Pour répondre aux problématiques engendrées par la diffusion de plus en plus massive des corpus linguistiques et à l’hétérogénéité de leurs formats, nous proposons une méthode permettant de prendre en main des corpus langagiers oraux et de les convertir dans un format permettant leur exploitation outillée. Pour cette recherche, le corpus ESLO nous sert d’exemple par sa licence de diffusion, son format, son volume et ses atouts sociolinguistiques et diachroniques. Notre travail se fonde sur la compilation de ce corpus pour (...) le rendre compatible avec l’outil de textométrie TXM. Nous opérons un ensemble de transformations des données pour l’utiliser au mieux. Enfin, pour illustrer les apports de ces avancées méthodologiques, nous proposons une analyse fine et multidimensionnelle de l’usage des interrogatives dans le corpus ESLO. (shrink)

BackgroundType-Token Ratio, given its relatively simple hand computation, is one of the few LSA measures calculated by clinicians in everyday practice. However, it has significant well-documented shortcomings; these include instability as a function of sample size, and absence of clear developmental profiles over early childhood. A variety of alternative measures of lexical diversity have been proposed; some, such as Number of Different Words/100 can also be computed by hand. However, others, such as Vocabulary Diversity and the Moving Average Type Token (...) Ratio rely on complex resampling algorithms that cannot be conducted by hand. To date, no large-scale study of all four measures has evaluated how well any capture typical developmental trends over early childhood, or whether any reliably distinguish typical from atypical profiles of expressive child language ability.Materials and MethodsWe conducted linear and non-linear regression analyses for TTR, NDW, VocD, and MATTR scores for samples taken from 946 corpora from typically developing preschool children, engaged in adult-child toy play, from the Child Language Data Exchange System. These were contrasted with 504 samples from children known to have delayed expressive language skills. We also conducted a separate sub-analysis which examined possible contextual effects of sampling environment on lexical diversity.ResultsOnly VocD showed significantly different mean scores between the typically -developing children and delayed developing children group. Using TTR would actually misdiagnose typical children and miss children with known language impairment. However, computation of VocD as a function of toy interactions was significant and emerges as a further caution in use of lexical diversity as a valid proxy index of children’s expressive vocabulary skill.DiscussionThis large scale statistical comparison of computer-implemented algorithms for expressive lexical profiles in young children with traditional, hand-calculated measures showed that only VocD met criteria for evidence-based use in LSA. However, VocD was impacted by sample elicitation context, suggesting that non-linguistic factors, such as engagement with elicitation props, contaminate estimates of spoken lexical skill in young children. Implications and suggested directions are discussed. (shrink)

This book reflects the growing influence of corpus linguistics in a variety of areas such as lexicography, translation studies, genre analysis, and language ...

Cet article interroge la question des corpus en analyse multimodale des corpus oraux d’interactions filmées dans le cadre d’une linguistique qui intègre l’étude des gestes à celle du discours pour rendre compte des pratiques langagières dans leur globalité. Ce type d’approche est traditionnellement associé à des petits corpus supports d’analyses qualitatives. À l’appui d’un tour d’horizon de recherches contemporaines en analyse multimodale des interactions orales, nous montrons que l’étude linguistique des gestes se prête à une grande variété d’approches innovantes au (...) plan méthodologique. En pratique, il reste à ce jour difficile de construire des grands corpus pour l’analyse gestuelle, parce qu’il s’agit d’une entreprise longue et coûteuse (enregistrement, transcription, annotation) : les petits corpus sont nombreux parce qu’ils sont plus faciles à construire pour un chercheur seul ou une petite équipe de recherche aux moyens limités. Cette situation tend cependant à évoluer, et ce de plusieurs manières, grâce aux collaborations nationales et internationales et aux nouveaux outils numériques. Les « petits » corpus n’en restent pas moins sources de résultats précieux en analyse gestuelle. Pour diverses raisons, les standards internationaux de l’évaluation de la recherche tendent à valoriser l’analyse quantitative aux dépens de l’analyse qualitative, faisant oublier que ces deux types d’approches ont des objectifs certes différents mais complémentaires : ils permettent de répondre à des questions de recherche différentes (étroites ou larges) et de proposer des savoirs d’origines différentes (généralisabilité des résultats ou généralisabilité des processus observés), dont la légitimité est elle aussi de nature différente (réfutabilité des résultats ou consilience des experts). Nombre de travaux récents en analyse gestuelle encouragent à remettre en question la dichotomie traditionnelle entre analyses qualitatives et quantitatives, en intégrant les deux approches de diverses manières. (shrink)

In this paper, we present an overview of existing parallel corpora for Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) in different languages focusing on the approach adopted for their construction. We make the main distinction between manual and (semi)–automatic approaches in order to investigate in which respect complex and simple texts vary and whether and how the observed modifications may depend on the underlying approach. To this end, we perform a two-level comparison on Italian corpora, since this is the only language, (...) with the exception of English, for which there are large parallel resources derived through the two approaches considered. The first level of comparison accounts for the main types of sentence transformations occurring in the simplification process, the second one examines the results of a linguistic profiling analysis based on Natural Language Processing techniques and carried out on the original and the simple version of the same texts. For both levels of analysis, we chose to focus our discussion mostly on sentence transformations and linguistic characteristics that pertain to the morpho-syntactic and syntactic structure of the sentence. (shrink)

The collection of very large text sources has revolutionized the study of natural language, leading to the development of several models of language learning and distributional semantics that extract sophisticated semantic representations of words based on the statistical redundancies contained within natural language. The models treat knowledge as an interaction of processing mechanisms and the structure of language experience. But language experience is often treated agnostically. We report a distributional semantic analysis that shows written (...) language in fiction books varies appreciably between books from the different genres, books from the same genre, and even books written by the same author. Given that current theories assume that word knowledge reflects an interaction between processing mechanisms and the language environment, the analysis shows the need for the field to engage in a more deliberate consideration and curation of the corpora used in computational studies of natural language processing. (shrink)

The central aims of this paper are to show how linguistic corpora have been used and can be used in philosophy and to argue that linguistic corpora and corpus analysis should be added to the philosopher’s toolkit of ways to address philosophical questions. A linguistic corpus is a curated collection of texts representing language use that can be queried to answer research questions. Among many other uses, linguistic corpora can help answer questions about the meaning of words and the (...) structure of discourse. Through a discussion of examples, the paper shows that there are many philosophical questions that can be addressed by using a linguistic corpus. However, linguistic corpora need not (and often cannot) replace traditional philosophical methods. Lastly, it argues that the special properties of linguistic corpora, including their independence and the current ease and cheapness of access, make them an indispensable resource for philosophers. (shrink)

Whether prose or poetry, how does a text come to mean what it does? A functional-semantic approach to text analysis, such as is illustrated in this book, offers a revealing look at the resources of language at work in the creation of meaning, and a unique perspective on the text as object of study. Believing the best way to learn about text linguistics is through the analysis of full texts, the author includes analyses of texts, (...) both spoken and written, drawn from a variety of genres, including examples of religious and political discourse. In the first section, the author provides an overview suitable to those who are new to the theory and methodology of Systemic Functional Grammar and Rhetorical Structure Theory. Building on this foundation, section two presents the findings from several case studies in text analysis, demonstrating how to conduct indepth functional-semantic analysis of selected texts. This second section will benefit both beginners and those who have already had some background in the study of linguistics. Text Linguistics is the ideal choice for those who are learning about text linguistics, and functional approaches to language study. (shrink)

Whether prose or poetry, how does a text come to mean what it does? A functional-semantic approach to text analysis, such as is illustrated in this book, offers a revealing look at the resources of language at work in the creation of meaning, and a unique perspective on the text as object of study. Believing the best way to learn about text linguistics is through the analysis of full texts, the author includes analyses of texts, (...) both spoken and written, drawn from a variety of genres, including examples of religious and political discourse. In the first section, the author provides an overview suitable to those who are new to the theory and methodology of Systemic Functional Grammar and Rhetorical Structure Theory. Building on this foundation, section two presents the findings from several case studies in text analysis, demonstrating how to conduct indepth functional-semantic analysis of selected texts. This second section will benefit both beginners and those who have already had some background in the study of linguistics. Text Linguistics is the ideal choice for those who are learning about text linguistics, and functional approaches to language study. (shrink)

Written by researchers in their field, this book is about the skills beyond basic word recognition that are necessary for the processing and comprehension of spoken and written language. It offers topics such as: language and text analysis; cognitive processing and comprehension; development of literacy; literacy and schooling; and more.

Originally published in 1990. Each of the 12 chapters in this book build upon an approach to the analysis of spoken and written texts that is centred upon the recipient rather than the producer, for the abilities of listeners and readers deserve much attention. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of linguistics, literary studies, English, education, communication studies and psychology.

A construction is found in American Sign Language that we call a Question–Answer Clause. It is made of two parts: the first part looks like an interrogative clause conveying a question, while the second part resembles a declarative clause answering that question. The very same signer has to sign both, the entire construction is interpreted as truth-conditionally equivalent to a declarative sentence, and it can be uttered only under certain discourse conditions. These and other properties of Question–Answer Clauses are (...) discussed, and a detailed syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic account is provided. Question–Answer Clauses are argued to be copular clauses consisting of a silent copula of identity connecting an interrogative clause in the precopular position with a declarative clause in the postcopular position. Pragmatically, they instantiate a topic/comment structure, with the first part expressing a sub-question under discussion and the second part expressing the answer to that sub-question. Broader implications of the analysis are discussed for the Question Under Discussion theory of discourse structuring, for the analysis of pseudoclefts in spoken languages, and for recent proposals about the need for answerhood operators and exhaustivity operators in the grammar and the consequences for the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

In the 1956-1957 course titled “The Concept of Nature”, Merleau-Ponty takes up Schelling’s thought. In reading Merleau-Ponty’s text on Schelling’s philosophy, we arrive at a point of contact between the philosophy of natural productivity and the philosophy of intellectual or artistic intuition. Merleau-Ponty seems to discover the Schellingian idea of the absolute as an abyss against the Cartesian idea of God as creator. The Merleau-Pontian interpretation of Schelling’s philosophy of nature and art from his course gives us one of (...) the keys to his unfinished ontology, which is that nature and art, physis and logos, are tied up in the perception of the dimension of being given in painting or poetry, as the analysis of painting in Eye and Mind will show us an organon of the ontology of the savage being. (shrink)

Exploratory analysis is an area of increasing interest in the computational linguistics arena. Pragmatically speaking, exploratory analysis may be paraphrased as natural language processing by means of analyzing large corpora of text. Concerning the analysis, appropriate means are statistics, on the one hand, and artificial neural networks, on the other hand. As a challenging application area for exploratory analysis of text corpora we may certainly identify text databases, be it information retrieval or information filtering systems. With (...) this paper we present recent findings of exploratory analysis based on both statistical and neural models applied to legal text corpora. Concerning the artificial neural networks, we rely on a model adhering to the unsupervised learning paradigm. This choice appears naturally when taking into account the specific properties of large text corpora where one is faced with the fact that input-output-mappings as required by supervised learning models cannot be provided beforehand to a satisfying extent. This is due to the fact of the highly changing contents of text archives. In a nutshell, artificial neural networks count for their highly robust behavior regarding the parameters for model optimization. In particular, we found statistical classification techniques much more susceptible to minor parameter variations than unsupervised artificial neural networks. In this paper we describe two different lines of research in exploratory analysis. First, we use the classification methods for concept analysis. The general goal is to uncover different meanings of one and the same natural language concept. A task that, obviously, is of specific importance during the creation of thesauri. As a convenient environment to present the results we selected the legal term of neutrality, which is a perfect representative of a concept having a number of highly divergent meanings. Second, we describe the classification methods in the setting of document classification. The ultimate goal in such an application is to uncover semantic similarities of various text documents in order to increase the efficiency of an information retrieval system. In this sense, document classification has its fixed position in information retrieval research from the very beginning. Nowadays renewed massive interest in document classification may be witnessed due to the appearance of large-scale digital libraries. (shrink)

Topic model is a well proven tool to investigate the semantic content of textual corpora. Yet corpora sometimes include texts in several languages, making it impossible to apply language-specific computational approaches over their entire content. This is the problem we encountered when setting to analyze a philosophy of science corpus spanning over eight decades and including original articles in Dutch, German and French, on top of a large majority of articles in English. To circumvent this multilingual problem, we use (...) machine-translation tools to bulk translate non-English documents into English. Though largely imperfect, especially syntactically, these translations nevertheless provide correctly translated terms and preserve the semantic proximity of documents with respect to one another. To assess the quality of this translation step, we develop a “semantic topology preservation test” that relies on estimating the extent to which document-to-document distances have been preserved during translation. We then conduct an LDA topic-model analysis over the entire corpus of translated and English original texts, and compare it to a topic-model done over the English original texts only. We thereby identify the specific contribution of the translated texts. These studies reveal a more complete picture of main topics that can found in the philosophy of science literature, especially during the early days of the discipline when numerous articles were published in languages other than English. (shrink)

In this study, multidimensional feature extraction is performed on the U-language recordings of the test takers, and these features are evaluated separately, with five categories of features: pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary, grammar, and semantics. A deep neural network model is constructed to model the feature values to obtain the final score. Based on the previous research, this study uses a deep neural network training model instead of linear regression to improve the correlation between model score and expert score. The method (...) of using word frequency for semantic scoring is replaced by the LDA topic model for semantic analysis, which eliminates the need for experts to manually label keywords before scoring and truly automates the critique. Also, this paper introduces text cleaning after speech recognition and deep learning-based speech noise reduction technology in the scoring model, which improves the accuracy of speech recognition and the overall accuracy of the scoring model. Also, innovative applications and improvements are made to key technologies, and the latest technical solutions are integrated and improved. A new open oral grading model is proposed and implemented, and innovations are made in the method of speech feature extraction to improve the dimensionality of open oral grading. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore some of the possibilities, advantages and difficulties of corpus-based analyses of semantic and pragmatic aspects of language in one particular field, namely the linguistic expression of emotion concepts. For this purpose, a methodological procedure is proposed and an exemplary analysis of the emotion concept “fear” in English is performed. The procedure combines Kövecses' lexical approach and Stefanowitsch's metaphorical pattern analysis with additional concepts from corpus linguistics such as semantic preference and semantic (...) prosody. The results of the study show that such a corpus-based analysis of emotion words offers several advantages. Firstly, by exploring the surroundings of the search word in a vast amount of text, we are not only able to find evidence of conceptual metaphor and metonymy that structure the emotion concept and of related emotion concepts, but also we can enrich the description of the emotion concept with information from a series of dimensions and add a pragmatic viewpoint by revealing an explicit or implicit evaluation of the emotion. The second advantage offered by a corpus-based approach lies in the possibility of quantifying results, i.e., comparing the frequency, productivity and creative use of individual metaphors and metonymies, which is especially interesting in view of contrastive studies. (shrink)

If the words of natural human language possess a universal positivity bias, as assumed by Boucher and Osgood’s (1969) famous Pollyanna hypothesis and computationally confirmed for large text corpora in several languages (Dodds et al., 2015), then children and youth literature (CYL) should also show a Pollyanna effect. Here we tested this prediction applying a vector space model- based sentiment analysis tool called SentiArt (Jacobs, 2019) to two CYL corpora, one in English (372 books) and one in German (...) (500 books). Pitching our analysis at the sentence level, and assessing semantic as well as lexico-grammatical information, bBoth corpora show the Pollyanna effect and thus add further evidence to the universality hypothesis. The results of our multivariate sentiment analyses provide interesting testable predictions for future scientific studies of literature. (shrink)

The paper discusses the role of language and culture in the context of quantitative text analysis in psychological research. It reviews current automatic text analysis methods and approaches from the perspective of the unique challenges that can arise when going beyond the default English language. Special attention is paid to closed-vocabulary approaches and related methods, both from the perspective of cross-cultural research where the analytic process inherently consists of comparing phenomena across cultures and languages and the (...) perspective of generalizability beyond the language and the cultural focus of the original investigation. We highlight the need for a more universal and flexible theoretical and methodological grounding of current research, which includes the linguistic, cultural, and situational specifics of communication, and we provide suggestions for procedures that can be implemented in future studies and facilitate psychological text analysis across languages and cultures. (shrink)

Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine-assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by (...) proposing metatheoretical and theoretical foundations suitable for machine-assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of Elder-Vass, Kaidesoja and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non-discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow Feldman and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software. (shrink)

Differences in language use and structures between signed and spoken languages have often been attributed to so-called language “modality.” Indeed, this is derived from the conception that spoken languages resort to both the oral-aural channel of speech and the visual-kinesic channel of visible bodily action whereas signed languages only resort to the latter. This paper addresses the use of enactment, a depictive communicative strategy whereby language users imitate referents in signed and spoken languages. Reviewing (...) comparative research on enactment, this paper highlights theoretical and methodological shortcomings in prior works. First, a broader set of causal explanations needs to be taken into account when interpreting differences between signing and speaking communities. A more comprehensive conceptual toolbox ensures that differences are not automatically attributed to modality. In particular, less-studied factors of language diversity, like sociolinguistic and cultural ecologies, and how they interact with other factors should be considered. Second, diversity in enactment across signed and spoken languages is shown to be inadequately and insufficiently documented. It is argued that by comparing enactment across more diverse signing and speaking communities and using large, directly comparable corpora, solid analyses can be carried out, enabling a better understanding of how and why different communities use enactment in similar or different ways. (shrink)

Social scientists and computer scientist are divided by small differences in perspective and not by any significant disciplinary divide. In the field of text analysis, several such differences are noted: social scientists often use unsupervised models to explore corpora, whereas many computer scientists employ supervised models to train data; social scientists hold to more conventional causal notions than do most computer scientists, and often favor intense exploitation of existing algorithms, whereas computer scientists focus more on developing new models; and (...) computer scientists tend to trust human judgment more than social scientists do. These differences have implications that potentially can improve the practice of social science. (shrink)

Available corpora for Argument Mining differ along several axes, and one of the key differences is the presence (or absence) of discourse markers to signal argumentative content. Exploring effective ways to use discourse markers has received wide attention in various discourse parsing tasks, from which it is well-known that discourse markers are strong indicators of discourse relations. To improve the robustness of Argument Mining systems across different genres, we propose to automatically augment a given text with discourse markers such (...) that all relations are explicitly signaled. Our analysis unveils that popular language models taken out-of-the-box fail on this task; however, when fine-tuned on a new heterogeneous dataset that we construct (including synthetic and real examples), they perform considerably better. We demonstrate the impact of our approach on an Argument Mining downstream task, evaluated on different corpora, showing that language models can be trained to automatically fill in discourse markers across different corpora, improving the performance of a downstream model in some, but not all, cases. Our proposed approach can further be employed as an assistant tool for better discourse understanding. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.3 (1999) 22-39 [Access article in PDF] Review Article Language, or No Language Daniel Heller-Roazen Werner Hamacher. Maser: Bemerkungen im Hinblick auf Hinrich Weidemanns Bilder. Berlin: Gallerie Max Hetzler, 1998. All translations from this text are my own. [M] ________. pleroma--Reading in Hegel. Trans. Nicholas Walker and Simon Jarvis. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. [pl] ________. Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan. (...) Trans. Peter Fenves. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996. [P] Trans. of Entferntes Verstehen: Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. [EV] 1. The Rest of Language When Aristotle, at the opening of his treatise on interpretation, defines the nature and function of language, he does so by referring "the things in the voice [ta en tei phonei]" to impressions on the soul (pathe¯mata), which, in turn, he refers to "things [pragmata]" [De interpretatione 16a4 ff.]. Aristotle's text establishes, in this way, that vocal utterances are signs of things. The philosophical significance of this gesture could not be more decisive. Once De interpretatione determines the canonical form of the statement as a "meaningful sentence [logos se¯mantikos]" and, more precisely, as a "proposition [logos apophantikos]" bearing truth or falsity, and once it asserts that truth and falsity reside in the composition (synthesis) of elements [16a10-15], 1 the consequence is inevitable: the paradigmatic form of true speech must be that of the "statement of one thing concerning another thing [legein ti kata tinos]" [17a25]. 2 Here it matters little whether the relation of speech to things is grasped as one of imitation or constitution, reproduction or production; it matters little, moreover, whether the things at issue--that which language means--are understood as sensible objects or supersensuous entities, material beings or logical idealities. In every utterance, speech, by virtue of its very form, is necessarily capable of being dissolved into those things of which it speaks. Indeed, the Aristotelian principle of analysis (literally, "loosening up") demands this [End Page 22] dissolution as the end toward which all speech, insofar as it is both assertive and predicative, ultimately tends. Language is thus posited only in order to be effaced; its specific constituents are identified only to be returned, in the end, to the world of things. When Augustine writes, in a lapidary formula at the start of his De doctrina christiana, that "things are learned by signs [res per signa discuntur]" [1.2.2.20], he simply summarizes what is already stated in the Aristotelian locus classicus: words, the elements of language, function in the service of things; when words show what exists, their task is accomplished.Werner Hamacher's works constitute perhaps the most powerful contemporary attempt to delineate and interrogate this aporetic structure, by which language, in its classical philosophical and theoretical elaboration, is simultaneously constructed and effaced, identified as such and destituted of all propriety. The implications of this structure, which are both logical and metaphysical, extend not only to the Aristotelian, but even to the most modern theories of language and its operation. "At the end of every semantic theory of language and its truth," Hamacher thus writes in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, "stands the aporetic verdict: language does not speak; it has nothing to say" [P 338; EV 325]. When language is determined by its "semantic and referential functions," we read, it follows that at "the end and thus the site of its destination, it no longer means anything and no longer refers to anything" [P 338; EV 325]. If Hamacher's texts often take as their point of departure contemporary doctrines of literary production and language, it is because, in the field of literary studies, the invocation of the semantic determination of language thus leads thought to eliminate the very element that might have been its subject of examination: language. The one discipline that might have resisted the apophantic dissolution of language proves itself not to be, as the German term has it, a "science of literature [Literaturwissenschaft]" but, rather, "more or less clandestinely a science against literature" [P... (shrink)

The topic of the article is important, because nowadays there is a need to study the semiotics of media text translation, the use of innovations in choosing the types of media text translation. The aim of the article is the need to study and substantiate the importance of studying the essence of the concepts of “semiotics”, “media text”. The article gives a theoretical justification for the concept of media text in the field of mass communication, substantiates (...) the semiotics of learning about signs and sign systems; semiotic characteristics of media texts translation are given. In the field of view of semiotics are various sign systems, features of translation of these signs in media texts, in particular: natural (spoken) and artificial (formal) languages, sentence systems of scientific theories, signaling systems in society and nature, states and many others. Artificial languages can also be considered as sign systems (including the “language” of scientific theory, “languages” of fine arts, cinema, theater, music), various types of visual sign systems (from road signs to painting), as well as any complex control systems considered from the standpoint of cybernetics: machines, devices and their circuits, living organisms, their subsystems (for example, central nervous system), industrial and social associations and society as a whole. (shrink)

The two aims of the paper were to systematically review and critique social science and linguistic text analyses of nursing records in order to inform future research in this emerging area of research. Systematic searches in reference databases and in citation indexes identified 12 articles that included analyses of the social and linguistic features of records and recording. Two reviewers extracted data using established criteria for the evaluation of qualitative research papers. A common characteristic of nursing records was the (...) economical use of language with local meanings that conveyed little information to the uninitiated reader. Records were dominated by technocratic‐medical discourse focused on patients’ bodies, and they depicted only very limited aspects of nursing practice. Nurses made moral evaluations in their categorisation of patients, which reflected detailed surveillance of patients’ disturbing behaviour. The text analysis methods were rarely transparent in the articles, which could suggest research quality problems. For most articles, the significance of the findings was substantiated more by theoretical readings of the institutional settings than by the analysis of textual data. More probing empirical research of nurses’ records and a wider range of theoretical perspectives has the potential to expose the situated meanings of nursing work in healthcare organisations. (shrink)

In this article, we use a mix of computational techniques to identify textual shifts in the Ottoman şeyhülislams’ fetvas between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Our analysis, supplemented by a close reading of these texts, indicates that the fetvas underwent multiple forms of transformation, a consequence of the institutional evolution of the şeyhülislam’s fetva office that aimed to speed up and streamline the production of the fetvas: over time, the texts appropriated a more uniform character and came to contain shorter (...) responses. In the compositions of the questions, we identified many “trigger terms” that facilitated reflexive responses independent of the fetvas’ jurisprudential contexts, a tendency that became stronger after the second half of the seventeenth century. In addition, we propose in the article a methodology that measures the relative strengths of textual and conceptual links among the fetva corpora of various Ottoman şeyhülislams. This analysis informs us about possible paths of long-term evolution of this genre of jurisprudential documents. (shrink)

A lot of effort is currently made to provide methods to analyze and understand deep neural network impressive performances for tasks such as image or text classification. These methods are mainly based on visualizing the important input features taken into account by the network to build a decision. However these techniques, let us cite LIME, SHAP, Grad-CAM, or TDS, require extra effort to interpret the visualization with respect to expert knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to (...) inspect the hidden layers of a fitted CNN in order to extract interpretable linguistic objects from texts exploiting classification process. In particular, we detail a weighted extension of the Text Deconvolution Saliency (wTDS) measure which can be used to highlight the relevant features used by the CNN to perform the classification task. We empirically demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on corpora from two different languages: English and French. On all datasets, wTDS automatically encodes complex linguistic objects based on co-occurrences and possibly on grammatical and syntax analysis. (shrink)

Collegiality among nurses is necessary for the accomplishment of the tasks of care, for safety and quality improvement and for professional self‐regulation. Nurses, especially in hospitals, are more likely to work in groups than other professionals, yet those relationships have not been well explored. Bullying, intimidation and fear are frequently identified, while respectful disagreements are rarely described. In this paper, a single story by a nurse about her conversational conflict with another nurse is given a close reading. I use the (...) ‘triadic line’ of William Carlos Williams to format an extended excerpt of interview text, in order to make visible the rhythms and organization of spoken language. Mills' concept of a ‘vocabulary of motives’ is used to examine the rhetorical strategies deployed by each nurse. Finally, I analyze the narrative structure of the story, highlighting the ways that moral certainty and uncertainty function to involve the reader in the story, and the complex role of virtue in nursing discourse. (shrink)

Après avoir fait l’état des lieux de la base de données VALIBEL en la situant dans son contexte institutionnel, nous mettons en exergue dans cet article quelques possibilités d’investigation qu’offre la base en regard de ses évolutions récentes. Une attention particulière est portée à l’outillage des corpus en termes de disfluences (avec le programme DisMo) et à l’étude du vieillissement langagier (liée au corpus Corpage). Nous concluons en montrant en quoi l’enrichissement constant de la base (en outillage et en corpus) (...) permet d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de recherches dans des domaines encore peu explorés en linguistique, eu égard à des problématiques sociétales majeures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:History of Philosophy and the Reflective Society by Riccardo PozzoRobert R. ClewisPOZZO, Riccardo. History of Philosophy and the Reflective Society. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021. vi + 231 pp. Cloth, $94.99In a forward-looking proposal, Pozzo lays out his vision for a multidisciplinary history of philosophy "from a global perspective." This book is "a long position paper, an extended essay dedicated to twenty-first century policies of philosophical research from (...) a global perspective." The chosen format is a Denkschrift, that is, a memorandum in the sense of a document that experts lay out for their government to ponder. Perhaps, Pozzo suggests, the history of philosophy could even have an impact on economic authorities and policymakers. Indeed, the work seems driven by the laudable aim of promoting access and equality around the world. The author reveals a just concern for migrants in particular, since they bring [End Page 156] with them their intellectual traditions and philosophical texts, which can be translated and thereby foster intercultural dialogue.The book consists of an introduction (chapter 1) followed by nine chapters. It has a thirty-page references list as well as subject and name indexes. In part one, Pozzo argues for the need for new narratives in the history of philosophy (chapter 2), in order to establish its role in addressing migration (chapter 3). The second part concerns reflective society (chapter 4). It considers societal readiness (chapter 5) and cultural innovation (chapter 6). Part three explores the paradigm shift from a close reading of texts to a "distant" reading of corpora (chapter 7), a shift Pozzo endorses. It examines implications for the translation of languages (chapter 8) and the translation of studies (knowledge) and competencies (chapter 9). Chapter 10 concludes by briefly reflecting on the notions of the "fluidity" of peoples and their ideas, biodiversity (and food), and spiritual humanism based on dignity.Scholars in the history of philosophy "should be open to the idea of a pluriversum of a history of facts and places, whereby history of philosophy finds its grounding in spatial heterogeneity." Nowadays, when people migrate and transfer competencies at increasing velocity, the "history of philosophy can be usefully reinvented on the basis of its consideration of intercultural dialogue." Pozzo considers the World Digital Library to be "one of the most exciting examples of corpora that talk to each other"—an idea he uses not merely metaphorically. By "corpora" is meant not just the sum of separate books, but XML-accessible complete collections of traditions of texts, with corresponding dictionaries, thesauri, and reference works, which make it possible to analyze a number of original texts as well as transliterations into other alphabets or hanzi characters. The result would be a "data-driven" history of philosophy.Given that history of philosophy is a product of culture, it is influenced by migrating peoples, who bring philosophical ideas and religious traditions with them. Research on migration thus ought to also consider translations of texts and competencies from one to another context, be it linguistic, economic, political, or cultural. The humanities, and a reflective society more generally, might provide a partial basis for intercultural dialogue. The history of philosophy might even thereby improve the quality of life of citizens.Pozzo rightly emphasizes that we need multilingual philosophers and historians of philosophy. History of philosophy ought to also be based on robust lexical and historical considerations, and historians of philosophy should be trained in a number of the world's languages as well as face the challenge of dealing with multilingualism and with validating translations. Pozzo's proposed methodology, informed by computational techniques, relies on tools such as vocabularies, ontologies, concordances, frequencies, or the analysis of texts and corpora, which integrates quantitative and formal methods into the portfolio of the methods of history of philosophy and intellectual history. Since Pozzo has published [End Page 157] widely on Kant, it is fitting that he explores Kant on migration as well as the editorial contexts and translation projects concerning the philosopher's writings.As for aesthetics, Pozzo notes that the history of philosophy can reflect on migrants' cultural and artistic creations. Historians of philosophy should thus start observing and interpreting phenomena created by... (shrink)

Advances in machine learning hold promise for corpus analysis: they have the potential to allow for more efficient and less biased analyses of text. This would be a boon for qualitative research, such as the survey research conducted by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis. In this paper we examine the utility of automated machine learning for select survey questions, with a focus on LDA and VADER. We thus compare human and machine coding on the question of whether underrepresented philosophers (...) are more likely to respond negatively to questions concerning diversity and inclusivity in academic philosophy. Our study has mixed results, revealing instances where automated machine learning can be used to fruitfully support and interrogate more traditional hand-coding techniques, but also instances where we were unable to glean much insight. (Contact authors for draft.). (shrink)

Emotional recognition has arisen as an essential field of study that can expose a variety of valuable inputs. Emotion can be articulated in several means that can be seen, like speech and facial expressions, written text, and gestures. Emotion recognition in a text document is fundamentally a content-based classification issue, including notions from natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning fields. Hence, in this study, deep learning assisted semantic text analysis (DLSTA) has been proposed for human (...) emotion detection using big data. Emotion detection from textual sources can be done utilizing notions of Natural Language Processing. Word embeddings are extensively utilized for several NLP tasks, like machine translation, sentiment analysis, and question answering. NLP techniques improve the performance of learning-based methods by incorporating the semantic and syntactic features of the text. The numerical outcomes demonstrate that the suggested method achieves an expressively superior quality of human emotion detection rate of 97.22% and the classification accuracy rate of 98.02% with different state-of-the-art methods and can be enhanced by other emotional word embeddings. (shrink)

Cet article propose d'interroger la notion de contextualisation à partir d'une perspective d'analyse textuelle des discours. La contextualisation est ici définie comme le processus par lequel le chercheur tente d’établir la pertinence d’une mise en relation entre un texte et un autre (ou plusieurs autres) et de leur regroupement au sein d’un corpus. Trois critères (générique, auctorial et thématique) sont identifiés, autorisant les passages de texte à texte(s) et dessinant ce que nous suggérons d'appeler des sphères de contextualisation. Finalement, une (...) hiérarchisation et des articulations possibles entre ces trois sphères sont envisagées. (shrink)

Cet article propose d'interroger la notion de contextualisation à partir d'une perspective d'analyse textuelle des discours. La contextualisation est ici définie comme le processus par lequel le chercheur tente d’établir la pertinence d’une mise en relation entre un texte et un autre (ou plusieurs autres) et de leur regroupement au sein d’un corpus. Trois critères (générique, auctorial et thématique) sont identifiés, autorisant les passages de texte à texte(s) et dessinant ce que nous suggérons d'appeler des sphères de contextualisation. Finalement, une (...) hiérarchisation et des articulations possibles entre ces trois sphères sont envisagées. (shrink)

Professor Leonard proposes that imperative and interrogative sentences be classified, together with declarative ones, as true and false. The interesting analysis he gives in connection with this proposal points out that these three types of utterance have something in common and has the merit of evincing the identity of this common element. Also it may seem to offer attractive possibilities of integrating various types of discourse in its promise of partial assimilation of interrogatives and imperatives to the model of (...) truth-valuable language. Even so, Leonard's account is not altogether satisfactory. I shall not discuss his treatment of imperatives but shall argue that his conception of interrogatives has unacceptable consequences. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, researchers have made great advances in the area of computational methods for extracting meaning from text. This research has to a large extent been spurred by the development of latent semantic analysis (LSA), a method for extracting and representing the meaning of words using statistical computations applied to large corpora of text. Since the advent of LSA, researchers have developed and tested alternative statistical methods designed to detect and analyze meaning in text (...) corpora. This research exemplifies how statistical models of semantics play an important role in our understanding of cognition and contribute to the field of cognitive science. Importantly, these models afford large-scale representations of human knowledge and allow researchers to explore various questions regarding knowledge, discourse processing, text comprehension, and language. This topic includes the latest progress by the leading researchers in the endeavor to go beyond LSA. (shrink)

There are several linguistic phenomena that, when examined closely, give evidence that people speak through characters, much like authors of literary works do, in everyday discourse. However, most approaches in linguistics and in the philosophy of language leave little theoretical room for the appearance of characters in discourse. In particular, there is no linguistic criterion found to date, which can mark precisely what stretch of discourse within an utterance belongs to a character, and to which character. And yet, without (...) at least tentatively marking the division of labor between the different characters in an utterance, it is absolutely impossible to arrive at an acceptable interpretation of it. As an alternative, I propose to take character use seriously, as an essential feature of discourse in general, a feature speakers and listeners actively seek out in utterances. I offer a simple typology of actions in discourse that draws on this understanding, and demonstrate its usefulness for the analysis of a conversation transcript. (shrink)

The problem is to reintroduce rhetoric, the rhetorician, the fight of discourse into the field of analysis.... The problem is to "rhetorize" philosophy.Philosophy takes place in the medium of language, in spoken and written discourses, which are themselves given as texts. Texts are written, read, memorized, reproduced, and cited; they circulate and are disseminated, but may also get damaged or lost, censored or forbidden, or become opaque and unreadable. This textual constitution is not a contingent but an essential (...) attribute of Western philosophy. In fact, the staging of dialogic and agonal orality in the medium of text is one of the characteristic features of Greek thought. Thus, the... (shrink)

The authors here promote the reintroduction of temporality into the description and analysis of spoken interaction. They argue that spoken words are, in fact, temporal objects and that unless linguists consider how they are delivered within the context of time, they will not capture the full meaning of situated language use. Their approach is rigorously empirical, with analyses of English, German, and Italian rhythm, all grounded in sequences of actual talk-in-interaction.

COVID-19 is a disease that affects the quality of life in all aspects. However, the government policy applied in 2020 impacted the lifestyle of the whole world. In this sense, the study of sentiments of people in different countries is a very important task to face future challenges related to lockdown caused by a virus. To contribute to this objective, we have proposed a natural language processing model with the aim to detect positive and negative feelings in open-text (...) answers obtained from a survey in pandemic times. We have proposed a distilBERT transformer model to carry out this task. We have used three approaches to perform a comparison, obtaining for our best model the following average metrics: Accuracy: 0.823, Precision: 0.826, Recall: 0.793 and F1 Score: 0.803. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Corpora and discourse studies: Integrating discourse and corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan.) and provides a critical discussion of key topics and stances in the marriage equality debate in Germany. The ways in which the German print media covered the debate are explored through two corpora which include relevant texts from three German newspapers and two magazines from two key periods ; in 2001, Germany introduced ‘civil unions’ but it was only in 2017 that (...) marriage was opened to same-sex couples. Qualitative and quantitative analyses using AntConc and ProtAnt suggest that while there are parallels to marriage equality debates in other countries, there are also language-/culture-specific features. For example, there is a stronger focus on children’s welfare in the contemporary data, since marriage equality meant joint adoption rights for same-sex couples. Through an exploration of keywords/collocations and close reading of prototypical texts, it is shown how linguistic choices contribute to framing the arguments for/against marriage equality and how these stances are connected to culture-specific and cross-cultural norms. (shrink)

L’article permet de préciser quelques spécificités du corpus CFPP2000 et montre à partir de l’exemple des interrogatives indirectes (percontatives) comment ce corpus peut contribuer à une description de ce que nous appelons « la langue commune ». Dans un premier temps, nous rappelons les choix qui ont présidé à la confection du CFPP2000. Puis nous examinons les types d’interrogatives indirectes qui apparaissent dans le CFPP2000, avec des fréquences variées. Les interrogatives indirectes selon la norme grammaticale dominent. Cependant (...) les interrogatives indirectes en « est-ce que » sont bien représentées et elles apparaissent chez des locuteurs de toutes les origines sociales montrant que le corpus CFPP2000 ne se confond pas avec ce standard des grammaires. En revanche, les percontatives in situ sont très rares et plusieurs indices montrent qu’il s’agit encore de formes stigmatisées. (shrink)

We have never come face to face with ‘Philosophy’, that goddess who was courted, scorned, hated, and betrayed throughout history by those who claimed to represent her - we only come into contact with her officers: philosophers, that is, human beings who exist in an economic context, have religious ideas, support political opinions, find a way through their emotional history, are paid by institutions, fanstasize about a vision of hope, have appetites, can fight, are mad keen to be noticed and (...) recognized and above all frequently make certain types of statements that have claims to validity. So philosophers are not only creatures in history but also historical creatures who interrogate the meaning of the world and particularly their own work. However, one of the tricks of instrumental rationality - if we follow Marx's analysis - is to focus first on the product rather than the producer. This is the basic reason for the fact that a passion for the exegesis of philosophical texts often conceals philosophers’ practices. And this is why - where African philosophers are concerned, and they are not the only ones - people focus first, with benign curiosity, on their books, the theories that they expound and that may provide matter for heated discussion, but questions are hardly ever asked about the stance of African philosophers, in other words, the actual conditions in which their position is created, the particular abilities of African philosophers to achieve their emergence as ‘philosophers’, and their recognition in the international arena. The rhetoric about the acceptance of multi-culturalism argued on the basis of the complexity of present-day societies often hides practices and processes of legitimation that are revealed by their relationship to those two phenomena, economics and the state. The love of little abstractions that philosophy resists in the name of its historical position, the haste with which African philosophers, among others, clamour for recognition from their peers in other cultures are partly intended secretly to conceal their true relationship to money. Not that ‘disinterested’ philosophers ‘in love’ with knowledge do not exist, but we need to recognize that they often fail to say, as Adorno does in Dialectique négative, that ‘philosophy's freedom is simply the ability to allow its non-freedom to be expressed’. The purpose of this article is less to question philosophers’ capacity for knowledge than to urge them to have the courage to proclaim and challenge their non-freedom. (shrink)

The article deals with the notion of the genetic code and its metaphorical understanding as a “language”. In the traditional view of the language metaphor of the genetic code, combinations of nucleotides are signs of amino acids. Similarly, words combined from letters represent certain meanings. The language metaphor of the genetic code, 171–200, 2011) assumes that the nucleotides stay in the analogy to letters, triples to words and genes to sentences. We propose an application of mathematical linguistic (...) methods on the notion of the genetic code. We provide quantitative analysis of mRNA strings and natural language texts. This analysis is sensitive to the detection of the code units hierarchy. We also take into consideration a representative quantitative analysis of DNA, RNA and proteins. Our analysis of mRNA confirms an assumption that the design of the genetic code cannot analogize DNA bases and letters. The notion of the letter is much more appropriate if analogized with triplets or amino acids, 187–191, 2017). (shrink)

Based on a corpus-driven analysis of two translated versions ofHongloumeng(one by David Hawkes and the other by Xianyi Yang and Gladys Yang) in parallel corpora, this article investigates the use of lexical bundles in an attempt to trace the stylistic features and differences in the translations produced by the respective translators. TheHongloumengcorpus is developed at the sentence level to facilitate co-occurrence of the source texts and the two corresponding translations. For this purpose, the three-word and four-word lexical bundles were first (...) extracted and then analyzed with respect to the functional classification proposed by Biber et al. (2004). The results of the study show that Hawkes' translation is embedded with a greater number and variety of lexical bundles than the one by the Yang couple. The study also identified the differences between the two versions which can be traced back to the deployment of different translation strategies of the translators, appearing in turn to be influenced by the language backgrounds of the translators, the translation skopos and settings, and the social, political, and ideological milieu in which the translations were produced. (shrink)