Understanding complex constructions: a quantitative corpus-linguistic approach to the processing of english relative clauses

Die vorliegende Arbeit präsentiert einen korpusbasierten Ansatz an die kognitive Verarbeitung komplexer linguistische Konstruktionen am Beispiel englischer Relativsatzkonstruktionen (RCC). Im theoretischen Teil wird für eine konstruktionsgrammatische Perspektive auf sprachliches Wissen argumentiert, welche erlaubt, RCCs als schematische Konstruktionen zu charakterisieren. Diese Perspektive wird mit Konzeptionen exemplarbasierter Modelle menschlicher Sprachverarbeitung zusammengeführt, welche die Verarbeitung einer linguistischen Struktur als Funktion von der Häufigkeit vergangener Verarbeitungen typidentischer Vorkommnisse begreift. Häufige Strukturen gelangen demnach zu einem priviligierten Status im kognitiven System eines Sprechers, welcher in konstruktionsgrammatischen Theorien als entrenchment bezeichnet wird. Während der jeweilge entrenchment-Wert einer gegebenen Konstruktion für konkrete Zeichen vergleichsweise einfach zu bestimmen ist, wird die Einschätzung mit ansteigender Komplexität und Schematizität der Zielkonstruktion zunehmend schwieriger. Für höherstufige N-gramme, welche durch eine grosse Anzahl an variablen Positionen ausgezeichnet sind, ist das Feld noch vergleichweise unerforscht. Die vorliegende Arbeit ist bemüht, diese Lücke zu schließen entwickelt eine korpusbasierte mehrstufige Messprozedur, um den entrenchment-Wert komplexer schematischer Konstruktionen zu erfassen. Da linguistisches Wissen hochstrukturiert ist und menschliche Sprachverarbeitungsprozesse struktursensitiv sind, wird ein clusteranalytisches Verfahren angewendet, welches die salienten RCC hinsichtlich ihrer strukturellen Ähnlichlichkeit organisiert. Aus der Position einer RCC im konstruktionalen Netzwerk sowie dessen entrenchment-Wert kann nun der Grad der erwarteteten Verarbeitungsschwierigkeit abgeleitet werden. Der abschliessende Teil der Arbeit interpretiert die Ergebnisse vor dem Hintergrung psycholinguistischer Befunde zur Relativsatzverarbeitung

English Morphosyntax

Material used in class (Introduction to linguistics II: Morphosyntax) PDF files include COURSE SCHEDULE and SOLUTION MID-TERM EXA

Introduction to linguistics I: Meaning and Use

Materials used in clas

MANTIS at #SMM4H 2023: Leveraging Hybrid and Ensemble Models for Detection of Social Anxiety Disorder on Reddit

This paper presents our system employed for the Social Media Mining for Health 2023 Shared Task 4: Binary classification of English Reddit posts self-reporting a social anxiety disorder diagnosis. We systematically investigate and contrast the efficacy of hybrid and ensemble models that harness specialized medical domain-adapted transformers in conjunction with BiLSTM neural networks. The evaluation results outline that our best performing model obtained 89.31% F1 on the validation set and 83.76% F1 on the test set.Comment: accepted at at the #SMM4H 2023 workshop, co-located with the AMIA Annual Symposium 202

Alzheimer's Disease Detection from Spontaneous Speech through Combining Linguistic Complexity and (Dis)Fluency Features with Pretrained Language Models

In this paper, we combined linguistic complexity and (dis)fluency features with pretrained language models for the task of Alzheimer's disease detection of the 2021 ADReSSo (Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech) challenge. An accuracy of 83.1% was achieved on the test set, which amounts to an improvement of 4.23% over the baseline model. Our best-performing model that integrated component models using a stacking ensemble technique performed equally well on cross-validation and test data, indicating that it is robust against overfitting.Comment: accepted at Interspeech202

Broader Strokes: The Curricular and Pedagogical Possibilities of Multiage Educational Settings

Multiage classrooms seem to be an idea of the past, as students in most schools across the country are grouped by age. However, research by Goldman (1981), Rhoades (1966), and Eisner (2003) argue that multiage grouping has significant social, behavioral, and intellectual advantages for students. Using educational criticism and connoisseurship as a methodology, this article examines the accounts of a professor who taught in a multiage school environment within the United States, as well as observations of a multiage school in the Masaka district of Uganda. This study aims to understand how curriculum and pedagogy interact within multiage system, as well as whether those interactions help or hinder students. Through interviews observations, and classroom artifacts, it was found as Perez, Breault, and White (2014) argue curriculum functions as a space, not only a given content trajectory. Additionally, it was found that in creating a space where community was encouraged, the school was able to move toward pedagogy of love

Robust, reproducible and quantitative analysis of thousands of proteomes by micro-flow LC-MS/MS

Nano-flow liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (nano-flow LC-MS/MS) is the mainstay in proteome research because of its excellent sensitivity but often comes at the expense of robustness. Here we show that micro-flow LC-MS/MS using a 1x150 mm column shows excellent reproducibility of chromatographic retention time (2000 samples of human cell lines, tissues and body fluids. Deep proteome analysis identifies >9000 proteins and >120,000 peptides in 16 h and sample multiplexing using tandem mass tags increases throughput to 11 proteomes in 16 h. The system identifies >30,000 phosphopeptides in 12 h and protein-protein or protein-drug interaction experiments can be analyzed in 20 min per sample. We show that the same column can be used to analyze >7500 samples without apparent loss of performance. This study demonstrates that micro-flow LC-MS/MS is suitable for a broad range of proteomic applications

Ancient mitogenomes from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Central Anatolia and the effects of a Late Neolithic bottleneck in sheep (Ovis aries)

Occupied between ~10,300 and 9300 years ago, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Aşıklı Höyük in Central Anatolia went through early phases of sheep domestication. Analysis of 629 mitochondrial genomes from this and numerous sites in Anatolia, southwest Asia, Europe, and Africa produced a phylogenetic tree with excessive coalescences (nodes) around the Neolithic, a potential signature of a domestication bottleneck. This is consistent with archeological evidence of sheep management at Aşıklı Höyük which transitioned from residential stabling to open pasturing over a millennium of site occupation. However, unexpectedly, we detected high genetic diversity throughout Aşıklı Höyük’s occupation rather than a bottleneck. Instead, we detected a tenfold demographic bottleneck later in the Neolithic, which caused the fixation of mitochondrial haplogroup B in southwestern Anatolia. The mitochondrial genetic makeup that emerged was carried from the core region of early Neolithic sheep management into Europe and dominates the matrilineal diversity of both its ancient and the billion-strong modern sheep populations

Ancient mitogenomes from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Central Anatolia and the effects of a Late Neolithic bottleneck in sheep (Ovis aries)

Occupied between ~10,300 and 9300 years ago, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of Aşıklı Höyük in Central Anatolia went through early phases of sheep domestication. Analysis of 629 mitochondrial genomes from this and numerous sites in Anatolia, southwest Asia, Europe, and Africa produced a phylogenetic tree with excessive coalescences (nodes) around the Neolithic, a potential signature of a domestication bottleneck. This is consistent with archeological evidence of sheep management at Aşıklı Höyük which transitioned from residential stabling to open pasturing over a millennium of site occupation. However, unexpectedly, we detected high genetic diversity throughout Aşıklı Höyük's occupation rather than a bottleneck. Instead, we detected a tenfold demographic bottleneck later in the Neolithic, which caused the fixation of mitochondrial haplogroup B in southwestern Anatolia. The mitochondrial genetic makeup that emerged was carried from the core region of early Neolithic sheep management into Europe and dominates the matrilineal diversity of both its ancient and the billion-strong modern sheep populations