Word class effect in online processing of proverbs: A reaction-time study

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-196
Author(s):  
Lückert Claudia
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
American English ◽  
Word Class ◽  
Distributional Analysis ◽  
Time Study ◽  
Class Effect ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Processing Demands ◽  
Word Classes

Abstract Proverbs (as Easy come, easy go) are a type of conventionalized multiword unit that can be used as separate, complete statements in speech or writing (Mieder 2007; Steyer 2015). The rationale of this study is to examine word class effects in online processing of proverbs. In Lückert and Boland (submitted), we reported facilitative effects associated with proverb keywords which suggests that word-level properties are active alongside properties of the level of the multiword unit. Previous research has shown that individual word classes have different effects in online language processing. Numerous studies revealed that verbs are processed more slowly (Cordier et al. 2013) and involve greater processing demands compared to nouns (Macoir et al. 2019). The results of the present study suggest that verbs rather than nouns facilitate proverb processing. A distributional analysis of word classes in proverb corpora implies a trend to prefer verbs over nouns in American English proverbs.

scholarly journals A deep database of medical abbreviations and acronyms for natural language processing

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Grossman Liu ◽  
Raymond H. Grossman ◽  
Elliot G. Mitchell ◽  
Chunhua Weng ◽  
Karthik Natarajan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
American English ◽  
Substantial Improvement ◽  
Future Application ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
High Coverage ◽  
Clinical Text ◽  
Automated Quality Control

AbstractThe recognition, disambiguation, and expansion of medical abbreviations and acronyms is of upmost importance to prevent medically-dangerous misinterpretation in natural language processing. To support recognition, disambiguation, and expansion, we present the Medical Abbreviation and Acronym Meta-Inventory, a deep database of medical abbreviations. A systematic harmonization of eight source inventories across multiple healthcare specialties and settings identified 104,057 abbreviations with 170,426 corresponding senses. Automated cross-mapping of synonymous records using state-of-the-art machine learning reduced redundancy, which simplifies future application. Additional features include semi-automated quality control to remove errors. The Meta-Inventory demonstrated high completeness or coverage of abbreviations and senses in new clinical text, a substantial improvement over the next largest repository (6–14% increase in abbreviation coverage; 28–52% increase in sense coverage). To our knowledge, the Meta-Inventory is the most complete compilation of medical abbreviations and acronyms in American English to-date. The multiple sources and high coverage support application in varied specialties and settings. This allows for cross-institutional natural language processing, which previous inventories did not support. The Meta-Inventory is available at https://bit.ly/github-clinical-abbreviations.

Historical change of word classes

Diachronica ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Gerner
Keyword(s):  
Target Word ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Temporal Parameter ◽  
Word Class ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
Asian Languages ◽  
Typical Process

This paper isolates four parameters that guide the historical change of word classes: the quantificational parameter, the directional parameter, the preservative parameter and the temporal parameter. These parameters are involved in the organization of seven case studies in East Asian languages. Based on these case studies I define four diachronic tendencies that apply to East Asian languages and perhaps beyond: (1) the greater the size of the target word class, the lower the number of new acquired meanings; (2) if a word class engages on a path of change, then the greater its size, the more likely it is that the process of change in which it engages will be lexicalization; (3) in a typical process of grammaticalization relatively more meanings are generated than in a typical process of lexicalization; (4) processes of grammaticalization represent temporally short processes more often than processes of lexicalization.

DO L1-L2 DIFFERENCES IN DISCOURSE PROCESSING REFLECT PROCESSING DEMANDS OR DIFFICULTY OF FORM-FUNCTION MAPPING?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Eun-Kyung Lee ◽  
Scott Fraundorf
Keyword(s):  
Time Pressure ◽  
Complex Form ◽  
Discourse Processing ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Online Processing ◽  
Form Function ◽  
Processing Demands ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Korean Learners ◽  
Function Mapping

Abstract We examined what causes L1-L2 differences in sensitivity to prominence cues in discourse processing. Participants listened to recorded stories in segment-by-segment fashion at their own pace. Each story established a pair of contrasting items, and one item from the pair was rementioned and manipulated to carry either a contrastive or presentational pitch accent. By directly comparing the current self-paced listening data to previously obtained experimenter-paced listening data, we tested whether reducing online-processing demands allows L2 learners to show a nativelike behavior, such that contrastive pitch accents facilitate later ruling out the salient alternative. However, reduced time pressure failed to lead even higher proficiency L1-Korean learners of English to reach a nativelike level, suggesting that L2 learners’ nonnativelike processing and representation of the prominence cue in spoken discourse processing can be due to the inherent difficulty of fully learning a complex form-function mapping rather than to online-processing demands.

Early lexical development: comprehension and production

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 183-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen Benedict
Keyword(s):  
Word Class ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Lexical Development ◽  
Word Acquisition ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Production Development ◽  
Comprehension Development

ABSTRACTLists of the first 50 words comprehended and produced by eight infants between 0; 9 and 1; 8 were compared. Comprehension development began earlier (around 0; 9) and reached the 50-word level (age 1; 1) earlier than production development (ages 1; 0 and 1; 6 respectively) and rate of word acquisition for comprehension was twice that of production, confirming the hypothesis that comprehension precedes production for lexical development. Word-class analysis revealed differences in the proportion and type of action words in comprehension and production vocabularies. It is suggested that action is central to lexical development but is expressed differently in comprehension, where action words are used to initiate actions, and production, where non-action words accompany the child's actions.

scholarly journals Language beyond the language system: dorsal visuospatial pathways support processing of demonstratives and spatial language during naturalistic fast fMRI

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roberta Rocca ◽  
Kenny R. Coventry ◽  
Kristian Tylén ◽  
Marlene Staib ◽  
Torben E. Lund ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Information Integration ◽  
Visual Cues ◽  
Reference Frames ◽  
Finite Impulse Response ◽  
Angular Gyrus ◽  
Attentional Orienting ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Pragmatic Inference ◽  
The Right

AbstractSpatial demonstratives are powerful linguistic tools used to establish joint attention. Identifying the meaning of semantically underspecified expressions like “this one” hinges on the integration of linguistic and visual cues, attentional orienting and pragmatic inference. This synergy between language and extralinguistic cognition is pivotal to language comprehension in general, but especially prominent in demonstratives.In this study, we aimed to elucidate which neural architectures enable this intertwining between language and extralinguistic cognition using a naturalistic fMRI paradigm. In our experiment, 28 participants listened to a specially crafted dialogical narrative with a controlled number of spatial demonstratives. A fast multiband-EPI acquisition sequence (TR = 388ms) combined with finite impulse response (FIR) modelling of the hemodynamic response was used to capture signal changes at word-level resolution.We found that spatial demonstratives bilaterally engage a network of parietal areas, including the supramarginal gyrus, the angular gyrus, and precuneus, implicated in information integration and visuospatial processing. Moreover, demonstratives recruit frontal regions, including the right FEF, implicated in attentional orienting and reference frames shifts. Finally, using multivariate similarity analyses, we provide evidence for a general involvement of the dorsal (“where”) stream in the processing of spatial expressions, as opposed to ventral pathways encoding object semantics.Overall, our results suggest that language processing relies on a distributed architecture, recruiting neural resources for perception, attention, and extra-linguistic aspects of cognition in a dynamic and context-dependent fashion.

Word classes and the scope of lexical flexibility in Tongan

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 445-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Svenja Völkel
Keyword(s):  
Word Class ◽  
Crucial Issue ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Manner Adverb

Abstract Tongan is an Oceanic language belonging to the Polynesian subgroup. Based on previous work (Churchward 1953, Tchekhoff 1981, Broschart 1997), Tongan has been classified as a 'flexible' language by various typological approaches on word classes (Hengeveld 1992, Rijkhoff 1998, Croft 2001). This means that lexical items are per se not categorised in terms of major word classes, but they can function as noun, verb, adjective and manner adverb without morphosyntactic derivation. However, not all lexemes are entirely flexible occurring within all these constructions. So the crucial issue of how flexible Tongan really is remains. This question will be addressed by a survey based on a combination of syntactic and semantic word class criteria – basically following Croft's prototype approach (2000, 2001) but also considering Hengeveld & Rijkhoff's work (Hengeveld 1992, Hengeveld, Rijkhoff & Siewierska 2004, Hengeveld 2013) Evans & Osada's work (2005). It reveals the scope of lexical flexibility for various lexemes and semantic groups.

scholarly journals Explicit Interaction Model towards Text Classification

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 6359-6366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cunxiao Du ◽  
Zhaozheng Chen ◽  
Fuli Feng ◽  
Lei Zhu ◽  
Tian Gan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Text Classification ◽  
Deep Neural Networks ◽  
Interaction Mechanism ◽  
Interaction Model ◽  
Classification Task ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Benchmark Datasets ◽  
Classification Tasks

Text classification is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing. Recently, deep neural networks have achieved promising performance in the text classification task compared to shallow models. Despite of the significance of deep models, they ignore the fine-grained (matching signals between words and classes) classification clues since their classifications mainly rely on the text-level representations. To address this problem, we introduce the interaction mechanism to incorporate word-level matching signals into the text classification task. In particular, we design a novel framework, EXplicit interAction Model (dubbed as EXAM), equipped with the interaction mechanism. We justified the proposed approach on several benchmark datasets including both multilabel and multi-class text classification tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. As a byproduct, we have released the codes and parameter settings to facilitate other researches.

The history of /-n/ loss in English: Phonotactic change with lexical and grammatical specificity

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 203-230
Author(s):  
Donka Minkova ◽  
Michael Lefkowitz
Keyword(s):  
Data Base ◽  
Middle English ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
N Loss ◽  
Morphological Marker ◽  
Statistical Comparison ◽  
Rates Of Change ◽  
Word Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Word Classes

Abstract In Old English, /-n/ loss started in early Northumbrian and spread to the southern dialects after about 1050. An important diagnostic of the transition to Middle English, the loss is commonly assumed to be morphologically driven. However, /-n/ loss in atonic syllables could also be phonologically-conditioned: aweġ ‘away’<onweġ, abūtan ‘about’<onbūtan. In Middle English, the loss proceeded rapidly, but the triggers behind the different rates of change and the different results for the various categories have not been fully explored. Using LAEME, we survey all attestations of /-n/ loss, enriching the empirical data-base on the change. The findings show significant differences within word-classes, and differences between inflectional and derivational suffixes. This raises a set of theoretical questions: why did only /-n/ inflections lose their codas, why was the productivity of verbal derivational /-n/ phonotactically restricted, what justifies the loss or retention of /-n/ in stems? We look into the interplay of phonological and morphological factors, isolate the sets in which the results appear to be phonotactically driven, and address the phonotactic dimension in relation to other factors, both within and above the word level. In noun plurals, /-n/ loss emerges as the clearest case of avoidance of phonotactically suboptimal sequences at the word level. A statistical comparison of the end-points of the change reveals that overall frequency has stayed constant and has no obvious direct bearing on the process, while the presence of /-n/ as a morphological marker has changed significantly. The paper ends by identifying aspects of the history of /-n/ that remain uncharted.

A Dynamic Construal Approach to Lexical Transcategorial Shifts in Mandarin

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 576
Author(s):  
Ting Yang
Keyword(s):  
Word Class ◽  
Chinese Word ◽  
European Languages ◽  
On Line ◽  
Word Classes

A dynamic construal approach is adopted to address the word class transcategorial shifts in Mandarin. It is pointed out that the dispute on the classification of Chinese word classes and the consequent controversial proposals of nominalization, verbalization, etc. is in essence a matter of categorization. Instead of the static views, it holds that the categorization of word classes is dynamic and a cluster of factors affects the on-line categorizing process. From the dynamic construal view, Indo-European languages and Mandarin share analogous transcategorial shift processes.

Linguistic Word Classes in the Spoken Language of Normal, Hard-of-Hearing, and Deaf Children

1968 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
John B. Brannon
Keyword(s):  
Hearing Impairment ◽  
Hard Of Hearing ◽  
Classification System ◽  
Spoken Language ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Deaf Children ◽  
Word Class ◽  
New Classification ◽  
Word Classes

The spoken language of three groups of subjects—normal, hard-of-hearing, and deaf—was analyzed by means of a new classification system devised by Jones, Goodman, and Wepman. Each spoken word was sorted into one of 14 word classes. Group means for each word class were compared. It was concluded that a significant hearing impairment reduces productivity of both tokens and types of words. A moderate impairment lowers the use of adverbs, pronouns, and auxiliaries; a profound impairment reduces nearly all classes. In proportion to total word output the deaf overused nouns and articles, underused prepositions, quantifiers, and indefinites.

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