Browsing Linguistics by Title
Now showing items 54-73 of 143
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Generativism and Emergentism: Evidence From Second Language Acquisition Studies of Poverty of the Stimulus Phenomena
This work applies evidence from second language acquisition studies to the question of the existence of an inborn, language-specific system that constrains the set of possible human grammars. Three sets of studies are ... -
A Grammar Library for Information Structure
(2014-04-30)This dissertation makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with an eye toward creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual ... -
Historical syntax of the English articles in relation to the count/non-count distinction
(1996)This dissertation focuses on functional nodes within the structure of the English noun phrase. The count/non-count distinction affects multiple aspects of the syntax of noun phrases, but the syntactic basis for that ... -
How peripheral a phenomenon is it?: On the interaction of DP-internal ellipsis, degree inversion, and islands
In this dissertation I set out to solve a series of puzzles related to the notion of a DP periphery, defined as an area around the edge of a given domain targeted by operations such as movement and agreement. In solving ... -
Human-assisted Neural Machine Translation: Harnessing Human Feedback for Machine Translation
Neural machine translation (NMT) is a promising approach to the task of machine translation that has led to state-of-the-art results in many settings. However, NMT translations are still far from sufficient for many practical ... -
The imperfective paradox in the English progressive and other semantic course corrections
(2000)The topic of this work is semantic course corrections. I use this term to refer to a discourse-level phenomenon that sheds light on a number of puzzles in semantics and pragmatics at the level of the sentence. At issue ... -
Improving Turkish Spelling Correction with Wikipedia Edit History Data
Spelling correction is a well-established NLP application, but the quality for English spelling correction tends to be significantly higher than for other languages. One significant issue for minority languages in NLP is ... -
An Independent Assessment of Phonetic Distinctive Feature Sets used to Model Pronunciation Variation
(2014-04-30)It has been consistently shown that Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) performance on casual, spontaneous speech is much worse than on carefully planned or read speech by as much as double the word error rate, and that ... -
Inferring Grammars from Interlinear Glossed Text: Extracting Typological and Lexical Properties for the Automatic Generation of HPSG Grammars
This dissertation presents a grammar inference system that leverages linguistic knowledge recorded in the form of annotations in interlinear glossed text (IGT) and in a meta-grammar engineering system (the LinGO Grammar ... -
Information Retrieval for Clinical Decision Support
Within the field of clinical support, access to relevant, peer-reviewed information from medical journals and other research publications is critical to making informed decisions regarding the diagnosis and care of patients. ... -
Investigation of sentence structure in domain adaptation for sentiment classification
(2014-02-24)A popular use case of computational linguistics is the identification of sentiment in text. Many current methods for sentiment classification focus on word features within sentences of a text. These methods employ different ... -
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 ... -
It's Only Morpho-Logical: Modeling Agreement in Cross-Linguistic Dependency Parsing
(2012-08-10)I propose a linguistically motivated set of features to model morphological agreement and add them to MSTParser, a graph-based dependency parser (McDonald et al., 2006). Compared to the parser's built-in morphological ... -
Japanese gapping in minimalist syntax
(2006)This dissertation investigates an elliptical construction called Gapping in Japanese. Gapping is the omission of a predicate in clauses that are conjoined. The study focuses on capturing the correlation between Gapping ... -
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 ... -
Labeling and Automatically Identifying Basic-Level Categories
Basic-level categories are the primary categories humans use to think and communicate; they are the first categories learned, with numerous psychological advantages including quick exemplar recognition time. They are ... -
Language attitudes and bilingualism in Turkish-German popular film
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine attitudes towards Turkish-German language mixing. Lambert (1967), Lippi-Green (1997) and Preston (2010) have shown that stereotypes about groups of people can be expressed ... -
Language Dataset Documentation Design: Learning from Deaf and Indigenous Communities
This dissertation investigates how engaging with stakeholder groups, namely natural language processing (NLP) practitioners and language communities, can contribute to the development of documentation toolkits that are ... -
Language maintenance and shift across generations in Inner Mongolia
Language shift happens when a group of people stops using one language in favor of another, such that subsequent generations no longer acquire the original language. Research on the sociolinguistics of language shift has ... -
Latent Compositional Representations for English Function Word Comprehension
This paper investigates whether biasing natural language models toward tree-compositional structure and systematic token representation can improve performance on tasks that require the use of function words. The method ...