Lexical Measures Research Articles

Question Answering Passage Retrieval and Re-ranking Using N-grams and SVM

Over the last few decades, with the meteoric rise of Information Technology, Question Answering (QA) has attracted more attention and has been extremely explored. Indeed, several QA systems are based on a passage retrieval engine which aims to deliver a set of passages that are most likely to contain a relevant response to a question stated in natural language. In an attempt to enhance the performance of existing QASs by increasing the number of generated correct answers and ensure their relevance, we propose a novel approach for retrieving and re-ranking passages based on n-grams and SVM models. The core principle is to first rely on the dependency degree of n-gram words of the query in the passage to retrieve correct passages. Then, an SVM based model is used to improve passage ranking incorporating various lexical, syntactic and semantic similarity measures. Emperical evaluation performed with the CLEF dataset demonstrates the merits of our approach: the results obtained by our implemented system transcend that of other previously proposed ones.

Chunk use and development in advanced Chinese L2 learners of English

The use of ‘chunks’ is not only a common and characteristic feature of first language use, but may also be a distinguishing factor between less and more proficient second language users. The present study aimed at investigating potential correlations between chunk use and holistically rated proficiency scores and development over time in advanced Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) over the course of 18 months of English classes. Neither holistically rated proficiency scores nor common complexity measures had shown any progress in these learners, but a few lexically based measures did. Therefore, the development of chunks in these learners was examined as chunks are mostly lexical in nature and might show more subtle progress over time. The use of chunks was examined in the first and last two texts of the learners and, in line with previous research, it was found that more proficient writers use relatively more chunks, specifically collocations. Chunk coverage, the total number of chunk words divided by the total number of words, also correlated with some holistic proficiency scores, and increased significantly over time. Average chunk length did not show any correlation with proficiency scores nor did it increase over time. Increased proficiency in written texts is thus specifically related to the use of more chunks. This study shows that development in advanced Chinese L2 learners of English appears to be subtle, which might be due to the fact that at this advanced level mainly lexical changes take place. Future research into development over time in advanced learners may thus have to zoom in on lexical measures especially. Implications of this study point to the importance of promoting the use of target language chunks to advanced learners of English.

Lexicale rijkdom, frequentielagen en tekstmoeilijkheid

In line with recent developments in both language acquisition and text comprehension studies, it is argued that more reliable and valid lexical richness measures can be obtained by including frequency class information. To that end, texts written by 452 elementary school children (L1/L2) in grades 3–6 were investigated. In order to find out whether a frequency class based lexical measure is more valid than type/token based measures, the central question to be answered was whether with increasing vocabulary skills from grades 3 to 6 (measured by standardized vocabulary tests), the number of low frequency words in children’s writings increased, and whether L2-children with lower vocabulary skills used relatively more high frequency words than their L1-peers. The results show a gradually growing number of low frequency words: children in grade 3 use more words belonging to the 1,000–5,000 word frequency range; in grades 4/5 more from the 5,000–12,500 range; and in grade 6 more from the 12,500-plus range. L2-children in all grades use relatively more words from the first frequency class (the first 1,000 lemmas) than their L1-peers. The effect sizes, however, with eta2 ranging from .09 to .02 between grades, and from eta2 = .01 to nonsignificant between L1/L2, were lower than those of the standardized productive and receptive vocabulary tests (eta2 = .26-.35 resp. between grades, eta2 = .34-.23 resp. between L1/L2), and also lower than the effect sizes for the number of different types in the texts (eta2 = .23 between grades, and .01 between NT1/NT2). The TTR shows only a significant difference in the wrong direction (grade 6 outperforming grade 5). The frequency class based lexical measure MLR discriminates significantly both between the grades and between L1/L2, but the effect sizes are low (eta2 = .05 between grades, and eta2 = .02 between L1/L2). These outcomes show evidence that a frequency class based lexical measure as the MLR is more valid than a type/token based measure such as the TTR.

The principals of meaning: Extracting semantic dimensions from co-occurrence models of semantics.

Notable progress has been made recently on computational models of semantics using vector representations for word meaning (Mikolov, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013). As representations of meaning, recent models presumably hone in on plausible organizational principles for meaning. We performed an analysis on the organization of the skip-gram model's semantic space. Consistent with human performance (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957), the skip-gram model primarily relies on affective distinctions to organize meaning. We showed that the skip-gram model accounts for unique variance in behavioral measures of lexical access above and beyond that accounted for by affective and lexical measures. We also raised the possibility that word frequency predicts behavioral measures of lexical access due to the fact that word use is organized by semantics. Deconstruction of the semantic representations in semantic models has the potential to reveal organizing principles of human semantics.

한국어 구어 말뭉치를 대상으로 한 연어구성 추출 방법들의 비교: 재현가능 연구

한국어 구어 말뭉치를 대상으로 한 연어구성 추출 방법들의 비교: 재현가능 연구

The complex, dynamic development of L2 lexical use: A longitudinal study on Chinese learners of English

Abstract This longitudinal study examined the one-year development of 15 university-level Chinese students' English lexical use from a Complex Dynamic Systems (CDS) perspective. Four measures were employed to gauge the participants' L2 lexical development in terms of their use of individual words and lexical bundles. Data analysis at both the group and individual levels, combined with several CDS analytic methods, illustrate that the learners' lexical sophistication, diversity, density and use of lexical bundles followed diverging paths of development. When lexical sophistication stabilized, indicative of the occurrence of the lexical plateau, a more synchronous development was captured by separate lexical measures. The relationships between different lexical measures fluctuated during the course of development with individual learner differences, and the development of lexical bundle use deviated from that of individual words. The findings suggest that different dimensions of lexical use interactively constitute the complex, dynamic L2 lexical system, and the CDS perspective provides a useful framework for examining long-term lexical development.

Comparing multi-modality and constraint-induced treatment for aphasia: a preliminary investigation of generalisation to discourse

Background: At present, there is no consensus regarding the comparative efficacy of constraint and non-constraint treatments. Moreover, studies to date have measured the effects of treatment using single-word confrontation naming tasks and omnibus aphasia batteries.Aims: We applied reliable communicative measures of lexical and communicative behaviours to investigate the comparative impact of multi-modality aphasia therapy (M-MAT) and constraint-induced aphasia therapy plus (CIAT Plus) on three discourse genres.Methods & Procedures: Thirteen people with chronic aphasia each participated in 2 weeks of intensive CIAT Plus and 2 weeks of intensive M-MAT (30 hours over 2 weeks). Seven participants undertook CIAT Plus first, while six undertook M-MAT first. Discourse samples from three conditions were collected (picture description, Cinderella story retell and semi-structured conversation) at three time points (pre-treatment, post-CIAT Plus and post-M-MAT). Primary outcome measures included lexical measures (total words, words per minute) and communication measures (total correct information units (CIUs), CIUs per minute).Outcomes & Results: Results varied considerably within and across participants and also across the three discourse conditions. Furthermore, changes in both positive and negative directions were evident throughout the data set. There was a slight trend for better outcomes from CIAT Plus for individuals with mild aphasia and from M-MAT for individuals with moderate aphasia.Conclusions: In order to inform clinical practice and facilitate treatment planning and evaluation, further research is essential to continue to develop reliable discourse measures; to reach consensus on what constitutes “meaningful change” within discourse data and to take steps to mitigate against the variability inherent within discourse.

A Structural-Lexical Measure of Semantic Similarity for Geo-Knowledge Graphs

Graphs have become ubiquitous structures to encode geographic knowledge online. The Semantic Web’s linked open data, folksonomies, wiki websites and open gazetteers can be seen as geo-knowledge graphs, that is labeled graphs whose vertices represent geographic concepts and whose edges encode the relations between concepts. To compute the semantic similarity of concepts in such structures, this article defines the network-lexical similarity measure (NLS). This measure estimates similarity by combining two complementary sources of information: the network similarity of vertices and the semantic similarity of the lexical definitions. NLS is evaluated on the OpenStreetMap Semantic Network, a crowdsourced geo-knowledge graph that describes geographic concepts. The hybrid approach outperforms both network and lexical measures, obtaining very strong correlation with the similarity judgments of human subjects.

Measuring the Vocabulary Size of Egyptian EFL Learners and the Effectiveness of Some English Lexical Measures

Measuring the Vocabulary Size of Egyptian EFL Learners and the Effectiveness of Some English Lexical Measures

Orthographic lexicon and reading skills in young Spanish speaking readers / Léxico ortográfico y habilidad lectora en jóvenes lectores hispanoparlantes

This study analyses the relationship between orthographic processing and reading skills in Spanish speaking children, taking into account school experience and different reading levels, focusing on aspects of orthographic ambiguity, frequency, semantics and efficiency in written word recognition. Lexical orthographic processing assessment measures, decoding and lexical-semantic representations for reading ability were used in a sample of 1070 years 2 to 6 primary school students. Results showed the significant contribution orthographic lexicon makes to reading proficiency in Spanish, as well as the impact students years’ experience in reading practice has on specializing and refining orthographic lexicon, particularly in words with ambiguous spelling. These results are discussed in the context of orthographic transparency and interdependence between the mechanisms of grapho-phonological and orthographic-lexical word recognition.

A Study of Authorship Attribution in English and Tamil Emails

The aim of our study is to identify author of unknown emails of Tamil and English. The recent approaches in Authorship Attribution show that apart from lexical measures some other features of written language are considerably effective as discriminators of author style. However, there have been no attempts to compare the attribution potential of these features. The aim of the present study, then, has to examine the effectiveness of several styles-markers in authorship attribution between the following two languages, English and Tamil equally important, however, we have to compare the usefulness of the chosen style-markers across a two languages the results proved high attribution effectiveness can be achieved in both the language.

Auditory implicit semantic priming in Spanish-speaking children with and without specific language impairment.

We analyzed whether Spanish-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) showed deficits in lexical-semantic processing/organization, and whether these lexical measures correlated with standardized measures of language abilities. Fourteen children with Typical Language Development (TLD) and 16 age-matched children with SLI (8;0-9;11 years) participated. In a Lexical Decision (LD) task with implicit semantic priming, children judged whether a given speech pair contained two words (semantically related/unrelated) or a word-pseudoword. Children received a comprehensive language and reading test battery. Children with TLD exhibited significant semantic priming; they were faster for semantically related word pairs than for unrelated (p < .001) and than for word-pseudoword pairs (p < .0002). The group with SLI did not exhibit significant semantic priming, despite showing more variability. Children with SLI made significantly slower LDs [F(1, 26) = 4.61, p < .05, partial η2 = .15] and more errors [F(1, 26) = 4.16, p < .05, partial η2 = .13] than children with TLD. Mean response time across all LD conditions and the receptive vocabulary (PPVT-III) were significantly negativity correlated for children with SLI (r = -.71, p = .004). Children with SLI, especially those with the poorest language scores, showed a semantic-lexical deficit and a weakness in lexical-semantic association networks. Their performance on the LD task was significantly slower and poorer than for children with TLD. Increasing a child's vocabulary may benefit lexical access.

The effect of two different visual presentation modalities on the narratives of mainstream grade 3 children

This study investigated whether a dynamic visual presentation method (a soundless animated video presentation) would elicit better narratives than a static visual presentation method (a wordless picture book). Twenty mainstream grade 3 children were randomly assigned to two groups and assessed with one of the visual presentation methods. Narrative performance was measured in terms of micro- and macrostructure variables. Microstructure variables included productivity (total number of words, total number of T-units), syntactic complexity (mean length of T-unit) and lexical diversity measures (number of different words). Macrostructure variables included episodic structure in terms of goal-attempt-outcome (GAO) sequences. Both visual presentation modalities elicited narratives of similar quantity and quality in terms of the micro- and macrostructure variables that were investigated. Animation of picture stimuli did not elicit better narratives than static picture stimuli.

Lexical Diversity and Omission Errors as Predictors of Language Ability in the Narratives of Sequential Spanish–English Bilinguals: A Cross-Language Comparison

This study explored the utility of language sample analysis for evaluating language ability in school-age Spanish-English sequential bilingual children. Specifically, the relative potential of lexical diversity and word/morpheme omission as predictors of typical or atypical language status was evaluated. Narrative samples were obtained from 48 bilingual children in both of their languages using the suggested narrative retell protocol and coding conventions as per Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (SALT; Miller & Iglesias, 2008) software. An additional lexical diversity measure, VocD, was also calculated. A series of logistical hierarchical regressions explored the utility of the number of different words, VocD statistic, and word and morpheme omissions in each language for predicting language status. Omission errors turned out to be the best predictors of bilingual language impairment at all ages, and this held true across languages. Although lexical diversity measures did not predict typical or atypical language status, the measures were significantly related to oral language proficiency in English and Spanish. The results underscore the significance of omission errors in bilingual language impairment while simultaneously revealing the limitations of lexical diversity measures as indicators of impairment. The relationship between lexical diversity and oral language proficiency highlights the importance of considering relative language proficiency in bilingual assessment.

Ever decreasing circles: Speech production in semantic dementia

We explored the impact of a degraded semantic system on lexical, morphological and syntactic complexity in language production. We analysed transcripts from connected speech samples from eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched healthy speakers. The frequency distributions of nouns and verbs were compared for hand-scored data and data extracted using text-analysis software. Lexical measures showed the predicted pattern for nouns and verbs in hand-scored data, and for nouns in software-extracted data, with fewer low frequency items in the speech of the patients relative to controls. The distribution of complex morpho-syntactic forms for the SD group showed a reduced range, with fewer constructions that required multiple auxiliaries and inflections. Finally, the distribution of syntactic constructions also differed between groups, with a pattern that reflects the patients' characteristic anomia and constraints on morpho-syntactic complexity. The data are in line with previous findings of an absence of gross syntactic errors or violations in SD speech. Alterations in the distributions of morphology and syntax, however, support constraint satisfaction models of speech production in which there is no hard boundary between lexical retrieval and grammatical encoding.

Reassessing word frequency as a determinant of word recognition for skilled and unskilled readers.

The importance of vocabulary in reading comprehension emphasizes the need to accurately assess an individual's familiarity with words. The present article highlights problems with using occurrence counts in corpora as an index of word familiarity, especially when studying individuals varying in reading experience. We demonstrate via computational simulations and norming studies that corpus-based word frequencies systematically overestimate strengths of word representations, especially in the low-frequency range and in smaller-size vocabularies. Experience-driven differences in word familiarity prove to be faithfully captured by the subjective frequency ratings collected from responders at different experience levels. When matched on those levels, this lexical measure explains more variance than corpus-based frequencies in eye-movement and lexical decision latencies to English words, attested in populations with varied reading experience and skill. Furthermore, the use of subjective frequencies removes the widely reported (corpus) Frequency × Skill interaction, showing that more skilled readers are equally faster in processing any word than the less skilled readers, not disproportionally faster in processing lower frequency words. This finding challenges the view that the more skilled an individual is in generic mechanisms of word processing, the less reliant he or she will be on the actual lexical characteristics of that word.

Is more better? Milieu communication teaching in toddlers with intellectual disabilities.

The authors sought to determine whether a program of 5 weekly doses of milieu communication teaching (MCT) would yield improvements in children's communication and word use compared with a once-weekly delivery of the same treatment. Sixty-four children with intellectual and communication delay were randomly assigned to receive 60-min sessions of MCT either 1 time or 5 times per week over a 9-month treatment. Growth curves were fit to data collected at 5 points before, during, and after the MCT was delivered. With groups collapsed, significant growth across the experimental period was observed on all measures, but this was not associated unconditionally with treatment intensity. Children who played with 9 or more objects during a standard play assessment, an empirically identified cut-point, benefited more from the high- than from the low-intensity treatment on lexical measures (Hedges's g range = .49 to .65). More MCT is not always better for all children. Clinicians can expect that increasing the frequency of MCT sessions will yield moderate enhancement of outcomes if the child has high interest in objects.

Withdrawal notice to: Effects of text length on lexical diversity measures: Using short texts with less than 200 tokens

The publisher regrets sincerely that an error in its production office resulted in the below article appearing in this issue twice. To remedy this error, pages 522–532 from this issue have been retracted. SYS, 40 (2012) 522–532, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2012.10.017 . The duplicate article has therefore been withdrawn. As a consequence, pages 522–532 related to the duplicate article are missing from the printed issue. The publisher sincerely apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.

The Speech Intelligibility Index and the Pure-Tone Average as Predictors of Lexical Ability in Children Fit With Hearing Aids

To determine whether a clinically obtainable measure of audibility, the aided Speech Intelligibility Index (SII; American National Standards Institute, 2007), is more sensitive than the pure-tone average (PTA) at predicting the lexical abilities of children who wear hearing aids (CHA). School-age CHA and age-matched children with normal hearing (CNH) repeated words and nonwords, learned novel words, and completed a standardized receptive vocabulary test. Analyses of covariance allowed comparison of the 2 groups. For CHA, regression analyses determined whether SII held predictive value over and beyond PTA. CHA demonstrated poorer performance than CNH on tests of word and nonword repetition and receptive vocabulary. Groups did not differ on word learning. Aided SII was a stronger predictor of word and nonword repetition and receptive vocabulary than PTA. After accounting for PTA, aided SII remained a significant predictor of nonword repetition and receptive vocabulary. Despite wearing hearing aids, CHA performed more poorly on 3 of 4 lexical measures. Individual differences among CHA were predicted by aided SII. Unlike PTA, aided SII incorporates hearing aid amplification characteristics and speech-frequency weightings and may provide a more valid estimate of the child's access to and ability to learn from auditory input in real-world environments.

Syntactic Processing Depends on Dorsal Language Tracts

Frontal and temporal language areas involved in syntactic processing are connected by several dorsal and ventral tracts, but the functional roles of the different tracts are not well understood. To identify which white matter tract(s) are important for syntactic processing, we examined the relationship between white matter damage and syntactic deficits in patients with primary progressive aphasia, using multimodal neuroimaging and neurolinguistic assessment. Diffusion tensor imaging showed that microstructural damage to left hemisphere dorsal tracts--the superior longitudinal fasciculus including its arcuate component--was strongly associated with deficits in comprehension and production of syntax. Damage to these dorsal tracts predicted syntactic deficits after gray matter atrophy was taken into account, and fMRI confirmed that these tracts connect regions modulated by syntactic processing. In contrast, damage to ventral tracts--the extreme capsule fiber system or the uncinate fasciculus--was not associated with syntactic deficits. Our findings show that syntactic processing depends primarily on dorsal language tracts.