Diacritic Restoration and the Development of a Part-of-Speech Tagset for the Māori Language

This thesis investigates two fundamental problems in natural language processing: diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging. Over the past three decades, statistical approaches to diacritic restoration and part-of-speech tagging have grown in interest as a consequence of the increasing availability of manually annotated training data in major languages such as English and French. However, these approaches are not practical for most minority languages, where appropriate training data is either non-existent or not publically available. Furthermore, before developing a part-of-speech tagging system, a suitable tagset is required for that language. In this thesis, we make the following contributions to bridge this gap: Firstly, we propose a method for diacritic restoration based on naive Bayes classifiers that act at word-level. Classifications are based on a rich set of features, extracted automatically from training data in the form of diacritically marked text. This method requires no additional resources, which makes it language independent. The algorithm was evaluated on one language, namely Māori, and an accuracy exceeding 99% was observed. Secondly, we present our work on creating one of the necessary resources for the development of a part-of-speech tagging system in Māori, that of a suitable tagset. The tagset described was developed in accordance with the EAGLES guidelines for morphosyntactic annotation of corpora, and was the result of in-depth analysis of the Māori grammar

Grammar practice : theory and practice

Fil: Luque Colombres, María Candelaria. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Meehan, Patricia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Oliva, María Belén. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Rius, Natalia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: de Maussion, Ana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Neyra, Vanina Pamela. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Our main objective when writing this handbook has been to design some kind of material that would provide the first-year university student at Facultad de Lenguas with the basic foundations of English grammar. Although this handout could be used as a self-study grammar guide, the student should bear in mind it is meant to be used as a complement of class work. Therefore, the material included in the present publication has not been organized according to the level of difficulty, but rather in accordance with the syllabus of the subject. Each chapter brings along graded exercises which have been carefully designed to improve and consolidate the grammar topics included in the syllabus of the subject. Finally, we would like to point out that to round off each unit, we have decided to include texts (often authentic ones) in an attempt to offer the student a new perspective on the subject: one which relates grammatical structure systematically to meaning and use.Fil: Luque Colombres, María Candelaria. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Meehan, Patricia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Oliva, María Belén. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Rius, Natalia. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: de Maussion, Ana. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina.Fil: Neyra, Vanina Pamela. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Lenguas; Argentina

Noun Phrases: Structural Patterns on Fiction

Abstract Noun phrases are very relevant in discourse, as they convey much information. However, they form a very varied group, and can differ greatly on structure, length and complexity. This paper reports a research based on the study of their behaviour in the fictional register (Biber et al., 1999) with the aim of exploring those structural features specific of the genre. For fulfilling this purpose, a corpus of study was previously selected, which consists of two extracts of 5,000 words approximately, from two different novels: Case Histories, by Kate Atkinson, and Moon Palace, by Paul Auster. The texts were analysed by signaling the noun phrases that contained and by classifying them according to the number and type of constituents. Several different classifications were necessary to conduct the analysis of the different word classes and elements appearing in the phrases. These data were recollected, observed and described, and the results were explained. The most relevant findings are the nearly equal distribution of nouns and pronouns as heads of the phrases —53% in the case of nouns, and 47% in the case of pronouns—, the essential role played by personal pronouns in the register—which form an 80% of all the pronominal forms—, and the recurrence of other structures and word classes which are infrequent in other registers, such as relative clauses, possessive determiners or proper names (Biber et al., 1999). All of these findings point to the fact that fiction is concerned with the lives, actions and goals of a restricted set of characters, presented as familiar to the readers. In addition, sometimes full reproductions of dialogues between characters are present in the texts, so fiction is a written genre which encapsulates some conversational features. Therefore, the genre sometimes acquires a more colloquial tone which, together with the familiar atmosphere created by the story, tries to involve the reader in that fictional reality

Syntax of Dutch

The Syntax of Dutch will be published in at least seven volumes in the period 2012-2016 and aims at presenting a synthesis of the currently available syntactic knowledge of Dutch. It is primarily concerned with language description and not with linguistic theory, and provides support to all researchers interested in matters relating to the syntax of Dutch, including advanced students of language and linguistics. The two volumes Nouns and Noun Phrases discuss the internal make-up as well as the distribution of noun phrases. Topics that will be covered include: complementation and modification of noun phrases; properties of determiners (article, demonstratives), numeral and quantifiers; the use of noun phrases as arguments, predicates and adverbial modifiers.De afgelopen vijftig jaar zijn er talloze wetenschappelijke en vaak specialistische werken over grammatica verschenen. In diezelfde periode is echter niet alleen de discussie over grammatica veranderd, maar ook de presentatie van formele structuren en de interpretatie van informatie. Gedegen antwoorden over de structuur van een bepaalde taal zijn daarom niet eenvoudig te vinden. Syntax of Dutch slaagt hier echter uitstekend in. Het werk richt zich op één enkel kernaspect van de Nederlandse grammatica: de zinsbouw of de syntaxis. Ondanks het specialistische onderwerp bestaat het uit maar liefst zeven delen, waaraan in totaal meer dan tien jaar is gewerkt. Het resultaat is een uniek naslagwerk voor taalkundigen én geïnteresseerde leken die meer willen weten over de syntactische eigenschappen van de Nederlandse taa

Towards Universal Semantic Tagging

The paper proposes the task of universal semantic tagging---tagging word tokens with language-neutral, semantically informative tags. We argue that the task, with its independent nature, contributes to better semantic analysis for wide-coverage multilingual text. We present the initial version of the semantic tagset and show that (a) the tags provide semantically fine-grained information, and (b) they are suitable for cross-lingual semantic parsing. An application of the semantic tagging in the Parallel Meaning Bank supports both of these points as the tags contribute to formal lexical semantics and their cross-lingual projection. As a part of the application, we annotate a small corpus with the semantic tags and present new baseline result for universal semantic tagging.Comment: 9 pages, International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS

Difficulties Encountered by English Specific Purposes Learners in Using Pronouns

         تناولت هذه الدراسة الصعوبات التي تواجه الطلبة دارسي اللغة الانكليزية لاغراض خاصة في استعمال الانواع المختلفة  من الضمائر ان طلبة قسم الحاسبات في المعهد التقني بابل بحاجة ماسة لاستخدام اللغة الانكليزية بالشكل الصحيح باعتبار ان الحاسبات تعتبر تقنية حديثة وعالمية وملازمة للغة الانكليزية0 وان استخدام الانواع المختلفة من الضمائر في اللغة الانكليزية يعتبر ضروري جدا لسلامة اللغة وخصوصا للطلبة الدارسي اللغة الانكليزية لاغراض خاصة  لذا هدفت الدراسة الى شرح الانواع المختلفة من الضمائر وتشخيص الصعوبات التي تواجه الطلبة في استخدام الضمائر وتميز اسباب حصول الاخطاء فيها0         وعليه افترضت الدراسة ان معظم الطلبة دارسي اللغة الانكليزية لاغراض خاصة يواجهون صعوبات في استخدام الضمائر0 وان سبب عدم استجابة الطلبة يعود لعدم استعمال الانواع المختلفة من الضمائر في مناهجهم ولتحقيق هدف هذه الدراسة صمم اختبار لعينة من طلبة قسم الحاسبات (40 طالب وطالبة) لتشخيص قابليتهم في استخدام الانواع المختلفة من الضمائر0The study deals with the difficulties encountered by English Specific Purposes (ESP) learners in using pronoun. There are many types of pronoun, each one has a special function. Therefore, the study aims at investigating the difficulties encountered ESP learners in using pronouns. The study hypothesizes that: most of Iraqi ESP students face difficulties in using different types of pronouns in studying English as a foreign language. Finding out the causes of the students errors.          To verify these hypotheses, a diagnostic test has been adopted and applied to a sample of (40) Iraqi (2) stage students, Computer Department, Technical Institute of Babylon to investigate their ability in using pronouns in studying English as a foreign language

Syntax of Dutch. Nouns and Noun Phrases Volume 2

The aim of this publication is to present a complete synthesis of the available knowledge of Dutch syntax. It is primarily concerned with language description and not with linguistic theory, providing support to all researchers of language and linguistics, including graduate students. The first two volumes in this series, Nouns and Noun Phrases, discuss the internal make-up as well as the distribution of noun phrases, and address the following areas: complementation and modification of noun phrases; properties of determiners (articles and demonstratives), numerals and quantifiers; the use of noun phrases as arguments, predicates and adverbial modifiers.