Eesti keele sõnavara afektikalduvus ja mis sellega peale hakata

Author(s): Ene Vainik / Language(s): Estonian Issue: 08-09/2012

A practical need to make Estonian synthetic speech more natural and easier to follow has directed researcher attention to human emotions as reflected in natural speech. The article contemplates how the emotion or, more generally, affectivity of the author of a written sentence could be recognized from lexical cues. It appears that it is not only content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) that deserve attention in this respect, but also various function words (pronouns, deictics, intensifiers etc.) Five classes of the lexical bias of affect are distinguished: descriptive emotion vocabulary, expressive emotion vocabulary, evaluative markers, presence markers and intensity markers; also, their contribution to the expression either of the author of the utterance or of the protagonist of the sentence is demonstrated. A conclusion is made that different tones of voice should probably be synthesized for the author's authentic emotions (anger, joy, sadness, fear, surprise) and for the less expressive emotions resonating to those of the protagonist, including, e.g., a brisk, sharp or dull tone of voice. The main message of the article is that recognition of the lexical bias of affect should begin from the function words referring to the presence of the author of the utterance.

Can We Use Second Life For Language Learning And Instruction?

Author(s): Yavuz Samur / Language(s): English Issue: 145/2009

Over the last few years there has been an increased interest in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs), or virtual worlds, by instructional designers and developers. One of these MUVEs is a very well known world, Second Life (SL). There are many instructional activities taking place in Second Life and language learning, English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learning is just one of them. Gartner Inc. (2007) says that 80 percent of active internet users will have a “Second Life” in the virtual world by the end of 2011. In this paper, the researches and use of SL in language instruction is examined and some suggestions are offered to both instructors and designers on how they can leverage of SL especially in higher education settings.

František Čermák, Vladimír Petkevič, Alexandr Rosen (eds.): Korpusová lingvistika Praha 2011, 1–3.

Author(s): Kateřina Najbrtová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 5/2012

Korespondenční texty a jejich lingvistické využití

Author(s): Klára Osolsobě / Language(s): Czech Issue: 5/2012

Variantnost koncovek -i/-é v nominativu plurálu substantiv zakončených na -asta, -ista, -ita ve světle novějších korpusových dokladů

Author(s): Milena Hebal-Jezierska / Language(s): Czech Issue: 3/2011

The aim of the article is to present an analysis of variant endings -i and -é. The research was carried out on the base of Czech National Corpus SYN2005. The ending -i is a vari-ant of ending -é in the standard language (it amounts to 4 %). According to the corpora examination, the ending -i can be mainly found in the names of followers and members of social and political movements and institutions. No occurence or sporadic occurrence of the ending -i can be found in names of followers of religious views, supporters of reli-gious movements and members of sects, the names of specialists and sportsmen. The occurence of the form -i depends on the various factors: linguistical layer, semantical group that the word belongs to, type and frequency of the word, context and a text.

Accusative resumptive pronoun in the Czech relative clauses with absolutive relativizer co

Author(s): Mirjam Fried / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2010

This paper addresses the poorly understood patterning in the presence vs. absence of the accusative resumptive pronoun in the Czech relative clauses (RC) introduced by the absolutive relativizer co. Using both qualitative and frequency-based quantitative ana-lysis, I investigate the distribution of the resumptive pronoun in authentic usage as at-tested in the Czech National Corpus. The study leads to the conclusion that the criteria that determine the distribution of the accusative resumptive pronoun go well beyond the traditionally invoked need for expressing agreement categories (gender, number) and grammatical relations (accusative object) or that the presence vs. absence of the pronoun should depend exclusively on the animacy of the relativized noun. Instead, the distribution appears to depend on the semantic compatibility between the relativized noun and the proposition expressed by the RC, reflecting a functional distinction be-tween a determinative and non-determinative (explicative) interpretation of the RC; the former is unambiguously signaled by the bare relativizer co, the latter is available with the analytic co + resumptive pronounACC pattern as one of the interpretive options.

Od ni přes aniž až k bez toho, aniž by

Author(s): František Štícha / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2010

The article concerns primarily the distribution of the single-word conjunction aniž and its synonyms, which are the compounds bez toho, aby/bez toho, že and the most com-plex form bez toho, aniž by. The author argues that this complex conjunction, which consists of four words (the word aniž itself being, form the historical point of view, a fusion of three words – a – ni – ž), is a problematic innovation in contemporary stan-dard Czech. The reason is that the shorter innovation of bez toho, aby or bez toho, že was invented (or adopted from other languages) after November 1989 to replace the single-word aniž probably for stylistic reasons (aniž being felt as strongly formal or li-terary). Now, the most complex bez toho, aniž by combines the newly used bez toho, aby/že with the formal aniž, which, in fact, should have been replaced by the bez toho, aby/že. a fully non-functional device thus appears within the system of Czech conjuncti-ons and only future usage will determine whether this will be adopted in standard Czech. As the corpus findings show now, the single-word aniž is much more frequent in written standard Czech than both the bez toho, aby/že variant and the most complex bez toho, aniž by.

Čágo bélo, tschüssikowski und die anderen

Author(s): Martin Šemelík / Language(s): German Issue: 21/2020

The present study is devoted to contact formulas from the Czech-German perspective. Contact formulas are forms in which designation function is not or is only weakly given and the attention-attracting function predominates. They include greeting, addressing and introduction formulas. The aim of the study is to treat selected aspects of these phenomena from a Czech-German perspective and to expand the rather modest amount of pragmatics-related contributions to the Czech-German linguistic comparison. The applied method is empirical in the sense that the text is based on the analysis of large electronic corpora of Czech and German (Syn series of the Czech National Corpus, DeReKo, DWDS-Korpus) and on Internet searches. At the same time, however, data from a personal text archive of the author as well as other data are taken into account. As the study has shown, besides a considerable amount of similarities, there are more or less prominent differences between the Czech and German system of contact formulas, especially as greeting and addressing regards.

Chatting with Chatbots: Sign Making in Text-based Human-computer Interaction

Author(s): Dorthe Duncker / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2020

This paper investigates the kind of sign making that goes on in text-based human–computer interaction, between human users and chatbots, from the point of view of integrational linguistics. A chatbot serves as a “conversational” user interface, allowing users to control computer programs in “natural language”. From the user’s perspective, the interaction is a case of semiologically integrated activity, but even if the textual traces of a chat may look like a written conversation between two humans the correspondence is not one-to-one. It is argued that chatbots cannot engage in communication processes, although they may display communicative behaviour. They presuppose a (second-order) language model, they can only communicate at the level of sentences, not utterances, and they implement communicational sequels by selecting from an inventory of executable skills. Instead of seeing them as interlocutors in silico, chatbots should be seen as powerful devices for humans to make signs with.

HOW LEARNING AND COMMUNICATION PROCESSES OCCUR NATURALLY VS. ARTIFICIALLY: AN ANALYSIS

Author(s): Andrei Zamfira / Language(s): English Issue: 02/2021

In this paper we will continue our work we started in previous article about the human communication capacity by language (verbal or textual) and why it is one of the most hard tasks that to be artificially emulated by computer technologies. This time we will focus our studies on the psychological aspect of learning and communication by language, and we’ll show how researchers in Cognitive Linguistics found that information that we use for communicating is stored and organized inside our brain. There were many models created from the efforts of scholars in the domain who tried to find out the exact organization of this (unseen before) knowledge system, called the Mental Lexicon, and even though all of these created models are different they also do share some common traits, such that information is organized on a 3 tiers, which are those corresponding to phonology, lexical and semantics. The entries are linked within the tiers by some learned (weighted) associations which represent the relations that exist between them (e.g. objects in a house, plants from outdoors) but also inter-tier, such that the lexical form of a word from a certain language is linked to its corresponding significances from the semantic tier and also with its phonetic representation (sound). After we presented and analysed language from a cognitive side, next we went and tried to explain the processes also from their most raw representation, which is the neurological one. Due to the developments from the last decades in technologies for brain imagistic it has been possible to find out the exact location of the language processes inside our brains, which regions are responsible for what language tasks(perception, production), where the Mental Lexicon relies, what path follows the language information as it is being processed by different regions of the brain. This leads somehow with the thought to the organization and storage of data into computer machine (both software and hardware layers) by means of logical units (bits) and how it is accessed and processed. In the final of the paper we will present the computer technologies that have been created until today in order to emulate artificially the language capacity of humans. We will discuss and analyse the inner functionalities of automatic speech recognition systems and see what complex technologies would be needed to properly implement one. The final goal of the discussions and analyses we made here is to show how invaluable we, as human beings are, and that our mental capabilities, structures of data are impossible to be completely emulated artificially by machines technologies.

EVALUATION THE QUALITY OF MOOCS BY REDESIGNING LEARNING SPACES: ERGONOMICS, CREDIBILITY, DENSITY AND INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Author(s): Omar Larouk,Marina. V. Garanovich / Language(s): English Issue: 03/2020

The training (MOOC) is open to everyone, via the Internet, offered by university establishments in order to offer everyone the possibility of learning certain training modules or updating their knowledge. This online course can validate the knowledge acquired. The initiatives of major universities (FUN-France; MIT OpenCourseWare, etc.) are developed academic initiatives to make their courses visible on the web as well as organizations such as COURSERA. In this article, we give an overview of existing platforms in France and the United States, with an analysis by assessing the quality of MOOC, via predominant macro-criteria such as: -access and ergonomics, the credibility and certification of institutions and information retrieval services.

Elena Paskaleva

Author(s): Author Not Specified / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2013

In memoriam: Elena Paskaleva ‒ On behalf of the Institute of Information and Computation Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

The Wake of Modernistic Tourism in the Kingdom: A Multimodal Analysis of Online Discourse

Author(s): Ansa Hameed,Naeem Afzal,Ismat Jabeen / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Background: Suadi Vision 2030 is an embodiment of a futuristic vision that aims at attaining significant social, cultural, and economic advancement in the Kingdom within the ongoing decade. And revolutionizing the tourism industry is one of the key components in the Suadi Vision for not only developing a sustainable economic source but also representing the versatility of the Saudi landscape and culture to the outer world. Problem: However, to attract tourists from around the globe, it is pertinent to clearly and persuasively elucidate what the country has to offer in terms of its tourist attractions, facilities, and activities. For the said purpose, different government and private-run websites provide prime information and description of the tourism opportunities in KSA. Aim: The current project aimed at analyzing the effectiveness of linguistic and semiotic representation of the content provided online to attract foreign tourists specifically. Frameworks: The multimodal framework was adopted to analyze the selected content. To evaluate the written discourse, Fairclough’s critical analysis consisting of “description, interpretation, and explanation of text” (p. 109) was implemented. Similarly, to scrutinize the images ‘Grammar of Images’ model promulgated by Kress & van Leeuwen (2006) was employed. Results: The findings of the study demonstrate that the website discourse effectively presents the Kingdom as a modern, multicultural, and rich landscape for prospective tourists. Also, the imagery and discursive strategies applied positively exhibit the vitality and vivacity of Saudi culture, lifestyle and tourism experience through complementing each other effectively. Cognitive value: Saudi Vision 2030 has widely been analyzed employing multiple methods and frameworks. However, there is a dearth of research focusing on analyzing the use of discourse as well as images by employing a multimodal framework. This study contributes by addressing this gap in the existing research.

Localizarea interfeţelor de utilizare: o provocare sau un simplu exerciţiu de weekend?

Author(s): Sorin Paliga / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2011

Localizing the dialogues when running an operating system or an application has become an interesting activity over the last two decades. The breathtaking spread of computer technique has led to a larger and larger use of computers, which has thus reached social strata with a lower level of linguistic capabilities, even if we refer to English. The real number of those capable of mastering English at a good level is lower than currently acknowledged. The paper focuses on an activity rarely approached as a university discipline in Romania, even if it clearly represents a chapter — or a subchapter at the worst — of translation techniques. Translating the computer dialogues has remained an isolated, not rarely chaotic activity, without any coherent approach and without any norms. The users, mainly those without a good knowledge of English, are the direct and innocent victims of such a situation. The paper, seemingly the first such approach in the field, sums up the main problems and suggests some further steps in order to improves the current situation.

European Language Equality in the Digital Age: The Case of Lithuania

Author(s): Anželika Gaidienė / Language(s): English Issue: 86/2022

The article addresses the current status of Lithuanian language technologies and presents the situation of European language equality in the digital environment. It investigates quantitative and qualitative indicators revealing language equality in the context of the European Union taking into account the number of speakers, digital language resources and technologies and the support to them, with a special focus on the case of Lithuania. The article intends to outline the work which has already been accomplished in the area of language technologies and identify the gaps and challenges which still need to be addressed in the case of Lithuanian as an official national and EU language. It provides the latest overview of the situation of Lithuanian language technologies through the analysis of digital language resources and tools/services. The results show that though a number of changes have occurred in the past ten years, there is still a shortage of language resources in education and other spheres.

Zaawansowane procedury NLP jako przesłanka rekonstrukcji idei wiedzy

Author(s): Rafał Maciąg / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2022

The article presents the current state of development of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, in particular the GPT-3 language model, and presents its consequences for understanding the phenomenon of knowledge. The NLP technology has been experiencing remarkable development recently. The GPT-3 language model presents a level of advancement that allows it to generate texts as answers to general questions, as summaries of the presented text, etc., which reach the level surpassing the analogous level of human texts. These algorithmic operations lead to the determination of the probability distribution of its components. Texts generated by such a model should be considered as autonomous texts, using immanent, implicit knowledge embedded in language. This conclusion raises questions about the status of such knowledge. Help in the analysis is provided also by the theory of discourse, as well as the theory of discursive space based on it, that proposes the interpretation of knowledge as a trajectory of discourses in a dynamical space. Recognizing that knowledge may also be autonomous, and in particular not be at the exclusive disposal of humans, leads to the question of the status of artificial cognitive agents, such as the GPT-3 language model.

The Spectrum of Sense Remoteness in Polysemy: Bridging Computational and Theoretical Lexicography with Psycholinguistics (Part 1)

Author(s): Dorota Klimek-Jankowska,Krzysztof Hwaszcz,Justyna Wieczorek / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This two-part paper bridges insights from psycholinguistics and from theoretical and computational lexicography to develop a fine-grained classification of polysemy organized along a wider spectrum of sense remoteness of ambiguous words in Polish based on the investigation of a large collection of linguistic data.1 In the first part, we equip readers with background knowledge on different psycholinguistic views on polysemy and we introduce the basic spectrum of sense remoteness proposed in earlier literature. We also present the methodology of our research and we report the results of our quantitative study based on a large sample of sense pairs randomly extracted from plWordNet (Słowosieć) thanks to the resources received from the CLARIN-PL Language Technology Center (the Polish section of the European research infrastructure CLARIN ERIC). We show that the most widely represented polysemy types are nested polysemy, polysemy by metaphor and polysemy by metonymy. The second part proposes an extended spectrum of sense remoteness and presents insights on different types of polysemy included in this spectrum with a special attention paid to nested polysemy.

‚Kostbares Perd‘ oder ‚elegantes Mädchen‘ – ausgewählte Aspekte der Übersetzung deutscher Markennamen ins Chinesische

Author(s): Jarosław Aptacy / Language(s): German Issue: 31/2022

The aim of the article is to present selected aspects of the translation of German brand names into Chinese. First, the concept and functions of the brand are described, then the question of whether brand names should be local or global. Features of the Chinese language and writing, relevant to the translation of brand names, are also discussed. In the analytical part, linguistic and graphic features of Chinese brand names are characterized and methods of translating foreign names into Chinese are presented. These are (i) direct translation, (ii) free translation without regard to the original pronunciation, (iii) mixed translation, which takes into account both the pronunciation and the meaning of the original name. Of the 27 brand names examined, 11 were translated using method (i), 8 using method (ii) and 8 using method (iii).

PHASES OF GAMIFYING CROATIAN WEB DICTIONARIES (THE EXAMPLE OF MREŽNIK)

Author(s): Josip Mihaljević / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2022

This paper focuses on the phases of gamifying Mrežnik. The gamification process was conducted at the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics on the project Croatian Web-Dictionary – Mrežnik. The games can help players in learning specific language and dictionary contents. Mrežnik consists of three modules: the module for adult native speakers of Croatian with 10,000 entries, the module for schoolchildren with 3,000 entries, and the module for non-native speakers with 1,000 entries. Some games based on the dictionary content for all three models were developed, and some are still in the development phase. A conceptual framework for gamification was created in parallel to creating these games and includes planning, developing, testing, and implementing the games within the dictionary. The first step was identifying game types and gamification elements present in dictionaries and other lexicographic publications. Before creating dictionary games for the Mrežnik project, the types of educational games and gamification elements used on websites of lexicographic publications were identified (183 web dictionaries and 76 encyclopedias were analyzed). After identifying all possible game types for learning many different types of dictionary content, the next step involved the design and later development of the first versions of dictionary games which contain basic gamification elements such as scoring, leaderboards, levels, time limits, and badges. The next step involved game testing, which was done with two groups of foreign students learning Croatian. The results of the conducted research showed that games can help students learn Croatian as a foreign (other) language. The games for children were presented to groups of elementary school students visiting the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics. Based on users' feedback, the games were later modified. The last step involves publishing games, promoting them, and monitoring user satisfaction.

Status zapożyczenia-cytatu we współczesnym języku polskim na przykładzie galicyzmów

Author(s): Michalina Buler / Language(s): Polish Issue: 21/2022

The aim of the study was to establish the current status of the Gallicisms functioning in the Polish language in the form of quotations, by verifying their adaptation at the level of spelling, inflection, and word formation, as well as pointing to the processes of their syntactic adaptation. It was assumed, first, that the Gallicims regarded so far as quotations could have lost this status as a result of progressive formal adaptation. The second hypothesis concerned the borrowings that still meet the definitional criteria of a quotation – despite their non advanced formal adaptation, they cannot be comprehended as units that are subject to no rules of the Polish language system, as during their functioning in the Polish language they undergo indispensable processes of syntactic adaptation. The status of the adaptation of the Gallicisms at the level of spelling, inflection, word formation, and syntax was verified based on the information contained in the selected Polish language dictionaries and the instances of the usage of the given units, found in the contemporary Polish language texts. The analysis demonstrated that many of the investigated Gallicisms lost their status of a borrowing- quotation, more still, are characterized by advanced formal adaptation, progressing with the growing frequency of the units’ usage. The research also confirmed that the Gallicisms maintaining their status of a quotation, similarly to the adapted borrowings, undergo the processes of syntactic adaptation, i.e. can be assigned to a proper grammatical category, and all the units used in the function of substantives or nominal phrases are assigned in the Polish language grammatical gender.