [Beck, Benz, Dekker]; (iii) Semantik von Tense und Voice [Fernando, Lekaku, Sailer]; (iv) Das Syntax-Semantik Interface [Kobuchi-Philip, Stateva, Zeijlstra], (v) Modalität [van Rooy, Copley] und (vi) Semantik [Aksan, Nicolas, Schäfer, Schlücker, Seong, Zwarts]

Emotion Metaphors in New Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study of Emotion Concepts in Institutionalized Second-Language Varieties of English

The present study examined emotion metaphors in the so-called “New Englishes”. New Englishes have emerged worldwide as varieties (in regions like West Africa, East Africa, South Asia and South-East Asia) that have developed or are in the process of developing their own variety-specific features and preferences. Emotion metaphors are understood in this study as conceptual metaphors in accordance with Conceptual Metaphor Theory by Lakoff & Johnson (1980). Conceptual metaphors are the stuff of cognition, language and behavior and provide insight into the fundamentally metaphorical nature of our conceptual systems. The central assumption of the present study concerned how the diverse linguistic and socio-cultural aspects surrounding the New Englishes could potentially motivate the manner in which these varieties conceptualize the emotions, i.e. New English emotion metaphors will vary in a culturally specific way. Although emotional experience belongs to basic human experience (including bodily experience), which would speak to a more universal tendency in the conceptualization of emotion, it was, nevertheless, assumed that emotion concepts have the potential to be filtered via the unique cultural aspects underlying these varieties. Furthermore, this would then be visible on the linguistic level in the form of metaphors, acting as a good indicator for the presence of cultural-specific conceptualizations of emotions, especially when emotion metaphors attributable to New English varieties are compared to emotion metaphors attributable to a (former) norm-providing variety, like British English. In order to determine to what extent New English emotion metaphors differ from or are similar to British English emotion metaphors, a corpus-based study was conducted with the GloWbE corpus (Corpus of Global Web-Based English). On the basis of “Metaphorical Pattern Analysis” (Stefanowitsch 2006) and the “Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit” (Steen et al. 2010), a method was developed to aid the extraction and identification of linguistic metaphors in the corpus data. The linguistic metaphors were assumed to reflect conceptual metaphors in the conceptual systems of the individual speakers and, as such, were classified according to the source domain involved (e.g. ANGER IS FIRE (I burned with rage)). This step also involved multiple levels of granularity. The corpus-based data from six New English components (Nigeria, Kenya, India, Singapore) of the GloWbE corpus were compared with each other and with data from a reference variety, i.e. British English. The empirical part of the present study was divided into three case studies. Each case study was devoted to the exploration of one emotion concept and its metaphors in the New Englishes. The first case study explored the concept of ANGER, while the second and third delved into the concepts of FEAR and HAPPINESS, respectively. The results of the case studies demonstrated that the initial assumption concerning emotion metaphor variability does not entirely hold for the New Englishes. There were no significant indicators that the varieties act differently when it comes to metaphorizing emotion concepts. This was particularly true for very frequent metaphors, e.g. ANGER IS A PERSON or ANGER IS A FLUID IN A CONTAINER. Therefore, it was concluded that the motivational basis for most of the New English and British emotion metaphors could be explained in reference to the embodiment hypothesis, which views our physical and bodily experience as the basis for conceptualization. Nevertheless, some differences emerged with regard to very infrequent metaphors, e.g. ANGER IS FOOD / DRINK, which due to their small numbers did not lend themselves well to statistical analysis. Yet, it is perhaps the case that it is their infrequency that necessitates creativity, which, in turn, would lend itself more readily to cultural filtration as a motivational basis