scholarly journals Approaches to Text Simplification: Can Computer Technologies Outdo a Human Mind?

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Svetlana Vladimirovna Pervukhina ◽  
Gyulnara Vladimirovna Basenko ◽  
Irina Gennadjevna Ryabtseva ◽  
Elena Evgenyevna Sakharova
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Background Knowledge ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Professional Communication ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Text Simplification

Narrowly specialized information is addressed to a limited circle of professionals though it provokes interest among people without specialized education. This gives rise to a need for the popularization of scientific information. This process is carried out through simplified texts as a kind of secondary texts that are directly aimed at the addressee. Age, language proficiency and background knowledge are the main features which are usually taken into consideration by the author of the secondary text who makes changes in the text composition, as well as in its pragmatics, semantics and syntax. This article analyses traditional approaches to text simplification, computer simplification and summarization. The authors compare human-authored simplification of literary texts with the newest trends in computer simplification to promote further development of machine simplification tools. It has been found that the samples of simplified scientific texts seem to be more natural than the samples of simplified literary texts since technical background knowledge can be processed with machine tools. The authors have come to the conclusion that literary and technical texts should imply different approaches for adaptation and simplification. In addition, personal readers’ experience plays a great part in finding the implications in literary texts. In this respect it might be reasonable to create separate engines for simplifying and adapting texts from diverse spheres of knowledge. Keywords Text Simplification; Natural Language Processing (NLP); Pragmatic Adaptation; Professional Communication; Literary Texts

scholarly journals Predictors of Successful Reading Comprehension in Bilingual Adults: The Role of Reading Strategies and Language Proficiency

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Deanna C. Friesen ◽  
Bailey Frid
Keyword(s):  
Reading Comprehension ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Reading Strategies ◽  
Background Knowledge ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
Dominant Language ◽  
Analysis Strategies

The current study investigated the type of strategies that English–French bilingual adults utilize when reading in their dominant and non-dominant languages and which of these strategies are associated with reading comprehension success. Thirty-nine participants read short texts while reporting aloud what they were thinking as they read. Following each passage, readers answered three comprehension questions. Questions either required information found directly in the text (literal question) or required a necessary inference or an elaborative inference. Readers reported more necessary and elaborative inferences and referred to more background knowledge in their dominant language than in their non-dominant language. Engaging in both text analysis strategies and meaning extraction strategies predicted reading comprehension success in both languages, with differences observed depending on the type of question posed. Results are discussed with respect to how strategy use supports the development of text representations.

scholarly journals Proficiency Differences in Syntactic Processing of Monolingual Native Speakers Indexed by Event-related Potentials

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 2728-2744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Pakulak ◽  
Helen J. Neville
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
English Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Memory Span ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Event Related Potentials ◽  
Related Potentials ◽  
Native Speakers Of English ◽  
Proficiency Scores

Although anecdotally there appear to be differences in the way native speakers use and comprehend their native language, most empirical investigations of language processing study university students and none have studied differences in language proficiency, which may be independent of resource limitations such as working memory span. We examined differences in language proficiency in adult monolingual native speakers of English using an ERP paradigm. ERPs were recorded to insertion phrase structure violations in naturally spoken English sentences. Participants recruited from a wide spectrum of society were given standardized measures of English language proficiency, and two complementary ERP analyses were performed. In between-groups analyses, participants were divided on the basis of standardized proficiency scores into lower proficiency and higher proficiency groups. Compared with lower proficiency participants, higher proficiency participants showed an early anterior negativity that was more focal, both spatially and temporally, and a larger and more widely distributed positivity (P600) to violations. In correlational analyses, we used a wide spectrum of proficiency scores to examine the degree to which individual proficiency scores correlated with individual neural responses to syntactic violations in regions and time windows identified in the between-groups analyses. This approach also used partial correlation analyses to control for possible confounding variables. These analyses provided evidence for the effects of proficiency that converged with the between-groups analyses. These results suggest that adult monolingual native speakers of English who vary in language proficiency differ in the recruitment of syntactic processes that are hypothesized to be at least in part automatic as well as of those thought to be more controlled. These results also suggest that to fully characterize neural organization for language in native speakers it is necessary to include participants of varying proficiency.

Meta-analysis of the neural representation of first language and second language

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 799-819 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAJANI SEBASTIAN ◽  
ANGELA R. LAIRD ◽  
SWATHI KIRAN
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
First Language ◽  
Likelihood Estimation ◽  
Neural Representation ◽  
Second Language Processing ◽  
Meta Analyses

ABSTRACTThis study reports an activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of published functional neuroimaging studies of bilingualism. Four parallel meta-analyses were conducted by taking into account the proficiency of participants reported in the studies. The results of the meta-analyses suggest differences in the probabilities of activation patterns between high proficiency and moderate/low proficiency bilinguals. The Talairach coordinates of activation in first language processing were very similar to that of second language processing in the high proficient bilinguals. However, in the low proficient group, the activation clusters were generally smaller and distributed over wider areas in both the hemispheres than the clusters identified in the ALE maps from the high proficient group. These findings draw attention to the importance of language proficiency in bilingual neural representation.

Text Simplification

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horacio Saggion
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Language Resources ◽  
The Past ◽  
Text Simplification ◽  
Text Readability ◽  
Target User ◽  
Evaluation Approaches ◽  
Linguistic Impairment ◽  
Automatic Text ◽  
The Web

Over the past decades, information has been made available to a broad audience thanks to the availability of texts on the Web. However, understanding the wealth of information contained in texts can pose difficulties for a number of people including those with poor literacy, cognitive or linguistic impairment, or those with limited knowledge of the language of the text. Text simplification was initially conceived as a technology to simplify sentences so that they would be easier to process by natural-language processing components such as parsers. However, nowadays automatic text simplification is conceived as a technology to transform a text into an equivalent which is easier to read and to understand by a target user. Text simplification concerns both the modification of the vocabulary of the text (lexical simplification) and the modification of the structure of the sentences (syntactic simplification). In this chapter, after briefly introducing the topic of text readability, we give an overview of past and recent methods to address these two problems. We also describe simplification applications and full systems also outline language resources and evaluation approaches.

What constitutes professional communication in aviation: Is language proficiency enough for testing purposes?

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyejeong Kim
Keyword(s):  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Limited English Proficiency ◽  
Rating Scale ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Oral Communication ◽  
Air Traffic ◽  
Professional Communication ◽  
Civil Aviation ◽  
Air Traffic Controller ◽  
Interactional Competence

This paper aims to identify what aviation experts consider to be the key features of effective communication by examining in detail their commentary on a 17-minute segment of recorded radiotelephony discourse between a Russian pilot and a Korean air traffic controller. The segment was played to three practising pilots and three air traffic controllers. Their commentary on the qualities of communication displayed in the interaction was recorded and coded thematically, using a grounded ethnography approach. The analysis revealed that although the Russian pilot was viewed as having limited English proficiency, the strategies he used to make himself understood were evaluated positively as fulfilling the requirements of the professional role. By contrast, the Korean air traffic controller, although not evaluated as having limited proficiency, was criticized for his lack of professional knowledge. The discourse analysis and the feedback given by these expert informants highlight not only the nature of the miscommunication arising in unexpected situations, but also the multiple factors that may contribute to it. While language proficiency is clearly an issue, there are many other sources of miscommunication that emerge during the exchange. These findings are used to critique the narrow, language-focused oral proficiency construct as articulated in the holistic descriptors and the rating scale stipulated by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, 2010) as the basis for tests of aviation English worldwide. Instead the paper proposes an expanded construct of oral communication incorporating elements of professional knowledge and behaviour with a focus on interactional competence specific to this context.

Honoring Fodor

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
José Manuel Igoa
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Jerry Fodor

Jerry Fodor made significant contributions to our knowledge of the human mind, of the nature of concepts and meaning, and of human language processing. Here is more on his atomistic theory of concepts.

Literature and Science

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Whitworth
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Influence ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Literature And Science ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Sociology Of Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Critical Practices ◽  
Strong Program ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

Though “literature and science” has denoted many distinct cultural debates and critical practices, the historicist investigation of literary-scientific relations is of particular interest because of its ambivalence toward theorization. Some accounts have suggested that the work of Bruno Latour supplies a necessary theoretical framework. An examination of the history of critical practice demonstrates that many concepts presently attributed to or associated with Latour have been longer established in the field. Early critical work, exemplified by Marjorie Hope Nicolson, tended to focus one-sidedly on the impact of science on literature. Later work, drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts, and on Mary Hesse’s and Max Black’s work on metaphor and analogy in science, identified the scope for a cultural influence on science. It was further bolstered by the “strong program” in the sociology of scientific knowledge, especially the work of Barry Barnes and David Bloor. It found ways of reading scientific texts for the traces of the cultural, and literary texts for traces of science; the method is implicitly modeled on psychoanalysis. Bruno Latour’s accounts of literary inscription, black boxing, and the problem of explanation have precedents in the critical practices of critics in the field of literature and science from the 1980s onward.

scholarly journals KGen: a knowledge graph generator from biomedical scientific literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (S4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anderson Rossanez ◽  
Julio Cesar dos Reis ◽  
Ricardo da Silva Torres ◽  
Hélène de Ribaupierre
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Alzheimer's Disease ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Scientific Literature ◽  
Software Tool ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
New Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Biomedical Texts

Abstract Background Knowledge is often produced from data generated in scientific investigations. An ever-growing number of scientific studies in several domains result into a massive amount of data, from which obtaining new knowledge requires computational help. For example, Alzheimer’s Disease, a life-threatening degenerative disease that is not yet curable. As the scientific community strives to better understand it and find a cure, great amounts of data have been generated, and new knowledge can be produced. A proper representation of such knowledge brings great benefits to researchers, to the scientific community, and consequently, to society. Methods In this article, we study and evaluate a semi-automatic method that generates knowledge graphs (KGs) from biomedical texts in the scientific literature. Our solution explores natural language processing techniques with the aim of extracting and representing scientific literature knowledge encoded in KGs. Our method links entities and relations represented in KGs to concepts from existing biomedical ontologies available on the Web. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by generating KGs from unstructured texts obtained from a set of abstracts taken from scientific papers on the Alzheimer’s Disease. We involve physicians to compare our extracted triples from their manual extraction via their analysis of the abstracts. The evaluation further concerned a qualitative analysis by the physicians of the generated KGs with our software tool. Results The experimental results indicate the quality of the generated KGs. The proposed method extracts a great amount of triples, showing the effectiveness of our rule-based method employed in the identification of relations in texts. In addition, ontology links are successfully obtained, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the ontology linking method proposed in this investigation. Conclusions We demonstrate that our proposal is effective on building ontology-linked KGs representing the knowledge obtained from biomedical scientific texts. Such representation can add value to the research in various domains, enabling researchers to compare the occurrence of concepts from different studies. The KGs generated may pave the way to potential proposal of new theories based on data analysis to advance the state of the art in their research domains.

scholarly journals Maturational Constraints on the Recruitment of Early Processes for Syntactic Processing

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (10) ◽  
pp. 2752-2765 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Pakulak ◽  
Helen J. Neville
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Syntactic Processing ◽  
Neural Organization ◽  
Anterior Negativity

An enduring question in the study of second-language acquisition concerns the relative contributions of age of acquisition (AOA) and ultimate linguistic proficiency to neural organization for second-language processing. Several ERP and neuroimaging studies of second-language learners have found that neural organization for syntactic processing is sensitive to delays in second-language acquisition. However, such delays in second-language acquisition are typically associated with lower language proficiency, rendering it difficult to assess whether differences in AOA or proficiency lead to these effects. Here we examined the effects of delayed second-language acquisition while controlling for proficiency differences by examining participants who differ in AOA but who were matched for proficiency in the same language. We compared the ERP response to auditory English phrase structure violations in a group of late learners of English matched for grammatical proficiency with a group of English native speakers. In the native speaker group, violations elicited a bilateral and prolonged anterior negativity, with onset at 100 msec, followed by a posterior positivity (P600). In contrast, in the nonnative speaker group, violations did not elicit the early anterior negativity, but did elicit a P600 which was more widespread spatially and temporally than that of the native speaker group. These results suggest that neural organization for syntactic processing is sensitive to delays in language acquisition independently of proficiency level. More specifically, they suggest that both early and later syntactic processes are sensitive to maturational constraints. These results also suggest that late learners who reach a high level of second-language proficiency rely on different neural mechanisms than native speakers of that language.

scholarly journals Word from the editors

2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 661-664
Author(s):  
ZORNITSA KOZAREVA ◽  
VIVI NASTASE ◽  
RADA MIHALCEA
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Semantic Networks ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Semantic Relations ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Regular Graphs ◽  
Knowledge Repositories ◽  
Knowledge Stores ◽  
The Web

Graph structures naturally model connections. In natural language processing (NLP) connections are ubiquitous, on anything between small and web scale. We find them between words – as grammatical, collocation or semantic relations – contributing to the overall meaning, and maintaining the cohesive structure of the text and the discourse unity. We find them between concepts in ontologies or other knowledge repositories – since the early ages of artificial intelligence, associative or semantic networks have been proposed and used as knowledge stores, because they naturally capture the language units and relations between them, and allow for a variety of inference and reasoning processes, simulating some of the functionalities of the human mind. We find them between complete texts or web pages, and between entities in a social network, where they model relations at the web scale. Beyond the more often encountered ‘regular’ graphs, hypergraphs have also appeared in our field to model relations between more than two units.

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