Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage

Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and equivalent similarities obtained from the typological features of the native languages. We leverage this finding to recover native language typological similarity structure directly from ESL text, and perform prediction of typological features in an unsupervised fashion with respect to the target languages. Our method achieves 72.2% accuracy on the typology prediction task, a result that is highly competitive with equivalent methods that rely on typological resources.Comment: CoNLL 201

Manacled to Identity: Cosmopolitanism, Class, and ‘The Culture Concept’ in Stephen Crane

This article begins with a close reading of Stephen Crane’s short story ‘Manacled’ from 1900, which situates this rarely considered short work within the context of contemporary debates about realism. I then proceed to argue that many of the debates raised by the tale have an afterlife in our own era of American literary studies, which has frequently focused on questions of ‘identity’ and ‘culture’ in its reading of realism and naturalism to the exclusion of the importance of cosmopolitan discourses of diffusion and exchange across national borders. I then offer a brief reading of Crane’s novel George’s Mother, which follows Walter Benn Michaels in suggesting that the recent critical attention paid to particularities of cultural difference in American studies have come to conflate ideas of class and social position with ideas of culture in ways that have ultimately obscured the presence of genuine historical inequalities in US society. In order to challenge this critical commonplace, I situate Crane’s work within a history of transatlantic cosmopolitanism associated with the ideas of Franz Boas and Matthew Arnold to demonstrate the ways in which Crane’s narratives sought out an experience of the universal within their treatments of the particular

Automatic Scaling of Text for Training Second Language Reading Comprehension

For children learning their first language, reading is one of the most effective ways to acquire new vocabulary. Studies link students who read more with larger and more complex vocabularies. For second language learners, there is a substantial barrier to reading. Even the books written for early first language readers assume a base vocabulary of nearly 7000 word families and a nuanced understanding of grammar. This project will look at ways that technology can help second language learners overcome this high barrier to entry, and the effectiveness of learning through reading for adults acquiring a foreign language. Through the implementation of Dokusha, an automatic graded reader generator for Japanese, this project will explore how advancements in natural language processing can be used to automatically simplify text for extensive reading in Japanese as a foreign language

Multiple Texts as a Limiting Factor in Online Learning: Quantifying (Dis-)similarities of Knowledge Networks across Languages

We test the hypothesis that the extent to which one obtains information on a given topic through Wikipedia depends on the language in which it is consulted. Controlling the size factor, we investigate this hypothesis for a number of 25 subject areas. Since Wikipedia is a central part of the web-based information landscape, this indicates a language-related, linguistic bias. The article therefore deals with the question of whether Wikipedia exhibits this kind of linguistic relativity or not. From the perspective of educational science, the article develops a computational model of the information landscape from which multiple texts are drawn as typical input of web-based reading. For this purpose, it develops a hybrid model of intra- and intertextual similarity of different parts of the information landscape and tests this model on the example of 35 languages and corresponding Wikipedias. In this way the article builds a bridge between reading research, educational science, Wikipedia research and computational linguistics.Comment: 40 pages, 13 figures, 5 table