ENHANCING LITERATURE REVIEW METHODS - TOWARDS MORE EFFICIENT LITERATURE RESEARCH WITH LATENT SEMANTIC INDEXING

Nowadays, the facilitated access to increasing amounts of information and scientific resources means that more and more effort is required to conduct comprehensive literature reviews. Literature search, as a fundamental, complex, and time-consuming step in every literature research process, is part of many established scientific methods. However, it is still predominantly supported by search techniqus based on conventional term-matching methods. We address the lack of semantic approaches in this context by proposing an enhancement of established literature review methods. For this purpose, we followed design science research (DSR) principles in order to develop artifacts and implement a prototype of our Tool for Semantic Indexing and Similarity Quries (TSISQ) based on the core concepts of latent semantic indexing (LSI). Its applicability is demonstrated and evaluated in a case study. Results indicate that the presented approach can help save valuable time in finding basic literature in a desired research field or increasing the comprehensiveness of a review by efficiently identifying sources that otherwise would not have been taken into account. The target audience for our findings includes researchers who need to efficiently gain an overview of a specific research field, deepen their knowledge or refine the theoretical foundations of their research

Co-text and receptive multilingualism ‒ Finnish students comprehending Estonian

This paper will offer some examples to explain the understanding of closely related languages. The traditional contrastive research in studying Estonian and Finnish has above all been based on similarities which have been studied on the level of, e.g., morphemes. However, resemblance is actually more holistic in nature. A rather new perspective on the intelligibility of closely related languages is that of receptive multilingualism. It refers to such communication where speakers use their L1s and understand the L1s of others. Common elements are often recognized in texts as well: cognates facilitate reading comprehension. The results of various translation tests show that the perceived similarity leads to different comprehension results in single items and in texts. Semantic relationships in phraseological units should also be considered and possibilities of improving mutual intelligibility by utilising semantic regularities will be discussed.Kokkuvõte. Pirkko Muikku-Werner: Ko-tekst ja retseptiivne mitmekeelsus – kuidas soome üliõpilased mõistavad eesti keelt. Tänapäevaseid keeleoskusnõudeid arvestades on mõistlik soodustada lähedaste sugulaskeelte, nagu eesti ja soome keele õppimist. Artikkel esitab näiteid, mis selgitavad arusaamist lähedaste sugulaskeelte vahel. Retseptiivse mitmekeelsuse uuringud sugulaskeele arusaadavusest emakeele baasil lähenevad mõistmisele üsnagi uuest vaatepunktist. Retseptiivne mitmekeelsus tähendab suhtlust, kus kõnelejad kasutavad oma emakeelt ja saavad aru oma kaasvestlejate emakeelest. Selle tähtsaks eelduseks on sarnasuste ärakasutamine holistilisematelt ja mitmekülgsematelt seisukohtadelt, kui seda varem on tehtud; näiteks ei liiguta pelgalt morfeemide tasandil, nagu soome ja eesti keele kontrastiivsed uuringud tavaliselt on teinud. Sarnasus on tegelikult palju holistlikum. Näiteks tekstidest ära tuntud sarnased elemendid lihtsustavad loetu mõistmist. Soome üliõpilaste seas läbi viidud testid näitavad, et tunnetatud sarnasus viib üksiksõnade ja lausetesse paigutatud sõnade tõlkimisel erinevate tulemusteni, mis annab tunnis tust ko(n)teksti olulisusest. Tähelepanu tasub pöörata ka fraseoloogilise ühendi liikmete vahelistele semantilistele suhetele. Nende vaheliste seaduspärasuste vaatlemine võib pakkuda uusi võimalusi lähedase sugulaskeele mõistmise lihtsustamiseks.Märksõnad: sarnasus, retseptiivne mitmekeelsus, sugulaskeeled, eesti keel, soome keel, arusaadavus, tõlketesti

Inducing Language-Agnostic Multilingual Representations

Cross-lingual representations have the potential to make NLP techniques available to the vast majority of languages in the world. However, they currently require large pretraining corpora or access to typologically similar languages. In this work, we address these obstacles by removing language identity signals from multilingual embeddings. We examine three approaches for this: (i) re-aligning the vector spaces of target languages (all together) to a pivot source language; (ii) removing language-specific means and variances, which yields better discriminativeness of embeddings as a by-product; and (iii) increasing input similarity across languages by removing morphological contractions and sentence reordering. We evaluate on XNLI and reference-free MT across 19 typologically diverse languages. Our findings expose the limitations of these approaches -- unlike vector normalization, vector space re-alignment and text normalization do not achieve consistent gains across encoders and languages. Due to the approaches' additive effects, their combination decreases the cross-lingual transfer gap by 8.9 points (m-BERT) and 18.2 points (XLM-R) on average across all tasks and languages, however. Our code and models are publicly available.Comment: *SEM2021 Camera Read

Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

Exploring cognition processes in second language acquisition: the case of cognates and false-friends in EST

This article explores one aspect of the processing perspective in L2 learning in an EST context: the processing of new content words, in English, of the type ‘cognates’ and ‘false friends’, by Spanish speaking engineering students. The paper does not try to offer a comprehensive overview of language acquisition mechanisms, but rather it is intended to review more narrowly how our conceptual systems, governed by intricately linked networks of neural connections in the brain, make language development possible, creating, at the same time, some L2 processing problems. The case of ‘cognates and false friends’ in specialised contexts is brought here to illustrate some of the processing problems that the L2 learner has to confront, and how mappings in the visual, phonological and semantic (conceptual) brain structures function in second language processing of new vocabulary. Resumen Este artículo pretende reflexionar sobre un aspecto de la perspectiva del procesamiento de segundas lenguas (L2) en el contexto del ICT: el procesamiento de palabras nuevas, en inglés, conocidas como “cognados” y “falsos amigos”, por parte de estudiantes de ingeniería españoles. No se pretende ofrecer una visión completa de los mecanismos de adquisición del lenguaje, más bien se intenta mostrar cómo nuestro sistema conceptual, gobernado por una complicada red de conexiones neuronales en el cerebro, hace posible el desarrollo del lenguaje, aunque ello conlleve ciertas dificultades en el procesamiento de segundas lenguas. El caso de los “cognados” y los “falsos amigos”, en los lenguajes de especialidad, se trae para ilustrar algunos de los problemas de procesamiento que el estudiante de una lengua extranjera tiene que afrontar y el funcionamiento de las correspondencias entre las estructuras visuales, fonológicas y semánticas (conceptuales) del cerebro en el procesamiento de nuevo vocabulario

Sequencing in SLA: Phonological Memory, Chunking and Points of Order.

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139863/1/Ellis1996Chunking.pd

Reading in English and in Chinese: Case Study of Retrospective Miscue Analysis with Two Adult ELLs

Retrospective Miscue Analysis (RMA) has proved to be a useful instructional tool in language arts classrooms and for English learners from various cultures. However, it has not been used with native Mandarin-speaking English learners. This qualitative case study explored the reading process of two adult Mandarin-speaking ELs through RMA. They read two pieces in simplified Chinese and two in English respectively. This study demonstrates that RMA supports adult ELs to become more metacognitive about their reading process, uncover reading strategies they use, build their confidence to read, acquire more agency, and learn more about the English language. RMA is a powerful instructional strategy for adult ELs. This qualitative case study explored the reading process of two adult Mandarin-speaking ELs through Retrospective Miscue Analysis. It demonstrates that RMA supports adult ELs to become more metacognitive about their reading process, uncover reading strategies they use, build their confidence to read, acquire more agency, and learn more about the English language

A metáfora na adquisición de expresións idiomáticas. Un análise empírico nas variantes do inglés nativo e inglés como lingua estranxeira

Traballo Fin de Grao en Lingua e Literatura Inglesas. Curso 2018-2019The teaching and learning of idioms have recently received attention in Cognitive Linguistics literature, most notably in Cognitive Semantics (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Gibbs, 1993, 1994; Kövecses & Szabó, 1999, 2001; Boers, 2011; Ruiz de Mendoza & Pérez-Hernández, 2011). Broadly, cognitive accounts argue that the meaning of most idioms is systematically motivated by underlying conceptual mechanisms such as metaphor and metonymy. The goal of this BA thesis is to explore idioms from a metaphoric perspective and to show how they are acquired and used across L1 and L2 varieties of English, highlighting the importance of metaphoric competence (MC) in the processes of teaching and learning. Particular attention will be paid to metaphorical idioms, comparing traditional and cognitive semantic approaches and tackling such issues as the development of metaphor interpretation and production skills in L1, the relationship between metaphor interpretation and production skills in L1 and L2, as well as the MC contribution to the understanding and interpretation of idioms and the problems involved in L1-L2 transfer. In addition, an empirical analysis will be provided examining parallelisms and divergences in the use of metaphorical idioms across L1 and L2 varieties of English. Ultimately, this study is intended to shed light into the active metaphorical thinking process that takes place in L1 to facilitate both the learning and use of metaphor-based idioms in L