Linguistics
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Stylistic variation in African American Language: examining the social meaning of linguistic features in a Seattle community
Linguistic features associated with African American Language (AAL) may have a large set of ideological and functional meanings beyond ethnic identity. While sociolinguists know a lot, comparatively, about regional and ... -
The Language of Law: An Analysis of Gender and Turn-Taking in U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments
In this study, I present a corpus of short exchanges between speakers in U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments. Each exchange is labeled on a spectrum of “cooperative” to “competitive” by a human annotator with legal experience ... -
Old Stereotypes "Live Free or Die": Addressing the Evaluation Problem of non-rhoticity in New Hampshire
Recent research examining New Hampshire English has demonstrated that the traditional Eastern New England features are dissipating among New Hampshirites (Nagy, 2001; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2005; Nagy & Irwin, 2010; Stanford, ... -
On the Statistical Significance Testing for Natural Language Processing
This thesis explores and compares statistical significance tests frequently used in comparing Natural Language Processing (NLP) system performance in several aspects. We begin by establishing the fundamentals of the NLP ... -
Enriching Scientific Paper Embeddings with Citation Context
Amid profusion of scientific literature, methods to organize and search available papers are quite valuable. Embedded representations of papers have potential to be used as input to a variety of tasks related to research ... -
Braiding Language (by Computer): Lushootseed Grammar Engineering
This dissertation describes the beginnings of the t̕əbšucid project. t̕əbšucid, literally the braiding of language, is a way to refer to "grammar" in Lushootseed (also known as Puget Salish, ISO-639-3:lut). The t̕əbšucid ... -
Productivity, influence, and evolution: The complex language shift of Modern Ladino
This dissertation uses data from interviews with Seattle Ladino speakers, an online forum in Ladino, and documents from the University of Washington Sephardic Studies Collection to investigate the language shift that Modern ... -
Issues in Named Entity Recognition on Early Modern English Letters
The influx of digitized historical documents into online collections has made the study of these documents much more accessible to researchers and the general public. This data, however, is frequently raw data sometimes ... -
Verb-linking and Events in Syntax: The Case of Uyghur -(i)p Constructions
This dissertation explores the syntactic structures of Uyghur multi-verb constructions formed using the verb-linking -(i)p suffix. In such constructions, only the final verb is inflected for tense, and -(i)p attaches to ... -
Named Entity Resolution for Historical Texts
The field of digital humanities has spurred an increase in applications of computational lin- guistics to historical documents, but the field remains underdeveloped. Standard natural language processing (NLP) techniques ... -
Pronouns Raising and Emerging
This dissertation revisits the question of the syntactic and semantic status of pronouns, incorporating new syntactic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic data to support an analysis of n-to-D head movement in the nominal domain. ... -
Multi-predicate Constructions in Nuuchahnulth
This dissertation documents and models two types of multi-predicate constructions in Nuuchahnulth: serial verb constructions, and a construction involving the suffix -(q)ḥ, which is called the predicate linker. I define a ... -
When change comes from within: The origin and diachronic development of 'positive' anymore from pre-Modern Scots to Modern North American English
The goal of this thesis is to provide a syntactic account of the diachronic development of the adverb anymore from a polarity sensitive aspectual adverb in Late Middle Scots (approximately 1550 to 1700), shown in (1); to ... -
Contextual Scripture Recommendation for Writers
Recommendation of book passages, quotes, or citations based on a given text can aid writing, research, literary analysis, and the incorporation of legal references (e.g. laws, previous cases). Each of these applications ... -
Korean Learners' Long-Term Individual Networks of Practice
This dissertation examines investment in language learning, especially how that investment looks over the entirety of a learner’s target language-related journey. It investigates investment, in terms of positive and negative ... -
Exploring Phone Recognition in Pre-verbal and Dysarthric Speech
In this study, we perform phone recognition on speech utterances made by two groups of people: adults who have speech articulation disorders and young children learning to speak language. We explore how these utterances ... -
&0: The Syntax and Semantics of 'Slash' and 'And/or'
I claim that 'slash' has become the first new coordinator in English in recent history. I use data from naturally observed spontaneous conversation and examples from corpora to demonstrate that 'slash' is an English syntactic ... -
Ways to be a Good Consultant: Answer Ranking in Medical Domain
In this study, we make a move to answer ranking task of medical community question answering (QA). The task of answer ranking has four different settings based on whether features from questions or other answers are used. ... -
Understanding and Generating Multi-Sentence Texts
English is often found in units comprised of multiple sentences, but synthesizing information across sentence boundaries, whether for understanding or generation, is a difficult challenge for natural language processing ... -
Parallel Sentence Detection in Comparable Corpora with Bilingual Word Embeddings for Low-resource Languages
In an emergency, machine translation systems can be useful in facilitating international cooperation during rescue efforts. Unfortunately, training resources (bitexts) for many language pairs are scarce and tend to comprise ...
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