Search results for: syntactic priming

Authors: Anes Enakoa, Yawei Liang

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Question Answering (QA) system is one of the most important and demanding tasks in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In QA systems, the answer generation task generates a list of candidate answers to the user's question, in which only one answer is correct. Answer selection is one of the main components of the QA, which is concerned with selecting the best answer choice from the candidate answers suggested by the system. However, the selection process can be very challenging especially in Arabic due to its particularities. To address this challenge, an approach is proposed to answer questions with multiple answer choices for Arabic QA systems based on Textual Entailment (TE) recognition. The developed approach employs a Support Vector Machine that considers lexical, semantic and syntactic features in order to recognize the entailment between the generated hypotheses (H) and the text (T). A set of experiments has been conducted for performance evaluation and the overall performance of the proposed method reached an accuracy of 67.5% with C@1 score of 80.46%. The obtained results are promising and demonstrate that the proposed method is effective for TE recognition task.

Keywords: information retrieval, machine learning, natural language processing, question answering, textual entailment

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Authors: E. Mendoza, D. Jackson-Maldonado, G. Avecilla-Ramírez, A. Mondaca

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Assessing language proficiency is a major issue in psycholinguistic research. There are multiple tools that measure language dominance and language proficiency in hearing bilinguals, however, this is not the case for Deaf bilinguals. Specifically, there are few, if not none, assessment tools useful in the description of the multilingual abilities of Mexican Deaf signers. Because of this, the linguistic characteristics of Mexican Deaf population have been poorly described. This paper attempts to explain the necessary changes done in order to adapt the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP) to Mexican Sign Language (LSM) and written/oral Spanish. BLP is a Self-Evaluation tool that has been adapted and translated to several oral languages, but not to sign languages. Lexical, syntactic, cultural, and structural changes were applied to the BLP. 35 Mexican Deaf signers participated in a pilot study. All of them were enrolled in Higher Education programs. BLP was presented online in written Spanish via Google Forms. No additional information in LSM was provided. Results show great heterogeneity as it is expected of Deaf populations and BLP seems to be a useful tool to create a bilingual profile of the Mexican Deaf population. This is a first attempt to adapt a widely tested tool in bilingualism research to sign language. Further modifications need to be done.

Keywords: deaf bilinguals, assessment tools, bilingual language profile, mexican sign language

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Authors: JiYoung Park, SueGoo Rhee, HyunAe Woo

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In liver regeneration, quiescent hepatocytes need to be primed to fully respond to growth factors such as hepatocyte growth factor. To understand the priming process, it is necessary to analyze patterns of gene expression that occur during liver regeneration after partial hepatectomy (PHx). Recently, tyrosine phosphorylation of signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (pYSTAT3) has been shown to play an important role in initiating liver regeneration. In order to evaluate the role of pYSTAT3 on liver regeneration after PHx, we used an intrabody which can selectively inhibit pYSTAT3. In our previous studies, an intrabody had been shown that it bound specifically to the pYSTAT3. Adenovirus-mediated expression of the intrabody in HepG2 cells, as well as mouse liver, blocked both accumulation of pYSTAT3 in the nucleus and downstream target of pYSTAT3. In this study, PHx was performed on intrabody-expressing mice and the expression levels of liver regeneration-related genes were analyzed. We also measured liver/body weight ratios and the related cellular signaling pathways were analyzed. Acute phase response genes were reduced in an intrabody-expressing mice during liver regeneration than in control virus-injected mice. However, the time course of liver mass restoration in intrabody-expressing mice was similar to that observed in control virus-injected mice. We also observed that the expression levels of anti-apoptotic genes, such as Bcl2 and Bcl-xL were decreased in intrabody-expressing mice whereas the expression of cell cycle-related genes such as cyclin D1, and c-myc was increased. Liver regeneration after PHx was partially impaired by the selective inhibition of pYSTAT3 with a phosphorylation site-specific intrabody and these results indicated that pYSTAT3 might have limited role in liver mass recovery.

Keywords: STAT3, pYSTAT3, liver regeneration, intrabody

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Authors: Adrian-Gabriel Chifu, Sebastien Fournier

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One of the challenges of natural language understanding is to deal with the subjectivity of sentences, which may express opinions and emotions that add layers of complexity and nuance. Sentiment analysis is a field that aims to extract and analyze these subjective elements from text, and it can be applied at different levels of granularity, such as document, paragraph, sentence, or aspect. Aspect-based sentiment analysis is a well-studied topic with many available data sets and models. However, there is no clear definition of what makes a sentence difficult for aspect-based sentiment analysis. In this paper, we explore this question by conducting an experiment with three data sets: ”Laptops”, ”Restaurants”, and ”MTSC” (Multi-Target-dependent Sentiment Classification), and a merged version of these three datasets. We study the impact of domain diversity and syntactic diversity on difficulty. We use a combination of classifiers to identify the most difficult sentences and analyze their characteristics. We employ two ways of defining sentence difficulty. The first one is binary and labels a sentence as difficult if the classifiers fail to correctly predict the sentiment polarity. The second one is a six-level scale based on how many of the top five best-performing classifiers can correctly predict the sentiment polarity. We also define 9 linguistic features that, combined, aim at estimating the difficulty at sentence level.

Keywords: sentiment analysis, difficulty, classification, machine learning

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Authors: Haoyang Liang, Dandong Ge

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With the rapid development of Chinese cities, traffic congestion has become more and more serious. At the same time, there are many closed old residential area in Chinese cities, which seriously affect the connectivity of urban roads and reduce the density of urban road networks. After reopening the restricted old residential area, the internal roads in the original residential area were transformed into urban roads, which was of great help to alleviate traffic congestion. This paper uses the spatial syntactic theory to analyze the urban road network and compares the roads with the integration and connectivity degree to evaluate whether the opening of the roads in the residential areas can improve the urban traffic. Based on the road network system within the first loop road in Kunming, the Space Syntax evaluation model is established for status analysis. And comparative analysis method will be used to compare the change of the model before and after the road openness of the old urban residential district within the first-ring road in Kunming. Then it will pick out the areas which indicate a significant difference for the small dimensions model analysis. According to the analyzed results and traffic situation, the evaluation of road openness in the old urban residential district will be proposed to improve the urban residential districts.

Keywords: Space Syntax, Kunming, urban renovation, traffic jam

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Authors: Luís Antonio de Almeida Rodriguez, José Maria Parente de Oliveira, Ednelson Oliveira

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In the last two decades, the world’s aviation authorities have made several attempts to create consensus about a global and accepted approach for applying semantics to web services registry descriptions. This problem has led communities to face a fat and disorganized infrastructure to describe aeronautical web services. It is usual for developers to implement ad-hoc connections among consumers and providers and manually create non-standardized service compositions, which need some particular approach to compose and semantically discover a desired web service. Current practices are not precise and tend to focus on lightweight specifications of some parts of the OWL-S and embed them into syntactic descriptions (SOAP artifacts and OWL language). It is necessary to have the ability to manage the use of both technologies. This paper presents an implementation of the ontology OWL-S that describes a Brazilian Aeronautical Web Service Registry, which makes it able to publish, advertise, make multi-criteria semantic discovery aligned with the ideas of the System Wide Information Management (SWIM) Program, and invoke web services within the Air Traffic Management context. The proposal’s best finding is a generic approach to describe semantic web services. The paper also presents a set of functional requirements to guide the ontology development and to compare them to the results to validate the implementation of the OWL-S Ontology.

Keywords: aeronautical web services, OWL-S, semantic web services discovery, ontologies

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Authors: Bowen Ding, Yihao Kuang

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In recent years, large-scale pre-trained language models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of natural language processing tasks. The word vectors produced by these language models can be viewed as dense encoded presentations of natural language that in text form. However, it is unknown how much linguistic information is encoded and how. In this paper, we construct several corresponding probing tasks for multiple linguistic information to clarify the encoding capabilities of different language models and performed a visual display. We firstly obtain word presentations in vector form from different language models, including BERT, ELMo, RoBERTa and GPT. Classifiers with a small scale of parameters and unsupervised tasks are then applied on these word vectors to discriminate their capability to encode corresponding linguistic information. The constructed probe tasks contain both semantic and syntactic aspects. The semantic aspect includes the ability of the model to understand semantic entities such as numbers, time, and characters, and the grammatical aspect includes the ability of the language model to understand grammatical structures such as dependency relationships and reference relationships. We also compare encoding capabilities of different layers in the same language model to infer how linguistic information is encoded in the model.

Keywords: language models, probing task, text presentation, linguistic information

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Authors: Anna Kesoyan

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The present paper deals with the syntax-related problems of translation from English into Armenian. Although Syntax is a part of grammar, syntax-related problems of translation are studied separately during the process of translation. Translation from one language to another is widely accepted as a challenging problem. This becomes even more challenging when the source and target languages are widely different in structure and style, as is the case with English and Armenian. Syntax-related problems of translation from English into Armenian are mainly connected with the syntactical structures of these languages, and particularly, with the word order of the sentence. The word order of the sentence of the Armenian language, which is a synthetic language, is usually characterized as “rather free”, and the word order of the English language, which is an analytical language, is characterized “fixed”. The following research examines the main translation means, particularly, syntactical transformations as the translator has to take real steps while trying to solve certain syntax-related problems. Most of the means of translation are based on the transformation of grammatical components of the sentence, without changing the main information of the text. There are several transformations that occur during translation such as word order of the sentence, transformations of certain grammatical constructions like Infinitive participial construction, Nominative with the Infinitive and Elliptical constructions which have been covered in the following research.

Keywords: elliptical constructions, nominative with the infinitive constructions, fixed and free word order, syntactic structures

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Authors: Lesley Karen Penera

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Despite the countless that has been drawn to investigate Philippine English for a myriad of reasons, none was known to have ventured on a probe of its grammatical features as used in a technology-driven linguistic landscape by two generations in the digital age. Propelled by the assumption of an emerging Philippine English variety, this paper determined the grammatical features that characterize the digital native-immigrants’ Philippine English. It also ascertained whether mistake or deviation instigated the use of the features, and established this variety’s level of comprehensibility. This exploratory mixed-methods inquiry employed some qualitative and quantitative data drawn from a social networking site, the digital native-immigrant group, and the comprehensibility-raters who were selected through non-random purposive sampling. The study yields 8 grammatical features, mostly deemed results of deviation, yet the texts characterized by such features were mostly rated with excellent comprehensibility. This substantiates some of the grammatical features identified in earlier studies, provides evidentiary proof that the digital groups’ Philippine English is not bound by the standard of syntactic accuracy and corroborates the assertion on language’s manipulability as an instrument fashioned to satisfy the users’ need for successful communication in actual instances for use of English past the walls of any university where the variety is cultivated. The same could also be rationalized by some respondents’ position on grammar and accuracy to be less vital than one’s facility to communicate effectively.

Keywords: comprehensibility, deviation, digital immigrants, digital natives, mistake, Philippine English variety

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Authors: Venkateswar Pujari

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This study tries to investigate the complex interplay between control, awareness, and attention in human cognitive processes. The fundamental elements of cognitive functioning that play a significant role in influencing perception, decision-making, and behavior are attention, awareness, and control. Understanding how they interact can help us better understand how our minds work and may even increase our understanding of cognitive science and its therapeutic applications. The study uses an empirical methodology to examine the relationships between attention, awareness, and control by integrating different experimental paradigms and neuropsychological tests. To ensure the generalizability of findings, a wide sample of participants is chosen, including people with various cognitive profiles and ages. The study is structured into four primary parts, each of which focuses on one component of how attention, awareness, and control interact: 1. Evaluation of Attentional Capacity and Selectivity: In this stage, participants complete established attention tests, including the Stroop task and visual search tasks. 2. Evaluation of Awareness Degrees: In the second stage, participants' degrees of conscious and unconscious awareness are assessed using perceptual awareness tasks such as masked priming and binocular rivalry tasks. 3. Investigation of Cognitive Control Mechanisms: In the third phase, reaction inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and working memory capacity are investigated using exercises like the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and the Go/No-Go paradigm. 4. Results Integration and Analysis: Data from all phases are integrated and analyzed in the final phase. To investigate potential links and prediction correlations between attention, awareness, and control, correlational and regression analyses are carried out. The study's conclusions shed light on the intricate relationships that exist between control, awareness, and attention throughout cognitive function. The findings may have consequences for cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and clinical psychology by providing new understandings of cognitive dysfunctions linked to deficiencies in attention, awareness, and control systems.

Keywords: attention, awareness, control, cognitive functioning, neuropsychological assessment

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Authors: Sophie Whittle

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Prior to present day, English syntax historically exhibited an inconsistent verb-second (V2) rule, which saw the verb move to the second position in the sentence following the fronting of a type of phrase. There was a high amount of variation throughout the history of English with regard to the ordering of subject and verb, and many explanations attempting to account for this variation have been documented in previous literature. However, these attempts have been contradictory, with many accounts positing the effect of previous syntactic changes as the main motivations behind the decline of V2. For instance, morphosyntactic changes, such as the loss of clitics and the loss of empty expletives, have been loosely connected to changes in frequency for the loss of V2. The questions surrounding the development of non-V2 in English have, therefore, yet to be answered. The current paper aims to bring together a number of explanations from different linguistic fields to determine the factors driving the changes in English V2. Using historical corpus-based methods, the study analyses both quantitatively and qualitatively the changes in frequency for the history of V2 in the Old, Middle, and Modern English periods to account for the variation in a range of sentential environments. These methods delve into the study of information structure, prosody and language contact to explain variation within different contexts. The analysis concludes that these factors, in addition to changes within the syntax, are responsible for the position of verb movement. The loss of V2 serves as an exemplar study within the field of historical linguistics, which combines a number of factors in explaining language change in general.

Keywords: corpora, English, language change, mixed-methods, syntax, verb-second

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Authors: Tayebeh Norouzi

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This study aims to investigate the acquisition process of intonation. It examines the intonation structure of Tokyo Japanese and its realization by Iranian learners of Japanese. Seven Iranian learners of Japanese, differing in fluency, and two Japanese speakers participated in the experiment. Two sentences were used to test the phonological and phonetic characteristics of lexical pitch-accent as well as the intonation patterns produced by the speakers. Both sentences consisted of similar words with the same number of syllables and lexical pitch-accents but different syntactic structure. Speakers were asked to read each sentence three times at normal speed, and the data were analyzed by Praat. The results show that lexical pitch-accent, Accentual Phrase (AP) and AP boundary tone realization vary depending on sentence type. For sentences of type XdeYwo, the lexical pitch-accent is realized properly. However, there is a rise in AP boundary tone regardless of speakers’ level of fluency. In contrast, in sentences of type XnoYwo, the lexical pitch-accent and AP boundary tone vary depending on the speakers’ fluency level. Advanced speakers are better at grouping words into phrases and produce more native-like intonation patterns, though they are not able to realize downstep properly. The non-native speakers tried to realize proper intonation patterns by making changes in lexical accent and boundary tone.

Keywords: intonation, Iranian learners, Japanese prosody, lexical accent, second language acquisition.

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Authors: Thorsten Auer, Sumaya Islam, Sabrina Plaß, Colin Wooldridge

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Whether individuals are more likely to forgo some ethical values if it is for a “great” social mission remains questionable. Research interest in the mechanism of moral disengagement has risen sharply in the organizational context over the last decades. Moral disengagement provides an explanatory approach to why individuals decide against their moral intent and describes the tendency to make unethical decisions due to a lack of self-regulation given various actions and their consequences. In our study, we examine the differences between individual decision-making given a commercial and social entrepreneurial context. Thereby, we investigate whether individuals in a social entrepreneurial context, characterized by pro-social goals and purpose beyond profit maximization, tend to make more or less “unethical” decisions in trade-off situations than those given a profit-focused commercial, entrepreneurial context. While a general priming effect may explain the tendency for individuals to make less unethical decisions given a social context, it remains unclear how individuals decide given a trade-off in that specific context. The trade-off in our study is characterized by the option to decide (un-) ethically to enhance the business purpose (in the social context, a social purpose, in the commercial context, a profit-maximization purpose). To investigate which characteristics of the context –and specifically of a trade-off – lead individuals to disregard and override their ethical values for a “greater good”, we design a conjoint analysis. This approach allows us to vary the attributes and scenarios and to test which attributes of a trade-off increase the probability of making an unethical choice. We add survey data to examine the individual propensity to morally disengage as an influencing factor to prefer certain attributes. Currently, we are in the final process of designing the conjoint analysis and plan to conduct the study by December 2022. We contribute to a better understanding of the role of moral disengagement in individual decision-making in a (social) entrepreneurial trade-off.

Keywords: moral disengagement, social entrepreneurship, unethical decision, conjoint analysis

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Authors: Saad M. Darwish, Magda M. Madbouly, Murad B. Khorsheed

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Sign Languages (SL) are the most accomplished forms of gestural communication. Therefore, their automatic analysis is a real challenge, which is interestingly implied to their lexical and syntactic organization levels. Hidden Markov models (HMM’s) have been used prominently and successfully in speech recognition and, more recently, in handwriting recognition. Consequently, they seem ideal for visual recognition of complex, structured hand gestures such as are found in sign language. In this paper, several results concerning static hand gesture recognition using an algorithm based on Type-2 Fuzzy HMM (T2FHMM) are presented. The features used as observables in the training as well as in the recognition phases are based on Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). SVD is an extension of Eigen decomposition to suit non-square matrices to reduce multi attribute hand gesture data to feature vectors. SVD optimally exposes the geometric structure of a matrix. In our approach, we replace the basic HMM arithmetic operators by some adequate Type-2 fuzzy operators that permits us to relax the additive constraint of probability measures. Therefore, T2FHMMs are able to handle both random and fuzzy uncertainties existing universally in the sequential data. Experimental results show that T2FHMMs can effectively handle noise and dialect uncertainties in hand signals besides a better classification performance than the classical HMMs. The recognition rate of the proposed system is 100% for uniform hand images and 86.21% for cluttered hand images.

Keywords: hand gesture recognition, hand detection, type-2 fuzzy logic, hidden Markov Model

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Authors: Assabo Mohamed, Bile Mohamed, Ali Farah, Isman Souleiman, Olga Alos Ramos, Marie Cadet

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The life of a nuclear power plant is regularly punctuated by short or long period outages to carry out maintenance operations and/or nuclear fuel reloading. During these stops periods, it is essential to conserve all the secondary circuit equipment to avoid corrosion priming. This kind of circuit is one of the main components of a nuclear reactor. Indeed, the conservation materials on shutdown of a nuclear unit improve circuit performance and reduce the maintenance cost considerably. This study is a part of the optimization of the dry preservation of equipment from the water station of the nuclear reactor. The main objective is to provide tools to guide Electricity Production Nuclear Centre (EPNC) in order to achieve the criteria required by the chemical specifications of conservation materials. A theoretical model of drying exchangers of water station is developed by the software Engineering Equation Solver (EES). It used to size requirements and air quality needed for dry conservation of equipment. This model is based on heat transfer and mass transfer governing the drying operation. A parametric study is conducted to know the influence of aerothermal factor taking part in the drying operation. The results show that the success of dry conservation of equipment of the secondary circuit of nuclear reactor depends strongly on the draining, the quality of drying air and the flow of air injecting in the secondary circuit. Finally, theoretical case study performed on EES highlights the importance of mastering the entire system to balance the air system to provide each exchanger optimum flow depending on its characteristics. From these results, recommendations to nuclear power plants can be formulated to optimize drying practices and achieve good performance in the conservation of material from the water at the stop position.

Keywords: dry conservation, optimization, sizing, water station

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Authors: Maria L. Swanson

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Language is a system which constantly changes and reflects social and cultural transformations of a speech community. If it is phonetic system, morphological patterns and syntactic arrangements undergo little charge and are not easily transferable from one language to another, the lexicon has a high degree of flexibility. Borrowings in Arabic have always been an interesting and important subject of study to various fields of linguistics, history and culturology, and there is quite number of works devoted to this subject (al-Khalīl, Sībawīḥ, Jeffery, Belkin, al-Maghribii, Holes, Stetkevich, el-Mawlūdī, between many others). At the same time, the history of borrowing has never been described as a process starting from its originating and up to the present time. Most of the researches study lexical and morphological adaptation of borrowed words for specific or several historical periods or delineate this process on the whole. Meanwhile, we have described the whole history of borrowings in Arabic with the brief depicting of lexical and morphological specifics for each historical period using quantitative method through dividing Arabic borrowings into several groups, basing on the specific of their adaptation of new vocabulary which is tightly related to the global transformations in the Arabic history. We explain reasons for borrowings of specific lexical layers for each historical period together with the description of its morphological specifics. We also use qualitative approach through performing statistics about the share of loan vocabulary in Arabic during different periods and the percentage of borrowings from donor languages. The history of a character and amount of borrowings is a good resource for theoretical and practical lexicography and morphology studies. It is also beneficial for researchers in the field of global and specific national, political and social developments, and different types of contacts.

Keywords: anthropological linguistics, borrowings, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics

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Authors: Marcus Maia

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The present study reports and discusses the use of eye tracking qualitative data in reading workshops in Brazilian middle and high schools and in Generative Syntax and Sentence Processing courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, respectively. Both endeavors take the sentential level as the proper object to be metacognitively explored in language education (cf. Chomsky, Gallego & Ott, 2019) to develop innate science forming capacity and knowledge of language. In both projects, non-discrepant qualitative eye tracking data collected and quantitatively analyzed in experimental syntax and psycholinguistic studies carried out in Lapex (Experimental Psycholinguistics Laboratory of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) were displayed to students as a point of departure, triggering discussions. Classes would generally start with the display of videos showing eye tracking data, such as gaze plots and heatmaps from several studies in Psycholinguistics and Experimental Syntax that we had already developed in our laboratory. The videos usually triggered discussions with students about linguistic and psycholinguistic issues, such as the reading of sentences for gist, garden-path sentences, syntactic and semantic anomalies, the filled-gap effect, island effects, direct and indirect cause, and recursive constructions, among other topics. Active, problem-solving based methodologies were employed with the objective of stimulating student participation. The communication also discusses the importance of developing full literacy, epistemic vigilance and intellectual self-defense in an infodemic world in the lines of Maia (2022).

Keywords: reading, educational psycholinguistics, eye-tracking, active methodology

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Authors: Maria Lina Garrido

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This paper aims to reflect upon instruction in English classes with the specific purpose of reading comprehension development, having as its paradigm the considerations presented by William Grabe, in his book Reading in a Second Language: Moving from theory to practice. His concerns regarding the connection between research findings and instructional practices have stimulated the present author to re-evaluate both her long practice as an English reading teacher and as the author of two reading textbooks for graduate students. Elements of the reading process such as linguistic issues, prior knowledge, reading strategies, critical evaluation, and motivation are the main foci of this analysis as far as the activities developed in the classroom are concerned. The experience with university candidates on postgraduate courses with different levels of English knowledge in Bahia, Brazil, has definitely demanded certain adjustments to this author`s classroom setting. Word recognition based on cognates, for example, has been emphasized given the fact that academic texts use many Latin words which have the same roots as the Brazilian Portuguese lexicon. Concerning syntactic parsing, the tenses/verbal aspects, modality and linking words are included in the curriculum, but not with the same depth as the general English curricula. Reading strategies, another essential predictor for developing reading skills, have been largely stimulated in L2 classes in order to compensate for a lack of the appropriate knowledge of the foreign language. This paper presents results that demonstrate that this author`s teaching practice is compatible with the implications and instruction concerning the reading process outlined by Grabe, however, it admits that each class demands specific instructions to meet the needs of that particular group.

Keywords: classroom practice, instructional activities, reading comprehension, reading skills

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Authors: Wen-Bin Chiou, Hsiao-Chiao Weng

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Social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter are low-cost tools that can promote the creation of social connections by providing a convenient platform that can be accessed at any time. In the current research, a laboratory experiment was conducted test the hypothesis that reminders of losing SNS would alter the impact of social events, especially those involving social exclusion. Specifically, this study explored whether losing SNS would intensify perceived social distress induced by exclusionary bogus feedback. Eighty-eight Facebook users (46 females, 42 males; mean age = 22.6 years, SD = 3.1 years) were recruited via campus posters and flyers at a national university in southern Taiwan. After participants provided consent, they were randomly assigned to a 2 (SNS non-use vs. neutral) between-subjects experiment. Participants completed an ostensible survey about online social networking in which we included an item about the time spent on SNS per day. The last question was used to manipulate thoughts about losing SNS access. Participants under the non-use condition were asked to record three conditions that would render them unable to use SNS (e.g., a network adaptor problem, malfunctioning cable modem, or problems with Internet service providers); participants under the neutral condition recorded three conditions that would render them unable to log onto the college website (e.g., server maintenance, local network or firewall problems). Later, this experiment employed a bogus-feedback paradigm to induce social exclusion. Participants then rated their social distress on a four-item scale, identical to that of Experiment 1 (α = .84). The results showed that thoughts of losing SNS intensified distress caused by social exclusion, suggesting that the loss of SNS has a similar effect to the loss of a primary source for social reconnections. Moreover, the priming effects of SNS on perceived distress were more prominent for heavy users. The demonstrated link between the idea of losing SNS use and increased pain of social exclusion manifests the importance of SNS as a crucial gateway for acquiring and rebuilding social connections. Use of online social networking appears to be a two-edged sword for coping with social exclusion in human lives in the e-society.

Keywords: online social networking, perceived distress, social exclusion, SNS

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Authors: Lin Dong, Fei Shi

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Based on the railway network and the principles of space syntax, the study attempts to reconstruct the spatial relationship of the passenger network connections from space and time perspective. According to the travel time data of main stations in the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration obtained by the Internet, the topological drawing of railway network under different time sections is constructed. With the comprehensive index composed of connection and integration, the accessibility and network operation efficiency of the railway network in different time periods is calculated, while the fairness of the network is analyzed by the fairness indicators constructed with the integration and location entropy from the perspective of horizontal and vertical fairness respectively. From the analysis of the efficiency and fairness of the railway passenger transport network, the study finds: (1) There is a strong regularity in regional system accessibility change; (2) The problems of efficiency and fairness are different in different time periods; (3) The improvement of efficiency will lead to the decline of horizontal fairness to a certain extent, while from the perspective of vertical fairness, the supply-demand situation has changed smoothly with time; (4) The network connection efficiency of Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang regions is higher than that of the western regions such as Anqing and Chizhou; (5) The marginalization of Nantong, Yancheng, Yangzhou, Taizhou is obvious. The study explores the application of spatial syntactic theory in regional traffic analysis, in order to provide a reference for the development of urban agglomeration transportation network.

Keywords: spatial syntax, the Yangtze River Delta, railway passenger time, efficiency and fairness

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Authors: Marie Komorna, Katerina Hadkova

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One reason why hearing disabilities as compared to other disabilities are considered to be less serious, is the belief that deaf and hard of hearing persons can read and write without problems and can therefore fairly easily compensate for problems related to their limited ability to hear sound. However in reality this is not the case, especially as regards written Czech, deaf persons are often not able to communicate their message clearly to its recipients. Their inability to communicate fully in written language is one of the most severe problems facing a number of deaf persons, a problem which they face and which makes it difficult for them to function in a sound-based environment. Despite this fact, this issue is one which has been given only a minimum of attention in the Czech Republic. That is why we decided to focus our research on this issue, specifically targeting written communication of deaf pupils in primary and secondary schools. The paper summarizes the background and objectives of this research. The written work of deaf respondents was obtained in response to a narrative based on a series of images which depicted a continuous storyline. Based on an analysis of the obtained written work we tried to describe the specifics of the narrative abilities of the deaf authors of these texts. We also analyzed other aspects and specific traits of text written by deaf authors at a phonetic-phonological, lexical-semantic, morphological and syntactic, respectively pragmatic level. Based on the results of the project it will be possible to increase knowledge of the communication abilities of deaf persons in written Czech. The obtained data may be used during future research and for teaching purposes and/or education concepts for teaching Czech to deaf pupils.

Keywords: communication competence, deaf, narrative, written texts

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Authors: Shivani Tiwari, Prathibha Karanth, B. Rajashekhar

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Impairments of syntactic morphology are often considered central in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). In English and related languages, deficits of tense-related grammatical morphology could serve as a clinical marker of SLI. Yet, cross-linguistic studies on SLI in the recent past suggest that the nature and severity of morphosyntactic deficits in children with SLI varies with the language being investigated. Therefore, in the present study we investigated the morphosyntactic deficits in a group of children with SLI who speak Kannada, a morphologically complex Dravidian language spoken in Indian subcontinent. A group of 15 children with SLI participated in this study. Two more groups of typical developing children (15 each) matched for language and age to children with SLI, were included as control participants. All participants were assessed for morphosyntactic comprehension and expression using standardized language test and a spontaneous speech task. Results of the study showed that children with SLI differed significantly from age-matched but not language-matched control group, on tasks of both comprehension and expression of morphosyntax. This finding is, however, in contrast with the reports of English-speaking children with SLI who are reported to be poorer than younger MLU-matched children on tasks of morphosyntax. The observed difference in impairments of morphosyntax in Kannada-speaking children with SLI from English-speaking children with SLI is explained based on the morphological richness theory. The theory predicts that children with SLI perform relatively better in morphologically rich language due to occurrence of their frequent and consistent features that mark the morphological markers. The authors, therefore, conclude that language-specific features do influence manifestation of the disorder in children with SLI.

Keywords: specific language impairment, morphosyntax, Kannada, manifestation

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Authors: Eric Bonetto, Anthony Piermatteo, Fabien Girandola, Gregory Lo Monaco

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The present contribution focuses on the effect of the structure of social representations on group identification. A social representation (SR) is defined as an organized and structured set of cognitions, produced and shared by members of a same group about a same social object. Within this framework, the central core theory establishes a structural distinction between central cognitions – or 'core' – and peripheral ones: the former are theoretically considered as more connected than the later to group members’ social identity and may play a greater role in SRs’ ability to allow group identification by means of a common vision of the object of representation. Indeed, the central core provides a reference point for the in-group as it constitutes a consensual vision that gives meaning to a social object particularly important to individuals and to the group. However, while numerous contributions clearly refer to the underlying role of SRs in group identification, there are only few empirical evidences of this aspect. Thus, we hypothesize an effect of the structure of SRs on group identification. More precisely, central cognitions (vs. peripheral ones) will lead to a stronger group identification. In addition, we hypothesize that the refutation of a cognition will lead to a stronger group identification than its activation. The SR mobilized here is that of 'studying' among a population of first-year undergraduate psychology students. Thus, a pretest (N = 82), using an Attribute-Challenge Technique, was designed in order to identify the central and the peripheral cognitions to use in the primings of our main study. The results of this pretest are in line with previous studies. Then, the main study (online; N = 184), using a social priming methodology, was based on a 2 (Structural status of the cognitions belonging to the prime: central vs. peripheral) x 2 (Type of prime: activation vs. refutation) experimental design in order to test our hypotheses. Results revealed, as expected, the main effect of the structure of the SR on group identification. Indeed, central cognitions trigger a higher level of identification than the peripheral ones. However, we observe neither effect of the type of prime, nor interaction effect. These results experimentally demonstrate for the first time the effect of the structure of SRs on group identification and indicate that central cognitions are more connected than peripheral ones to group members’ social identity. These results will be discussed considering the importance of understanding identity as a function of SRs and on their ability to potentially solve the lack of consideration of the definition of the group in Social Representations Theory.

Keywords: group identification, social identity, social representations, structural approach

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Authors: Raquel Mateo Mendaza, Carmen Novo Urraca

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The current paper presents the elaboration of a corpus database that aligns two different corpora in order to simplify the search of information both for researchers and students of Old English. This database comprises the information contained in two main reference corpora, namely the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (DOEC), compiled at the University of Toronto, and the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English (YCOE). The first one provides information on all surviving texts written in the Old English language. The latter offers the syntactical and morphological annotation of several texts included in the DOEC. Although both corpora are closely related, as the YCOE includes the DOE source text identifier, the main problem detected is that there is not an alignment of texts that allows for the search of whole fragments to be further analysed in terms of morphology and syntax. The database proposed in this paper gathers all this information and presents it in a simple, more accessible, visual, and educational way. The alignment of fragments has been done in an automatized way. However, some problems have emerged during the creating process particularly related to the lack of correspondence in the division of fragments. For this reason, it has been necessary to revise the whole entries manually to obtain a truthful high-quality product and to carefully indicate the gaps encountered in these corpora. All in all, this database contains more than 60,000 entries corresponding with the DOE fragments annotated by the YCOE. The main strength of the resulting product is its research and teaching implications in the study of Old English. The use of this database will help researchers and students in the study of different aspects of the language, such as inflectional morphology, syntactic behaviour of given words, or translation studies, among others. By means of the search of words or fragments, the annotated information on morphology and syntax will be automatically displayed, automatizing, and speeding up the search of data.

Keywords: alignment, corpus database, morphosyntactic analysis, Old English

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Authors: Emmanuel Nikiema

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This paper examines article incorporation in Mauritian Creole, a French Lexifier Creole which exhibits three forms of article incorporation as illustrated in (1-3). While various analyses of article incorporation have been proposed in the literature, fewer studies have explored the motivation of this widespread phenomenon in Mauritian Creole (MC) as opposed to other French Lexifier Creoles spoken in the Caribbean. For example, Mauritian Creole exhibits 4 times more CV incorporation than Haitian Creole, and 40 times more than Reunion Creole. (1) Consonantal type (C): loraz ‘thunder storm’, lete ‘summer’, zwazo ‘bird’, nide ‘idea’. (2) Syllabic type (CV): lapo ‘skin’, liku ‘neck’, ledo ‘back’, leker ‘heart’, diber ‘butter’. (3) Bi-consonantal (CVC): delo ‘water’, dizef ‘egg’, lizye ‘eye’, dilwil ‘oil’. The goal of this study is twofold: 1) uncover the rules governing the three types of article incorporation in MC, and 2) account for its remarkable occurrence in MC as opposed to its quasi-absence in Reunion Creole. We have collected a corpus of over 700 cases and organized it into three categories (C; CV and CVC). For example, there are 471 examples of CV incorporation in MC against 112 in Haitian Creole and only 12 in Reunion Creole. Two questions can be raised: 1) what is the motivation and distribution of the three types of incorporation in MC, and 2) how can one account for the high volume of incorporation in MC as opposed to its quasi-absence in Reunion Creole? We suggest that article incorporation in MC is related to the structure of nouns in Bantou languages. While previous authors have largely used population settlement data in the colonies during the Creole formation period to justify their analyses, we propose an account based on the syntactic structure of Bantou nouns. This analysis will shed light on the contribution of African languages to the formation of MC, and on to why MC has exhibited more article incorporation cases than any other French Lexifier Creole.

Keywords: article incorporation, creole languages, description, phonology

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Authors: Debit Datta, Jeffrey J. Coleman, Scott A. Enebak, Lori G. Eckhardt

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Pinus taeda, commonly known as loblolly pine, is a crucial timber species native to the southeastern USA. An emerging problem has been encountered for the past few years, which is better to be known as loblolly pine needle defoliation (LPND), which is threatening the ecological health of southeastern forests and economic vitality of the region’s timber industry. Currently, more than 1000 hectares of loblolly plantations in Alabama are affected with similar symptoms and have created concern among southeast landowners and forest managers. However, it is still uncertain whether LPND results from one or the combination of several fungal pathogens. Therefore, the objectives of the study were to identify and characterize the fungi associated with LPND in the southeastern USA and document the damage being done to loblolly pine as a result of repeated defoliation. Identification of fungi was confirmed using classical morphological methods (microscopic examination of the infected needles), conventional and species-specific priming (SSPP) PCR, and ITS sequencing. To date, 17 species of fungi, either cultured from pine needles or formed fruiting bodies on pine needles, were identified based on morphology and genetic sequence data. Among them, brown-spot pathogen Lecanostica acicola has been frequently recovered from pine needles in both spring and summer. Moreover, Ophistomatoid fungi such as Leptographium procerum, L. terebrantis are associated with pine decline have also been recovered from root samples of the infected stands. Trees have been increasingly and repeatedly chlorotic and defoliated from 2019 to 2020. Based on morphological observations and molecular data, emerging loblolly pine needle defoliation is due in larger part to the brown-spot pathogen L. acoicola followed by pine decline pathogens L. procerum and L. terebrantis. Root pathogens were suspected to emerge later, and their cumulative effects contribute to the widespread mortality of the trees. It is more likely that longer wet spring and warmer temperatures are favorable to disease development and may be important in the disease ecology of LPND. Therefore, the outbreak of the disease is assumed to be expanded over a large geographical area in a changing climatic condition.

Keywords: brown-spot fungi, emerging disease, defoliation, loblolly pine

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Authors: Yi Gu

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The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu has been a bestseller Chinese Sci-Fi novel for years since 2008. The book was translated into English by Ken Liu in 2014 and won the prestigious 2015 science fiction and fantasy writing Hugo Award, drawing greater attention from wider international communities. The story exposes the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, in an intriguing narrative for readers at home and abroad. However, without the access to the source text, western readers may not be aware that the original Chinese version of the book is rich in gender-bias. Some Chinese scholars have applied feminist translation theories to their analysis on this book before, based on isolated selected, cherry-picking examples. Thus this paper aims to obtain a more thorough picture of how translators can cope with gender discrimination and reshape the gendered discourse from the source text, by systematically investigating the lexical and syntactic patterns in the translation of Liu’s entire book of 400 pages. The source text and the translation were downloaded into digital files, automatically aligned at paragraph level and then manually post-edited. They were then compiled into a parallel corpus of 114,629 English words and 204,145 Chinese characters using Sketch Engine. Gender-discrimination markers such as the overuse of ‘girl’ to describe an adult woman were searched in the source text, and the alignment made it possible to identify the strategies adopted by the translator to mitigate gender discrimination. The results provide a framework for translators to address gender bias. The study also shows how corpus methods can be used to further research in feminist translation and critical discourse analysis.

Keywords: corpus, discourse analysis, feminist translation, science fiction translation

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Authors: Ali Algryani

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Ellipsis involves the omission of an item or items that can be recovered from the preceding clause. Ellipsis is used as a cohesion marker; it enhances the cohesiveness of a text/discourse as a clause is interpretable only through making reference to an antecedent clause. The present study attempts to investigate the linguistic phenomenon of ellipsis from a translation perspective. It is mainly concerned with how ellipsis is translated from English into Arabic. The study covers different forms of ellipsis, such as noun phrase ellipsis, verb phrase ellipsis, gapping, pseudo-gapping, stripping, and sluicing. The primary aim of the study, apart from discussing the use and function of ellipsis, is to find out how such ellipsis phenomena are dealt with in English-Arabic translation and determine the implications of the translations of elliptical structures into Arabic. The study is based on the analysis of Dhofar University (DU) students' translations of sentences containing different forms of ellipsis. The initial findings of the study indicate that due to differences in syntactic structures and stylistic preferences between English and Arabic, Arabic tends to use lexical repetition in the translation of some elliptical structures, thus achieving a higher level of explicitness. This implies that Arabic tends to prefer lexical repetition to create cohesion more than English does. Furthermore, the study also reveals that the improper translation of ellipsis leads to interpretations different from those understood from the source text. Such mistranslations can be attributed to student translators’ lack of awareness of the use and function of ellipsis as well as the stylistic preferences of both languages. This has pedagogical implications on the teaching and training of translation students at DU. Students' linguistic competence needs to be enhanced through teaching linguistics-related issues with reference to translation and both languages, .i.e. source and target languages and with special emphasis on their use, function and stylistic preferences.

Keywords: cohesion, ellipsis, explicitness, lexical repetition

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Authors: Irene Yi

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Machine learning, natural language processing, and neural network models of language are becoming more and more prevalent in the fields of technology and linguistics today. Training data for machines are at best, large corpora of human literature and at worst, a reflection of the ugliness in society. Machines have been trained on millions of human books, only to find that in the course of human history, derogatory and sexist adjectives are used significantly more frequently when describing females in history and literature than when describing males. This is extremely problematic, both as training data, and as the outcome of natural language processing. As machines start to handle more responsibilities, it is crucial to ensure that they do not take with them historical sexist and misogynistic notions. This paper gathers data and algorithms from neural network models of language having to deal with syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and text classification. Results are significant in showing the existing intentional and unintentional misogynistic notions used to train machines, as well as in developing better technologies that take into account the semantics and syntax of text to be more mindful and reflect gender equality. Further, this paper deals with the idea of non-binary gender pronouns and how machines can process these pronouns correctly, given its semantic and syntactic context. This paper also delves into the implications of gendered grammar and its effect, cross-linguistically, on natural language processing. Languages such as French or Spanish not only have rigid gendered grammar rules, but also historically patriarchal societies. The progression of society comes hand in hand with not only its language, but how machines process those natural languages. These ideas are all extremely vital to the development of natural language models in technology, and they must be taken into account immediately.

Keywords: gendered grammar, misogynistic language, natural language processing, neural networks

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Authors: Swee Kun Yap, Sachin Jangam, Suraj Vasudevan

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Experiential learning is dubbed as a highly effective way to enhance learning. Virtual reality (VR) is thus a helpful tool in providing a safe, memorable, and interactive learning environment. A class of 49 fluid mechanics students participated in starting up a pump, one of the most used equipment in the chemical industry, in VR. They experience the process in VR to familiarize themselves with the safety training and the standard operating procedure (SOP) in guided mode. Students subsequently observe their peers (in groups of 4 to 5) complete the same training. The training first brings each user through the personal protection equipment (PPE) selection, before guiding the user through a series of steps for pump startup. One of the most common feedback given by industries include the weakness of our graduates in pump design and operation. Traditional fluid mechanics is a highly theoretical module loaded with engineering equations, providing limited opportunity for visualization and operation. With VR pump, students can now learn to startup, shutdown, troubleshoot and observe the intricacies of a centrifugal pump in a safe and controlled environment, thereby bridging the gap between theory and practical application. Following the completion of the guided mode operation, students then individually complete the VR assessment for pump startup on the same day, which requires students to complete the same series of steps, without any cues given in VR to test their recollection rate. While most students miss out a few minor steps such as the checking of lubrication oil and the closing of minor drain valves before pump priming, all the students scored full marks in the PPE selection, and over 80% of the students were able to complete all the critical steps that are required to startup a pump safely. The students were subsequently tested for their recollection rate by means of an online quiz 3 weeks later, and it is again found that over 80% of the students were able to complete the critical steps in the correct order. In the survey conducted, students reported that the VR experience has been enjoyable and enriching, and 79.5% of the students voted to include VR as a positive supplementary exercise in addition to traditional teaching methods. One of the more notable feedback is the higher ease of noticing and learning from mistakes as an observer rather than as a VR participant. Thus, the cycling between being a VR participant and an observer has helped tremendously in their knowledge retention. This reinforces the positive impact VR has on learning.

Keywords: experiential learning, learning by doing, pump, unit operations, virtual reality

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