Disambiguating human spoken diary entries using context information

The EPA has commissioned studies to gather fine-grained time / activity / location / exposure data from a diverse cross-section of the population. The information is recorded into digital voice diaries and transcribed by a human for classification into a standard representational system, the Consolidated Human Activity Database. Analysis of the diary entries is a long and tedious process for a human encoder. Automating the process and providing useful information can greatly assist a human encoder in correctly classifying the diary entries. This paper will discuss utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to analyze spoken diary entries and classify the locations and activities into semantic categories. There will be three main foci that form the hypotheses of the study: improving diary classification accuracy using context information, using thresholds to balance precision and recall tradeoffs, and utilizing the CHAD database structure to improve accuracy by generalizing the semantic ontologies. The word and context based system shows the relevance of using context information to improve CHAD code classification by using the surrounding diary entry context to augment the word analysis of the diary entries. The threshold-based system shows relative difference levels between top scoring CHAD codes can be utilized to balance tradeoffs between precision and recall. The semantic ontology system shows that generalizing semantic ontologies by employing the CHAD database structure can improve classification accuracy by reducing granularity

The corporate blog as an emerging genre of computer-mediated communication: features, constraints, discourse situation

Digital technology is increasingly impacting how we keep informed, how we communicate professionally and privately, and how we initiate and maintain relationships with others. The function and meaning of new forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not always clear to users on the onset and must be negotiated by communities, institutions and individuals alike. Are chatrooms and virtual environments suitable for business communication? Is email increasingly a channel for work-related, formal communication and thus "for old people", as especially young Internet users flock to Social Networking Sites (SNSs)? Cornelius Puschmann examines the linguistic and rhetorical properties of the weblog, another relatively young genre of CMC, to determine its function in private and professional (business) communication. He approaches the question of what functions blogs realize for authors and readers and argues that corporate blogs, which, like blogs by private individuals, are a highly diverse in terms of their form, function and intended audience, essentially mimic key characteristics of private blogs in order to appear open, non-persuasive and personal, all essential qualities for companies that wish to make a positive impression on their constituents.Digital technology is increasingly impacting how we keep informed, how we communicate professionally and privately, and how we initiate and maintain relationships with others. The function and meaning of new forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not always clear to users on the onset and must be negotiated by communities, institutions and individuals alike. Are chatrooms and virtual environments suitable for business communication? Is email increasingly a channel for work-related, formal communication and thus "for old people", as especially young Internet users flock to Social Networking Sites (SNSs)? Cornelius Puschmann examines the linguistic and rhetorical properties of the weblog, another relatively young genre of CMC, to determine its function in private and professional (business) communication. He approaches the question of what functions blogs realize for authors and readers and argues that corporate blogs, which, like blogs by private individuals, are a highly diverse in terms of their form, function and intended audience, essentially mimic key characteristics of private blogs in order to appear open, non-persuasive and personal, all essential qualities for companies that wish to make a positive impression on their constituents

Linguistic Representation and Processing of Copredication

This thesis addresses the lexical and psycholinguistic properties of copredication. In particular, it explores its acceptability, frequency, crosslinguistic and electrophysiological features. It proposes a general parsing bias to account for novel acceptability data, through which Complex-Simple predicate orderings are degraded across distinct nominal types relative to the reverse order. This bias, Incremental Semantic Complexity, states that the parser seeks to process linguistic representations in incremental stages of semantic complexity. English and Italian acceptability data are presented which demonstrate that predicate order preferences are based not on sense dominance but rather sense complexity. Initial evidence is presented indicating that pragmatic factors centred on coherence relations can impact copredication acceptability when such copredications host complex (but not simple) predicates. The real-time processing and electrophysiological properties of copredication are also presented, which serve to replicate and ground the acceptability dynamics presented in the thesis

Text Types in Personal Chronic Pain Blogs : Variation of Werlich's Text-Typical Clause Structures

Tiivistelmä – Referat – Abstract Tutkimuksessa määritetään kroonisen kivun henkilökohtaisissa englanninkielisissä blogeissa esiintyvät yleisimmät tekstityypit. Määrittely kuvaa Werlichin tekstityypillisen lausemuodon yleisyyttä kertovana, kuvailevana, perustelevana, erittelevänä tai ohjailevana tekstityyppinä blogitekstin lauseissa sekä tekstiryhmätasolla. Lisäksi arvioidaan tekstityyppien yleisyyttä sosiolingvistisestä näkökulmasta blogikirjoittajien kolmen tilastollisen ominaisuuden vaikutuksena tekstityyppien esiintymiseen. Työssä tekstityyppi määritellään lausetasolla tiettyjä lauserakennemuotoja edustaviksi luokiksi, jotka kuvastavat kirjoittajan keskittymistä tiettyyn tapaan jäsentää havaintoja. Tekstityyppi määritellään tekstin kielipiirteitä kuvaavaksi luokaksi erotuksena tekstin käyttötapaan perustuvaan genreluokitteluun. Kroonisen kivun blogien tekstityyppejä ei ole tutkittu vaikka krooninen kipu on yleinen tila aikuisväestössä. Tutkimuksissa on todettu kirjoittajien hyötyvän kipublogeista kivunhallinnassa. Lisäksi on tunnistettu useita kipublogien kirjoittamisen tavoitteita, joiden on todettu muuttuvan ajan mittaan osalla kirjoittajista. Aiemmissa blogitekstien luokitteluissa on tunnistettu kaksi yleistä blogityyppiä, joita määrittävät kielipiirteet havaitaan osittain lausetason tekstityyppejä vastaaviksi. Tutkimusmenetelmänä käytettiin tekstilingvististä yhdistelmää tekstityyppien laadullisesta lauseanalyysistä ja määrällisestä kokotekstianalyysistä sekä määrällistä sosiolingvististä tilastollisten muuttujien analyysiä. Tarkasteltavien blogitekstien aineisto koostuu 26:sta kokonaisesta blogitekstistä. Kirjoittajia on 13 ja jokaiselta on kaksi blogitekstiä. Analysoitavia lauseita on 1068. Lähdeblogit valittiin tekstitietokantaan lumipallo-otannalla ja tarkoituksellisella otannalla, joissa valintakriteerinä olivat kirjoittajan krooninen kipu ja toimiminen blogin ainoana kirjoittajana. Tuloksissa huomataan lausetasolla tekstityyppiluokkien määritelmien osittainen päällekkäisyys. Yleisimmiksi tekstityypeiksi muodostuvat väittävän, ohjeistavan ja kertovan tekstityypin yhdistelmät, joista väittävä tyyppi on yllättävän vallitseva. Tekstityyppien osuuksien vaihtelu ei työssä selity kirjoittajan tilastollisten ominaisuuksien vaihtelulla, koska tilastollinen tarkastelu nähdään pienen otannan takia vain suuntaa antavana. Lisätutkimusta toivotaan tekstin lausekohtaisista aiheista ja tekstityypeistä yhdistämällä sisältöanalyysiä ja tekstilingvistiikkaa. Lisäksi ehdotetaan kipublogitekstien tutkimista vertailemalla tekstien hierarkkisia ja vaihemaisia rakennepiirteitä, kuten lauseen Teema-Reema aiheita.This study describes personal chronic pain blog entries written in English by defining the common text types in the blogs. Text types are defined as text-classifying tools that combine a clause-level structural perspective and a whole-text level category perspective. On the clause level, each clause is defined as representing one of five Werlich's text types that reflect author focus on cognitive processes. The study also explores the effect of author socio-demographic attributes of gender, age and duration of chronic pain on the text types identfied in the analysis. Chronic pain is a common health condition that also affects the sufferer’s focus of attention. The text types in chronic pain blogs have not been studied even though studies have found that blog writing has therapeutic effects on pain management for chronic pain sufferers. Studies have also identified several purposes for writing chronic pain blogs. The purposes have been found to change for some of the chronic pain blog writers. Previous studies on blog types suggest two common text types. A combined qualitative-quantitative analysis of text-typical clauses and blog entries was conducted on a sample of 26 whole-text entries. The sample consists of two entries from 13 authors with total of 1068 clauses. Additionally, a socio-linguistic variable analysis was conducted with text types as dependent variables and author attributes as independent variables. The data was gathered with a combined purposive-snowball method with author chronic pain condition and personal authorship as sample selection criteria. The results show some overlapping analytical criteria for clause-level text types. The most frequent text types are identified as combinations of argumentation, instruction and narration with argumentation being surprisingly high in prevalence. The text-typical variation does not seem to be an effect of a specific author variable although the socio-linguistic analysis is not proved as statistically significant because of the small sample size. Further study on text types is suggested in a combined interpersonal feature and text type analysis of chronic pain blog entries. A different approach is also suggested in identification and comparison of hierarchical and text-organizational features such as Theme-Rheme analysis of clauses

An examination of the concept of "genre" as a tool for the design of speaking activities for English for specific purposes (ESP)

This action research is aimed to investigate the application of the concept of genre for the selection, design and teaching of oral genres relevant to the needs of students of Political Management and Political Science at Bremen University. Although the genre approach has become widely accepted for teaching field-specific content in English for Specific purposes (ESP), the literature review revealed that the focus of its application was writing and that oral genres have been under-researched. A framework for developing academic English courses suggested by Swales {1990) helped to identify the genre of discussion as the most important for these students. The research comprises several stages with distinct methodology and findings for each of them. The stages include studies of a discourse community of students who returned from a semester abroad; the selection of a corpus for modelling the genre of argumentative discussion; discourse analysis of the corpus; designing activities on the basis of the results of this analysis; video recording learners' discussions; and analysing the effectiveness of the methodology. The research addresses several aspects of researching and teaching oral genres. The first one is related to. the development of theory for the analysis of oral genres relevant to students needs and examining which concepts and ideas used for studying written interaction in ESP and SFL are applicable to researching spoken communication. The aim of the theoretical part was to conduct discourse analysis of a corpus of extracts from TV discussion programmes, selected to exemplify the genre, in order to reveal phonological and lexico-grammatical features in relation to the rhetorical function of persuasion of the genre of politics-related argumentative discussion. Concepts from Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) applied to prosody and pragmatics were used to identify language features important for raising students' awareness of characteristics of this genre. The most important aspect addressed in this research was investigating the impact of genre- based pedagogy for teaching the genre of discussion in the academic classroom. Activities for three teaching and learning cycles (Rothery, 1996) were designed and used in two rounds of teaching. The effectiveness of genre-based methodology was evaluated on the basis of quantitative and qualitative analysis of data collected at all phases of the teaching, and learning cycles in the first round of teaching. Another important issue addressed in this research was assessment. Using formative assessment in the form of self-assessment reports demonstrated how the focus of genre based assessment can be shifted from the products to the processes of genre learning. At the same time developing and introducing a CEFR- based (Common European Framework of Reference) discussion assessment form with detailed descriptors was one of the key elements in optimising genre-based classroom teaching. The research may be seen as a contribution to the conceptualisation of the teaching of oral genres in academic settings. Combining elements of the two schools of genre English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) helped to develop a comprehensive approach for identifying, characterising and teaching the genre of discussion relevant to the needs of the selected group of ESP students. This approach places emphasis on the combination of fostering genre awareness and providing maximum opportunities for genre acquisition in the genre-based classroom. The research has been helpful improving the pedagogical practice of teaching the genre of discussion in one tertiary-level academic setting and the results are potentially transferrable to similar contexts in other universities