Designing Statistical Language Learners: Experiments on Noun Compounds

The goal of this thesis is to advance the exploration of the statistical language learning design space. In pursuit of that goal, the thesis makes two main theoretical contributions: (i) it identifies a new class of designs by specifying an architecture for natural language analysis in which probabilities are given to semantic forms rather than to more superficial linguistic elements; and (ii) it explores the development of a mathematical theory to predict the expected accuracy of statistical language learning systems in terms of the volume of data used to train them. The theoretical work is illustrated by applying statistical language learning designs to the analysis of noun compounds. Both syntactic and semantic analysis of noun compounds are attempted using the proposed architecture. Empirical comparisons demonstrate that the proposed syntactic model is significantly better than those previously suggested, approaching the performance of human judges on the same task, and that the proposed semantic model, the first statistical approach to this problem, exhibits significantly better accuracy than the baseline strategy. These results suggest that the new class of designs identified is a promising one. The experiments also serve to highlight the need for a widely applicable theory of data requirements.Comment: PhD thesis (Macquarie University, Sydney; December 1995), LaTeX source, xii+214 page

The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway; Volume III

This grammar is based on extensive fieldwork, published and unpublished lore, and recent as well as older recordings, particularly those held in the archives of Roinn Bhéaloideas Éireann and Raidió na Gaeltachta. These sources provide a picture of extensive variation and change across the six generations born between 1850 and 2000. The grammar draws on several branches of linguistics: descriptive and historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics. It is the most comprehensive treatment of any variety of Irish. Volume III contains chapters on prepositions, functors, initial mutations, higher register, borrowings and language contact, and onomastics

The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway; Volumes I-IV

This grammar is based on extensive fieldwork, published and unpublished lore, and recent as well as older recordings, particularly those held in the archives of Roinn Bhéaloideas Éireann and Raidió na Gaeltachta. These sources provide a picture of extensive variation and change across the six generations born between 1850 and 2000. The grammar draws on several branches of linguistics: descriptive and historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics. It is the most comprehensive treatment of any variety of Irish. Volume I provides an introduction and chapters on historical phonology, sandhi and nominal morphology. Volume II describes plural noun morphology, the verb and pronominals. Volume III contains chapters on prepositions, functors, initial mutations, higher register, borrowings and language contact, and onomastics. Volume IV presents transcriptions and a CD containing recordings of a slection of speakers across the generations. The final volume also contains a vocabulary, bibliography and four indexes

The Irish of Iorras Aithneach, County Galway; Volumes I-IV

This grammar is based on extensive fieldwork, published and unpublished lore, and recent as well as older recordings, particularly those held in the archives of Roinn Bhéaloideas Éireann and Raidió na Gaeltachta. These sources provide a picture of extensive variation and change across the six generations born between 1850 and 2000. The grammar draws on several branches of linguistics: descriptive and historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics. It is the most comprehensive treatment of any variety of Irish. Volume I provides an introduction and chapters on historical phonology, sandhi and nominal morphology. Volume II describes plural noun morphology, the verb and pronominals. Volume III contains chapters on prepositions, functors, initial mutations, higher register, borrowings and language contact, and onomastics. Volume IV presents transcriptions and a CD containing recordings of a slection of speakers across the generations. The final volume also contains a vocabulary, bibliography and four indexes

‘Pitied but distrusted’: Discourses surrounding British widows of the First World War

This thesis employs critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) to unpick the discourses surrounding British widows of men who died as a result of the First World War. The war widows’ pension scheme, as implemented under the Royal Warrant of 1916, was the first (financially) non-contributory pension, and the first specifically directed towards women in Britain. Implemented against a backdrop of the first mass, industrialised war of the modern era, the discourses and ideologies underpinning it are firmly rooted in those of the previous century. At a time when the State was intervening in the life of its citizens in more extensive way than at any previous time, it also sought to distance itself from these citizens through the use of an impersonal style of communication. This was used to present war widows’ pension legislation that was framed around discourses of morality and nationalism that masks underlying parsimony and patriarchy. This thesis draws on a wide range of resources such as charitable records, media sources and Hansard reports, concentrating on a selection of 200 individual case files relating to claims for a war widow’s pension, held in the National Archive, Kew. Two case files are analysed in detail using discourse-historical analysis (Wodak, 2001) as a framework for a linguistic analysis. The two case files chosen represent widows whose experiences are typical of those found in the corpus. One widow is representative of the sizeable group of women who had their pensions stopped because of ‘improper’ behaviour, the correspondence in her file revealing how discourses of morality, social welfare and national identity are employed interdiscursively to deny her State funds. The second case study is more diachronic, showing how one widow, in common with thousands of others, was denied a pension on grounds on ineligibility. She employs discourses of social welfare and nationalism to support her claim over a period of nearly 40 years. Over the course of the 20th century, the relationship between the State and the public altered, and this case file offers an opportunity to explore this in some detail