Spelling correction in the NLP system 'LOLITA: dictionary organisation and search algorithms

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a spelling correction system and associated dictionaries, for the Natural Language Processing System 'LOLITA'. The dictionary storage is based upon a trie (M-ary tree) data-structure. The design of the dictionary is described, and the way in which the data-structure is implemented is also discussed. The spelling correction system makes use of the trie structure in order to limit repetition and "garden path' searching. The spelling correction algorithms used are a variation on the 'reverse minimum edit-distance' technique. These algorithms have been modified in order to place more emphasis on generation in order of likelihood. The system will correct up to two simple errors {i.e. insertion, omission, substitution or transposition of characters) per word. The individual algorithms are presented in turn and their combination into a unified strategy to correct misspellings is demonstrated. The system was implemented in the programming language Haskell; a pure functional, class-based language, with non-strict semantics and polymorphic type-checking. The use of several features of this language, in particular lazy evaluation, and their corresponding advantages over more traditional languages are described. The dictionaries and spelling correcting facilities are in use in the LOLITA system. Issues pertaining to 'real word' error correction, arising from the system's use in an NLP context, axe also discussed

American languages: Indians, ethnology, and the empire for liberty

American Languages: Indians, Ethnology, and the Empire for Liberty is a study of knowledge and power, as it relates to Indian affairs, in the early republic. It details the interactions, exchanges, and networks through which linguistic and racial ideas were produced and it examines the effect of those ideas on Indian administration. First etymology, then philology, guided the study of human descent, migrations, and physical and mental traits, then called ethnology. It would answer questions of Indian origins and the possibility of Indian incorporation into the United States. It was crucial to white Americans seeking to define their polity and prove their cultivation by contributing to the republic of letters.;The study of Indian languages was both part of the ongoing ideological construction of the empire for liberty and it could serve practical ends for the extension and consolidation of imperial relations with the native groups within and on the borders of the United States. Administrators of Indian affairs simultaneously asserted continental mastery and implicitly admitted that it was yet incomplete. Language could be used to illustrate Indian civilization and Indian savagery, the openness of the U.S. nation and its exclusivity, Indian affinities to Anglo-Saxons and their utter difference. Language was a race science frequently opposed to understandings of race defined through the body alone.;The War Department repeatedly sought linguistic information that it could use as the basis of policy, but philology was not a discourse of scientific control imposed upon helpless Indians. On the contrary, Indians lay at the heart of almost all that was known of Indian languages. This was especially true once European scientific interest shifted from the study isolated words to grammatical forms, which happened to coincide with debates over Indian removal in the United States. This meant that Indians were in an unprecedented position to shape the most authoritative scientific knowledge of the Indian at the moment that U.S. Indian policy was most uncertain. Native tutoring, often mediated through white missionaries, led Peter S. Du Ponceau to refute the notion, shared alike by apologists for removal (e.g. Lewis Cass) and European philosophers (e.g. Wilhelm von Humboldt) that the American languages indicated Indian savagery. ;Yet in attempting to prove that Native American languages were not savage, Du Ponceau defined Indian grammatical forms as unchanging plans of ideas that all Indians, and only Indians, possessed. Henry R. Schoolcraft, Indian agent, protege of Cass, and husband to the Ojibwa-Irish Jane Johnston, extended this line of thought and defined a rigid Indian mind that refused civilization. Such conclusions suggested that Indians possessed fixed mental traits. This conclusion largely agreed with those that ethnologists of the American school would advance years later, but those scientists argued that language could offer no information on physical race. The rapid (but brief) rise of the American school undermined the ethnological authority of the philological knowledge that Indians, such as David Brown (Cherokee) and Eleazer Williams (Mohawk) had produced in the preceding decades.;After decades of debate over Indian plans of ideas, patterns of thought, and whether Indian languages were a suitable medium for teaching the concepts of Christianity and republican government---debates intensified by the invention of the Cherokee alphabet and the understanding that Sequoyah, its author, intended it to insulate Cherokee society from white interference---the federal government began moving toward a policy of English-only instruction. Even after the strident opposition of the American school, language remained a key marker of civilization and nationhood

Orphans : childhood alienation and the idea of the self in Rousseau, Wordsworth and Mary Shelley

This thesis explores representations of the self in Rousseau's Émile (1762). Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818). It uses the idea of 'the orphan' not in a strictly literal sense, but in order to explore representations of the self that stress an individual's autonomy, and thus tend to minimise the importance of society and cultural inheritance to the formation of the self. Crucial to understanding this model of the self is the idea found in Émile of autonomous natural growth: the idea that a child brought up in relative seclusion in the countryside, and offered the minimum of assistance from its adult carers, is capable of developing naturally, seemingly under its own volition. Rousseau believed that such a child would have an authenticity lacking in those children unduly contaminated by external cultural factors. The model of autonomous growth proposed by Rousseau relates to the discourse of possessive individualism and to the idea of the self-made man, beholden to no one, and free to make his own way in the world. This model of the self influenced Wordsworth and Mary Shelley, who both respond to and react against Rousseau's thinking. The thesis explores the contradictions implicit in this model of self-formation. It stresses the impossibility of keeping children free from external human factors, looking at the way that physical and mental development is necessarily accompanied by a child's acculturation, for example in relation to language acquisition. It explores the complications that arise from this in relation to questions of autonomy. The thesis highlights the sense of alienation and the emotional cost experienced by the child who is brought up to perceive itself as set apart from 'others', as exemplified by the loneliness felt by the most isolated of the 'children' under discussion, Victor Frankenstein's creation. In contrast to the discourse of possessive individualism this study persists in treating the self as historically situated, and inhabited by the culture that surrounds it

Musicking and Literacy Connections in the Third Space: Leveraging the Strengths of a Latinx Immigrant Community

The music-making classroom is a space were students enact their multi-literacies. This space is especially important for Latinx bilingual students who are often labeled as struggling in school. In the music-making classroom, students reinvent their identities as integral members of a learning community, are accepted as leaders by their peers and are seen as literate in their music making practices. This habitus of success can have a durable, generative and transposable impact on the identity formation for the bilingual student that goes beyond the music classroom. This occurs because the music–making classroom acts as a third space both cognitively and physically, where students can translanguage, implementing all their ways of knowing to make meaning. This study examines the question, How does the music-making classroom as a third space facilitate literacy acts and literacy identities for bilingual children? Field observations of students enrolled at the Corona Youth Music Program, an El Sistema inspired afterschool orchestral program, provide a thick description of student literacies as well as the various ways in which the music classroom is both a physical and cognitive third space. Student writing and interviews will reveal meta-talk and meta-thinking around music practices, the social and academic function of music in their lives, and the role that music plays in connecting to school and home literacies. Teaching artist interviews point to the culturally responsive practices that facilitate critical and creative literacy acts in the classroom. Interviews with parents uncover the ways in which music is a fund of knowledge of families’ cultural practices

Distance education and second language instruction: an analysis and recommendations for integration.

The following thesis surveyed and examined the fields of distance education and Second Language Acquisition in order to illustrate key theories and assumptions of both fields. This thesis is a synthesis of relevant learning theories and instructional methodologies for each environment, and describes how the two have evolved both individually and collectively. Using this historical review as a basis, recommendations for the development of on-line second language instruction have been generated, as have suggestions as to the direction for the combined future of distance education and Second Language instruction. The goals of this study were to provide a critical overview of second language acquisition, a critical assessment of distance education, and a comprehensive set of guiding principles for the provision of on-line second language instruction

The simultaneous acquisition of a second and third language

This study investigates whether it is possible and necessary to acquire a second and third language simultaneously in our present multicultural, multilingual South Africa with its eleven official languages. The qualitative, descriptive empirical research was executed for the duration of the first school term within a multiracial grade four class at Richmond Primary School in KwaZulu Natal. Afrikaans and Zulu were taught in separate periods, simultaneously, for the exact number oflessons per week, with the exact same content, method and teacher. The success ofthe research, rested on maintaining absolute reality within the normal daily routine of the school day, in order to see if it is possible to acquire two languages simultaneously. The very positive outcomes of this research cannot be generalized, but rather indicate possible tendencies that it is indeed possible to acquire two languages simultaneously.Psychology of EducationM. Ed. (with specialisation in Guidance and Counselling