Extracting information from participial structures

Our applied linguistic research aims at increasing the efficiency of a rule-based information extraction (IE) system by enhancing it with further grammatical knowledge. The input of the IE system is made up of sentences of business news. The event of the piece of news is identified through the main verb of the sentence, while parti'cipants and circumstances of the event through arguments and adjuncts of the main verb. Our objective was to unfold the hidden information, contained by NPs within which non-finite verbs (e.g. participles) appear. Thus, we invented a rule-system to transform participial structures into sentences with a finite verb, so that they could serve as input of the IE system. To tackle this task we had to be able to distinguish between real participles and adjectives. According to us there are some distributional criteria which can be used as the basis for creating the right classification

Energy Policy Options - from the Perspective of Public Attitudes and Risk Perceptions

In the present study a representative sample (N = 797) of the Swedish population was surveyed, with regard to attitudes related to energy policy issues (e.g., environmental attitudes, risk perceptions, and attitudes towards different energy production systems) and self-reported electricity saving behavior. These factors were considered relevant in a Swedish energy policy context, because of the planned phase-out of nuclear power. Citizens’ attitudes have traditionally been important factors in energy policy-making, especially nuclear policy, and one of the conditions for a successful phase-out is increased levels of electricity savings among households and in industry, in order to compensate for the loss in energy production. Respondents reported positive attitudes to the environment in general and to electricity saving, while the attitudes to nuclear power as an energy production system in Sweden were relatively negative. Perceived risk was an important predictor of these attitudes and it was concluded that it is important to investigate mechanisms behind this variable. The relationship between attitudes towards electricity saving and electricity saving behavior was weak. It is discussed whether the contribution of psychological knowledge in energy conservation campaigns could be to elaborate on people’s willingness to be moral and public-spirited citizens in combination with their pro-environmental attitudes. This work was supported by grants from NUTEK and FRN. Viklund (1999) presented more data from the survey referred to here.energy policy; electricity saving; risk perception; attitudes; behavior

Extracting information from participial structures

Our applied linguistic research aims at increasing the efficiency of a rule-based information extraction (IE) system by enhancing it with further grammatical knowledge. The input of the IE system is made up of sentences of business news. The event of the piece of news is identified through the main verb of the sentence, while parti'cipants and circumstances of the event through arguments and adjuncts of the main verb. Our objective was to unfold the hidden information, contained by NPs within which non-finite verbs (e.g. participles) appear. Thus, we invented a rule-system to transform participial structures into sentences with a finite verb, so that they could serve as input of the IE system. To tackle this task we had to be able to distinguish between real participles and adjectives. According to us there are some distributional criteria which can be used as the basis for creating the right classification

Fostering metacognitive genre awareness in L2 academic reading and writing: A case study of pre-service English teachers

Although the concept of metacognition has received considerable attention for its impact on learning across disciplinary areas, it has not been sufficiently discussed in the context of L2 academic reading and writing. In this paper, we bring together two theoretical frameworks, genre analysis and metacognition theory, and discuss the concept of metacognitive genre awareness. Drawing on the analysis of the data collected from a group of pre-service English teachers at a major Swedish university, we examine the process of building this awareness within ESP genre-based academic reading and writing instruction and show how it influences L2 students’ ability to interpret and compose academic texts. It was found that all study participants developed declarative (what) and procedural (how) metacognitive knowledge of genre-relevant aspects of academic texts, but only a few demonstrated conditional (when and why) knowledge of the genre in their reading analyses and writing assignments. It is concluded that using a metacognition framework to study L2 academic writing provides us with new insights and practical applications for L2 instruction

Acquisition of Verbal Aspect in L2 English by advanced learners with L1 Russian and L1 Norwegian: A web-based eye tracking study

It is well known that the similarities between L1 and L2 (also L3, etc.) facilitate language acquisition, whereas significant differences between them result in non-facilitating effects. These effects are known as Cross-Linguistic Influence (CLI). The main objective of the current study is to investigate the CLI, experienced by high proficient L2 English speakers when the grammatical aspect is being acquired. In order to investigate and compare different L2 processing patterns, I tested L1 speakers of a language with an obligatory contrast between perfective and imperfective aspect (Russian) and a language without such distinction (Norwegian). The participants recruited for this experiment were university students with advanced level of proficiency in English, and the groups were closely matched by proficiency. From the perspective of grammatical aspect, none of these languages bears complete similarity to English. Moreover, these languages differ dramatically in how they encode aspectual semantics in their grammar, hence we hoped to find substantial differences in processing and acquisition of the English system due to CLI. In Russian, with its perfective/imperfective contrast, aspectual information is obligatorily encoded in the verb form. Speakers of Russian link imperfective aspect with ongoing events and perfective aspect with completed events. In Norwegian, on the other hand, there is no grammatical way of encoding aspectual differences, i.e., the same verbal forms are employed to refer to either ongoing or completed events. As for English, there exist specialized forms that encode progressive meaning (e.g., Present and Past Progressive), but the jury is still out as to whether the Simple Past forms encode perfectivity or should be treated as neutral aspect. The goal of this thesis is thus to investigate semantic acquisition and processing of the English Past Progressive and Simple Past forms by studying online changes in gaze patterns by L2 listeners with L1 Russian and L1 Norwegian. The thesis aims to answer the following research questions: RQ 1: Do native speakers of Russian have strong opposition between Simple Past and Progressive Past in L2 English due to the transfer of similar opposition from their L1 on the processing level? RQ 2: How will Norwegian L1 speakers behave in the online eye-tracking Picture-Sentence Matching task? RQ 3: Is there any difference between online and offline results in the L1 Norwegian or the L1 Russian group? The methodology used to answer these research questions was web-based eye tracking. The experiment was implemented on JATOS platform using Webgazer.js software. The participants were asked to perform a sentence-picture matching task: they viewed visual displays with two pictures on the screen and listened to pre-recorded audio stimuli while their eye movements were tracked. This setup allowed for collecting both processing and conscious choice data performed after each sentence. The task contained audio stimuli of sentences with the Past Simple and Past Progressive verbal forms, and visual stimuli, depicting ongoing and completed events. The results of the experiment show that: 1) Both groups have a strong preference for an ongoing event picture when they listen to sentences involving the verb in the Past Progressive form. The offline responses also reflect this preference. This corresponds to the pattern exhibited by L1 speakers of English. 2) L1 speakers of Russian have a strong preference for a completed event picture when they listen to sentences involving the verb in the Past Simple form. The offline responses also reflect this preference. This doesn’t correspond to the pattern exhibited by L1 speakers of English, who had no preference for either completed or ongoing event picture in this condition. 3) L1 speakers of Norwegian have a weaker, but still sunstantial preference for an ongoing event picture when they listen to sentences involving the verb in the Past Simple form. The offline responses also reflect this preference. This doesn’t correspond to the pattern exhibited by L1 speakers of English, who had no preference for either completed or ongoing event picture in this condition. Taken together, the results indicate that while learners from both L1s converge on target-like interpretation of the Past Progressive form, their interpretation of the Past Simple form is deviant from that of the native speakers even at advanced levels of proficiency. We argue that this is likely due to CLI, with L1 Russian speakers mapping the semantic opposition between imperfective and perfective aspect onto English, and L1 Norwegians making a link between the English and the Norwegian Simple Past tense forms

The Visegrad Group and the European Union’s ‘Eastern’ Dimension

The 2004 enlargement of the European Union (EU) changed the dynamics of its engagement with the former Soviet Republics which now constitute the Eastern neighbourhood. As well as manifold implications of the eastward shift of the EU border and ‘acquisition of a shared neighbourhood with Russia, the enlarged EU now incorporated new member states with foreign policy concerns focused mostly on the Eastern neighbours. Four of the new member states – the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia – brought into the EU with them their own subregional alliance in the form of the Visegrad Group (VG). Since 2004 the ‘Visegrad 4’ (V4) have been attempting to develop an effective multilateral contribution to EU ‘Eastern Policy’ and to reform processes in the WNIS. This paper argues that while there has been some evidence of an effective VG multilateral approach, in both inputs to EU Eastern policy and modest support for broader ‘Europeanisation’ processes in WNIS, so far the VG has failed to achieve a lead role in EU Eastern policy and that a range of obstacles have limited the multilateral approach of the V4 in general

Lexical and Grammar Resource Engineering for Runyankore & Rukiga: A Symbolic Approach

Current research in computational linguistics and natural language processing (NLP) requires the existence of language resources. Whereas these resources are available for a few well-resourced languages, there are many languages that have been neglected. Among the neglected and / or under-resourced languages are Runyankore and Rukiga (henceforth referred to as Ry/Rk). Recently, the NLP community has started to acknowledge that resources for under-resourced languages should also be given priority. Why? One reason being that as far as language typology is concerned, the few well-resourced languages do not represent the structural diversity of the remaining languages. The central focus of this thesis is about enabling the computational analysis and generation of utterances in Ry/Rk. Ry/Rk are two closely related languages spoken by about 3.4 and 2.4 million people respectively. They belong to the Nyoro-Ganda (JE10) language zone of the Great Lakes, Narrow Bantu of the Niger-Congo language family.The computational processing of these languages is achieved by formalising the grammars of these two languages using Grammatical Framework (GF) and its Resource Grammar Library (RGL). In addition to the grammar, a general-purpose computational lexicon for the two languages is developed. Although we utilise the lexicon to tremendously increase the lexical coverage of the grammars, the lexicon can be used for other NLP tasks.In this thesis a symbolic / rule-based approach is taken because the lack of adequate languages resources makes the use of data-driven NLP approaches unsuitable for these languages

Modelling the Development of Children’s use of Optional Infinitives in Dutch and English using MOSAIC

In this study we use a computational model of language learning (MOSAIC) to investigate the extent to which the Optional Infinitive (OI) phenomenon in Dutch and English can be explained in terms of a resource-limited distributional analysis of Dutch and English child-directed speech. The results show that the same version of MOSAIC is able to simulate changes in the pattern of finiteness marking in two children learning Dutch and two children learning English as the average length of their utterances increases. These results suggest that it is possible to explain the key features of the OI phenomenon in both Dutch and English in terms of the interaction between an utterancefinal bias in learning and the distributional characteristics of child-directed speech in the two languages. They also show how computational modelling techniques can be used to investigate the extent to which cross-linguistic similarities in the developmental data can be explained in terms of common processing constraints as opposed to innate knowledge of Universal Grammar