The lingering death of assimilation : problems and issues in Indian education

This study presents an overview of the history of American Indian education with particular emphasis on the role of the federal government. The first chapter is designed to introduce the reader to the ideology and intent of the earliest attempts to provide education to American Indians. Traditional research sources for the first chapter included historical accounts and governmental reports. The second chapter contains documentation of personal experiences of survivors of this education system. The research method utilized was the interview process. This method was selected because it allowed for an approximation of the storytelling process, a traditional form for the oral transfer of information from one generation to the next. Four American Indian adults who have successfully completed a college education, three at the doctoral level, were the persons interviewed

Agency, structure and realism in language and linguistics

This thesis considers the scientific status of linguistics and the historical and contemporary attempts to view linguistics as closely aligned to, or one of, the natural sciences. Such attempts share certain common features that make up what is identified here as the ‘Formalist Attitude’. The question ‘what is a language?’ is central to the discussion of the scientific status of linguistics, so a central task of the thesis is to show how answers to this question display the features of the Formalist Attitude. In particular it is shown that attempts to constrict the theoretical purview of linguistics around a view of language that sustains claims to natural scientific status fail to account for the social ontology of language and the role of speakers within the creation and reproduction of language. A consequence of this failure is an inability to explain important language phenomena such as language change, arbitrariness and knowledge of language, which the alternative conception of language defended here successfully accounts for. ‘Language’ is best seen as a power of speakers to communicate with one another, a view which emphasises the motivated, social, reproductive and transformative aspects of actual speech. The negative and positive arguments jointly defended, support the view that linguistics, considered with respect to its object of knowledge, methodology and ability to offer explanations and predictions, is not akin to natural science but should be considered a social science. Besides historical contextualisation of the problem, the thesis looks at current trends, such as cognitive and integrationist linguistics, that are broadly consistent with its criticisms and conclusions. The purpose of the thesis then is twofold; to identify, explain and criticise a problematic and influential tradition within linguistics and then to provide some Lockean underlabouring for contemporary linguistics that will be valuable to linguists and philosophers

Knowledge-Augmented Large Language Models for Personalized Contextual Query Suggestion

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at tackling various natural language tasks. However, due to the significant costs involved in re-training or fine-tuning them, they remain largely static and difficult to personalize. Nevertheless, a variety of applications could benefit from generations that are tailored to users' preferences, goals, and knowledge. Among them is web search, where knowing what a user is trying to accomplish, what they care about, and what they know can lead to improved search experiences. In this work, we propose a novel and general approach that augments an LLM with relevant context from users' interaction histories with a search engine in order to personalize its outputs. Specifically, we construct an entity-centric knowledge store for each user based on their search and browsing activities on the web, which is then leveraged to provide contextually relevant LLM prompt augmentations. This knowledge store is light-weight, since it only produces user-specific aggregate projections of interests and knowledge onto public knowledge graphs, and leverages existing search log infrastructure, thereby mitigating the privacy, compliance, and scalability concerns associated with building deep user profiles for personalization. We then validate our approach on the task of contextual query suggestion, which requires understanding not only the user's current search context but also what they historically know and care about. Through a number of experiments based on human evaluation, we show that our approach is significantly better than several other LLM-powered baselines, generating query suggestions that are contextually more relevant, personalized, and useful

Negotiating with a logical-linguistic protocol in a dialogical framework

This book is the result of years of reflection. Some time ago, while working in commodities, the author felt how difficult it was to decide the order in which to use arguments during a negotiation process. What would happen if we translated the arguments into cards and played them according to the rules of the Bridge game? The results were impressive. There was potential for improvement in the negotiation process. The investigation went deeper, exploring players, cards, deals and the information concealed in the players´ announcements, in the cards and in the deals. This new angle brought the research to NeuroLinguistic Patterns and cryptic languages, such as Russian Cards. In the following pages, the author shares her discovery of a new application for Logical Dialogues: Negotiations, tackled from basic linguistic structures placed under a dialogue form as a cognitive system which ‘understands’ natural language, with the aim to solve conflicts and even to serve peace