350 research outputs found
Reconstructing Native Language Typology from Foreign Language Usage
Linguists and psychologists have long been studying cross-linguistic
transfer, the influence of native language properties on linguistic performance
in a foreign language. In this work we provide empirical evidence for this
process in the form of a strong correlation between language similarities
derived from structural features in English as Second Language (ESL) texts and
equivalent similarities obtained from the typological features of the native
languages. We leverage this finding to recover native language typological
similarity structure directly from ESL text, and perform prediction of
typological features in an unsupervised fashion with respect to the target
languages. Our method achieves 72.2% accuracy on the typology prediction task,
a result that is highly competitive with equivalent methods that rely on
typological resources.Comment: CoNLL 201
Predicting Native Language from Gaze
A fundamental question in language learning concerns the role of a speaker's
first language in second language acquisition. We present a novel methodology
for studying this question: analysis of eye-movement patterns in second
language reading of free-form text. Using this methodology, we demonstrate for
the first time that the native language of English learners can be predicted
from their gaze fixations when reading English. We provide analysis of
classifier uncertainty and learned features, which indicates that differences
in English reading are likely to be rooted in linguistic divergences across
native languages. The presented framework complements production studies and
offers new ground for advancing research on multilingualism.Comment: ACL 201
Grounding System Adequacy of HV/MV Substations in Areas With Reduced Accessibility
The adequacy of grounding systems has to be verified periodically in the operational time. With urban development and buildings growth adjacent to power systems as HV/MV substations, it is very rare to have area around with sufficient accessibility for installing the potential and current electrodes. This paper discusses a safety criterion to verify the effectiveness of a grounding system. This criterion suggests conservative tests for both ground potential rise and touch voltages and step voltages that allow to verify the grounding systems effectiveness in areas with reduced accessibility and to monitor its evolution in the time
Do You See What I Mean? Visual Resolution of Linguistic Ambiguities
Understanding language goes hand in hand with the ability to integrate
complex contextual information obtained via perception. In this work, we
present a novel task for grounded language understanding: disambiguating a
sentence given a visual scene which depicts one of the possible interpretations
of that sentence. To this end, we introduce a new multimodal corpus containing
ambiguous sentences, representing a wide range of syntactic, semantic and
discourse ambiguities, coupled with videos that visualize the different
interpretations for each sentence. We address this task by extending a vision
model which determines if a sentence is depicted by a video. We demonstrate how
such a model can be adjusted to recognize different interpretations of the same
underlying sentence, allowing to disambiguate sentences in a unified fashion
across the different ambiguity types.Comment: EMNLP 201
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