339 research outputs found

    A Universal Part-of-Speech Tagset

    Full text link
    To facilitate future research in unsupervised induction of syntactic structure and to standardize best-practices, we propose a tagset that consists of twelve universal part-of-speech categories. In addition to the tagset, we develop a mapping from 25 different treebank tagsets to this universal set. As a result, when combined with the original treebank data, this universal tagset and mapping produce a dataset consisting of common parts-of-speech for 22 different languages. We highlight the use of this resource via two experiments, including one that reports competitive accuracies for unsupervised grammar induction without gold standard part-of-speech tags

    Structured Training for Neural Network Transition-Based Parsing

    Full text link
    We present structured perceptron training for neural network transition-based dependency parsing. We learn the neural network representation using a gold corpus augmented by a large number of automatically parsed sentences. Given this fixed network representation, we learn a final layer using the structured perceptron with beam-search decoding. On the Penn Treebank, our parser reaches 94.26% unlabeled and 92.41% labeled attachment accuracy, which to our knowledge is the best accuracy on Stanford Dependencies to date. We also provide in-depth ablative analysis to determine which aspects of our model provide the largest gains in accuracy

    \u3cem\u3eDon Quixote\u3c/em\u3e in Russia in the 1920s-1930s: The Problem of Perception and Interpretation

    Get PDF
    This study logically continues my previous examination of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia throughout the early twentieth century and how this perception changed over time. In this new article, which will be the third in a sequence of five, I will again use a number of materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars to demonstrate how the perception of Don Quixote by Russian intelligentsia shifted from being skeptical to complete admiration and even glorification of the hero. Don Quixote was increasingly compared with Prometheus, the most powerful and most romanticized personage of Greek methodology. Indeed, “. . . начав юмористический роман, осмеивающий увлечение современников рыцарскими похождениями, Сервантес и не думал, что потешный рыцарь печального образа постепенно вырастет в гигантскую фигуру страдальца-идеалиста” (“. . . when starting a humorous novel satirizing contemporary fascination with knightly adventures, Cervantes could not have guessed that the amusing Knight of the Sad Countenance would gradually grow into a great figure of the suffering idealist”; my trans; Solomin 91). The situation changed, though, and changed rapidly, during the 1920s to the 1930s. This decade was marked by a fascination with new forms, ideas, movements, and experimentations. The country finally overcame devastation and hunger, class battles were finally behind it, and the Russian intelligentsia readily stepped forward to help the country revive the cultural life that had been almost entirely lost since 1917. Obviously, the new type of hero was coming to the forefront of the cultural discourse: the practitioner who, without fear, would be ready to sacrifice his life for the common good. And if such a hero could not be created in haste, he could easily be found in the classics. Don Quixote was chosen to become a symbol of the new Soviet man

    Bakhtin in His Own Voice: Interview by Victor Duvakin: Translation and Notes by Slav N. Gratchev

    Get PDF
    On March 15, 2013, Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty) broadcast a recording of selections from a series of interviews with Mikhail Bakhtin conducted in 1973 by philologist and dissident Victor Duvakin (Komardenkov 1972, 18).1 At this key moment in the Soviet era, Professor Duvakin, who had been dismissed from his position at Moscow State University, decided to create a phono-history of the epoch (Timofeev-Resovsky 1995, 384). Among the three hundred people whom Duvakin interviewed was Mikhail Bakhtin (Bocharova and Radzishevsky1996, 123), the seventy-eight-year-old retired professor of literature who was known familiarly by many as “chudak.”2 Bakhtin had continued to write about Dostoevsky, the theory of the novel, and “the great time” (большого времени) of the historicity of meaning. After a number of weeks spent with Bakhtin (seeBakhtin 2002, 12), Duvakin left us an enormous archive of “Bakhtin in his own voice”—eighteen hours’ worth of conversations with the philosopher, of which the broadcast portions are translated here. In these interviews Bakhtin discusses literature and poets, and talks very personally as if he is lecturing at the university to his students. He mentions some of the most important figures of [End Page 592] the literary movement in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century—figures like Fyodor Sologub, Valery Bryusov, Maxim Gorky Vladimir Mayakovsky Velimir Khebnikov, and Alexander Blok. The interview has never been translated into English and, consequently has been inaccessible to English-speaking audiences interested in the life and works of Mikhail Bakhtin. This annotated translation attempts to fill the gap and to bring Bakhtin to the Western audience in “his own voice” (Gratchev and Gyulamiryan 2014, 2). Brief notes are included to identify important Russian literary figures and historical events in order to help Western readers contextualize Bakhtin’s observations.

    Don Quixote in Russia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: The Problem of Perception and Interpretation

    Get PDF
    This study examines the problem of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By using materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars, I want to demonstrate that this process of appropriation was a long and a complex one, and there were specific reasons for that. The first modern novel, upon arrival in Russia, received minimal attention and was perceived as a simple, comical book; then, gradually, it started to gain significance. The majority of the materials that are used throughout this text are only available in Russian, are kept in the scientific libraries of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, and have never been translated into English. To facilitate reading this article, within the text I use the English translations that I generated myself, but, to preserve the authenticity of the text and give interested readers the opportunity to see or read the information in Russian, I included the original text in the endnotes

    Token and Type Constraints for Cross-Lingual Part-of-Speech Tagging

    Get PDF
    We consider the construction of part-of-speech taggers for resource-poor languages. Recently, manually constructed tag dictionaries from Wiktionary and dictionaries projected via bitext have been used as type constraints to overcome the scarcity of annotated data in this setting. In this paper, we show that additional token constraints can be projected from a resource-rich source language to a resource-poor target language via word-aligned bitext. We present several models to this end; in particular a partially observed conditional random field model, where coupled token and type constraints provide a partial signal for training. Averaged across eight previously studied Indo-European languages, our model achieves a 25% relative error reduction over the prior state of the art. We further present successful results on seven additional languages from different families, empirically demonstrating the applicability of coupled token and type constraints across a diverse set of languages

    Introduction. The Polyphonic World of Cervantes and Dostoevsky

    Get PDF
    The communication and interrelation between Spanish and Russian literature have lasted for several centuries. At times, the connections grew weaker and at other times stronger, but they never disappeared completely. Throughout this period, which extends roughly from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, there were single instances when the relationship between Spanish and Russian literature was becoming very intense, and we can admit that these interactions were very productive for both sides. The careful study of motives, forms, and all possible aspects of such communication, even if reviewed only in part, can be both revealing and productive for Spanish literary history as well as for Russian. A historic overview of Spanish-Russian literary relations will give us abundant and interesting material for more concrete literary analysis and for theoretical generalization and conclusions. These materials will show us significant similarities in the process of historical development of two countries that, in spite of being so far apart territorially and culturally, have much in common. In fact, the Spanish-Muslim cultural interrelations in the Middle Ages are in many ways reminiscent of the Mongol Yoke that spread over Russia and lasted for almost three centuries. An understanding of these events then may help us explain later processes that took place in Russia and Spain once Arab and Mongol dominations came to an end, in particular regarding the role of the so-called exotic color in the arts, in the transformation of literary genres, etc

    Don Quixote in Russia in the Early Twentieth Century: The Problem of Perception and Interpretation

    Get PDF
    This study logically continues my previous examination of the perception of Don Quixote in Russia throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how this perception changed over time. In this new article, I will again use a number of materials inaccessible to English-speaking scholars to demonstrate how the perception of Don Quixote by Russian intelligentsia shifted from humorous to complete admiration and even idealization of the hero. Don Quixote was more and more frequently compared with Prometheus, the most powerful and most romanticized personage of Greek methodology. Indeed, “начав юмористический роман, осмеивающий увлечение современников рыцарскими похождениями, Сервантес и не думал, что потешный рыцарь печального образа постепенно вырастет в гигантскую фигуру страдальца-идеалиста” (“by starting a humorous novel satirizing contemporary fascination with knightly adventures, Cervantes could not even guess that the amusing Knight of the Sad Countenance would gradually grow into a great figure of the suffering idealist”; my trans; Solomin 91). This study will not attempt to exhaust all questions related to this matter. Instead it tries to open some new routes that will perhaps lead us toward new generalizations and productive conclusions. At the very least, this study aims to arouse a scholarly interest in some key topics related to Cervantes’ reception in Russia in the early twentieth century, his re-discovery and gradual transformation or, more to the point, re-accentuation of the image of Don Quixote during the Silver Age of Russian literary Renaissance

    Review of The Gift of Active Empathy: Scheler, Bakhtin, and Dostoevsky, by Alina Wyman

    Get PDF
    There are certain writers that literary scholars of all times will study again and again, and there are certain literary works that are too important to be examined only once. Reading Dostoevsky is always an “excruciatingly visceral experience” not only for us, the readers, but also for scholars like Max Scheler and Mikhail Bakhtin (p. 230). Alina Wyman’s book makes a major contribution to this experience. Wyman’s argument is both original and elegantly simple: for Bakhtin and Scheler the concept of loving empathy is fundamental in both their respective models of being and in the particular structure of their careers. The investigation of this fundamental emotional phenomenon remains relevant to both thinkers’ inquiries throughout their philosophical careers. There are, of course, some fundamental differences; if for Scheler the loving empathy “unifies the world,” for Bakhtin the answerable empathy is “a way into the unity of Being” (p. 6). This is, in a nutshell, the argument Wyman so elegantly develops throughout her interesting book
    corecore