I3rab: A New Arabic Dependency Treebank Based on Arabic Grammatical Theory

Treebanks are valuable linguistic resources that include the syntactic structure of a language sentence in addition to part-of-speech tags and morphological features. They are mainly utilized in modeling statistical parsers. Although the statistical natural language parser has recently become more accurate for languages such as English, those for the Arabic language still have low accuracy. The purpose of this article is to construct a new Arabic dependency treebank based on the traditional Arabic grammatical theory and the characteristics of the Arabic language, to investigate their effects on the accuracy of statistical parsers. The proposed Arabic dependency treebank, called I3rab, contrasts with existing Arabic dependency treebanks in two main concepts. The first concept is the approach of determining the main word of the sentence, and the second concept is the representation of the joined and covert pronouns. To evaluate I3rab, we compared its performance against a subset of Prague Arabic Dependency Treebank that shares a comparable level of details. The conducted experiments show that the percentage improvement reached up to 10.24% in UAS and 18.42% in LAS.

Going beyond the Text: Interactional Competence in Reading Comprehension Class

Drawing on the principles underlying conversation analysis (CA), this paper is a single case analysis of interaction in an English as a foreign language (EFL) reading comprehension classroom in Saudi Arabia. It looks at learning from a sociocultural perspective and uses constructs from this theoretical perspective. It focuses on Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) (Walsh, 2013), showing classroom interaction features that are considered CIC. The paper reflects how an understanding of the concept can lead to more dialogic, engaged learning environments. The paper also connects CIC to teachers’ ability to manipulate simple classroom interactional resources to make the teaching process more effective. The paper demonstrates how teachers can induce CIC by utilizing interactional techniques, such as relaxing the mechanism and speed through which turns are taken or given, use of active listenership devices, extending wait time, and use of open-ended questions to expand topics under development. The paper argues that those techniques will help teachers, as evidenced from the cited examples, further enhance classroom participation so that it is convergent with their pedagogical goals. Finally, the paper has pedagogical implementations as it sheds light on techniques that help promote classroom interaction as an indication of learning among students with limited linguistic resources.

Performing microcelebrity: Analyzing Papi Jiang's online persona through stance and style

ABSTRACT Contemporary digital media is characterized by a cultural logic of participation that encourages sharing, confession, phatic communication, and an emphasis on the visual. In this techno-cultural milieu, self-presentation has become a key mode of communication, and has enabled ordinary individuals to attain a measure of celebrity status. A key component of being a microcelebrity entails developing a consistent persona that is recognizable and unique. How such persona can be studied from the sociolinguistic perspective of stance and style is the focus of this article. We combined corpus linguistic and qualitative discourse analytic methods to examine a small corpus of videos produced by Chinese online celebrity, Papi Jiang. The article presents key lexico-grammatical, discourse-level, and non-linguistic resources that are analyzed as stance markers that together contribute to Papi's intense, critical-satirical performative style. The significance of the findings is discussed in relation to performance, performativity, and critique in digital media. (Persona, microcelebrity, style, performance, stance)*

Reclaiming the Multilingual Narrative of Children in the Borderlands Using a Critical Integration Approach

By joining together different methods and curriculum delivery in an elementary school setting, the author defined a unique critical integration approach to address questions of inclusive multilingual literacy practices. The author encouraged students to build upon their prior knowledge, ways in which to show that knowledge, and specifically, their linguistic cultural wealth, which generated a respect for the linguistic diversity of all students. The author created a collaborative pedagogical space in which the students constructed an innovative curriculum by co-mingling student experiences, their cultural and linguistic resources, and their interpretive frameworks. The teacher-research project involved a Funds of Knowledge orientation, the use of a variety of pedagogical tools influenced by the theory of Multiple Intelligences, gifted strategies, community cultural wealth, emancipatory education, critical and culturally responsive pedagogy, and visual arts aesthetics.

Modern Linguistic Technologies: Strategy for Teaching Translation Studies

How often students use IT resources is a key factor in the acquisition of skills associated to the new technologies. Strategies aimed at increasing student autonomy need to be developed and should offer resources that encourage them to make use of computing tools in class hours. The analysis of the modern linguistic technologies, concerning intellectual language processing necessary for the creation and function of the highly effective technologies of knowledge operation was considered in the paper under consideration. Computerization of the information sphere has triggered extensive search for solving the problem of the use of natural language mechanisms in automated systems of various types. One of them was creating Controlled languages based on a set of features which made machine translation more refined. Triggered by the economic demand, they are not artificial languages like Esperanto, but natural simplified languages, in terms of vocabulary, grammatical and syntactic structures. More than ever, the tasks of modern computer linguistics behold creating software for natural language processing, information retrieval in large data sets, support of technical authors in the process of creating professional texts and users of computer technology, hence creating new translation tools. Such powerful linguistic resources as corpora of texts, terminology databases and ontologies may facilitate more efficient use of modern multilingual information technology. Creating and improving all methods considered will help make the job of a translator more efficient. One of the programs, CLAT does not aim at producing machine translation, but allows technical editors to create flawless, sequential professional texts through integrated punctuation and spelling modules. Other programs under consideration are to be implemented in Ukrainian translation departments. Moreover, the databases considered in the paper enable studying of the dynamics of the linguistic system and developing areas of applied research such as terminography, terminology, automated data processing etc. Effective cooperation of developers, translators and declarative institutes in the creation of innovative linguistic technologies will promote further development of translation and applied linguistics.

Schoolscaping in the third space

The aim of this paper is to trace students’ multilingualism and agency in the schoolscape of the Language Introduction Programme (LIP) in one Swedish upper secondary school. Through linguistic schoolscaping, the study contributes to a deeper understanding of LIP. The schoolscape is analysed as reconstructions of photographs of displayed images, objects, symbols, and written language on walls and elsewhere in the school area. The photographs are analysed in terms of how they orient to time, place, and space; control behaviour; and shape discourses. Through the analysis, discourses of an organized, inclusive, and tolerant society appear, that simultaneously shape a discourse of behaviour: in this school (and in Sweden) we (want to) follow (the) rules. Students’ multilingualism is nearly absent in the schoolscape, as is their agency. In line with Bhabha’s concept third space, the schoolscape may be understood as a space for Swedishness, where inclusion demands mastery of Swedish. The in-betweenness of the LIP, as a transitional programme, appears as a space to escape otherness by changing language, which is the requirement for inclusion. Thus, in this case, the signage displayed in the schoolscape does not open up spaces for identity development related to multilingualism or multiculturalism. Opening space for students as agents in the schoolscape and making their diverse linguistic resources visible would also open up a third space for negotiation of norms, through contestation, resistance, and manifestation. Thus students’ development of multiple identities would be enabled and their opportunities to be (co-)creators of their own futures widened.

Comprehension of Ukrainian by Estonians via Russian: Structural and extra-linguistic aspects

This study explores how people use and expand their linguistic resources in the situation when they have some proficiency in L2 and try to understand L3 that is related to L2. The focus of the study is on the comprehension of Ukrainian by Estonian L1 speakers via their proficiency in Russian (L2). This situation is labeled as mediated receptive multilingualism. The aim of this research is to investigate the role of cross-linguistic similarity (objective or perceived, in the terms of Ringbom 2007) and extra-linguistic predictors of success in comprehension. In addition to measuring the success rate, we pay attention to the participant's perspective. The experiment was conducted with 30 speakers of Estonian as L1 and included a questionnaire, C-test in Russian, three Ukrainian texts with different groups of tasks, and debriefing. In this article, we focus on the task of defining Ukrainian words from the text and on debriefing interviews. The results showed that similarity, perceived or objective, is not the only decisive factor in facilitating understanding. The participants explanations confirmed our previous findings that similarity, albeit important, is only partly responsible for successful comprehension. This became clear from the debriefing interviews. In many cases, the participants' choice was affected by a range of extra-linguistic factors: general knowledge, context, exposure to various registers of Russian, M-factor, meta-linguistic awareness, and learnability. In some instances, context and general knowledge outweighed similarity. These findings show how similarity worked together with extra-linguistic factors in facilitating successful comprehension in challenging multilingual settings.

Robust Complaint Processing in Portuguese

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) community has witnessed huge improvements in the last years. However, most achievements are evaluated on benchmarked curated corpora, with little attention devoted to user-generated content and less-resourced languages. Despite the fact that recent approaches target the development of multi-lingual tools and models, they still underperform in languages such as Portuguese, for which linguistic resources do not abound. This paper exposes a set of challenges encountered when dealing with a real-world complex NLP problem, based on user-generated complaint data in Portuguese. This case study meets the needs of a country-wide governmental institution responsible for food safety and economic surveillance, and its responsibilities in handling a high number of citizen complaints. Beyond looking at the problem from an exclusively academic point of view, we adopt application-level concerns when analyzing the progress obtained through different techniques, including the need to obtain explainable decision support. We discuss modeling choices and provide useful insights for researchers working on similar problems or data.

Going beyond the Text: Interactional Competence in Reading Comprehension Class

Drawing on the principles underlying conversation analysis (CA), this paper is a single case analysis of interaction in an English as a foreign language (EFL) reading comprehension classroom in Saudi Arabia. It looks at learning from a sociocultural perspective and uses constructs from this theoretical perspective. It focuses on Classroom Interactional Competence (CIC) (Walsh, 2013), showing classroom interaction features that are considered CIC. The paper reflects how an understanding of the concept can lead to more dialogic, engaged learning environments. The paper also connects CIC to teachers’ ability to manipulate simple classroom interactional resources to make the teaching process more effective. The paper demonstrates how teachers can induce CIC by utilizing interactional techniques, such as relaxing the mechanism and speed through which turns are taken or given, use of active listenership devices, extending wait time, and use of open-ended questions to expand topics under development. The paper argues that those techniques will help teachers, as evidenced from the cited examples, further enhance classroom participation so that it is convergent with their pedagogical goals. Finally, the paper has pedagogical implementations as it sheds light on techniques that help promote classroom interaction as an indication of learning among students with limited linguistic resources.

Les effets d'une posture plurilingue de l'écriture collaborative sur l'expérience émotionnelle d’apprenantes créolophones et la qualité de leurs productions écrites

The purpose of this research was to determine, first, how a plurilingual or monolingual posture adopted during a collaborative writing task influences the emotional experience of Creole learners of French as a second language (FL2), and second, how this emotional experience interacts with the quality of the written production. To this end, 39 FL2 Creole-speaking learners collaboratively wrote texts under two experimental conditions: one imposing the exclusive use of FL2 during the collaborative activity and the other allowing free choice as to the languages to be used. After each task, participants individually answered a self-evaluation questionnaire to measure their emotional state while doing the task. In order to establish a relationship between the emotions experienced by the learners and their writing performance, the texts from both conditions were evaluated using an analytical rubric. The results showed that the participants experienced more positive emotions when they were free to use all their linguistic resources, including their native language (L1). Thus, their emotional experience was significantly more positive in the condition without linguistic constraints. While having access to L1 use contributed to a more positive learning climate, obligatory second language (L2) use was primarily associated with tension and anxiety. Also, participants who experienced positive emotions, regardless of the task, wrote better texts and scored highest on overall quality.