Review of Eze (1980): Nigerian Pidgin English Sentence Complexity

1981 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-124
Author(s):  
Loreto Todd
Keyword(s):  
English Sentence ◽  
Sentence Complexity

When Hearing Does Not Mean Understanding: On the Neural Processing of Syntactically Complex Sentences by Listeners With Hearing Loss

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Margreet Vogelzang ◽  
Christiane M. Thiel ◽  
Stephanie Rosemann ◽  
Jochem W. Rieger ◽  
Esther Ruigendijk
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Loss ◽  
Sentence Processing ◽  
Secondary Task ◽  
Sentence Comprehension ◽  
Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽  
Normal Hearing ◽  
Cognitive Demands ◽  
Sentence Complexity ◽  
Complex Sentences ◽  
And Task

Purpose Adults with mild-to-moderate age-related hearing loss typically exhibit issues with speech understanding, but their processing of syntactically complex sentences is not well understood. We test the hypothesis that listeners with hearing loss' difficulties with comprehension and processing of syntactically complex sentences are due to the processing of degraded input interfering with the successful processing of complex sentences. Method We performed a neuroimaging study with a sentence comprehension task, varying sentence complexity (through subject–object order and verb–arguments order) and cognitive demands (presence or absence of a secondary task) within subjects. Groups of older subjects with hearing loss ( n = 20) and age-matched normal-hearing controls ( n = 20) were tested. Results The comprehension data show effects of syntactic complexity and hearing ability, with normal-hearing controls outperforming listeners with hearing loss, seemingly more so on syntactically complex sentences. The secondary task did not influence off-line comprehension. The imaging data show effects of group, sentence complexity, and task, with listeners with hearing loss showing decreased activation in typical speech processing areas, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and superior temporal gyrus. No interactions between group, sentence complexity, and task were found in the neuroimaging data. Conclusions The results suggest that listeners with hearing loss process speech differently from their normal-hearing peers, possibly due to the increased demands of processing degraded auditory input. Increased cognitive demands by means of a secondary visual shape processing task influence neural sentence processing, but no evidence was found that it does so in a different way for listeners with hearing loss and normal-hearing listeners.

PRINCIPAL PROBLEMS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING SYSTEMS

2018 ◽  
pp. 35-38
Author(s):  
O. Hyryn
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
Syntactic Ambiguity ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
Analysis Methods ◽  
The Way

The article deals with natural language processing, namely that of an English sentence. The article describes the problems, which might arise during the process and which are connected with graphic, semantic, and syntactic ambiguity. The article provides the description of how the problems had been solved before the automatic syntactic analysis was applied and the way, such analysis methods could be helpful in developing new analysis algorithms. The analysis focuses on the issues, blocking the basis for the natural language processing — parsing — the process of sentence analysis according to their structure, content and meaning, which aims to analyze the grammatical structure of the sentence, the division of sentences into constituent components and defining links between them.

scholarly journals 3D Avatar Approach for Continuous Sign Movement Using Speech/Text

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3439
Author(s):  
Debashis Das Chakladar ◽  
Pradeep Kumar ◽  
Shubham Mandal ◽  
Partha Pratim Roy ◽  
Masakazu Iwamura ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Hearing Impaired ◽  
Learning System ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Indian Sign Language ◽  
Impaired Person ◽  
3D Avatar

Sign language is a visual language for communication used by hearing-impaired people with the help of hand and finger movements. Indian Sign Language (ISL) is a well-developed and standard way of communication for hearing-impaired people living in India. However, other people who use spoken language always face difficulty while communicating with a hearing-impaired person due to lack of sign language knowledge. In this study, we have developed a 3D avatar-based sign language learning system that converts the input speech/text into corresponding sign movements for ISL. The system consists of three modules. Initially, the input speech is converted into an English sentence. Then, that English sentence is converted into the corresponding ISL sentence using the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique. Finally, the motion of the 3D avatar is defined based on the ISL sentence. The translation module achieves a 10.50 SER (Sign Error Rate) score.

scholarly journals Context, word, and student predictors in second language vocabulary learning

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
EVELIEN MULDER ◽  
MARCO VAN DE VEN ◽  
ELIANE SEGERS ◽  
LUDO VERHOEVEN
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Learning Outcomes ◽  
Vocabulary Learning ◽  
Vocabulary Knowledge ◽  
Levenshtein Distance ◽  
Context Word ◽  
Learning Gain ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
Contextual Support ◽  
L2 Vocabulary

ABSTRACTWe examined to what extent the variation in vocabulary learning outcomes (vocabulary knowledge, learning gain, and rate of forgetting) in English as a second language (L2) in context can be predicted from semantic contextual support, word characteristics (cognate status, Levenshtein distance, word frequency, and word length), and student characteristics (prior vocabulary knowledge, reading ability, and exposure to English) in 197 Dutch adolescents. Students were taught cognates, false friends, and control words through judging sentences with varying degrees of semantic contextual support using a pretest/posttest between subjects design. Participants were presented with an English target word and its Dutch translation, followed by an English sentence. They were instructed to judge the plausibility of the sentence. Mixed-efffects models indicated that learning gains were higher for sentences with more semantic contextual support and in students with stronger reading comprehension skills. We were the first to show that Levenshtein distance is an important predictor for L2 vocabulary learning outcomes. Furthermore, more accurate as well as faster learning task performance lead to higher learning outcomes. It can thus be concluded that L2 study materials containing semantically supportive contexts and that focus on words with little L1-L2 overlap are most effective for L2 vocabulary learning.

scholarly journals Mobile Educational SMSs as Supplementary Means to Teach Sentence Paraphrasing in EMP Course

2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jafar Asgari Arani
Keyword(s):  
Language Learning ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
English Language ◽  
Pilot Project ◽  
Likert Scale ◽  
Conventional Group ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
Paired Samples ◽  
Post Test ◽  
English Syntax

Digital media has been used to enhance language learning for decades. Since the aim of language learning is to develop communicative proficiency, using communication devices and channels that already exist in the classroom is a sensible way of exploiting opportunities for language practice. The ‘anywhere, anytime’ accessibility to educational contents that mobile SMSs, sometimes freely, offer users, means that mobile learning can extend the opportunities for study outside of the classroom. Given the importance of writing, especially for academic purposes in university, the study set a dual goal: firstly, to analyze the outcome of applying supplementary SMS activity to teach English syntax necessary to paraphrase sentences and secondly, to clarify the medical students' ideas about it. A quasi-experimental, pre-test and post-test, research design was utilized to investigate the hypotheses of this study. Two groups (each 40-second year students of medicine) were randomly assigned to be the experimental and the conventional group. Both groups were taught the same syllabus materials designed for English for Medical Purposes (EMP) II course in a 17-week semester in Kashan University of Medical Sciences, Iran. The former received the SMS –based supplementary contents in a scheduled pattern of delivery two times a week to strengthen their learning while the latter only was taught in a face to face setting. An open questionnaire was used to examine students feedback towards their attitudes. The validity of the questionnaire was examined by giving to a number of professors of English language. The data were also collected and analyzed through an Attitude/ Motivation questionnaire consisting of 12 Likert-scale items, pretest& posttest, paired-samples t-tests, and one way ANOWA. The pretest and posttest data paired t-test likert-scale items analyzed results showed that differences between the experimental and control groups were statistically significant. It was found that the effect of practicing SMS on the students' English syntax learning was positive. According to the findings, students receiving the supplementary English syntax SMSs noticeably improved their sentence paraphrasing performance and acquired higher grades during the post-test than those in conventional group. Qualitative data from interviews and questionnaires indicate that students hold positive attitudes towards receiving paraphrase syntactic points via SMS. Majority of students in this pilot project considered the educational program offered to be efficient, useful and beneficial. The data gathered revealed mobile syntactic supplementary SMSs can be integrated into EMP II course to enable students to develop better English sentence paraphrasing skills. Mobile SMS; Sentence Paraphrasing; Educational Tool; English for Medical Purposes

scholarly journals Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. e0253454
Author(s):  
Kanglong Liu ◽  
Muhammad Afzaal
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Pairwise Comparison ◽  
Important Variable ◽  
Sentence Length ◽  
Syntactic Complexity ◽  
Complexity Measures ◽  
British English ◽  
Sentence Complexity ◽  
Comparable Corpora ◽  
Main Effect

This study approaches the investigation of the simplification hypotheses in corpus-based translation studies from a syntactic complexity perspective. The research is based on two comparable corpora, the English monolingual part of COCE (Corpus of Chinese-English) and the native English corpus of FLOB (Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English). Using the 13 syntactic complexity measures falling into five subconstructs (i.e. length of production unit, amount of subordination, amount of coordination, phrasal complexity and overall sentence complexity), our results show that translation as a whole is less complex compared to non-translation, reflected most prominently in the amount of subordination and overall sentence complexity. Further pairwise comparison of the four subgenres of the corpora shows mixed results. Specifically, the translated news is homogenous to native news as evidenced by the complexity measures; the translated genres of general prose and academic writing are less complex compared to their native counterparts while translated fiction is more complex than non-translated fiction. It was found that mean sentence length always produced a significant effect on syntactic complexity, with higher syntactic complexity for longer sentence lengths in both corpora. ANOVA test shows a highly significant main effect of translation status, with higher syntactic complexity in the non-translated texts (FLOB) than the translated texts (COCE), which provides support for the simplification hypothesis in translation. It is also found that, apart from translation status, genre is an important variable in affecting the complexity level of translated texts. Our study offers new insights into the investigation of simplification hypothesis from the perspective of translation from English into Chinese.

scholarly journals Word-Order Issues in English-to-Urdu Statistical Machine Translation

2011 ◽  
Vol 95 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bushra Jawaid ◽  
Daniel Zeman
Keyword(s):  
Machine Translation ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Statistical Machine Translation ◽  
Parse Tree ◽  
Hard Problem ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
English Sentence ◽  
European Languages

Word-Order Issues in English-to-Urdu Statistical Machine Translation We investigate phrase-based statistical machine translation between English and Urdu, two Indo-European languages that differ significantly in their word-order preferences. Reordering of words and phrases is thus a necessary part of the translation process. While local reordering is modeled nicely by phrase-based systems, long-distance reordering is known to be a hard problem. We perform experiments using the Moses SMT system and discuss reordering models available in Moses. We then present our novel, Urdu-aware, yet generalizable approach based on reordering phrases in syntactic parse tree of the source English sentence. Our technique significantly improves quality of English-Urdu translation with Moses, both in terms of BLEU score and of subjective human judgments.

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