Teaching foreign languages taking into account the variety of types of communicative activity

The article deals with the key aspects of teaching foreign languages, taking into account the variety of types of communicative activity. It is known for certain that the leading communicative characteristic of language communication is its dualism, i.e. the presence in any separate act of communication of two participants and, accordingly, two communicative processes: the transmission or production of a language message and its reception. The processes of transmitting and receiving language messages can be separated by arbitrarily large intervals of space and time. The very two-sidedness of language communication determines the presence of different roles performed by the individuals involved in it. Each of these roles, which we will call types of communicative or linguistic activity, is a complex psychophysiological complex with pronounced specificity. The distinction between productive and receptive in linguistic communication is, therefore, not a terminological excess, but a fact of paramount importance, arising from the very nature of linguistic information exchange. Communication has many features that it would be right to take into account when teaching the acquired language. Such forms of speech activity as production and receiving have a different nature of origin and existence. An invaluable help in teaching foreign languages for the successful solution of these tasks is to conduct a number of lexicographic and phonetic-grammatical studies.

From X to Y: Anatomy of a Constructional Pattern

Compositionality is undoubtedly one of the hardest problems in linguistics. In decoding theories, the speaker occupies a leading role, having to carefully choose the form that better encodes the meaning to be communicated. In contrast, in inferential theories, the burden is shifted from speaker to hearer: linguistic information typically underspecifies meaning and the hearer must make a number of inferences to bridge the gap between what is said and what is meant. In this article, I argue that constructional meaning can aid the process of sentence meaning formation by providing a scaffold that can help the hearer with the construal operations. Constructions, by providing an additional layer of meaning, constrain the range of possible meanings activated by words thereby reducing the combinatorial explosion when several words are joined together. This process is examined here by analysing the meanings associated with the grammatical construction [from X to Y], which is connected to a polysemy network of related senses, using examples extracted from a multimodal corpus. A preliminary analysis of the gesturing behaviour associated with the different senses proposed is also included, which can be seen to contribute to the characterisation of the different senses of the polysemy network.

The Rediscovery Hypothesis: Language Models Need to Meet Linguistics

There is an ongoing debate in the NLP community whether modern language models contain linguistic knowledge, recovered through so-called probes. In this paper, we study whether linguistic knowledge is a necessary condition for the good performance of modern language models, which we call the rediscovery hypothesis. In the first place, we show that language models that are significantly compressed but perform well on their pretraining objectives retain good scores when probed for linguistic structures. This result supports the rediscovery hypothesis and leads to the second contribution of our paper: an information-theoretic framework that relates language modeling objectives with linguistic information. This framework also provides a metric to measure the impact of linguistic information on the word prediction task. We reinforce our analytical results with various experiments, both on synthetic and on real NLP tasks in English.

Preparing languages for natural language generation using Wikidata lexicographical data

In the lead-up to the launch of Abstract Wikipedia, a sufficient body of linguistic information, based on which the text within for a given language can be generated, must be in place so that different sets of functions, some working with concepts and others turning these into word sequences, can work together to produce something natural in that language. To achieve that information body's development requires more thorough consideration of a number of linguistic aspects sooner rather than later. This session will thus discuss aspects of language planning with respect to Wikidata lexicographical data and natural language generation, including the compositionality and manipulability of lexical units, the breadth and interconnectedness of units of meaning, and the treatment of variation among a language’s lects broadly construed. Special reference to the handling of each of these aspects for Bengali and those linguistic varieties often grouped with it will be presented.

Scots Wiki – moving forward

How do you recover after a crisis? This session will reflect on the work done by and with the sco.wiki community to recover and rebuild after the negative international press attention that surrounded the wiki in 2020. I’ll talk about on- and off- wiki community development, partnership development, the challenges that still face the project, and hopes for the future. I’ll also reflect on care in volunteer management, and why we should always remember that there are real people behind keyboards. As Scotland Programme Coordinator for Wikimedia UK, I’ve been involved in supporting the community post-crisis, and have been impressed and heartened by the volume of work which has taken place since sco.wiki hit the headlines. I’d like to take this opportunity to tell the story of a group of editors and Scots speakers who are determined that the wiki should survive, grow, and thrive. Abstract id. 11: In the lead-up to the launch of Abstract Wikipedia, a sufficient body of linguistic information, based on which the text within for a given language can be generated, must be in place so that different sets of functions, some working with concepts and others turning these into word sequences, can work together to produce something natural in that language. To achieve that information body's development requires more thorough consideration of a number of linguistic aspects sooner rather than later. This session will thus discuss aspects of language planning with respect to Wikidata lexicographical data and natural language generation, including the compositionality and manipulability of lexical units, the breadth and interconnectedness of units of meaning, and the treatment of variation among a language’s lects broadly construed. Special reference to the handling of each of these aspects for Bengali and those linguistic varieties often grouped with it will be presented.