No lo he visto 'masque' yo? : Emergence and properties of a negative polarity item in Peninsular Spanish

This paper shows that Spanish 'más que' (lit. more than) is much more than a comparative construction synchronically. Phonological, syntactic, and semantic evidence shows that various grammatically different entities hide under this single spelling. The most prominent of these is a (phonologically unstressed) negative polarity item with a meaning "only" or "just". By means of robust synchronic and diachronic corpus evidence, this paper explores its morphosyntactic properties and geographic distribution in the modern language, as well as when and how a comparative expression with no polarity associations could come to grammaticalize into a negative polarity item

Designing Service-Oriented Chatbot Systems Using a Construction Grammar-Driven Natural Language Generation System

Service oriented chatbot systems are used to inform users in a conversational manner about a particular service or product on a website. Our research shows that current systems are time consuming to build and not very accurate or satisfying to users. We find that natural language understanding and natural language generation methods are central to creating an e�fficient and useful system. In this thesis we investigate current and past methods in this research area and place particular emphasis on Construction Grammar and its computational implementation. Our research shows that users have strong emotive reactions to how these systems behave, so we also investigate the human computer interaction component. We present three systems (KIA, John and KIA2), and carry out extensive user tests on all of them, as well as comparative tests. KIA is built using existing methods, John is built with the user in mind and KIA2 is built using the construction grammar method. We found that the construction grammar approach performs well in service oriented chatbots systems, and that users preferred it over other systems

Enhanced Search with Wildcards and Morphological Inflections in the Google Books Ngram Viewer

We present a new version of the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which plots the fre-quency of words and phrases over the last five centuries; its data encompasses 6% of the world’s published books. The new Viewer adds three features for more pow-erful search: wildcards, morphological in-flections, and capitalization. These addi-tions allow the discovery of patterns that were previously difficult to find and fur-ther facilitate the study of linguistic trends in printed text