Master of Arts

thesisThis study addresses the most salient issues surrounding the tensions between the Ethnic Han and Uyghur in the People's Republic of China from the perspective of the nonestablishment. Using YouTube.com as a source, this study analyzes the videos uploaded to that website as well as the commentary associated with the videos, both posted by everyday netizens. This study concludes that many of the issues traditional sources have found to be relevant are also prevalent on YouTube.com. Additionally, this study suggests that there is dissatisfaction among the Han on the way the Chinese government handles its ethnic policy, especially as it relates to the Uyghur. This study also addresses some of the methodological problems associated with using the Internet as a source and YouTube in particular. This study suggests that while attribution can be difficult, if not impossible to ascertain, this peculiarity of the Internet also allows for more open and honest discussion of difficult ethnic issues denied traditional sources. It was also concluded that YouTube has the potential to help refine and guide the utilization of traditional sources. This study hopes to have established that meaningful original research can be conducted on the Internet and on YouTube.com

Glyph guessing for 'oo' and 'ee': spatial frequency information in sound symbolic matching for ancient and unfamiliar scripts.

In three experiments, we asked whether diverse scripts contain interpretable information about the speech sounds they represent. When presented with a pair of unfamiliar letters, adult readers correctly guess which is /i/ (the 'ee' sound in 'feet'), and which is /u/ (the 'oo' sound in 'shoe') at rates higher than expected by chance, as shown in a large sample of Singaporean university students (Experiment 1) and replicated in a larger sample of international Internet users (Experiment 2). To uncover what properties of the letters contribute to different scripts' 'guessability,' we analysed the visual spatial frequencies in each letter (Experiment 3). We predicted that the lower spectral frequencies in the formants of the vowel /u/ would pattern with lower spatial frequencies in the corresponding letters. Instead, we found that across all spatial frequencies, the letter with more black/white cycles (i.e. more ink) was more likely to be guessed as /u/, and the larger the difference between the glyphs in a pair, the higher the script's guessability. We propose that diverse groups of humans across historical time and geographical space tend to employ similar iconic strategies for representing speech in visual form, and provide norms for letter pairs from 56 diverse scripts

MEASURING WORD FREQUENCY IN LANGUAGE TEACHING TEXTBOOKS USING LEXITÜRK

Vocabulary is a fundamental component of language usage, and study into its interactions with other aspects of language competence is an essential topic of language teaching. There are strong relationships between vocabulary and language competency measurements. Learners with larger vocabularies are better at a variety of language abilities than those with lower vocabularies. As a result, it may be stated that vocabulary knowledge is inextricably tied to total language proficiency. This suggests that the quantity of words we know has an impact on how much text we can comprehend. The more often a word is used, the more polysemy and irregular morphology it is likely to have. One of a word's quantifiable qualities is how extensively it is used. Based on this measurable attribute, the word's prevalence and frequency can be considered a guiding reference. Analyzing the frequency of recurrence of a specific word or phrase is the most basic sort of corpus analysis. Words frequently occur together, forming collocations, colligations, and other word combinations. Exploring such trends is another sort of corpus analysis that one may perform. This is also known as chunks, n-grams, or lexical bundles. In particular, when selecting which word should be prioritized for language learners. If this model is adopted, foreign language students will be taught essentially the most often used words. The development and application of measurement like an analysis tool can assist developers or researchers in the dilemma of preferences arising from the inevitable use of a word corpus. For teaching after the stage of creating a corpus and shaping the language textbook's content with the marked and dense frequency words from a corpus are discussed in this study, and a tool which is created by the author is presented to and for the scientific community.  Kelime bilgisi, dil kullanımının temel bir bileşenidir ve dil yeterliliğinin diğer yönleriyle etkileşimlerinin incelenmesi, dil öğretiminin temel bir konusudur. Kelime bilgisi ve dil yeterliliği ölçümleri arasında güçlü ilişkiler vardır. Daha geniş kelime dağarcığına sahip öğrenciler, çeşitli dil becerilerinde daha düşük kelime dağarcığına sahip olanlardan daha iyidir. Sonuç olarak, kelime bilgisinin ayrılmaz bir şekilde toplam dil yeterliliğine bağlı olduğu söylenebilir. Bu, bildiğimiz kelimelerin miktarının, ne kadar metni anlayabileceğimiz üzerinde bir etkisi olduğunu göstermektedir. Bir kelime ne kadar sık ​​kullanılırsa, o kadar çok anlamlılık ve düzensiz morfolojiye sahip olması muhtemeldir. Bir kelimenin ölçülebilir niteliklerinden biri, ne kadar kapsamlı kullanıldığıdır. Bu ölçülebilir özelliğe dayanarak, kelimenin yaygınlığı ve sıklığı yol gösterici bir referans olarak kabul edilebilir. Belirli bir kelimenin veya ifadenin tekrarlanma sıklığını analiz etmek, en temel türde korpus analizidir. Kelimeler sıklıkla birlikte bulunur, eşdizimler, birliktelikler ve diğer kelime kombinasyonları oluşturur. Bu tür eğilimleri keşfetmek, kişinin yapabileceği başka bir tür korpus analizidir. Bu aynı zamanda parçalar, n-gramlar veya sözcük demetleri olarak da bilinir. Özellikle, dil öğrenenler için hangi kelimeye öncelik verilmesi gerektiğini seçerken. Bu model benimsenirse, yabancı dil öğrencilerine esasen en sık kullanılan kelimeler öğretilecektir. Ölçümün bir analiz aracı gibi geliştirilmesi ve uygulanması, bir kelime bütünlüğünün kaçınılmaz kullanımından kaynaklanan tercihler ikileminde geliştiricilere veya araştırmacılara yardımcı olabilir. Derlem oluşturma ve dil ders kitabının içeriğini bir bütünceden belirgin ve yoğun sıklıktaki kelimelerle şekillendirme aşamasından sonra öğretim için bu çalışmada ele alınmış ve yazarın oluşturduğu bir araç bilim camiasına ve bilim camiasına sunulmuştur

The Chinese print media’s reporting of domestic ‘terrorist’ attacks: ideographs, social values and counter-terrorism frames

Following the attacks of September 11 2001 in the United States, China proclaimed its own ‘war on terror’ with the Uyghur of Xinjiang as a frontline. At the same time as ongoing US anti-terrorism efforts around the world, the Chinese government deployed repressive campaigns in one of its own troubled regions, campaigns which intensified with the riots in Urumqi in 2009. A series of high-casualty attacks since 2014 demonstrates further exacerbation of the conflict and entailed a strengthening of the counter-terrorism apparatus in the following years. Yet several scholars have questioned the nature of the purported terrorist threat to China, suggesting that the new narrative around the Uyghur issue was an attempt by the regime to preserve its authority and escape international condemnation for the severity of its actions. However, although these scholars highlight the party-state’s use of the terrorism label for the Xinjiang conflict, there is still a comprehensive analysis missing on how the party-state portrays the terrorist threat to its people. Responding to this research problem, this dissertation presents the first systematic analysis Chinese media coverage of domestic ‘terrorist’ attacks. Drawing upon eight cases from 2009 to 2015, and twelve Chinese newspapers, this analysis focuses on the determinants of terrorism coverage and framing patterns through a combination of qualitative content analysis and quantitative text analysis. I argue that the Chinese party-state engages through various methods of news censorship and coordination to construct a terrorist threat that is surprisingly abstract- invoking extremism as the threat, but without referring much to particular agents, organisation or religions. Also, I argue that the party-state uses the abstract terrorism portrayal to campaign against all ‘three evil forces’ (terrorism, extremism, separatism), while also promoting social values that align with the regime’s resilience. The dissertation reveals the various frames that make up the party-state’s terrorist threat construction. It demonstrates that the party-state uses the Xinjiang conflict to rally the Chinese people under the flag of the Chinese Communist Party while also creating the image of an archetypical enemy that can be applied to a large range of party-state perceived threats. These features of the Chinese news coverage of ‘terrorist’ attacks shed light on the mediated reality of the conflict and provide an alternative perspective to US-centred media scholarship on terrorism

Identifying risks in China's counter-terrorism policy

published_or_final_versionInternational and Public AffairsMasterMaster of International and Public Affair

The Syntax of Colophons

The present volume focuses on the colophons found in several pothi manuscripts from Central, South and South East Asia. Its contributions discuss the colophons’ defining features, thus exposing their ‘syntax’, focusing particularly on the tracing of recurring patterns. The information extrapolated from colophons is further analysed to obtain a better understanding of these distinct manuscript cultures

Cross-Lingual and Low-Resource Sentiment Analysis

Identifying sentiment in a low-resource language is essential for understanding opinions internationally and for responding to the urgent needs of locals affected by disaster incidents in different world regions. While tools and resources for recognizing sentiment in high-resource languages are plentiful, determining the most effective methods for achieving this task in a low-resource language which lacks annotated data is still an open research question. Most existing approaches for cross-lingual sentiment analysis to date have relied on high-resource machine translation systems, large amounts of parallel data, or resources only available for Indo-European languages. This work presents methods, resources, and strategies for identifying sentiment cross-lingually in a low-resource language. We introduce a cross-lingual sentiment model which can be trained on a high-resource language and applied directly to a low-resource language. The model offers the feature of lexicalizing the training data using a bilingual dictionary, but can perform well without any translation into the target language. Through an extensive experimental analysis, evaluated on 17 target languages, we show that the model performs well with bilingual word vectors pre-trained on an appropriate translation corpus. We compare in-genre and in-domain parallel corpora, out-of-domain parallel corpora, in-domain comparable corpora, and monolingual corpora, and show that a relatively small, in-domain parallel corpus works best as a transfer medium if it is available. We describe the conditions under which other resources and embedding generation methods are successful, and these include our strategies for leveraging in-domain comparable corpora for cross-lingual sentiment analysis. To enhance the ability of the cross-lingual model to identify sentiment in the target language, we present new feature representations for sentiment analysis that are incorporated in the cross-lingual model: bilingual sentiment embeddings that are used to create bilingual sentiment scores, and a method for updating the sentiment embeddings during training by lexicalization of the target language. This feature configuration works best for the largest number of target languages in both untargeted and targeted cross-lingual sentiment experiments. The cross-lingual model is studied further by evaluating the role of the source language, which has traditionally been assumed to be English. We build cross-lingual models using 15 source languages, including two non-European and non-Indo-European source languages: Arabic and Chinese. We show that language families play an important role in the performance of the model, as does the morphological complexity of the source language. In the last part of the work, we focus on sentiment analysis towards targets. We study Arabic as a representative morphologically complex language and develop models and morphological representation features for identifying entity targets and sentiment expressed towards them in Arabic open-domain text. Finally, we adapt our cross-lingual sentiment models for the detection of sentiment towards targets. Through cross-lingual experiments on Arabic and English, we demonstrate that our findings regarding resources, features, and language also hold true for the transfer of targeted sentiment

Xinjiang Year Zero

Since 2017, the Chinese authorities have detained hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities in 'reeducation camps' in China’s northwestern Xinjiang autonomous region. While the official reason for this mass detention was to prevent terrorism, the campaign has since become a wholesale attempt to remould the ways of life of these peoples—an experiment in social engineering aimed at erasing their cultures and traditions in order to transform them into ‘civilised’ citizens as construed by the Chinese state. Through a collection of essays penned by scholars who have conducted extensive research in the region, this volume sets itself three goals: first, to document the reality of the emerging surveillance state and coercive assimilation unfolding in Xinjiang in recent years and continuing today; second, to describe the workings and analyse the causes of these policies, highlighting how these developments insert themselves not only in domestic Chinese trends, but also in broader global dynamics; and, third, to propose action, to heed the progressive Left’s call since Marx to change the world and not just analyse it

Cybernationalism and cyberactivism in China

El nacionalismo en la era de Internet se está convirtiendo cada vez más en un factor esencial que influye en la agenda-setting de la sociedad china, así como en las relaciones de China con los países extranjeros, especialmente con Occidente. Para China, una mejor comprensión de la estructura teórica universal y de los patrones de comportamiento del nacionalismo facilitaría la articulación social general de esta tendencia y potenciaría su papel positivo en la agenda-setting social. Por otra parte, un estudio del cibernacionalismo chino basado en una perspectiva china en el mundo académico occidental es un intento de transculturación. Desde el punto de vista de las relaciones internacionales y la geopolítica actuales, que son bastante urgentes, este intento ayudaría a mejorar la compatibilidad de China con el actual orden mundial dominado por Occidente, a reducir la desinformación entre China y otros países y a sentar las bases culturales e ideológicas para otras colaboraciones internacionales. Teniendo en cuenta el estado actual de la investigación sobre el nacionalismo chino y la naturaleza participativa de las masas del cibernacionalismo, esta disertación se centra en el cibernacionalismo en las tres partes siguientes. El primero es un estudio de los orígenes históricos del cibernacionalismo chino. Esta sección incluye tanto una exploración del consenso social en la antigua China como un estudio de la influencia del nacionalismo en la historia china moderna. El estudio de los orígenes históricos no sólo nos muestra la secuencia cronológica de la experiencia del desarrollo y la evolución tanto del proto-nacionalismo como del nacionalismo en China, sino que también revela un impulso decisivo para las reivindicaciones y comportamientos actuales del cibernacionalismo. La segunda parte trata del proceso de formación y ascenso del cibernacionalismo desde el siglo XXI. El importante antecedente del paso del nacionalismo al cibernacionalismo es el proceso de informatización de la sociedad china. Una vez completado el estudio de la situación básica de la sociedad china de Internet, especialmente el estudio de los medios sociales como espacio público, podemos vincular Internet con el nacionalismo y examinar el nuevo desarrollo del nacionalismo en la era de la participación de masas. El objetivo final es conectar el proto-nacionalismo, el nacionalismo y el cibernacionalismo, y seguir construyendo una comprensión del cibernacionalismo que sea coherente tanto con los principios universales del nacionalismo como con el contexto chino. Por último, validamos los resultados derivados del estudio anterior a través de la realidad social, es decir, estudiando las prácticas de ciberactivismo del cibernacionalismo para juzgar su suficiencia general así como su validez. Llevaremos a cabo varios estudios de caso de natural language processing basados en big data para reproducir la lógica de comportamiento y el impacto real del ciberactivismo de la manera más cercana posible a la realidad de Internet, evitando al mismo tiempo los defectos de argumentación unilateral y de infrarrepresentación de los estudios de caso tradicionales.Nationalism in the Internet age is increasingly becoming an essential factor influencing agendasetting within Chinese society, as well as China’s relations with foreign countries, especially the West. For China, a better understanding of the universal theoretical structure and behavioral patterns of nationalism would facilitate the overall social articulation of this trend and enhance its positive role in social agenda setting. On the other hand, a study of Chinese cybernationalism based on a Chinese perspective in western academia is an attempt at transculturation. From the viewpoint of the current rather urgent international relations and geopolitics, such an attempt would help to enhance China’s compatibility with the current western-dominated world order, reduce misinformation between China and other countries, and lay the cultural and ideological groundwork for various other international collaborations. Considering the current state of Chinese nationalism research and the mass participatory nature of cybernationalism, this dissertation focuses on cybernationalism in the following three parts. The first is a study of the historical origins of Chinese cybernationalism. This section includes both an exploration of the social consensus in ancient China and a survey of the influence of nationalism in modern Chinese history. The historical origins study not only shows us the chronological sequence of experiencing the development and evolution of both proto-nationalism and nationalism in China, but also reveals a decisive impetus for the current claims and behaviors of cybernationalism. The second part deals with the process of formation and rise of cybernationalism since the 21st century. The important background for the move from nationalism to cybernationalism is the informatization process of Chinese society. After we have completed the study of the basic situation of Chinese Internet society, especially the study of social media as a public space, we can link the Internet with nationalism and examine the new development of nationalism in the era of mass participation. The ultimate goal is to connect the proto-nationalism, nationalism, cybernationalism, and furtherly construct an understanding of cybernationalism that is consistent with both the universal principles of nationalism and the Chinese context. Finally, we validate the results derived from the previous study through social reality, i.e., by studying the cyberactivism practices of cybernationalism to judge its general sufficiency as well as validity. We will conduct several natural language processing case studies based on big data to reproduce the behavioral logic and actual impact of cyberactivism in the closest possible way to the Internet reality while avoiding the unilateral argumentation and under-representation flaws of traditional case studies