Things You Cannot Do in Norway: Multilingual Transnational Action and Interaction in Digital Communication

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Migrants from Senegal constitute a small minority in Norway, which complicates their possibilities of carrying out certain linguistic and cultural practices face-to-face. However, with increased access to digital means, socio-cultural practices, including multilingual discourse, may be participated in transnationally. In this paper, we analyse two stretches of multimodal conversation between a Senegalese living in Norway and two interlocutors in Senegal, more specifically one WhatsApp conversation with a nephew, and one Messenger interaction with a close friend. Based on interview and interactional data, we investigate how they use their various communicative resources to negotiate transnational relationships, and to seek emotional, spiritual, and practical support. The analysis shows how language choice is used to create virtual togetherness (Baldassar 2008; Nedelcu and Wyss 2016) in different ways. The interlocutors engage in practices ranging from phatic communication, banter and gifting, to help with practical issues and doing business as they manage different mobile chronotopes (Lyons and Tagg 2019). Our research extends the use of the mobile chronotope to include voice messages and considers more intimate relationships. It shines light on the immense resourcefulness of highly multilingual individuals in achieving their communicative aims and points this out as a fruitful area for future investigation.publishedVersio

An Integrative Approach to Family Language Policy Experiences: The Case of French-English Bilingual Families in the UK

The present mixed-method study examines the family language policies (FLP) of transnational French-English bilingual families in England. The research commences with a quantitative portion aimed at identifying existing parental beliefs and language management methods through an online survey (n=164). The findings revealed the strong presence of heteroglossic beliefs combined with more traditional monoglossic ideas about bilingualism. The survey results also highlighted significant incongruence between parents’ reported beliefs regarding the flexible nature of bilingualism and their support for a language separation strategy. The dynamic between ideologies, management and practices was essentially driven by the practical concern of increasing heritage language input rather than by ideology. The second phase of the study was a qualitative investigation designed to obtain an emic perspective on how particular language policies were experienced by transnational families and their individual members. 6 of the 164 online respondents took part in case studies, together with their partners and school-age children. Drawing on a combination of interviews, language portraits and observations of family interactions, the findings revealed that language planning decisions were shaped not only by parents’ overt language ideologies but also by covert motivations closely linked to their level of attachment to their country of origin as well as their attitudes to the local culture. The results also demonstrated that FLP may have a profound impact on the experiences of all family members. This study argues that in order for parents to embrace their heteroglossic beliefs and engage in flexible language practices, additional sources of heritage language input must be provided to multilingual families. Additionally, it is essential that researchers adopt a more integrative approach to FLP including young heritage speakers’ perspectives in order to understand the impact of parental language planning on children’s bilingual experiences

Ontology Localization

Nuestra meta principal en esta tesis es proponer una solución para construir una ontología multilingüe, a través de la localización automática de una ontología. La noción de localización viene del área de Desarrollo de Software que hace referencia a la adaptación de un producto de software a un ambiente no nativo. En la Ingeniería Ontológica, la localización de ontologías podría ser considerada como un subtipo de la localización de software en el cual el producto es un modelo compartido de un dominio particular, por ejemplo, una ontología, a ser usada por una cierta aplicación. En concreto, nuestro trabajo introduce una nueva propuesta para el problema de multilingüismo, describiendo los métodos, técnicas y herramientas para la localización de recursos ontológicos y cómo el multilingüismo puede ser representado en las ontologías. No es la meta de este trabajo apoyar una única propuesta para la localización de ontologías, sino más bien mostrar la variedad de métodos y técnicas que pueden ser readaptadas de otras áreas de conocimiento para reducir el costo y esfuerzo que significa enriquecer una ontología con información multilingüe. Estamos convencidos de que no hay un único método para la localización de ontologías. Sin embargo, nos concentramos en soluciones automáticas para la localización de estos recursos. La propuesta presentada en esta tesis provee una cobertura global de la actividad de localización para los profesionales ontológicos. En particular, este trabajo ofrece una explicación formal de nuestro proceso general de localización, definiendo las entradas, salidas, y los principales pasos identificados. Además, en la propuesta consideramos algunas dimensiones para localizar una ontología. Estas dimensiones nos permiten establecer una clasificación de técnicas de traducción basadas en métodos tomados de la disciplina de traducción por máquina. Para facilitar el análisis de estas técnicas de traducción, introducimos una estructura de evaluación que cubre sus aspectos principales. Finalmente, ofrecemos una vista intuitiva de todo el ciclo de vida de la localización de ontologías y esbozamos nuestro acercamiento para la definición de una arquitectura de sistema que soporte esta actividad. El modelo propuesto comprende los componentes del sistema, las propiedades visibles de esos componentes, las relaciones entre ellos, y provee además, una base desde la cual sistemas de localización de ontologías pueden ser desarrollados. Las principales contribuciones de este trabajo se resumen como sigue: - Una caracterización y definición de los problemas de localización de ontologías, basado en problemas encontrados en áreas relacionadas. La caracterización propuesta tiene en cuenta tres problemas diferentes de la localización: traducción, gestión de la información, y representación de la información multilingüe. - Una metodología prescriptiva para soportar la actividad de localización de ontologías, basada en las metodologías de localización usadas en Ingeniería del Software e Ingeniería del Conocimiento, tan general como es posible, tal que ésta pueda cubrir un amplio rango de escenarios. - Una clasificación de las técnicas de localización de ontologías, que puede servir para comparar (analíticamente) diferentes sistemas de localización de ontologías, así como también para diseñar nuevos sistemas, tomando ventaja de las soluciones del estado del arte. - Un método integrado para construir sistemas de localización de ontologías en un entorno distribuido y colaborativo, que tenga en cuenta los métodos y técnicas más apropiadas, dependiendo de: i) el dominio de la ontología a ser localizada, y ii) la cantidad de información lingüística requerida para la ontología final. - Un componente modular para soportar el almacenamiento de la información multilingüe asociada a cada término de la ontología. Nuestra propuesta sigue la tendencia actual en la integración de la información multilingüe en las ontologías que sugiere que el conocimiento de la ontología y la información lingüística (multilingüe) estén separados y sean independientes. - Un modelo basado en flujos de trabajo colaborativos para la representación del proceso normalmente seguido en diferentes organizaciones, para coordinar la actividad de localización en diferentes lenguajes naturales. - Una infraestructura integrada implementada dentro del NeOn Toolkit por medio de un conjunto de plug-ins y extensiones que soporten el proceso colaborativo de localización de ontologías

Using natural language processing for question answering in closed and open domains

With regard to the growth in the amount of social, environmental, and biomedical information available digitally, there is a growing need for Question Answering (QA) systems that can empower users to master this new wealth of information. Despite recent progress in QA, the quality of interpretation and extraction of the desired answer is not adequate. We believe that striving for higher accuracy in QA systems is subject to on-going research, i.e., it is better to have no answer is better than wrong answers. However, there are diverse queries, which the state of the art QA systems cannot interpret and answer properly. The problem of interpreting a question in a way that could preserve its syntactic-semantic structure is considered as one of the most important challenges in this area. In this work we focus on the problems of semantic-based QA systems and analyzing the effectiveness of NLP techniques, query mapping, and answer inferencing both in closed (first scenario) and open (second scenario) domains. For this purpose, the architecture of Semantic-based closed and open domain Question Answering System (hereafter “ScoQAS”) over ontology resources is presented with two different prototyping: Ontology-based closed domain and an open domain under Linked Open Data (LOD) resource. The ScoQAS is based on NLP techniques combining semantic-based structure-feature patterns for question classification and creating a question syntactic-semantic information structure (QSiS). The QSiS provides an actual potential by building constraints to formulate the related terms on syntactic-semantic aspects and generating a question graph (QGraph) which facilitates making inference for getting a precise answer in the closed domain. In addition, our approach provides a convenient method to map the formulated comprehensive information into SPARQL query template to crawl in the LOD resources in the open domain. The main contributions of this dissertation are as follows: 1. Developing ScoQAS architecture integrated with common and specific components compatible with closed and open domain ontologies. 2. Analysing user’s question and building a question syntactic-semantic information structure (QSiS), which is constituted by several processes of the methodology: question classification, Expected Answer Type (EAT) determination, and generated constraints. 3. Presenting an empirical semantic-based structure-feature pattern for question classification and generalizing heuristic constraints to formulate the relations between the features in the recognized pattern in terms of syntactical and semantical. 4. Developing a syntactic-semantic QGraph for representing core components of the question. 5. Presenting an empirical graph-based answer inference in the closed domain. In a nutshell, a semantic-based QA system is presented which provides some experimental results over the closed and open domains. The efficiency of the ScoQAS is evaluated using measures such as precision, recall, and F-measure on LOD challenges in the open domain. We focus on quantitative evaluation in the closed domain scenario. Due to the lack of predefined benchmark(s) in the first scenario, we define measures that demonstrate the actual complexity of the problem and the actual efficiency of the solutions. The results of the analysis corroborate the performance and effectiveness of our approach to achieve a reasonable accuracy.Con respecto al crecimiento en la cantidad de información social, ambiental y biomédica disponible digitalmente, existe una creciente necesidad de sistemas de la búsqueda de la respuesta (QA) que puedan ofrecer a los usuarios la gestión de esta nueva cantidad de información. A pesar del progreso reciente en QA, la calidad de interpretación y extracción de la respuesta deseada no es la adecuada. Creemos que trabajar para lograr una mayor precisión en los sistemas de QA es todavía un campo de investigación abierto. Es decir, es mejor no tener respuestas que tener respuestas incorrectas. Sin embargo, existen diversas consultas que los sistemas de QA en el estado del arte no pueden interpretar ni responder adecuadamente. El problema de interpretar una pregunta de una manera que podría preservar su estructura sintáctica-semántica es considerado como uno de los desafíos más importantes en esta área. En este trabajo nos centramos en los problemas de los sistemas de QA basados en semántica y en el análisis de la efectividad de las técnicas de PNL, y la aplicación de consultas e inferencia respuesta tanto en dominios cerrados (primer escenario) como abiertos (segundo escenario). Para este propósito, la arquitectura del sistema de búsqueda de respuestas en dominios cerrados y abiertos basado en semántica (en adelante "ScoQAS") sobre ontologías se presenta con dos prototipos diferentes: en dominio cerrado basado en el uso de ontologías y un dominio abierto dirigido a repositorios de Linked Open Data (LOD). El ScoQAS se basa en técnicas de PNL que combinan patrones de características de estructura semánticas para la clasificación de preguntas y la creación de una estructura de información sintáctico-semántica de preguntas (QSiS). El QSiS proporciona una manera la construcción de restricciones para formular los términos relacionados en aspectos sintáctico-semánticos y generar un grafo de preguntas (QGraph) el cual facilita derivar inferencias para obtener una respuesta precisa en el dominio cerrado. Además, nuestro enfoque proporciona un método adecuado para aplicar la información integral formulada en la plantilla de consulta SPARQL para navegar en los recursos LOD en el dominio abierto. Las principales contribuciones de este trabajo son los siguientes: 1. El desarrollo de la arquitectura ScoQAS integrada con componentes comunes y específicos compatibles con ontologías de dominio cerrado y abierto. 2. El análisis de la pregunta del usuario y la construcción de una estructura de información sintáctico-semántica de las preguntas (QSiS), que está constituida por varios procesos de la metodología: clasificación de preguntas, determinación del Tipo de Respuesta Esperada (EAT) y las restricciones generadas. 3. La presentación de un patrón empírico basado en la estructura semántica para clasificar las preguntas y generalizar las restricciones heurísticas para formular las relaciones entre las características en el patrón reconocido en términos sintácticos y semánticos. 4. El desarrollo de un QGraph sintáctico-semántico para representar los componentes centrales de la pregunta. 5. La presentación de la respuesta inferida a partir de un grafo empírico en el dominio cerrado. En pocas palabras, se presenta un sistema semántico de QA que proporciona algunos resultados experimentales sobre los dominios cerrados y abiertos. La eficiencia del ScoQAS se evalúa utilizando medidas tales como una precisión, cobertura y la medida-F en desafíos LOD para el dominio abierto. Para el dominio cerrado, nos centramos en la evaluación cuantitativa; su precisión se analiza en una ontología empresarial. La falta de un banco la pruebas predefinidas es uno de los principales desafíos de la evaluación en el primer escenario. Por lo tanto, definimos medidas que demuestran la complejidad real del problema y la eficiencia real de las soluciones. Los resultados del análisis corroboran el rendimient

Finding answers to questions, in text collections or web, in open domain or specialty domains

International audienceThis chapter is dedicated to factual question answering, i.e. extracting precise and exact answers to question given in natural language from texts. A question in natural language gives more information than a bag of word query (i.e. a query made of a list of words), and provides clues for finding precise answers. We will first focus on the presentation of the underlying problems mainly due to the existence of linguistic variations between questions and their answerable pieces of texts for selecting relevant passages and extracting reliable answers. We will first present how to answer factual question in open domain. We will also present answering questions in specialty domain as it requires dealing with semi-structured knowledge and specialized terminologies, and can lead to different applications, as information management in corporations for example. Searching answers on the Web constitutes another application frame and introduces specificities linked to Web redundancy or collaborative usage. Besides, the Web is also multilingual, and a challenging problem consists in searching answers in target language documents other than the source language of the question. For all these topics, we present main approaches and the remaining problems

UNDERSTANDING STUDENT READING MOTIVATION IN RELATION TO REPRESENTATION AND READER’S WORKSHOP

This thesis is a case study on one group of on-level learners in a sixth grade language arts class in northern New Jersey. Students were instructed using Reader’s Workshop principles throughout the school year. This study looks at whether student choice, using reader’s workshop, and providing student feedback affect reading motivation. Motivation to read is measured though Gambrell’s Motivation to Read Profile, once at the beginning of a Reader’s Workshop unit and once at the end. Throughout the unit, students are asked to rate their experiences and share their thinking. Parents are interviewed to determine familial literacy history and provide context for student learning. Students are assessed through the unit using informal as well as formal measures. This study asks the question: “How are middle school students inspired or motivated to read?” and “How can educators inspire the motivation of students in reading

Rethinking Ionesco’s Absurd: The Bald Soprano in the Interlingual Context of Vichy and Postwar France

Rereading Eugène Ionesco’s postwar play La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano) in the light of the original, wartime Romanian version alongside archival materials concerning his political activity in Vichy France allows us to reconsider his role in the theater of the absurd. Instead of staging the emptiness of language in a conformist world, the Romanian play dramatizes how language and language exchange created meaning but also upheld state violence during the Second World War. Although the French version of the play adapts this theme to the postwar context, traces of state power over language remain. This new approach to a central text of the theater of the absurd invites us to reexamine the politics of language and language learning in wartime and postwar France

International Englishes, Dialects and Glocalized Englishes: Translanguaging in South Korea

English has spread across the world as the language of business, education, science and travel. Americans, British and other native speakers living in Inner Circle countries speak English as a Native Language (ENL). Nigerians, Jamaicans, Singaporeans and others living in Outer Circle countries speak ‘World Englishes (WEs)’, but what do Koreans, Chinese, Japanese and others living in the Expanding Circle speak? Koreans learn English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) but they also speak Konglish, and they can see and hear English in Korean music, advertisements and products, indicating that English is not really a ‘foreign’ language. They often do better at communication with Chinese or Japanese business contacts than native speakers who do not know how to modify their English. In this dissertation I introduce the concepts of ‘Glocalized Englishes (GEs)’, ‘English as a Glocalized Language (EGL)’ and ‘International Englishes (IEs)’ to account for the relationships between different varieties of English. GEs cover Konglish, Chinglish, Janglish, and other hybrid languages which emerge through translanguaging in Expanding Circle countries. EGL expands the simple binary of ESL/EFL, and IEs describe the modified languages of native speakers and fluent English learners that are used for international communication. I propose a Pyramid Continuum model to represent these languages, with GEs on the bottom with the narrowest usability, ENL and WEs in the middle with moderate usability, and IEs on the top with the widest possible usability. I demonstrate how language ideologies coalesce together to form indexical configurations of EFL and EGL. The case study focusses on a South Korean university and includes taped interviews, written homework assignments, a survey on taking an English name, over 10 years of participant observation, and an analysis of the ‘linguascape’: the linguistic soundscape in videos of buildings and streets, and the linguistic landscape in photographs of buildings, streets, products, road signs, public literature and graffiti. Discussion of future implications include how to do further studies of other GEs, what linguistic features are indicative of IEs, and why language testing must include the recognition and production of IEs

How to write and use the Ontology Requirements Specification Document

The goal of the ontology requirements specification activity is to state why the ontology is being built, what its intended uses are, who the end-users are, and which requirements the ontology should fulfill. The novelty of this paper lies in the systematization of the ontology requirements specification activity since the paper proposes detailed methodological guidelines for specifying ontology requirements efficiently. These guidelines will help ontology engineers to capture ontology requirements and produce the ontology requirements specification document (ORSD). The ORSD will play a key role during the ontology development process because it facilitates, among other activities, (1) the search and reuse of existing knowledge-aware resources with the aim of re-engineering them into ontologies, (2) the search and reuse of existing ontological resources (ontologies, ontology modules, ontology statements as well as ontology design patterns), and (3) the verification of the ontology along the ontology development. In parallel to the guidelines, we present the ORSD that resulted from the ontology requirements specification activity within the SEEMP project, and how this document facilitated not only the reuse of existing knowledge-aware resources but also the verification of the SEEMP ontologies. Moreover, we present some use cases in which the methodological guidelines proposed here were applie