Individual Differences and Instructed Second Language Acquisition: Insights from Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning

The present dissertation focuses on the role of cognitive individual difference factors in the acquisition of second language vocabulary in the context of intelligent computer assisted language learning (ICALL). The aim was to examine the association between working memory and declarative memory and the learning of English phrasal verbs in a web-based ICALL-mediated experiment. Following a pretest-posttest design, 127 adult learners of English were assigned to two instructional conditions, namely meaning-focused and form-focused conditions. Learners in both conditions read news texts on the web for about two weeks; learners in the form-focused condition additionally interacted with the texts via selecting multiple-choice options. The results showed that both working memory and declarative memory were predictive of vocabulary acquisition. However, only the working memory effect was modulated by the instructional context, with the effect being found exclusively in the form-focused condition, and thus suggesting the presence of an aptitude-treatment interaction. Finally, findings also revealed that learning during treatment in the form-focused group was nonlinear, and that paying attention to form and meaning simultaneously impeded global reading comprehension for intermediate, not advanced learners. From a theoretical perspective, the findings provide evidence to suggest that individual differences in both working memory and declarative memory affect the acquisition of lexical knowledge in ICALL-supported contexts. Methodologically, the current study illustrates the advantages of conducting interdisciplinary work between ICALL and second language acquisition by allowing for the collection of experimental data through a web-based, all-encompassing ICALL system. Overall, the present dissertation represents an initial attempt at characterizing who is likely to benefit from ICALL-based interventions

“Russians are very sweet and nice”:a corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis of the representation of people in online travel reviews about Moscow

The paper explores how guests and hosts are represented in online travel reviews about Moscow. Tourism provides an opportunity to get acquainted with the sociocultural background of other nations and potentially to improve international relations. Moscow, the capital of Russia, is sometimes viewed as an unfriendly or unsafe destination and the Russian Government aims to increase the popularity of the city. However, there are concerns that modern tourism discourse contributes to the maintenance of asymmetrical guest-host power relations. Guests are often accused of consumerism while hosts are frequently backgrounded or represented as servants or cultural markers. Such representation can lead to client-servant attitude and even cause discrimination against hosts. While online travel reviews are considered an important genre of tourism discourse, most studies analyse the representation of people in promotional or media discourse. Considering that multimodality is an integral feature of tourism discourse and that the analysis of discourse patterns allows exploring the meanings widely shared by the society, the study utilizes a corpus-assisted multimodal approach by analysing the representation of people in headlines, texts, images and image captions of a corpus of online travel reviews. The analysis corroborates previous conclusions that guests tend to be represented as consumers enjoying themselves while hosts are perceived as friendly servants. However, the study provides evidence that tourists can background not only hosts but also themselves or other tourists. Moreover, the results reveal that in contrast to promotional and media discourse, guests can also portray themselves as active, solving problems while sometimes representing guests as rude or unwelcoming. The results also show that the representation of people can vary across the modes of the same document. The study concludes that user-generated tourism discourse reveals a complex picture and can express resistance to the dominant institutional imagery

Idiom treatment experiments in machine translation

Idiomatic expressions pose a particular challenge for the today\u27;s Machine Translation systems, because their translation mostly does not result literally, but logically. The present dissertation shows, how with the help of a corpus, and morphosyntactic rules, such idiomatic expressions can be recognized and finally correctly translated. The work leads the reader in the first chapter generally to the field of Machine Translation and following that, it focuses on the special field of Example-based Machine Translation. Next, an important part of the doctoral thesis dissertation is devoted to the theory of idiomatic expressions. The practical part of the thesis describes how the hybrid Example-based Machine Translation system METIS-II, with the help of morphosyntactic rules, is able to correctly process certain idiomatic expressions and finally, to translate them. The following chapter deals with the function of the transfer system CAT2 and its handling of the idiomatic expressions. The last part of the thesis includes the evaluation of three commercial systems, namely SYSTRAN, T1 Langenscheidt, and Power Translator Pro, with respect to continuous and discontinuous idiomatic expressions. For this, both small corpora and a part of the extensive corpus Europarl and the Digital Lexicon of the German Language in 20th century were processed, firstly manually and then automatically. The dissertation concludes with results from this evaluation.Idiomatische Redewendungen stellen für heutige maschinelle Übersetzungssysteme eine besondere Herausforderung dar, da ihre Übersetzung nicht wörtlich, sondern stets sinngemäß erfolgen muss. Die vorliegende Dissertation zeigt, wie mit Hilfe eines Korpus sowie morphosyntaktischer Regeln solche idiomatische Redewendungen erkannt und am Ende richtig übersetzt werden können. Die Arbeit führt den Leser im ersten Kapitel allgemein in das Gebiet der Maschinellen Übersetzung ein und vertieft im Anschluss daran das Spezialgebiet der Beispielbasierten Maschinellen Übersetzung. Im Folgenden widmet sich ein wesentlicher Teil der Doktorarbeit der Theorie über idiomatische Redewendungen. Der praktische Teil der Arbeit beschreibt wie das hybride Beispielbasierte Maschinelle Übersetzungssystem METIS-II mit Hilfe von morphosyntaktischen Regeln befähigt wurde, bestimmte idiomatische Redewendungen korrekt zu bearbeiten und am Ende zu übersetzen. Das nachfolgende Kapitel behandelt die Funktion des Transfersystems CAT2 und dessen Umgang mit idiomatischen Wendungen. Der letzte Teil der Arbeit beinhaltet die Evaluation von drei kommerzielle Systemen, nämlich SYSTRAN, T1 Langenscheidt und Power Translator Pro, in Bezug auf deren Umgang mit kontinuierlichen und diskontinuierlichen idiomatischen Redewendungen. Hierzu wurden sowohl kleine Korpora als auch ein Teil des umfangreichen Korpus Europarl und des Digatalen Wörterbuchs der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jh. erst manuell und dann maschinell bearbeitet. Die Dissertation wird mit Folgerungen aus der Evaluation abgeschlossen

Kontrastivní popis angličtiny a češtiny s využitím metodologie n-gramů

This dissertation examines phraseological patterns in three registers (parliamentary debates, newspaper reporting, children's fiction) in English and Czech. It identifies and analyses recurrent word sequences through n-gram extraction, aiming to characterise the phraseology of each register and compare them cross- linguistically, while observing how the n-gram method can be adapted to accommodate for the typological properties of each language. Czech is particularly challenging in this respect due to its morphological and positional variability. The dissertation comprises three case studies, each focussed on a different register. The first case study explores different n-gram lengths using a small corpus of a specialised register - parliamentary debates, suggesting that for a comprehensive register characterisation, different lengths should be combined. It notes the importance of discourse-structuring patterns and the problem of overlaps between n-grams. In the newspaper study, I extract n-grams containing prepositions - a convenient starting point given their frequency and involvement in text- structuring. N-grams are complemented with collocation analysis, revealing some evaluative prosodies and semantic preferences of patterns and suggesting that the newspaper register is not purely...Tato disertační práce zkoumá frazeologické vzorce ve třech různých registrech (parlamentní debaty, noviny a dětská beletrie) v angličtině a češtině. Vyhledává a rozebírá rekurentní sekvence slov pomocí metody n-gramů. Cílem je popsat frazeologické vlastnosti každého registru a porovnat je mezijazykově. Práce také zkoumá možnosti přizpůsobení metody n-gramů se zřetelem k typologickým vlastnostem zkoumaných jazyků. Čeština v tomto ohledu klade na metodu vyšší nároky kvůli velké míře morfologické a slovosledné variability. Práci tvoří tři případové studie, každá věnovaná jinému registru. První studie využívá a následně porovnává různé délky n-gramů. Předmětem zkoumání je malý korpus úzce specializovaného registru parlamentních debat. Studie dochází k závěru, že komplexního popisu registru lze dosáhnout nejlépe kombinací n-gramů různých délek. To ovšem představuje metodologický problém:, protože mezi n-gramy různých délek jsou četné překryvy, které znemožňují přesnou kvantifikaci a způsobují, že některé n-gramy jsou zastoupeny vícekrát. Studie popisuje různé funkce frazeologických vzorců a všímá si jejich role v organizaci diskursu. Druhá studie je věnována novinovým textům a zaměřuje se na n-gramy obsahující některou z předem zvolených předložek; předložky jsou ke zkoumání frazeologických vzorců...Institute of LinguisticsÚstav obecné lingvistikyFaculty of ArtsFilozofická fakult

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

CLARIN. The infrastructure for language resources

CLARIN, the "Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure", has established itself as a major player in the field of research infrastructures for the humanities. This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the organization, its members, its goals and its functioning, as well as of the tools and resources hosted by the infrastructure. The many contributors representing various fields, from computer science to law to psychology, analyse a wide range of topics, such as the technology behind the CLARIN infrastructure, the use of CLARIN resources in diverse research projects, the achievements of selected national CLARIN consortia, and the challenges that CLARIN has faced and will face in the future. The book will be published in 2022, 10 years after the establishment of CLARIN as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium by the European Commission (Decision 2012/136/EU)

Automated Semantic Analysis, Legal Assessment, and Summarization of Standard Form Contracts

Consumers are confronted with standard form contracts on a daily basis, for example, when shopping online, registering for online platforms, or opening bank accounts. With expected revenue of more than 343 billion Euro in 2020, e-commerce is an ever more important branch of the European economy. Accepting standard form contracts often is a prerequisite to access products or services, and consumers frequently do so without reading, let alone understanding, them. Consumer protection organizations can advise and represent consumers in such situations of power imbalance. However, with increasing demand, limited budgets, and ever more complex regulations, they struggle to provide the necessary support. This thesis investigates techniques for the automated semantic analysis, legal assessment, and summarization of standard form contracts in German and English, which can be used to support consumers and those who protect them. We focus on Terms and Conditions from the fast growing market of European e-commerce, but also show that the developed techniques can in parts be applied to other types of standard form contracts. We elicited requirements from consumers and consumer advocates to understand their needs, identified the most relevant clause topics, and analyzed the processes in consumer protection organizations concerning the handling of standard form contracts. Based on these insights, a pipeline for the automated semantic analysis, legal assessment, and summarization of standard form contracts was developed. The components of this pipeline can automatically identify and extract standard form contracts from the internet and hierarchically structure them into their individual clauses. Clause topics can be automatically identified, and relevant information can be extracted. Clauses can then be legally assessed, either using a knowledge-base we constructed or through binary classification by a transformer model. This information is then used to create summaries that are tailored to the needs of the different user groups. For each step of the pipeline, different approaches were developed and compared, from classical rule-based systems to deep learning techniques. Each approach was evaluated on German and English corpora containing more than 10,000 clauses, which were annotated as part of this thesis. The developed pipeline was prototypically implemented as part of a web-based tool to support consumer advocates in analyzing and assessing standard form contracts. The implementation was evaluated with experts from two German consumer protection organizations with questionnaires and task-based evaluations. The results of the evaluation show that our system can identify over 50 different types of clauses, which cover more than 90% of the clauses typically occurring in Terms and Conditions from online shops, with an accuracy of 0.80 to 0.84. The system can also automatically extract 21 relevant data points from these clauses with a precision of 0.91 and a recall of 0.86. On a corpus of more than 200 German clauses, the system was also able to assess the legality of clauses with an accuracy of 0.90. The expert evaluation has shown that the system is indeed able to support consumer advocates in their daily work by reducing the time they need to analyze and assess clauses in standard form contracts

CLARIN

The book provides a comprehensive overview of the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN – for the humanities. It covers a broad range of CLARIN language resources and services, its underlying technological infrastructure, the achievements of national consortia, and challenges that CLARIN will tackle in the future. The book is published 10 years after establishing CLARIN as an Europ. Research Infrastructure Consortium

Corpus-Based Approaches to Figurative Language: Metaphor and Austerity

Austerity is a by-product of the ongoing financial crisis. As Kitson et al (2001) explain, what was a \u201cNICE\u201d (\u2018non-inflationary consistent expansion\u2019) economy has turned \u201cVILE\u201d (\u2018volatile inflation, little expansion\u2019), and the economic and social fall-out is now becoming visible. Unemployment, redundancy, inflation, recession, insecurity, and poverty all loom, causing governments, businesses and individuals to reevaluate their priorities. A changing world changes attitudes, and the earliest manifestations of such change can often be found in figurative language. Political rhetoric attempts to sweeten the bitter pill that nations have no choice but to swallow; all are invited to share the pain, make sacrifices for the common good, and weather the storm. But more sinister undertones can also be perceived. In times of social and financial dire straits, scapegoats are sought and mercilessly pursued in the press. The elderly, unemployed, and disabled are under fire for \u201csponging off the state\u201d; and as jobs become scarcer and the tax bill rises, migrant populations and asylum seekers are viewed with increasing suspicion and resentment. Calls for a \u201cbig society\u201d fall on deaf ears. Society, it seems, is shrinking as self-preservation takes hold. Austerity is a timely area of study: although austerity measures have been implemented in the past, most of the contributions here address the current political and economic situation, which means that some of the studies reported are work in progress while others look at particular \u201cwindows\u201d of language output from the recent past. Whichever their focus, the papers presented here feature up-to-the-minute research into the metaphors being used to comment upon our current socioeconomic situation. The picture of austerity that emerges from these snapshots is a complex one, and one which is likely to be developed further and more widely in the coming future

A taxonomy of problems in arabic-english Translation: a systemic functional Linguistics approach Tawffeek abdou

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDWorking with Arab students pursuing a degree in English Language and Translation at the Taiz University, Republic of Yemen, has brought to the researcher‟s attention a number of errors or problems encountered in Arabic to English translation. This study aims to investigate the problems encountered by student translators (STs), novice translators (NTs) as well as more experienced translators (Ts) while translating from Arabic into English. The study starts with the assumption that Arabic and English belong to different families of languages and thus there is rarely a word-for-word equivalence in both languages. The present study is cross-sectional in nature. It is based on empirical data collected from several categories of translators. In other words, the data was collected from fourth-year students in the department of English and Translation in the Faculty of Arts, Taiz University, as well as five NTs who have previously graduated from this department and are currently working in a number of accredited translation offices in Taiz. The study also investigates the challenges faced by Ts. For this purpose, a novel, a tourist brochure, an editorial, and three academic abstracts all translated by established publishing houses and translation centres in and outside Yemen are examined. These texts are analyzed to determine to what extent the problems faced by STs and NTs reoccur in published translations produced by Ts. For its conceptual framework, the study adopts an eclectic approach that does not stick rigidly to a particular paradigm but rather draws upon multiple linguistic and translation theories. However, it is mainly based on Halliday‟s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and the problems have been classified along his taxonomy of meaning metafunctions into ideational, interpersonal and textual. Extra-textual problems are also analyzed. Several SFG-based translation models such as Hatim and Mason‟s (1990) sociometic model, House‟s (1977, 1997) translation quality assessment model, Hervey et al. (1992) register analysis model and Baker‟s (1990) equivalence model are also employed in the study to help the researcher examine the problems encountered in Arabic-English translation within those four categories. In addition, Nord‟s functional model to translation which is based on Skopos theory is also taken into consideration although to a minimum extent. In addition to the analysis of translations produced by various categories of translators, the study uses several triangulation research tools such as questionnaire, Thinking Aloud Protocols (TAPs), retrospective interviews, and classroom observation. These tools are employed to assist the researcher to identify the possible causes for the problems the STs, NTs, and Ts experience from the perspective of the participants themselves. The current translation programme at Taiz University is also analyzed to determine to what extent it contributes to the poor performance of the student translators and would-be translators. The study concludes that STs, NTs and even Ts encounter several problems at the ideational, interpersonal and textual levels. They also encounter problems at the extra-textual stratum. The study attributes these problems to structural and cultural differences between the two languages, the reliance on the dictionary rather than the meaning in use of lexical items, the differences in the cohesion and coherence systems of Arabic and English, the negligence of the role of context in translation as well as unfamiliarity with text-typologies and genre conventions. In other words, participants follow a bottom-up approach in translation and come close to the source text translating it literally. This approach is very damaging because it ignores the fact that the three metafunctions might be realized differently in the two languages. Furthermore, the study concludes that the manner in which translation is taught at Taiz University as well as the syllabus contribute mainly to the lack of translation competence of the student translators and would-be translators. The programme is inadequate and it needs urgent review and improvements. The present syllabus does not keep abreast with the latest theoretical and practical developments in the discipline of translation as well as neighbouring disciplines such as contrastive linguistics, text-analysis, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and the like. As for methodology, the study concludes that it is the transmissionist (teacher-centred) teaching approach rather than the transformational (learner-centred) which is commonly used in teaching translation. As a result, the read-and-translate approach dominates the scene and no tasks, activities, or projects are given to the STs. The study provides some recommendations, which if implemented, can be useful in enabling Yemeni and Arab universities to improve the competence among student translators in order to improve translation teaching at academic level. A major contribution of this study is the description and classification of translation problems in Arabic-English translation on the basis of meaning systems. Unlike traditional descriptive error analysis, which is widely used to analyze the translation product, SFG-based text analysis provides a systematic description of translation problems which allows a precise articulation of the nature of problems that would otherwise be explained simply as translations which “sound unnatural or awkward” (Kim 2008; Yallop 1999). As far as the researcher knows, no study in the Arab world has yet tackled translation problems from this perspective. Other studies have tackled deviated forms produced by students or translators using an error analysis technique rather than a holistic approach based on solid theoretical knowledge. In other words, while most other studies focused on specific „errors‟ and error analysis and ended at that, the present study does not only looks at „errors‟ as „difference‟ (from contrastive analysis) but rather from several perspectives. It is also more comprehensive by triangulating several sources of data and pooling them together for a more informed understanding