Spanish Corpus Research Articles

Detection of Sarcasm and Nastiness: New Resources for Spanish Language

The main goal of this work is to provide the cognitive computing community with valuable resources to analyze and simulate the intentionality and/or emotions embedded in the language employed in social media. Specifically, it is focused on the Spanish language and online dialogues, leading to the creation of Sofoco (Spanish Online Forums Corpus). It is the first Spanish corpus consisting of dialogic debates extracted from social media and it is annotated by means of crowdsourcing in order to carry out automatic analysis of subjective language forms, like sarcasm or nastiness. Furthermore, the annotators were also asked about the context need when taking a decision. In this way, the users’ intentions and their behavior inside social networks can be better understood and more accurate text analysis is possible. An analysis of the annotation results is carried out and the reliability of the annotations is also explored. Additionally, sarcasm and nastiness detection results (around 0.76 F-Measure in both cases) are also reported. The obtained results show the presented corpus as a valuable resource that might be used in very diverse future work.

Emotional Classification of Acoustic Information With Optimal Feature Subset Selection Methods

This paper mainly focuses on classification of various Acoustic emotional corpora with frequency domain features using feature subset selection methods. The emotional speech samples are classified into neutral, happy, fear , anger, disgust and sad states by using properties of statistics of spectral features estimated from Berlin and Spanish emotional utterances. The Sequential Forward Selection(SFS) and Sequential Floating Forward Selection(SFFS)feature subset selection algorithms are for extracting more informative features. The number of speech emotional samples available for training is smaller than that of the number of features extracted from the speech sample in both Berlin and Spanish corpora which is called curse of dimensionality. Because of this feature vector of high dimensionality the efficiency of the classifier decreases and at the same time the computational time also increases. For additional improvement in the efficiency of the classifier a subset of features which are optimal is needed and is obtained by using feature subset selection methods. This will enhances the performance of the system with high efficiency and lower computation time. The classifier used in this work is the standard K Nearest Neighbour (KNN) Classifier. Experimental evaluation proved that the performance of the classifier is enhanced with SFFS because it vanishes the nesting effect suffered by SFS. The results also showed that an optimal feature subset is a better choice for classification rather than full feature set.

How do we talk about doctors and drugs? Sentiment analysis in forums expressing opinions for medical domain.

The main goal of this study is to examine how people express their opinion in medical forums. We analyze the language used in order to determine the best way to tackle sentiment analysis in this domain. We have applied supervised learning and lexicon-based sentiment analysis approaches over two different corpora extracted from social web. Specifically, we have focused on two aspects: drugs and doctors. We have selected two forums and we have collected corpora for each one: (i) DOS, a Spanish corpus of drug reviews and (ii) COPOS, a Spanish corpus of patients' opinions about physicians. The classification results show that drug reviews are more difficult to classify than those about physicians. In order to understand the difference in the results, we have studied the linguistic features of both corpora. Although opinions about physicians and drugs are written in most cases by non-professional users, reviews about physicians are characterized by the use of an informal language while reviews about drugs are characterized by a combination of informal language with specific terminology (e.g. adverse effects, drug names) with greater lexical diversity, making the task of sentiment analysis difficult.

On the Relationship Between Subject Placement and Overt Pronouns in the Spanish of New York City Bilinguals

This paper reports on a variationist sociolinguistic analysis of the relationship between subject placement and overt pronoun rates in the Spanish of first- and second-generation Spanish-English bilinguals in New York City. The data used for the study come from a spoken corpus of Spanish in New York based on 140 sociolinguistic interviews. We show second-generation speakers exhibit a more rigid word order compared to their newly arrived first-generation peers, more often preferring subjects in the preverbal position, and we explain that this increase in word order rigidity among our second-generation can be attributed, in large part, to their increased use of and contact with English. We further posit that the difference in subject placement across generations can be explained by the different context of acquisition since the Spanish that these second-generation speakers are exposed to contains both a higher rate of overt pronouns and a higher rate of preverbal subjects.

Directness vs. indirectness

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to examine the cross-cultural differences between (in)direct Spanish and French request formulations, adopting a pragmatic approach. More specifically, this study focusses on pragmatic equivalences in request formulations in informal and educational contexts, in French and Spanish corpora. In order to do so, a taxonomy was developed, based on the literature and on the analysis of the Spanish and French corpora. The analysis of the data shows that, on the one hand, direct strategies are among the most frequent request formulations in both corpora and, on the other, some formulations are similar in Spanish and in French but that their pragmatic interpretation or their frequency differs.

Translation description for assessment and post-editing

Abstract This paper presents a corpus-based descriptive research procedure for the identification of significant divergences between original Spanish and Spanish translated from English. When considering the language pair English-Spanish, personal pronouns seem to be good markers of significant differences (anchor phenomena), since they must obligatorily occur in English, but not in Spanish. To test this hypothesis, empirical data have been extracted from a large reference corpus in Spanish (CREA) and from an English-Spanish parallel corpus (P-ACTRES), in both cases from the fiction subcorpora. Statistically significant differences have been found in some of the uses of personal pronouns, having textual and pragmatic implications in the target texts. The aim is to use the results obtained in the case of personal pronouns, together with results from other linguistic areas, to build a semi-automated tool for the post-editing of Spanish translations of texts written originally in English.

When “Questions“ are not Questions. Inferences and Conventionalization in Spanish But-Prefaced Partial Interrogatives

Abstract The present paper analyzes the discourse-pragmatic function of introducing Spanish qué ‘what’- interrogatives with the concessive connective pero ‘but’. In some contexts, a pero-preface contributes to the interpretation of the interrogative as the realization of an interactional challenge rather than a request for information (e.g. an information question). We explore the inferential processes by which the peropreface leads to an interpretation of the interrogative as an interactional challenge and try to demonstrate that this challenge function of pero-prefaced qué-interrogatives may not only achieved ‘ad hoc’ by a local combination of the constitutive elements, but also by conventionalized form-function associations that developed diachronically. In a first step, we analyze pero-prefaced qué-interrogatives in a corpus of spoken Present Day Spanish. There are three main functions of pero-prefaces: to signal that a previous answer to the same interrogative is insufficient, to insist on an answer to a previously unattended request, or to challenge an immediately preceding action by an interlocutor. Using methodology from variationist linguistics, we identify entrenched patterns of pero-prefaced qué-interrogatives that have conventionalized the challenge function. In a second step, we conduct a diachronic variationist analysis of the development of Spanish pero-prefaced qué-interrogatives between 1700 and 1975, testing the hypothesis that the challenge reading developed later than the question reading. Our results show that due to their largely monological nature, the same inferential processes cued by pero lead to different discourse functions in historical texts. Over time, however, the use of pero-prefaced interrogatives started to become more likely in constructed dialogues. We argue that this change reflects an ongoing conventionalization of the challenge function in pero-prefaced interrogatives in spoken language.

Phonetic and phonological aspects of Colombian Spanish

Colombia is, after Mexico, the second country with the largest number of Spanish speakers in the Hispanic world. More than 90% of their 48 million inhabitants are native speakers of Spanish. Colombian Spanish is a grouping of the varieties of Spanish spoken in this country with specific pronunciation, intonation and, especially, vocabulary. The article deals with some relevant phonetic and phonological aspects of Colombian Spanish, some of them shared with other Hispano-American regions, for instance the seseo (/θ/ merges with /s/), and other phenomena present in two Colombian superdialects as defined by Montes Giraldo (the presence or absence of implosive -s or the loss of intervocalic -d-). The article also deals with the extension of yeísmo, a merger of /ʎ/ into /ʝ/, in the area of Bogotá and with some phonetic phenomena of the creole language palenquero. The analysis is based on examples from spoken Colombian Spanish corpus PRESEEA and other sources.

Does empirical data from bilingual and native Spanish corpora meet linguistic theory? The role of discourse context in variation of subject expression

Abstract The goal of this study is to shed light on how empirical data on the discourse constraints of null and overt third person subject pronouns in L1 and bilingual Spanish meet linguistic theory. A (semi)spontaneous production task was administered to 34 Moroccan Arabic (MA)/Spanish early sequential bilinguals and 30 L1 Spanish controls. All 3rd person subject positions were coded: (1) morphosyntactic form (null pronoun vs. overt pronoun); (2) discourse function ([-Topic Shift] vs. [+Topic Shift]); (3) sentence relation (intrasentential vs. intersentential); (4) clause order within intrasentential contexts (main-subordinate vs. subordinate-main); and (5) access to the antecedent (clear vs. ambiguous antecedent). The results reveal general patterns of use in both L1 and bilingual Spanish: null pronouns express topic maintenance both in inter- and intrasentential contexts (both clause orders) and overt pronouns, especially in intersentential contexts, are generally used for topic change. However, additional analyses provide evidence that null pronouns in L1, but not in bilingual Spanish, are often used in change of reference contexts where the antecedent is not ambiguous. This reveals patterns that have gone unreported by most previous descriptive and theoretical studies. Finally, a higher use of ambiguous null pronouns is attested among bilingual speakers, which suggests a lower control of the mechanisms by which reference is established in discourse and supports, to some extent, the predictions derived from the Interface Hypothesis.

SFU ReviewSP-NEG: a Spanish corpus annotated with negation for sentiment analysis. A typology of negation patterns

In this paper, we present SFU ReviewSP-NEG, the first Spanish corpus annotated with negation with a wide coverage freely available. We describe the methodology applied in the annotation of the corpus including the tagset, the linguistic criteria and the inter-annotator agreement tests. We also include a complete typology of negation patterns in Spanish. This typology has the advantage that it is easy to express in terms of a tagset for corpus annotation: the types are clearly defined, which avoids ambiguity in the annotation process, and they provide wide coverage (i.e. they resolved all the cases occurring in the corpus). We use the SFU ReviewSP as a base in order to make the annotations. The corpus consists of 400 reviews, 221,866 words and 9455 sentences, out of which 3022 sentences contain at least one negation structure.

Comparing learners’ and native speakers’ use of collocations in written Spanish

AbstractThis article compares the use of collocations in texts written by native speakers and advanced learners of Spanish. The collocations studied were first identified in the sample texts on the grounds of phraseological criteria and subsequently assigned frequency information corresponding to their occurrence in a reference corpus of Spanish. The distribution of collocations with different frequency of co-occurrence and mutual information scores in the texts of the two samples was then compared, as was their proportion in the collocation repertoire of native speakers and learners. The study revealed significant differences both in terms of frequency and mutual information.

Improving the automatic segmentation of subtitles through conditional random field

Automatic segmentation of subtitles is a novel research field which has not been studied extensively to date. However, quality automatic subtitling is a real need for broadcasters which seek for automatic solutions given the demanding European audiovisual legislation. In this article, a method based on Conditional Random Field is presented to deal with the automatic subtitling segmentation. This is a continuation of a previous work in the field, which proposed a method based on Support Vector Machine classifier to generate possible candidates for breaks. For this study, two corpora in Basque and Spanish were used for experiments, and the performance of the current method was tested and compared with the previous solution and two rule-based systems through several evaluation metrics. Finally, an experiment with human evaluators was carried out with the aim of measuring the productivity gain in post-editing automatic subtitles generated with the new method presented.

AT THE DIALECTAL CROSSROADS: THE SPANISH OF ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

Bills & Vigil (2008) have established two dialects of New Mexican Spanish – Traditional Spanish and Border Spanish. In general, archaisms and Anglicisms predominate in the north of the state (Traditional Spanish) whereas Mexicanisms predominate in the south (Bord er Spanish). The recent incorporation of Mexicanisms in the Spanish of Albuquerque has placed it at a dialectal crossroads where a Traditional variety is being supplanted by Mexican Spanish, thereby making it more similar to Border Spanish. This study addr esses the extent to which the Spanish of Albuquerque has absorbed Mexicanisms and explores how they were introduced into the community. The use of Mexicanisms is compared to that of archaisms and Anglicisms using an original 20 - hour corpus of spoken Albuqu erque Spanish. Contrary to the claims of Bills & Vigil (2008), the Spanish of Albuquerque is much more similar to Border Spanish than Traditional Spanish and should be reclassified to reflect this difference.

Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal Perspective ed. by Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco, and Naomi Lapidus Shin

Reviewed by: Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal Perspective ed. by Ana M. Carvalho, Rafael Orozco, and Naomi Lapidus Shin Sarah E. Blackwell Carvalho, Ana M., Rafael Orozco, and Naomi Lapidus Shin, eds. Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal Perspective. Washington, DC: Georgetown UP, 2015. Pp. 258. 2015. ISBN 978-1-62616-170-2. Subject Pronoun Expression in Spanish: A Cross-dialectal Perspective is a welcome volume comprising important contributions on Spanish subject pronoun expression (SPE) by scholars focusing on monolingual Spanish varieties (part 1), Spanish in contact with other languages (part 2), and Spanish in contexts of acquisition (part 3). Each part contains four chapters, and all of them present quantitative analyses of SPE. In the preface, Ricardo Otheguy sketches the ground-laying work of early variationist sociolinguists, which sets the stage for quantitative-variationist studies of subject personal pronouns (SPPs) by Spanish pronombristas. In their “Introduction,” the editors identify questions addressed in the volume, including whether or not SPE is consistent across language varieties or susceptible to contact-induced change, and how it develops during language acquisition. These questions provide a unifying theme for the subsequent chapters. In chapter 1, Alfaraz analyzes Santo Domingo Spanish to determine whether its higher pronominal expression rate indicates a change in progress toward obligatory SPE in Dominican Spanish. She finds that variables conditioning SPE in other Spanish varieties (e.g., switch reference, singular verbs) also condition SPE in Dominican Spanish, but that second person singular references most strongly favor overt tú expression. Additionally, gender affects SPE, with Santo Domingo women favoring overt pronouns only slightly more than men. Nevertheless, overall SPP rates are similar to those of other Caribbean varieties, suggesting that Dominican Spanish is not unique in this regard. [End Page 486] In chapter 2, Orozco analyzes a corpus of Colombian Costeño (Barranquilla) Spanish and reports SPE rates comparable to those of other Caribbean varieties. Priming and tense/mood/aspect (TMA) effects on Costeño SPE also reflect results from earlier studies. The imperfect indicative most clearly favors SPE in Costeño, thus supporting the hypothesis that morphologically ambiguous verb paradigms promote more pronoun expression. Additionally, while perception verbs most strongly favor overt SPPs in Costeño, among mental activity verbs, only creer and saber favor expression. These findings suggest the need for further research on the effects of verb semantics on SPE. Lastra and Martín Butragueño (chapter 3) investigate SPE in Mexico City (MC) Spanish and report a low rate of overt SPPs in their MC corpus, a finding consistent with other “mainland” Spanish varieties. Grammatical person and number emerged as the strongest constraint on SPE in MC Spanish, which is also congruent with results form earlier studies. Textual genre has significant effects on subject expression (e.g., argumentation favors subject expression most strongly in the MC data). Interestingly, younger MC speakers use fewer overt subjects than older speakers, which contrasts with the direction of change evidenced in other Romance languages, suggesting a need for more research on age effects. Posio examines a corpus of conversational Peninsular Spanish in chapter 4, hypothesizing that frequently occurring verb forms, with or without SPPs, tend to appear in formulaic sequences having discourse-pragmatic functions with recognizable SPP expression or omission. For instance, the parenthetical epistemic downtoner no sé nearly always occurs with a null subject, while creo, when used to present opinions, has the highest SPP expression rate of the verbs Posio analyzes. Posio’s analysis of the discourse-pragmatic functions of frequent verb forms suggests that such forms may amplify (and possibly skew) the effects of constraints on SPE. Furthermore, his observation that constructions like ¿sabes? and ya sabes have low overt SPP rates in Peninsular Spanish, while formulaic tú sabes is quite frequent in Latin American varieties, highlights the need for future cross-dialectal studies of SPE in formulaic sequences to determine their contribution to dialectal differences in SPP usage. Part 2 begins with Torres Cacoullos and Travis’s chapter in which they compare the effects of cognition verbs, subject continuity, and priming on Spanish yo and English I expression in Colombian Spanish and American English. They show that first person singular expression in...

Sida y poesía en la temprana España democrática: El caso de Aníbal Núñez

This article explores the presence of HIV/AIDS in the Spanish poetry of the 1980s and the early 1990s. The emergence of HIV/AIDS as a literary topic in Spain followed a much slower pace than in other Western countries, to the extent that, during the time frame studied in this paper, poetic responses to the crisis were extremely rare. Moreover, these responses did not adopt an activist approach when representing the epidemic, nor did they openly denounce the discrimination suffered by people living with HIV/AIDS in Spain. Instead, these texts depicted the disease and its consequences in an oblique and metaphorical way. In the first half of the article, I describe the Spanish poetic corpus of HIV/AIDS, arguing that its indirect approach to the epidemic reflects not only a particular aesthetic choice (namely, that of the neo-baroque), but also a specific sociopolitical background that prevented the emergence of activist approaches to the crisis in Spain. In the second half of the article, I study one particular collection of poetry that illustrates the aesthetic and epistemic characteristics of the Spanish poetry of HIV/AIDS: Cristal de Lorena (Lorraine Glass) (1987), by Anibal Nunez (1944-87).

A variable cognitive and communicative resource in Spanish: The first-person plural subject and object

This study analyzes the variation of the Spanish first-person plural subject and verbal object nosotros (we); nos/a nosotros—(us/to us) within a corpus of contemporary Spanish, (Corpus Conversacional del Español de Canarias, CCEC) from a cognitive theoretical framework, that has been revealed to be very useful for studying syntactic variation and the meaning that variants convey, making it possible to analyze variants as a continuum of formal and semantic-pragmatic elements that reflect the human perception of reality. The gradual dimension of cognitive salience has played an important role to conceptualize the relative relevance of participants in communicative interaction. The subject and the object in the clause are regarded as reaching different degrees of salience. The inherently diffuse nature of the Spanish first-person plural reference together with the different degrees of salience of subject and verbal object make the omission the most frequent variant, whereas the expression is rather infrequent. Results reveal that subject and object variants are used according to the nature of the textual genre and therefore create communicative styles based along the cognitive dimension of +/− objectivity axis.

Transforming the AnCora corpus to HPSG

We present the construction of a HPSG corpus for Spanish, based on the transformation of the AnCora Spanish corpus into a HPSG compatible format. We describe the transformation process and the evaluation of the resulting corpus.

The event structure of reciprocal verbs and its implications for bidirectionality

In this article we present a detailed description of the event structure of the reciprocal situations expressed lexically in Spanish. The description is based on the sentences extracted from a Spanish corpus. We put forward a proposal that involves differentiating between t he simple or multiple nature of the reciprocal event and also between the independent or dependent relation of the subevents that make up a reciprocal situation. We characterize reciprocal verbs according to an aspectual typology and we also contribute a new analysis of the so-called collective verbs in order to distinguish them from reciprocal predicates. Finally, we propose a redefinition of the condition of bidirectionality for reciprocal situations.

O conceito de crise e suas denominações: tipos e causas das variações na terminologia da crise econômica mundial

This paper aims at introducing the concept of crisis in the economic scope, its denominations in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and European Spanish (ES), concluding with its denominative variants in both languages, such as: economy crisis, 2008 crisis, major crisis and major globalization crisis; crisis economica, crisis de 2008, gran crisis e gran crisis de la globalizacion, respectively, searching to identify the types and causes of these variations. These variants, as fragments, already proposed by Freixa (2014), present the following types: morph syntax variations which are related to an inferior lexicon character, being either by alteration in its syntagmatic structure or by maintenance or change of gender or number; lexicon – may be considered the synonymy itself, since there is total change between both lexical units which will produce the same meaning. Among the causes already proposed by the author (Freixa, 2014), only the following causes will be considered: the functional one, which is constituted by different communicative registers; the stylist icon, which is related to the author’s communicative options and needs. The types and causes of variations will be in traduced, exemplified and analyzed according to the contexts collected from the Brazilian and Spanish corpora, which integrates the Project Valores culturais e didaticos na metafora de especialidade: as multiplas imagens da crise economica mundial na imprensa escrita (Cultural and Didactic Values in the specialty metaphor: multiple images of the world economy crisis in the written midia) – an integrated research Project by USP – University of Sao Paulo, UEM – State University of Maringa, Unesp and University of Vigo, funded by CAPES/DGPU. As a conclusion, it was observed that the search for denominative variants has been relevant to introduce an in vivo terminology because the case of economical crisis concept and its denominations shows that variations found may go beyond the univocality.

Social factor comparisons of noun and verb insertion patterns in Spanish and English bilingual clauses

This paper compares noun and verb insertion in bilingual clauses in a Spanish and English bilingual data corpus collected in northeast Georgia (U.S.A.). Even though Myers-Scotton and Jake (2014) have given grammatical reasons why verbs theoretically can be as easily inserted as nouns, most bilingual data corpora, from many different language contact settings, show that far more nouns than verbs of one language are inserted into clauses of the other language. The northeast Georgia Hispanic community data set examined here is no exception. Analysis of the northeast Georgia data reveal that some social factors are associated with higher EL verb use. Children, who have more English proficiency in general than adults, insert more verbs into bilingual clauses than adults. Female gender, higher socio-economic status, and other than Mexican national origin are also associated with higher EL verb use.