Proceedings

Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora AEPC 2010. Editors: Lars Ahrenberg, Jörg Tiedemann and Martin Volk. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 10 (2010), 98 pages. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15893

Paragraph Structure in Arabic and English Expository Discourse

Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

A Process Theory of Natural Law and the Rule of Law in China

This Article analyzes China\u27s efforts to implement the rule of law and proposes a constructive, post-modern normative theory of law based on the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the Radical Empiricism of William James. This process theory of natural law provides a novel theory of natural law that eliminates the perceived illegitimacy arising from legal indeterminacy and closes the ontological gap between legal theory and practice. Process natural law also mediates many of the cultural differences between the East and the West through the telos of beauty (unity-in-diversity), which entails maximizing both an Eastern aesthetic sense of order (emergent harmony or spontaneous order) and a Western rational sense of order (complexity arising from diverse individual orderings). In accordance with the telos of beauty, process natural law further supports a culturally sensitive conception of the rule of law because, as Whitehead emphasizes, [e]ach society has its own type of perfection. This conception of the rule of law allows for important cultural differences to be reflected in the interpretation of democracy and formal legality and in the instantiation of individual rights in the law. Thus, the ideal rule of law may look quite different in the United States ( U.S. ) and China and may continue to evolve in our constantly changing, pluralistic, and multicultural world

Enhancing extractive summarization with automatic post-processing

Tese de doutoramento, Informática (Ciência da Computação), Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2015Any solution or device that may help people to optimize their time in doing productive work is of a great help. The steadily increasing amount of information that must be handled by each person everyday, either in their professional tasks or in their personal life, is becoming harder to be processed. By reducing the texts to be handled, automatic text summarization is a very useful procedure that can help to reduce significantly the amount of time people spend in many of their reading tasks. In the context of handling several texts, dealing with redundancy and focusing on relevant information the major problems to be addressed in automatic multi-document summarization. The most common approach to this task is to build a summary with sentences retrieved from the input texts. This approach is named extractive summarization. The main focus of current research on extractive summarization has been algorithm optimization, striving to enhance the selection of content. However, gains related to the increasing of algorithms complexity have not yet been proved, as the summaries remain difficult to be processed by humans in a satisfactory way. A text built fromdifferent documents by extracting sentences fromthemtends to form a textually fragile sequence of sentences, whose elements tend to be weakly related. In the present work, tasks that modify and relate the summary sentences are combined in a post-processing procedure. These tasks include sentence reduction, paragraph creation and insertion of discourse connectives, seeking to improve the textual quality of the final summary to be delivered to human users. Thus, this dissertation addresses automatic text summarization in a different perspective, by exploring the impact of the postprocessing of extraction-based summaries in order to build fluent and cohesive texts and improved summaries for human usage.Qualquer solução ou dispositivo que possa ajudar as pessoas a optimizar o seu tempo, de forma a realizar tarefas produtivas, é uma grande ajuda. A quantidade de informação que cada pessoa temque manipular, todos os dias, seja no trabalho ou na sua vida pessoal, é difícil de ser processada. Ao comprimir os textos a serem processados, a sumarização automática é uma tarefa muito útil, que pode reduzir significativamente a quantidade de tempo que as pessoas despendem em tarefas de leitura. Lidar com a redundância e focar na informação relevante num conjunto de textos são os principais objectivos da sumarização automática de vários documentos. A abordagem mais comum para esta tarefa consiste em construirse o resumo com frases obtidas a partir dos textos originais. Esta abordagem é conhecida como sumarização extractiva. O principal foco da investigação mais recente sobre sumarização extrativa é a optimização de algoritmos que visam obter o conteúdo relevante expresso nos textos originais. Porém, os ganhos relacionados com o aumento da complexidade destes algoritmos não foram ainda comprovados, já que os sumários continuam a ser difíceis de ler. É expectável que um texto, cujas frases foram extraídas de diferentes fontes, forme uma sequência frágil, sobretudo pela falta de interligação dos seus elementos. No contexto deste trabalho, tarefas que modificam e relacionam frases são combinadas numprocedimento denominado pós-processamento. Estas tarefas incluem a simplificação de frases, a criação de parágrafos e a inserção de conectores de discurso, que juntas procurammelhorar a qualidade do sumário final. Assim, esta dissertação aborda a sumarização automática numa perspectiva diferente, estudando o impacto do pós-processamento de um sumário extractivo, a fim de produzir um texto final fluente e coeso e em vista de se obter uma melhor qualidade textual.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), SFRH/BD/45133/200

Corpora for Computational Linguistics

Since the mid 90s corpora has become very important for computational linguistics. This paper offers a survey of how they are currently used in different fields of the discipline, with particular emphasis on anaphora and coreference resolution, automatic summarisation and term extraction. Their influence on other fields is also briefly discussed

English language education policy in China : a CDA and ethnographic study

IPhD ThesisDespite the growing stream of literature about English language education in China, there has been relatively little discussion of primary English language education. Past research has focused almost exclusively on secondary and tertiary English education. This research seeks to address this gap by examining primary English education policy. More specifically, this research provides insights into the extent to which each instance of language policy and planning can be seen as a product of its specific context. This thesis is based on an ethnographic study conducted in local education bureaus and three primary schools in Yulin, a Northwestern Chinese city with 3 million people. Drawing on critical discourse analysis (CDA) of political discourse(s), ethnographic field notes, questionnaires, interviews and classroom observation, this study investigates the influence of macro and micro levels of policy actors in disseminating and implementing the language policy. It also evaluates the apparent match and mismatch between macro policy and micro levels of practice within the local language policy and planning context. As such, I offer a lens for studying primary English education policy in China. The combination of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and ethnography represents a methodological contribution of this research and is used as a way of seeing if there are gaps between policy and practice; and, if so, what kind(s)? Thus, the main contribution of this study to the literature on language education policy is a framework for analyzing the interaction between policy and practice. This framework combines CDA and ethnography. CDA is used to try and identify underlying ideology and power relations in politically determined educational discourse, whereas the ethnographic part of the study is used to examine and interpret the implementation of policy among local education officials and teachers. Additionally, this research extends the current literature on English education policy by identifying that a lack of communication between macro and micro policy actors is a significant reason behind poor English language education quality. On the surface, local officials and teachers follow the instructions in the political discourse, due to a somewhat rigid hierarchical structure of Chinese society. In some aspects, though, local officials and teachers might veer away from, abandon or even change policy consciously or unconsciously in their daily routines and classes. Importantly, the findings presented in this thesis try to bridge the research on language education policy and teaching and content and methods

Aspects of Linguistic Variation

This volume brings together papers on linguistic variation. It takes a broad perspective, covering not only crosslinguistic and diachronic but also intralinguistic and interspeaker variation, and examines phenomena ranging from negation and TAM over connectives and the lexicon to definite articles and comparative concepts in well- and lesser-known languages. The collection thus contributes to our understanding of variation in general