Что и как спрашивают в социальных вопросно-ответных сервисах по-русски?

In our study we surveyed different approaches to the study of questions in traditional linguistics, question answering (QA), and, recently, in community question answering (CQA). We adapted a functional-semantic classification scheme for CQA data and manually labeled 2,000 questions in Russian originating from [email protected] CQA service. About half of them are purely conversational and do not aim at obtaining actual information. In the subset of meaningful questions the major classes are requests for recommendations, or how-questions, and fact-seeking questions. The data demonstrate a variety of interrogative sentences as well as a host of formally non-interrogative expressions with the meaning of questions and requests. The observations can be of interest both for linguistics and for practical applications

Grammatical properties of pronouns and their representation : an exposition

This volume brings together a cross-section of recent research on the grammar and representation of pronouns, centering around the typology of pronominal paradigms, the generation of syntactic and semantic representations for constructions containing pronouns, and the neurological underpinnings for linguistic distinctions that are relevant for the production and interpretation of these constructions. In this introductory chapter we first give an exposition of our topic (section 2). Taking the interpretation of pronouns as a starting point, we discuss the basic parameters of pronominal representations, and draw a general picture of how morphological, semantic, discourse-pragmatic and syntactic aspects come together. In section 3, we sketch the different domains of research that are concerned with these phenomena, and the particular questions they are interested in, and show how the papers in the present volume fit into the picture. Section 4 gives summaries of the individual papers, and a short synopsis of their main points of convergence

Analysis of errors in the automatic translation of questions for translingual QA systems

Purpose – This study aims to focus on the evaluation of systems for the automatic translation of questions destined to translingual question-answer (QA) systems. The efficacy of online translators when performing as tools in QA systems is analysed using a collection of documents in the Spanish language. Design/methodology/approach – Automatic translation is evaluated in terms of the functionality of actual translations produced by three online translators (Google Translator, Promt Translator, and Worldlingo) by means of objective and subjective evaluation measures, and the typology of errors produced was identified. For this purpose, a comparative study of the quality of the translation of factual questions of the CLEF collection of queries was carried out, from German and French to Spanish. Findings – It was observed that the rates of error for the three systems evaluated here are greater in the translations pertaining to the language pair German-Spanish. Promt was identified as the most reliable translator of the three (on average) for the two linguistic combinations evaluated. However, for the Spanish-German pair, a good assessment of the Google online translator was obtained as well. Most errors (46.38 percent) tended to be of a lexical nature, followed by those due to a poor translation of the interrogative particle of the query (31.16 percent). Originality/value – The evaluation methodology applied focuses above all on the finality of the translation. That is, does the resulting question serve as effective input into a translingual QA system? Thus, instead of searching for “perfection”, the functionality of the question and its capacity to lead one to an adequate response are appraised. The results obtained contribute to the development of improved translingual QA systems

Grammatical Error Analysis of Student's Comment Writing Based on Facebook Game in English Intensive Class of Stain Jurai Siwo Metro 2013

This paper is titled “Grammatical Error Analysis of Students' Comment Writing Based on Facebook Game in English Intensive Class of STAIN JURAI SIWO METRO 2013”. The aim of this research is to describe grammatical errors which are made by the students of English Intensive Class. It is a qualitative-descriptive research. The data are taken from the result of students‟ comment writing on Facebook game in English intensive class. Meanwhile, the techniques to collect the data used note and observation. The result is displayed in words. The research shows that the grammatical errors made by the students in English intensive class are using double auxiliary, confusing to apply nominal or verbal sentence, and making error interrogative form pattern

"Implicature-Laden" Elicitations in Talk Radio Shows

Indirect elicitations in talk radio programmes on BBC Radio are not uncommon, notwithstanding, misunderstanding between the host and his conversational partner is not frequent. Investigating some of the reasons this paper focuses on how the socio-cultural and cognitive factors of the context interweave in discourse. The author suggests that valid interpretation and appropriate response to inferred elicitations can be best explained within the framework of Relevance Theory, and more specifically, with the presumption of accessibility of schemas obtained from the cognitive environment of the discourse partners. Through examples of empirical research the paper aims to reveal how the mutual knowledge of the participants controls discourse via the mental processes occurring in the interaction of two minds

Relevance verbs in English and French: synonymy and its structural properties

This study deals with a particular group of predicates called "predicates/verbs of relevance" or "predicates/verbs of indifference" in the literature. Its purpose is to investigate to what extent verbs of this particular group present common structural properties. It therefore seeks to establish the structural manifestations of synonymy. These structural manifestations are not to be found in argument-function mapping a la Levin (1993), but rather in polarity, decategorialization and sentence structure. Corpus data reveal that syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact in particular ways in the field of relevance. This interaction appears to be grounded in pragmatic constraints arising from the principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986). The basic idea is that, as relevance is presupposed in human communication and need not be expressed, verbs of relevance are more likely to be used with negative than with positive polarity. Used with positive polarity, they tend to occur in sentence forms that present them as strongly presupposed. Used with negative polarity, they are more likely to occur in the focal area of the sentence. As statements about relevance express speaker's points of view, relevance verbs are also markers of intersubjectivity and are therefore subject to grammaticalization phenomena, such as the omission of prepositions