Digital literacy practices of Saudi Female university students

This study examines the way young Saudi women use language and other communicative resources in their digitally mediated interactions. It is motivated by the debate in Saudi Arabia on the impact of digital media on the way people use language, especially Arabic, the way they manage their social relationships, and the way they enact their cultural identities. The study was conducted at a women’s university in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia. A hundred and three participants were asked to complete a questionnaire on their online language use. Forty-seven of those participants were asked to keep a detailed literacy log of their digital practices over a period of four days and to submit samples of their interactions for closer analysis. The theoretical framework used to analyze the data combines concepts from new literacy studies (Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Gee & Hayes, 2010; Street, 2003), multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006; Jewitt, Bezemer, & O'Halloran, 2016), and mediated discourse analysis (Jones & Norris, 2005; Scollon, 2001). The framework sees people’s language use in terms of social practices and explores how those practices are affected by the different media people use to communicate, and how mediated communication is linked to broader issues of culture and identity. The analysis reveals that the participants’ digital practices are multimodal and multilingual, and the choices they make about the codes and modes they use take place in the context of a complex nexus of practice, involving the interaction among (i) the affordances and constrains of the different technologies they use, (ii) the demands of their social relationships, and (iii) their individual experiences and socialization into different ways of communicating. By appropriating different codes and modes in different ways in social media, young Saudi women are able to strategically situate themselves in different cultural ‘worlds’, maintaining traditional identities and cultural practices while at the same time enacting new kinds of identities. The study contributes to the debate on the effect of digital media on language use by adopting a sociocultural approach which links language use to social practices, social relationships and social identities

Rapid Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries for new Domains and Languages

This dissertation presents innovative strategies and methods for the rapid generation of pronunciation dictionaries for new domains and languages. Depending on various conditions, solutions are proposed and developed. Starting from the straightforward scenario in which the target language is present in written form on the Internet and the mapping between speech and written language is close up to the difficult scenario in which no written form for the target language exists

A sociolinguistic study of language practices and language attitudes of Lebanese families in London

This study explores the intergenerational patterns of language use and family language policies (FLPs), language attitudes towards Arabic and multilingualism, and identity practices of Lebanese families in London. It also investigates whether heritage language maintenance (HLM) or language shift (LS) is taking place, and whether assimilation or integration into the host society is occurring. My motivation for focussing on Lebanese immigrant families is that this ethnic group is relatively under-researched, despite being arguably one of the more heterogeneous Arabic-speaking communities ethnically, socio-historically and religiously. The participants in this study are first-generation Lebanese parents who were born in Lebanon, and their second-generation Lebanese-British children born in the UK. The study uses a mixed-method approach and data is collected by means of questionnaires, distributed to children and parents, semi-structured interviews with children and Arabic schoolteachers, focus group discussions with parents, and ethnolinguistic observations of families. The findings show that Lebanese parents are engaged in family language practices and FLPs to maintain the use of Lebanese Arabic (LA) at home. Children respond by speaking mostly LA with their parents and grandparents, and mostly English with their siblings and peers. However, the domain of FLP is dynamic and multi-directional. Children exercise their own agency in various ways to (re)negotiate FLPs and socialise their parents into their own language practices and behaviours. They use code-switching (CS), with both adults and peers, as a practical bilingual practice to fulfil various communicative needs and index different identities. With regards to Arabic literacy, the data indicates that children have ‘average’ literacy skills in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), but these skills are comparatively lower than those in English, despite the input from various socialisation sources such as dense networks of Lebanese and Arabic-speakers, Arabic mass media and Arabic complementary schools in London. The data also shows that parents and children prefer English for most literacy purposes. With regards to language attitudes, Lebanese parents and children hold positive attitudes towards both varieties of Arabic. The communicative need for LA, its emotional and symbolic value, its important role in guaranteeing strong familial and cultural connections, and participants’ oral proficiency support favourable attitudes towards LA. On the other hand, the educational, economic and religious value ascribed to MSA shape participants’ positive attitudes. However, the learning of MSA is perceived as more challenging than LA and as requiring more efforts and motivation to attain competence. As for identity practices, Lebanese parents and children have successfully managed to integrate into British society, whilst equally retaining their ethnocultural identity. This study contributes to the literature on FLPs, HLM and LS, and identity practices within ethnic minorities in the UK. It also highlights the diversity within the micro-level of Lebanese families in particular, and Arabic-speaking communities in general, and the dynamics of HL learning and language practices

Tune your brown clustering, please

Brown clustering, an unsupervised hierarchical clustering technique based on ngram mutual information, has proven useful in many NLP applications. However, most uses of Brown clustering employ the same default configuration; the appropriateness of this configuration has gone predominantly unexplored. Accordingly, we present information for practitioners on the behaviour of Brown clustering in order to assist hyper-parametre tuning, in the form of a theoretical model of Brown clustering utility. This model is then evaluated empirically in two sequence labelling tasks over two text types. We explore the dynamic between the input corpus size, chosen number of classes, and quality of the resulting clusters, which has an impact for any approach using Brown clustering. In every scenario that we examine, our results reveal that the values most commonly used for the clustering are sub-optimal