Probabilistic Modelling of Morphologically Rich Languages

This thesis investigates how the sub-structure of words can be accounted for in probabilistic models of language. Such models play an important role in natural language processing tasks such as translation or speech recognition, but often rely on the simplistic assumption that words are opaque symbols. This assumption does not fit morphologically complex language well, where words can have rich internal structure and sub-word elements are shared across distinct word forms. Our approach is to encode basic notions of morphology into the assumptions of three different types of language models, with the intention that leveraging shared sub-word structure can improve model performance and help overcome data sparsity that arises from morphological processes. In the context of n-gram language modelling, we formulate a new Bayesian model that relies on the decomposition of compound words to attain better smoothing, and we develop a new distributed language model that learns vector representations of morphemes and leverages them to link together morphologically related words. In both cases, we show that accounting for word sub-structure improves the models' intrinsic performance and provides benefits when applied to other tasks, including machine translation. We then shift the focus beyond the modelling of word sequences and consider models that automatically learn what the sub-word elements of a given language are, given an unannotated list of words. We formulate a novel model that can learn discontiguous morphemes in addition to the more conventional contiguous morphemes that most previous models are limited to. This approach is demonstrated on Semitic languages, and we find that modelling discontiguous sub-word structures leads to improvements in the task of segmenting words into their contiguous morphemes.Comment: DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, submitted and accepted 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8df7324f-d3b8-47a1-8b0b-3a6feb5f45c

Globalisation, Geopolitics, and Gender in Professional Communication

This edited collection investigates the linguistics of globalisation, geopolitics and gender in workplace cultures in a range of different contemporary international settings. The chapters examine how issues of globalisation, gender and geopolitics affect professionals in different workplace contexts, including domestic workers; IT professionals; teachers, university staff; engineers; entrepreneurs; CEOs of different corporates including locally based businesses as well as multinationals; farmers; co-operative leaders; NGO leaders; bloggers; healthcare assistants and caregivers. Taking different sociolinguistic approaches to exploring language and the geopolitics of gender at work in Dubai, Kuwait, Kenya, Uganda, Morocco, Nigeria, Malaysia, Turkey, Belgium, Switzerland, New Zealand, Uganda, the UK and the USA, each chapter focuses on a range of salient geopolitical issues which often have global applicability, but which may also be subject to more localised socio-cultural variation. The chapters critically discuss issues of gendered language, perceptions and representations of workplace cultures, discrimination, the role of gendered stereotyping and deeply ingrained socio-cultural myths about gender and the importance of examining the intersections of identity – all of which continue to persist as barriers to equality and inclusion in workplaces worldwide. Despite the variation and diversity in professions and geopolitical contexts captured across the chapters, remarkably similar issues of gender discrimination and persisting inequalities are identified and critically discussed, thus pointing to the global nature of these issues

A UK Discourse Analysis of Belonging in Romanian Identity and Immigratory Accounts

The 1st January 2014 was a political milestone for speculation and warning in the UK as Romania’s citizens became free to live and work visa-free across the EU. This thesis is a constructionist social psychological study drawing upon Shotter’s (1993a) writing on citizenship and Balkanism studies (Todorova, 2009) to investigate how citizenship and belonging were rhetorically mobilised within this epoch. Employing a dual-site methodology, receiving society (extracts from the BBCs Question Time and political interviews from The Andrew Marr Show), and mover voices (narrative interviews with ten self-defining Romanians living in Sheffield) were analysed using interpretative repertoire analysis and discourse analysis, respectively (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). The receiving society analysis explored how two interpretative repertoires were occasioned argumentatively as well as justified or contested rhetorically to construct the nation as under ‘threat’ from Romanian migration or the body politic as being ‘abused’ by Romanian migrants. Conversely, the mover voice analysis focused upon rhetorical features underpinning two key ‘moments’ of identity construction in the interviews: ‘civic becoming’, where participants narrated their acculturation and attempt to overcome ‘otherness’, and ‘civic belonging’, where ‘good migrant’ or ‘active citizen’ narratives in the receiving society were invoked. The thesis concludes by drawing upon critical psychology (Fox, D., Prilleltensky, & Austin, 2009) and Balkanism studies to make sense of the empirical findings. Future avenues of identity exploration, in light of the post-2014 political climate, are considered. The thesis provides three novel contributions to knowledge: firstly it examines the previously undocumented period whereby Romanian identity and migration were constructed in relation to commentary over lifting transitional controls; secondly it utilises a dual-site methodological approach concerned with how distinctive acculturative voices make sense of this epoch; lastly it employs Balkanism studies to historicise the legacy of such contemporary discourse, an important theoretical undertaking not previously undertaken in social psychology

Exploring a potential correspondence between the structural conditiions of universities and stratified graduate work

This thesis examines the nature of the relationship between the educational environment of UK universities and the graduate labour market through the lens of correspondence theory. This theory was developed by Bowles and Gintis (1976), who asserted that there is a structurally reproductive relationship between the conditions of education and labour. One of the key aims of this research is to test the usefulness of this theory to contemporary UK higher education. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 students and key staff members in the Law faculties of three different status universities; Elite, Old and New. The interviews covered a number of key topics including class sizes, relationships between students and staff, career preparation and routines of working. Documents outlining the nature of the courses (e.g. prospectuses) were also collected and analysed. These data revealed that at Elite University, subject specific knowledge is the primary purpose of learning and the students encounter an intense working environment but are afforded high levels of autonomy. At New University, the educational experience for students is much more structured, with much less pressure on students to perform and a central focus upon employability. Old University occupies a position between these two universities, offering a form of education that encourages some autonomy within a structured teaching environment and values both employability teaching and subject specific knowledge. The significant differences between the teaching and conditions at these three universities reflect characteristics associated with different levels of graduate work thus indicating the continued analytical value of the correspondence theory

Dead in the long room

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonThis thesis comprises a crime novel, Dead in the Long Room, and an accompanying extended critical essay. Dead in the Long Room is a novel written in homage to the Golden Age of crime and the many writers that genre represents. It embodies Gulddal & Rolls’ (2016) notion of the creative-critical nexus - the idea that literary texts do not exist as distinct from critical endeavour, but are in themselves exercises in critical response. Dead in the Long Room is therefore to be conceived as what I have termed elsewhere (Green 2021) ‘enacted criticism’. The critical essay that follows the novel offers an extended critical commentary on and engagement with my processes as a writer in the production of the novel. Drawing on critical resources derived from inter alia Bruner, Barthes, Bakhtin and Todorov, it engages in sustained critical fashion with the genre of Golden Age detective fiction - a form that is eminently self-reflexive and that is frequently marked by a deep awareness of its own ‘constructedness’ - and the ways in which textual interaction is conceived. Taken together, the novel and the critical essay are considered as examples of the kinds of ‘poetics’ envisioned by Lasky (2013)

'We are here because you were there': an investigation of the reading of, and engagement with, minority ethnic fiction in UK public libraries

This thesis aims to investigate the reading of, and engagement with, minority ethnic English language fiction in public libraries, focusing on materials written by Black British and Asian authors. In order to achieve this, a literature review and three empirical studies were conducted, using a mixed methods approach. The literature review showed that previous research in the field of minority ethnic fiction had largely overlooked its readership, and furthermore that academic models of fiction reading had not considered this type of material. The first study was a survey of the reading habits and attitudes of library users, conducted via a quantitative questionnaire and subsequent qualitative interviews. This was cross-sectional at the individual respondent level, but a longitudinal element was also included at the library level, which enabled analysis by community type, local ethnicity and class. The second study was a qualitative exploration of perceptions of reader ‘types’ using personal construct theory and the associated repertory grid technique, in order to generate and explore a series of constructs relating to the characteristics of fiction readers. The third, quantitative study also drew from personal construct theory, adapting the repertory grid to investigate in greater depth a group of readers’ beliefs, attitudes and intentions to read certain fiction genres. A model of genre fiction reading is presented, based on the research findings. This identifies a new fiction reader profile and gives a causal ordering to the characteristics of the fiction reader which had previously not been achieved. The model is also demonstrably flexible to allow different types of factors to be included, and to further explore the interactions between these factors. Finally, the theoretical and professional contributions of the research are summarised, and recommendations are made for future research and the development within libraries and the book trade of minority ethnic fiction collections