128 research outputs found

    Semantic verb classes in Tima (Niger-Congo)

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    The dissertation explores the correlations between the lexical meaning of verbs and their morphosyntactic behavior in terms of valency alternation patterns in the Niger-Congo language Tima spoken in Sudan

    Computational Stylistics in Poetry, Prose, and Drama

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    The contributions in this edited volume approach poetry, narrative, and drama from the perspective of Computational Stylistics. They exemplify methods of computational textual analysis and explore the possibility of computational generation of literary texts. The volume presents a range of computational and Natural Language Processing applications to literary studies, such as motif detection, network analysis, machine learning, and deep learning

    Sex & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll A moral Odyssey retold by Homer, Joyce and Duchamp

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    In 2023, one century after Marcel Duchamp completed his work on the Large Glass, a book comes to suggest that it is not self-referential but has specific protagonists, locations and details that convey a timeless moral lesson about archetypal issues that human nature is perpetually tormented with – Sex (lust) & Drugs (intoxication) & Rock’n’Roll (violence). By choice, Duchamp never directly referred to Homer regarding the Glass, and this work has been analysed by many scholars in different ways. When Dr Megakles Rogakos came across the work in 2000, the detail of the Oculist Witnesses on it prompted him to sense their possible connection with the Trial of the Bow in Homer’s Odyssey, and he spoke about it in a related talk at London’s Tate Gallery on 10 August of the same year. He made this theory the subject of his PhD thesis (2012-2016) at the University of Essex entitled “A Joycean Exegesis of The Large Glass: Homeric Traces in the Postmodernism of Marcel Duchamp”. The Homeric exegesis of Duchamp’s Glass through Joyce’s Ulysses aims to confirm the atavistic theory that the ancient is present in the contemporary. The Glass, like the Homeric Odyssey, as revisited in Ulysses, may be thought to be some kind of moralising treatise on the temptations of man to fall prey to the three deadliest sins throughout human history – lust of flesh; indulgence in drugs; craving for power, as discussed separately in chapters of the book (see III.9; III.8; III.12) and gave its title – “Sex & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll”, after Ian Dury’s censored song of 1977. If its Joycean exegesis is proven, then the Glass may enigmatically emerge as a Homeric paradigm of man’s initiation to inner freedom, which Duchamp called the “beauty of indifference”. Dr Eleftherios Anevlavis, translator of Joyce’s Ulysses and Wake, writes: “Dr Rogakos’ exegesis is an impressive intellectual creation, enriched with the practices of decipherment and the art of writing, but at the same time created by the experiences and exhaustive study of culture from Homer to Yoko Ono and of the cosmos from the cave paintings of Lascaux to the constellation of the Pleiades.” Remarkably, with his theory of the appropriation of Homer’s Odyssey in Duchamp’s Glass, Dr Rogakos offers a refreshingly tongue-in-cheek explanation of postmodernism’s relationship to antiquity

    'Ane end of an auld song?': macro and micro perspectives on written Scots in correspondence during the union of parliaments debates

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    This thesis examines the relationship between political identity and variation from a diachronic perspective. Specifically, it explores the use of written Scots features in the personal correspondence of Scottish politicians active during the Union of the Parliaments debates. Written Scots by 1700 had steadily retreated from most text-types in the face of ongoing anglicisation, but simultaneously the Union debates sparked heated discussion around questions of nationality and Scotland's separate identity. I consider the extent to which the use of Scots features may have been influenced by such discourse, but also how they may have become indexical markers used to lay claim to these ideologies. Drawing from the frameworks of First, Second and Third Wave perspectives on variation, and combining quantitative, macro-social methods with micro-social analysis, broad socio-political factors are explored alongside plausible stylistic intentions in conditioning or influencing the linguistic behaviour of these writers. The first analysis examines variation in the corpus temporally, using the chronologically-organised clustering technique VNC - Variability-based Neighbor Clustering (Gries and Hilpert, 2008), to measure Scots features over time. The crucial years of the debates (1700-1707) are compared with correspondence either side, and the VNC analysis identifies heightened use of Scots falling within the key years of the debates. The following macro-social analysis explores the factors driving this variation quantitatively, using a number of different statistical models to examine the data from various perspectives. Probabilities of Scots are found to correlate with certain political factors, though in complex and multilayered ways that reflect the composite nature of the historical figures operating in the Scottish parliament. The third analysis focuses on the features of written Scots itself and how these pattern in aggregate and across the individual authors who comprise the corpus. Findings suggest the persistence of written Scots was not being driven by a singular feature or set of tokens, rather, authors varied widely in their range and proportion of different variants. Finally, the micro-analysis examines the intra-writer variation of four individuals representing different political interests, exploring their Scots use across various recipients. Close-up inspection of features within particular extracts and letters suggests the subtle social and stylistic functions Scots had acquired for these writers. Its occurrence was found to reflect but also constitute the macro-social patterns identified earlier. Taken together, results indicate the use of Scots features was both influenced by, and contributed to, the political and ideological loyalties these writers harboured. Moreover, they tentatively suggest a process of reinterpretation was underway, in which Scots features were becoming a resource that could be selectively employed for particular indexical and communicative purposes

    A phonological and tonal analysis of Samue using Optimality Theory

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    Proceedings of the Eighth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CliC-it 2021

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    The eighth edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2021) was held at UniversitĂ  degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca from 26th to 28th January 2022. After the edition of 2020, which was held in fully virtual mode due to the health emergency related to Covid-19, CLiC-it 2021 represented the first moment for the Italian research community of Computational Linguistics to meet in person after more than one year of full/partial lockdown

    Matrix representations, linear transformations, and kernels for disambiguation in natural language

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    In the application of machine learning methods with natural language inputs, the words and their positions in the input text are some of the most important features. In this article, we introduce a framework based on a word-position matrix representation of text, linear feature transformations of the word-position matrices, and kernel functions constructed from the transformations. We consider two categories of transformations, one based on word similarities and the second on their positions, which can be applied simultaneously in the framework in an elegant way. We show how word and positional similarities obtained by applying previously proposed techniques, such as latent semantic analysis, can be incorporated as transformations in the framework. We also introduce novel ways to determine word and positional similarities. We further present efficient algorithms for computing kernel functions incorporating the transformations on the word-position matrices, and, more importantly, introduce a highly efficient method for prediction. The framework is particularly suitable to natural language disambiguation tasks where the aim is to select for a single word a particular property from a set of candidates based on the context of the word. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework to this type of tasks using context-sensitive spelling error correction on the Reuters News corpus as a model problem

    Translating the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia

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    In Translating the Hebrew Bible in Medieval Iberia Esperanza Alfonso and Javier del Barco offer an edition and comprehensive study of the first Hebrew-vernacular biblical glossary-commentary produced in medieval Iberia that is known to date

    Insurance Meets Sentiment: An Empirical Study of Attitudes Toward Life, Health, and P&C Insurances

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    Sentiment Analysis, an up-and-coming subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP), contains previously untapped potential that can be utilized to drive better business decision making. In this paper, we employ state-of-the-art sentiment analysis tools to compare the performances of traditional classification algorithms – namely Support Vector Machines (SVMs), bagging, boosting, random forest, and decision tree classifiers – on insurance-related textual data. We successfully demonstrate that algorithms such as bagging and boosting, which were constructed to enhance the performance of simpler algorithms such as decision tree classifiers, offer only marginal improvements in terms of classification accuracy and certain performance metrics for our data. However, the improved accuracy comes as the cost of slightly higher runtimes. Insurance companies could apply these findings to choose suitable algorithms and gain a more nuanced understanding of the needs of their insureds. Index Terms— Sentiment Analysis, Textual Analysis, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Opinion Mining (OM
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