RECURRENT LEXIS AND PHRASEOLOGY IN ENGLISH RESTAURANT REVIEWS: A DATA-DRIVEN ANALYSIS

This paper presents a corpus linguistic analysis of recurrent vocabulary and phraseologyin written English food discourse. More specifi cally, it focuses on the use and discourse functions of keywords, key multi-word terms and lexical bundles in a specialized corpus comprising 200 professional restaurant reviews that were published in online editions of selected British and American newspapers. The results of the study indicate that the most distinctive lexical feature of the analyzed texts is the frequent mention of ingredients and the limited presence of stance devices. The most frequently mentioned aspects of the referential content also show that what is evaluated is the total experience of eating and dining at a restaurant. These fi ndings contribute to the area of English forSpecific Purposes, off ering pedagogical potential that can be exploited when developing purpose-made teaching materials for students in food-related programs who need to learn the specialized vocabulary of their target profession.

Multi-feature fusion framework for sarcasm identification on twitter data: A machine learning based approach

Sarcasm is the main reason behind the faulty classification of tweets. It brings a challenge in natural language processing (NLP) as it hampers the method of finding people’s actual sentiment. Various feature engineering techniques are being investigated for the automatic detection of sarcasm. However, most related techniques have always concentrated only on the content-based features in sarcastic expression, leaving the contextual information in isolation. This leads to a loss of the semantics of words in the sarcastic expression. Another drawback is the sparsity of the training data. Due to the word limit of microblog, the feature vector’s values for each sample constructed by BoW produces null features. To address the above-named problems, a Multi-feature Fusion Framework is proposed using two classification stages. The first stage classification is constructed with the lexical feature only, extracted using the BoW technique, and trained using five standard classifiers, including SVM, DT, KNN, LR, and RF, to predict the sarcastic tendency. In stage two, the constructed lexical sarcastic tendency feature is fused with eight other proposed features for modelling a context to obtain a final prediction. The effectiveness of the developed framework is tested with various experimental analysis to obtain classifiers’ performance. The evaluation shows that our constructed classification models based on the developed novel feature fusion obtained results with a precision of 0.947 using a Random Forest classifier. Finally, the obtained results were compared with the results of three baseline approaches. The comparison outcome shows the significance of the proposed framework.

Detecting missing IS-A relations in the NCI Thesaurus using an enhanced hybrid approach

Background The National Cancer Institute (NCI) Thesaurus provides reference terminology for NCI and other systems. Previously, we proposed a hybrid prototype utilizing lexical features and role definitions of concepts in non-lattice subgraphs to identify missing IS-A relations in the NCI Thesaurus. However, no domain expert evaluation was provided in our previous work. In this paper, we further enhance the hybrid approach by leveraging a novel lexical feature—roots of noun chunks within concept names. Formal evaluation of our enhanced approach is also performed. Method We first compute all the non-lattice subgraphs in the NCI Thesaurus. We model each concept using its role definitions, words and roots of noun chunks within its concept name and its ancestor’s names. Then we perform subsumption testing for candidate concept pairs in the non-lattice subgraphs to automatically detect potentially missing IS-A relations. Domain experts evaluated the validity of these relations. Results We applied our approach to 19.08d version of the NCI Thesaurus. A total of 55 potentially missing IS-A relations were identified by our approach and reviewed by domain experts. 29 out of 55 were confirmed as valid by domain experts and have been incorporated in the newer versions of the NCI Thesaurus. 7 out of 55 further revealed incorrect existing IS-A relations in the NCI Thesaurus. Conclusions The results showed that our hybrid approach by leveraging lexical features and role definitions is effective in identifying potentially missing IS-A relations in the NCI Thesaurus.

Malayalam Morphosyntax: Inflectional Features and their Acquisition

Malayalam, which belongs to the South-Dravidian language family, is an agglutinative language with rich inflectional morphology. The aim of the thesis is to analyse the grammar and acquisition of Malayalam verbal inflections (tense, aspect and mood) and nominal inflections (case, number, and gender). Within the larger discussion of inflectional morphology and its acquisition, particular attention is paid to two complex morphological processes, a) the past tense formation of verbs and b) case assignment of subjects and objects.In particular, the thesis will show the following: a) that the past tense marker selection is determined by different grammatical principles in underived and derived stems; specifically, phonotactics in the former and the lexical feature of transitivity in the latter; b) that the dative nominals of a class of predicates (variously labelled experiencer or dative subject or psych predicates) are in fact subjects using an array of empirical tests involving binding, control, accusative marking, and predicate alternation; and c) that inflections for number and object case rest on lexical features of the noun (stem) and the allomorphy is governed by these featural requirements. In looking at the developing grammar in the two subjects, the thesis will show that Malayalam inflectional grammar has quite direct consequences for the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Specifically, acquisition proceeds unobstructed when the mode of selection is phonological and offers more challenges when the mode of selection is morphological, i.e., when the selection depends on the learning of the lexical or grammatical features of the noun and verb stems.Thus, using the interplay between acquisition and the grammatical description, we establish that in addition to the established factors that guide acquisition, mode of selection of an inflection plays a key role in determining the relative ease/difficulty in the acquisition of inflectional morphology. This follows quite neatly from the fact that children are phonologically competent even before much language is produced and that this module-competence could facilitate the acquisition of morphology. The thesis will argue that this is indeed the case.

VARIOUS APPRO ARIOUS APPROACHES TO THE STUD O THE STUDY OF ENGLISH SE Y OF ENGLISH SET EXPRESSIONS AND THE PROBLEMS OF CLASSIFICATION

Speech is what the speaker speaks about, expressing his/her feelings and interaction with the audience. The speaker tries to make his speech effective in one way or another and to attract the listener. A word has its own lexical and complementary meaning. For example, the lexical meaning of the words "expressive", "emotional", "affective" means "affective", and the additional meaning "emotional". In English, it is permissible to take into account syntactic, melodic and lexical features for expressing emotional expressions. By lexical feature, we mean adding additional meaning to words. The complementary meaning of words can be constant or variable. We must always pay attention to the constant meaning of words. Phrases can have different meanings depending on the situation.

Malayalam Morphosyntax: Inflectional Features and their Acquisition

Malayalam, which belongs to the South-Dravidian language family, is an agglutinative language with rich inflectional morphology. The aim of the thesis is to analyse the grammar and acquisition of Malayalam verbal inflections (tense, aspect and mood) and nominal inflections (case, number, and gender). Within the larger discussion of inflectional morphology and its acquisition, particular attention is paid to two complex morphological processes, a) the past tense formation of verbs and b) case assignment of subjects and objects.In particular, the thesis will show the following: a) that the past tense marker selection is determined by different grammatical principles in underived and derived stems; specifically, phonotactics in the former and the lexical feature of transitivity in the latter; b) that the dative nominals of a class of predicates (variously labelled experiencer or dative subject or psych predicates) are in fact subjects using an array of empirical tests involving binding, control, accusative marking, and predicate alternation; and c) that inflections for number and object case rest on lexical features of the noun (stem) and the allomorphy is governed by these featural requirements. In looking at the developing grammar in the two subjects, the thesis will show that Malayalam inflectional grammar has quite direct consequences for the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Specifically, acquisition proceeds unobstructed when the mode of selection is phonological and offers more challenges when the mode of selection is morphological, i.e., when the selection depends on the learning of the lexical or grammatical features of the noun and verb stems.Thus, using the interplay between acquisition and the grammatical description, we establish that in addition to the established factors that guide acquisition, mode of selection of an inflection plays a key role in determining the relative ease/difficulty in the acquisition of inflectional morphology. This follows quite neatly from the fact that children are phonologically competent even before much language is produced and that this module-competence could facilitate the acquisition of morphology. The thesis will argue that this is indeed the case.

Two genitive constructions of Old Babylonian

The paper shows that there is a pattern in the distribution of synthetic (šēp šarrim “the king's foot”) vs. analytical (kaspum ša awīlim “the boss's money”) genitive constructions in Old Babylonian. The choice depends on the lexical feature of head nouns known as (in)alienability. Old Babylonian kinship and body part terms, as well as some other substantives, are “inalienable”, which means they take only the synthetic construction. All other Old Babylonian nouns are “alienable”, which means they admit both the synthetic and the analytical construction (kasap tamkārī and kaspum ša tamkārī “the merchants’ money”). In the latter case, there is no general rule to predict the choice, yet in certain cases the two constructions display a non-random frequency distribution.