Lexical Clues Research Articles

The Epistemic Marker Určit Ě in the Light of Corpus Data

Abstract The paper presents a pilot study for a research project on epistemic modality and/or evidentiality markers in Czech. The study focuses on the expression určitě. Although, this marker is typically considered to signal high certainty, the dictionary of standard Czech (Slovník spisovné češtiny, SSČ) also offers an alternative meaning of probability, indicating a lower degree of certainty. We use parallel data from the InterCorp v15 corpus to determine whether the probability meaning can be identified unequivocally in real language data and whether it correlates with specific translation equivalents, linguistic features, or lexical context. Based on our findings, we propose an alternative method for distinguishing between different shades of meaning based on the communicative functions of the utterances, and we draw conclusions regarding the relevance of individual grammatical and lexical clues in context for future annotations.

Victim of Eros: The Poetics of Sex in Theocritus' First Idyll

This article proposes a new interpretation of the "sufferings of Daphnis" as they are sung by the shepherd Thyrsis in Theocritus' first Idyll. While the common view is that Daphnis' wasting was caused by a stubborn commitment to fidelity or to chastity, this paper argues that it is rather a symptom of his sexual impairment. The argument rests on two main elements: the connections between Daphnis and other figures acting as Aphrodite's consorts, and the presence of lexical clues pointing to the sexual character of the cowherd's illness. Finally, I argue that Theocritus' enigmatic account of Daphnis' fate in the first Idyll is consistent with the pervading metapoetic discourse of the poem: impotence serves to highlight Daphnis' fecundity as the founder of bucolic song.

Naman-, l'acquoreo scorrere del pensiero, e momenti della creazione verbale vedica

Nāman, the water-like flow of thought, and moments of verbal vedic creation. After having outlined the ontological and gnosiological roles of the Vedic lexeme nāman-, we will attempt to demonstrate the intersection of the dimension of verbalization with that of ‘its aqueous nature’ by means of textual clues (for instance in AV XVII, 1, 29 or in RV X, 129, 7) and through the characterization of Sarasvati, of Diṣhana (and similar figures), of Indra as liberator of the Waters and as Wortfuhrer, of the storm deities Maruts, who are bound both to water and to the word. Moreover, we will draw a comparison between Viśvāmitra and Odysseus. Among the various lexical clues, we have chosen to concentrate on ṛṣi- and rasa-. In conclusion, we suggest a possible etymology for nāman-, which would be consistent with the connotation of the ‘aqueous nature’ of the Vedic word meaning the ‘water-like flow of thought’. This allows us to insert the nāman- into the dynamic of verbal Vedic creation consisting in ulterior phases such as sāman-, dhāman- and brahman-. Finally we will examine RV I, 164, 45, which provides a suggestive confirmation of our reconstruction of the four phases of Vedic verbalization.

A Rule Based Answer Extraction System with Stemming & Anaphora Resolution

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is an area of computer Science and Sub area of Artificial Intelligence (AI).We are developing a rule-based system that can read a large collection of text (say for e.g. story) and find the sentence in the text that best answers the given question. The system uses set of handcrafted rules augmented with some NLP techniques like stemming, named entity extraction etc. that look for Lexical and semantic clues in the question and the text (i.e. story). Each rule awards a certain number of points to each sentence. After all of the rules have been applied, the sentence that obtains the highest score is returned as the answer.

ConText: An algorithm for determining negation, experiencer, and temporal status from clinical reports

In this paper we describe an algorithm called ConText for determining whether clinical conditions mentioned in clinical reports are negated, hypothetical, historical, or experienced by someone other than the patient. The algorithm infers the status of a condition with regard to these properties from simple lexical clues occurring in the context of the condition. The discussion and evaluation of the algorithm presented in this paper address the questions of whether a simple surface-based approach which has been shown to work well for negation can be successfully transferred to other contextual properties of clinical conditions, and to what extent this approach is portable among different clinical report types. In our study we find that ConText obtains reasonable to good performance for negated, historical, and hypothetical conditions across all report types that contain such conditions. Conditions experienced by someone other than the patient are very rarely found in our report set. A comprehensive solution to the problem of determining whether a clinical condition is historical or recent requires knowledge above and beyond the surface clues picked up by ConText.

Five factors in interpreting the last decade/ century and the next decade/ century in American English

Temporal nouns such as week, month, and year have two meanings: “even units,” e.g. from January to December, and “arbitrary periods,” e.g. any 12 months. The disambiguates the meanings of these temporal nouns preceded by last/ next: Ø next week means “from Sunday to Saturday,” e.g. Next week will be fun, and the next week “the next seven days,” e.g. The next week will be fun. Decade and century also have two meanings; however, they do not usually combine with Ø last/ next. Consequently, the last decade, for example, refers to either “the 1990s” or “the past 10 years.” Based on the analyses of tokens from the 1996 LA Times and New York Times corpora, this paper argues that the following five factors are involved in interpreting the last/ next + decade/ century: prepositions, tense, other lexical clues, pragmatic world knowledge, and relevance to the utterance time. Furthermore, two questionnaires containing authentic sentences from the two corpora were used to supplement these corpus findings. Thirty educated native speakers of American English living on the West Coast answered the questionnaires, the analyses of which support the aforementioned findings and also reveal that native speakers do not agree on what preposition to use for which interpretation.

Adaptive Web Search: Evolving a Program That Finds Information

Search engines contain programs that compare the words in a user's query to the words and phrases in Web pages. This comparison emphasizes relatively rare terms, terms that occur frequently in a page, and terms in prominent positions (such as a page's title), among other textual clues that suggest what the page is about. Although all search engines differ in the ways they determine which Web pages to present to a user, each incorporates a method that its designers hope will be effective. Nonetheless, retrieval algorithms perform inconsistently—some better in one circumstance, others in another--with no way to know in advance which will be most effective. The authors approach retrieval from a learning perspective. Rather than determining how to combine lexical clues beforehand, they infer how this should be done on the basis of users' evaluations of previously viewed documents. Unlike conventional systems, this approach automatically evolves new retrieval programs through genetic programming. It seems particularly effective for users whose need for information remains consistent over weeks or months.

An association‐based method for automatic indexing with a controlled vocabulary

In this article, we describe and test a two-stage algorithm based on a lexical collocation technique which maps from the lexical clues contained in a document representation into a controlled vocabulary list of subject headings. Using a collection of 4,626 INSPEC documents, we create a “dictionary” of associations between the lexical items contained in the titles, authors, and abstracts, and controlled vocabulary subject headings assigned to those records by human indexers using a likelihood ratio statistic as the measure of association. In the deployment stage, we use the dictionary to predict which of the controlled vocabulary subject headings best describe new documents when they are presented to the system. Our evaluation of this algorithm, in which we compare the automatically assigned subject headings to the subject headings assigned to the test documents by human catalogers, shows that we can obtain results comparable to, and consistent with, human cataloging. In effect, we have cast this as a classic partial match information retrieval problem. We consider the problem to be one of “retrieving” (or assigning) the most probably “relevant” (or correct) controlled vocabulary subject headings to a document based on the clues contained in that document. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An association-based method for automatic indexing with a controlled vocabulary

In this article, we describe and test a two-stage algorithm based on a lexical collocation technique which maps from the lexical clues contained in a document representation into a controlled vocabulary list of subject headings. Using a collection of 4,626 INSPEC documents, we create a “dictionary” of associations between the lexical items contained in the titles, authors, and abstracts, and controlled vocabulary subject headings assigned to those records by human indexers using a likelihood ratio statistic as the measure of association. In the deployment stage, we use the dictionary to predict which of the controlled vocabulary subject headings best describe new documents when they are presented to the system. Our evaluation of this algorithm, in which we compare the automatically assigned subject headings to the subject headings assigned to the test documents by human catalogers, shows that we can obtain results comparable to, and consistent with, human cataloging. In effect, we have cast this as a classic partial match information retrieval problem. We consider the problem to be one of “retrieving” (or assigning) the most probably “relevant” (or correct) controlled vocabulary subject headings to a document based on the clues contained in that document. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

TOWARDS THE USE OF SITUATIONAL INFORMATION IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

This paper is an exploratory study of one approach to incorporating situational information into information retrieval systems, drawing on principles and methods of discourse linguistics. A tenet of discourse linguistics is that texts of a specific type possess a structure above the syntactic level, which follows conventions known to the people using such texts to communicate. In some cases, such as literature describing work done, the structure is closely related to situations, and may therefore be a useful representational vehicle for the present purpose. Abstracts of empirical research papers exhibit a well‐defined discourse‐level structure, which is revealed by lexical clues. Two methods of detecting the structure automatically are presented: (i) a Bayesian probabilistic analysis; and (ii) a neural network model. Both methods show promise in preliminary implementations. A study of users' oral problem statements indicates that they are not amenable to the same kind of processing. However, from in‐depth interviews with users and search intermediaries, the following conclusions are drawn: (i) the notion of a generic research script is meaningful to both users and intermediaries as a high‐level description of situation; (ii) a researcher's position in the script is a predictor of the relevance of documents; and (iii) currently, intermediaries can make very little use of situational information. The implications of these findings for system design are discussed, and a system structure presented to serve as a framework for future experimental work on the factors identified in this paper. The design calls for a dialogue with the user on his or her position in a research script and incorporates features permitting discourse‐level components of abstracts to be specified in search strategies.

The discourse-level structure of empirical abstracts: an exploratory study

Free-text retrieval is less effective than it might be because of its dependence on notions that evolved with controlled vocabulary representation and searching. The structure and nature of the discourse level features of natural language text types are not incorporated. In an attempt to address this problem, an exploratory study was conducted for the purpose of determining whether information abstracts reporting on empirical work do possess a predictable discourse-level structure and whether there are lexical clues that reveal this structure. A three phase study was conducted, with Phase I making use of four tasks to delineate the structure of empirical abstracts based on the internalized notions of 12 expert abstractors. Phase II consisted of a linguistic analysis of 276 empirical abstracts that suggested a linguistic model of an empirical abstract, which was tested in Phase III with a two stage validation procedure using 68 abstracts and four abstractors. Results indicate that expert abstractors do possess an internalized structure of empirical abstracts, whose components and relations were confirmed repeatedly over the four tasks. Substantively the same structure revealed by the experts was manifested in the sample of abstracts, with a relatively small set of recurring lexical clues revealing the presence and nature of the text components. Abstractors validated the linguistic model at an average level of 86%. Results strongly support the presence of a detectable structure in the text-type of empirical abstracts. Such a structure may be of use in a variety of text-based information processing systems. The techniques developed for analyzing natural language texts for the purpose of providing more useful representations of their semantic content offer potential for application of other types of natural language texts.

Sensible Diagnostics in Diderot's La Religieuse

It is by now virtually a truism among eighteenth-century specialists that Denis Diderot took an intense interest in the medical theory of his day, and that this interest somehow seeped throughout his works. It is thus hardly innovative for critics to scan the corpus of selected medical treatises considered required reading by Diderot (according to his notes to the Elements de physiologic) for possible conceptual or lexical clues to the peculiar body language that imbues his writing, a language characterized by a distinctive combinatory of materialism, eroticism, and pathology.' As a result of the diligent inquiries that have been conducted over the past thirty years to uncover Diderot's supposed medical sources, attention has rightly been drawn to the singular concept central to them all: the quintessentially Enlightenment property known as sensibilite, which would, not coincidentally, also appear to be the most likely organizing principle of Diderot's own panoptic oeuvre. For most Diderot specialists, then, the case would seem to be closed, with a

Some Lexical Clues to Uto-Aztecan Prehistory

Some Lexical Clues to Uto-Aztecan Prehistory

'Do what I mean, not what I say!' Changes in mothers' action-directives to young children.

ABSTRACTThis study investigated mothers' notions of appropriate speech to 40 children aged 1; 6 to 3; 6. Spontaneous maternal action-directives were analysed in terms of the explicitness with which they expressed syntactic and lexical clues to action-directive intentions. Cross-sectional and longitudinal changes, and progressions within maternal repetition sequences, indicated that the children perceived as most limited in inferential skills elicited the most restricted input. Most of the action-directives they heard could be interpreted non-inferentially, because syntactic and lexical clues to intentions were explicitly expressed. External supports were removed gradually in response to the mother's perception of her child's increasing ability to draw extra-linguistic inferences. Several theoretical models of non-literal speech-act comprehension are supported. It is argued that the differences in language use reflect the mother's notions of the speech a listener is likely to understand.

The Prehistoric Tepehuan of Northern Mexico

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Prehistoric Tepehuan of Northern MexicoCarroll L. Riley, and Howard D. WintersCarroll L. Riley Search for more articles by this author , and Howard D. Winters Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 19, Number 2Summer, 1963 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/soutjanth.19.2.3629167 Views: 8Total views on this site Citations: 4Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology (1945-1972), which is continued by the Journal of Anthropological Research (1973-present). Copyright 1963 Department of Anthropology, University of New MexicoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Paul Liffman Los tepehuanes y sus predecesores: un ensayo bibliográfico, Journal de la société des américanistes 96, no.22 (Dec 2010): 267–288.https://doi.org/10.4000/jsa.11589David A. Phillips Prehistory of Chihuahua and Sonora, Mexico, Journal of World Prehistory 3, no.44 (Dec 1989): 373–401.https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00975109 Catherine S. Fowler Some Lexical Clues to Uto-Aztecan Prehistory, International Journal of American Linguistics 49, no.33 (Oct 2015): 224–257.https://doi.org/10.1086/465789Phil C. Weigand The Mines and Mining Techniques of the Chalchihuites Culture, American Antiquity 33, no.11 (Jan 2017): 45–61.https://doi.org/10.2307/277772