A Survey of Paraphrasing and Textual Entailment Methods

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of natural language expressions, such that a human who reads (and trusts) the first element of a pair would most likely infer that the other element is also true. Paraphrasing can be seen as bidirectional textual entailment and methods from the two areas are often similar. Both kinds of methods are useful, at least in principle, in a wide range of natural language processing applications, including question answering, summarization, text generation, and machine translation. We summarize key ideas from the two areas by considering in turn recognition, generation, and extraction methods, also pointing to prominent articles and resources.Comment: Technical Report, Natural Language Processing Group, Department of Informatics, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece, 201

Re-using features of English as a foreign language (EFL) materials for special needs students of the same age group

This paper identifies a lack of age-appropriate literacy software for dyslexic teenagers in Irish classrooms and investigates the features of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) software that could be helpful to dyslexic students. There are often two distinct special learner groups within the same classroom: special needs students with reading difficulties in their native language and EFL students. While there are clear differences between these two groups, there is some overlap in their linguistic difficulties, e.g. spelling. There is a lack of age-appropriate software aimed at dyslexic teenagers; most software used is aimed at dyslexic children. However, a lot of materials are available for teenage EFL students. The paper discusses a survey of teenage dyslexic students and teachers/tutors of dyslexic teenagers, which identified student needs and desired features/exercises for curriculum-focused Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) software for dyslexic students that the author is developing. Results show overlap of features and exercises present in existing EFL software

Dimensions of social meaning in post-classical Greek towards an integrated approach

Especially in the first half of the twentieth century, language was viewed as a vehicle for the transmission of facts and ideas. Later on, scholars working in linguistic frameworks such as Functional and Cognitive Linguistics, (Historical) Sociolinguistics and Functional Sociolinguistics, have emphasized the social relevance of language, focusing, for example, on linguistic concepts such as deixis, modality, or honorific language, or embedding larger linguistic patterns in their social contexts, through notions such as register, sociolect, genre, etc. The main aim of this article is to systematize these observations, through an investigation of how the central, though ill-understood notion of “social meaning” can be captured. The starting point for the discussion is the work that has been done in the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This framework distinguishes “social” (“interpersonal”) meaning from two other types of meaning, and offers a typology of different types of contexts with which these different meanings resonate. In order to achieve a more satisfactory account of social meaning, however, I argue that we need to connect to a theory of how signs convey meaning. The discussion is relevant for Ancient Greek in its entirety, but focuses specifically on Post-classical Greek: as a case study, I discuss five private letters from the so-called Theophanes archive

Cross-lingual Word Clusters for Direct Transfer of Linguistic Structure

It has been established that incorporating word cluster features derived from large unlabeled corpora can significantly improve prediction of linguistic structure. While previous work has focused primarily on English, we extend these results to other languages along two dimensions. First, we show that these results hold true for a number of languages across families. Second, and more interestingly, we provide an algorithm for inducing cross-lingual clusters and we show that features derived from these clusters significantly improve the accuracy of cross-lingual structure prediction. Specifically, we show that by augmenting direct-transfer systems with cross-lingual cluster features, the relative error of delexicalized dependency parsers, trained on English treebanks and transferred to foreign languages, can be reduced by up to 13%. When applying the same method to direct transfer of named-entity recognizers, we observe relative improvements of up to 26%

Whole Language Based Strategies for Teaching Reading in the Content Areas

The purpose of this project was to develop a thematic unit for use in a sixth grade classroom. The unit provides a whole language, integrated curriculum concentrating on ancient Greece. Fifteen lessons were developed for use with a social studies text to teach reading strategies to a class of sixth graders. The project includes a review of selected literature related to the topics of whole language instruction, thematic units, integration, and an explanation of how to utilize the project in a sixth grade classroom. A summary with conclusions and recommendations was included

Variation in the Vowel System of Mišótika Cappadocian: Findings from Two Refugee Villages in Greec

This paper discusses changes in the vowel system of contemporary Mišótika, the Cappadocian variety originally spoken in Misti. We compare the speech of native speakers from two Cappadocian refugee communities and analyse the differences between the two, taking into consideration mechanisms of language contact and linguistic change, and also the social parameters that influence the dialectal system. The study is based on recordings of native speakers of Mišótika who live in two different villages, one in the prefecture of Kilkis (Neo Agioneri), and the other in Thessaloniki (Xirohori). Although these villages are very close to one another, they present two major differences. Neo Agioneri is a homogeneous village, whereas Xirohori is a mixed village, since not only Cappadocians but also other Greek-dialect speakers live there. 78 Another distinguishing characteristic between the two villages is the attitude of the inhabitants towards Mišótika. It seems that speakers from Neo Agioneri are more receptive to the use of the dialect. The inhabitants from Xirohori, by contrast, present a different attitude, reflecting the consequences of social stigmatization and linguistic attrition that their dialect has undergone after the population exchange of the 1920s. To conclude, the current vowel system of Mišótika seems to diverge significantly from the older one described by Dawkins (1916). At the same time, the preliminary findings of our research indicate that there are also differences in the phonological status of the vowels between speakers of the same linguistic system. Dawkins, R. M. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor: a Study of the Dialects of Sílli, Cappadocia and Phárasa with Grammar, Texts, Translations and Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Computational Language Assessment in patients with speech, language, and communication impairments

Speech, language, and communication symptoms enable the early detection, diagnosis, treatment planning, and monitoring of neurocognitive disease progression. Nevertheless, traditional manual neurologic assessment, the speech and language evaluation standard, is time-consuming and resource-intensive for clinicians. We argue that Computational Language Assessment (C.L.A.) is an improvement over conventional manual neurological assessment. Using machine learning, natural language processing, and signal processing, C.L.A. provides a neuro-cognitive evaluation of speech, language, and communication in elderly and high-risk individuals for dementia. ii. facilitates the diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy efficacy in at-risk and language-impaired populations; and iii. allows easier extensibility to assess patients from a wide range of languages. Also, C.L.A. employs Artificial Intelligence models to inform theory on the relationship between language symptoms and their neural bases. It significantly advances our ability to optimize the prevention and treatment of elderly individuals with communication disorders, allowing them to age gracefully with social engagement.Comment: 36 pages, 2 figures, to be submite

Cohesion, commonality and creativity: youth work across borders

No abstract available