Linguistic Traits Research Articles

Catch Me If You Can — Detecting Fraudulent Online Reviews of Doctors Using Deep Learning

Fake online reviews are becoming more prevalent and are a significant concern for consumer protection groups and regulatory authorities. However, identifying fake reviews has been a challenge in IS, marketing, and computer science. In this study, we design a deep learning approach to capture the linguistic traits that differentiate between genuine and fake reviews. Our deep learning model is evaluated on a dataset of 181,951 doctor reviews, 8% of which are fake. Since a natural honeypot existed at one point on the platform that hosted these reviews, we are able to label the reviews that exploited the natural honeypot as fraudulent, thus overcoming the major challenge in constructing the ground truth for training the model. Our model shows a significant improvement in accuracy when compared to traditional machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression and random forest. Interestingly, we also find that human evaluators perform much worse than machine learning approaches. Compared to 200 human evaluators, our deep learning approach has a true positive rate (14.29% vs. 8.70%) that is twice as high, and it also achieves a much lower false positive rate (0.63% vs. 11.68%). We also observe that these evaluators are susceptible to human bias, as they are more likely to label fake reviews as genuine than they are to label genuine reviews as genuine. Our study offers further explanations for the advantages of deep learning and is the first to construct a deep learning model to detect fraudulent online reviews, an approach that can help curb fake reviews and increase information quality and market efficiency.

Geographical Roots of the Coevolution of Cultural and Linguistic Traits

This research explores the geographical origins of the coevolution of cultural and linguistic traits. It establishes the existence of common roots for: (i) the presence of sex-based grammatical gender and the prevalence of gender bias, (ii) the existence of politeness distinctions and power distance, and (iii) the structure of the future tense and long-term orientation. The study documents that geographical characteristics that generated gender gaps in agricultural productivity, and led to gender bias in society, fostered the existence of sex-based grammatical gender. Further, ecological diversity, and its effect on the formation of hierarchical societies and the rise in power distance, were conducive to the emergence of politeness distinctions. Finally, higher caloric crop return, and its impact on long-term orientation, contributed to cross-language variations in the structure of the future tense.

Análise da Ocorrência de Maquiavelismo e Narcisismo no Discurso nos Relatórios Administrativos de Empresas Envolvidas em Escândalos Financeiros

Objective: This paper’s motivation is to study the existence of words that display linguistic traits of Machiavellianism and Narcissism in the discourse of company leaders who are involved in corruption scandals in Brazil, in the light of Upper Echelons theory. Method: We analyzed the discourse of the leaders in the annual report of the companies Odebrecht S.A. and OAS S.A. The leaders studied are involved in fraudulent negotiations detected by Lava Jato Operation, an investigation carried out by the Federal Police of Brazil. The methodological procedures are based on the three-dimensional framework of discourse: text, discursive practice and social practice. Findings: The results suggest that the use of words such as “our”, “strong”, “development”, “great”, “larger”, “president”, “confidence” and “values” imply narcissistic traits. The semantic analysis of the acts of discourse, though, displays machiavellian traits. Contribution: We hope to instigate studies that focus on social changes deriving from the delivery of the referred discourse, and that they may incite, in the main users of the information in the companies’ management reports, the recognition of discourse that mask the organizations’ actual situation, with the purpose of generating personal and business profits, disregarding concerns with the damages society may face.

Overlap and Uniqueness: Linguistic Componential Traits Contributing to Expressive Skills in English as a Foreign Language

This study identified robust predictors of expressive skills in academic English as a foreign language. The participants were 92 Korean-speaking learners of English. The field test of the Pearson Test of English Academic was used as a secondary data analysis. Four communicative skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) and six enabling linguistic traits (written discourse, oral fluency, grammar, pronunciation, spelling, and vocabulary) were analyzed using writing and speaking skills as dependent variables. The greatest overlapping variance was found in the relationship between reading and writing. When listening and speaking skills were controlled, the unique variance accounted by reading in the prediction of writing became marginal. The results of this study demonstrated that L2 oral language skills became increasingly important to L2 writing outcomes as language proficiency improved over time.

Geographical Origins of Language Structures

This research explores the geographical origins of the coevolution of cultural and linguistic traits in the course of human history, relating the geographical roots of long-term orientation to the structure of the future tense, the agricultural determinants of gender bias to the presence of sex-based grammatical gender, and the ecological origins of hierarchical orientation to the existence of politeness distinctions. The study advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that: (i) variations in geographical characteristics that were conducive to higher natural return to agricultural investment contributed to the existing cross-language variations in the structure of the future tense, (ii) the agricultural determinants of gender gap in agricultural productivity fostered the existence of sex-based grammatical gender, and (iii) the ecological origins of hierarchical societies triggered the emergence of politeness distinctions.

Geographical Roots of the Coevolution of Cultural and Linguistic Traits

Geographical Roots of the Coevolution of Cultural and Linguistic Traits

“The Red Plague Rid You For Learning Me Your Language!” – Standard and Non-Standard Use in English and in Portuguese

This paper examines how non-standard British English is translated into European Portuguese with a view to understand the social attitudes and ideologies embedded in standard and non-standard European Portuguese. It focuses on a small corpus of literary works which resort to non-standard language as a fundamental linguistic trait of characters’ identity or plot in order to establish whether there were any successful attempts to maintain the deviation from standard in the target language. The paper fnds that the task of translating non-standard is ideologically charged insofar as it is mediation between normalised and non-normalised realities, very often requiring the specifc indexing of linguistic markers to particular social groups. The sensitivity involved in this process may explain why most translations examined, although able to render non-standard features in the target language to some extent, kept a closer proximity to standard language than the source texts. In view of this, most translations examined are imbued with an ideological thrust in favour of standard language.

Why was this asked? Automatically recognizing multiple motivations behind community question-answering questions

Community Question Answering (cQA) services encourage their members to ask any kind of question, which later on can get multiple answers from other community fellows. The research objective of this paper is understanding, and particularly automatically detecting, what motivates community members to ask questions to their unknown peers.In so doing, we first crawled a set of cQA questions from Yahoo! Answers, each of which was manually labelled according to their multiple motivations afterwards. Thus, one of the innovative aspects of our work is exploring a wide variety of multi-label classification strategies for the automatic recognition of concurrent motivations behind cQA questions. In order to build effective models, high-dimensional feature spaces were constructed on top of assorted linguistic features, this way discovering some linguistic traits that characterize some of these combinations.Overall, our experiments reveal that multi-label classification frameworks hold a real promise for this task. More precisely, our best configuration finished with a Hamming Score of 0.71. In terms of features, our outcomes unveil that the concurrence of motivations is likely to be signalled by the complexity in writing and the distribution of entity mentions across the entire question, ergo both question titles and bodies are required to be able to recognize their confluence.

Experimental Studies on the Cultural Evolution of Language

Why are languages the way they are? The biases and constraints that explain why languages display the traits they do—instead of other possible ones—include human cognition, social dynamics, communicative function, the structure of meanings, and the interactions between these. Cultural language evolution is concerned with explaining the causal pathways that link these biases and constraints with fundamental linguistic traits, such as combinatoriality, compositionality, conventionality, and arbitrariness. The cultural evolution of language, or the emergence of a language from no language, begins when motivated signals are used in context by individuals who do not share a means of communication. Repeated interaction between interlocutors makes individual signals compressible through reduction or simplification and can entrench idiosyncratic patterns. Transmission to new learners results in the increasing compressibility at the level of the system through the introduction of categories and regular rules, and in the spread of conventional, arbitrary signals.

Murdelisest tegelaskõnest "Tõe ja õiguse" I osas / Dialect in the Speech of Characters in A. H. Tammsaare’s Truth and Justice Part I

Murdelisest tegelaskõnest "Tõe ja õiguse" I osas / Dialect in the Speech of Characters in A. H. Tammsaare’s Truth and Justice Part I

Autism and Visual Impairment: a Review of the Literature

PurposeThis review presents the evidence on the prevalence of visual impairments in children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), and the similar behavioural traits associated with both visual impairment and autism.MethodA systematic literature review was conducted using online databases.ResultsSeven studies explored the incidence of visual impairments in people with ASD and found a higher incidence of strabismus (squint) (8.3%) than in a comparable child population (1.5 to 5.3%). Eleven studies identified behavioural traits common to both autistic and visually impaired populations. The majority were small-scale screening studies using varied methodologies, constituting an emerging field of research.ConclusionFurther large-scale, multicentre studies are required to accurately identify prevalence rates of ophthalmic conditions in people with ASD. There is a small but evolving evidence base that establishes behavioural and linguistic traits common to both visual impairment and autism.

Common Polygenic Risk For ASD And ADHD is Associated with Childhood Linguistic Traits within The General Population, But with Opposite Effects

Common Polygenic Risk For ASD And ADHD is Associated with Childhood Linguistic Traits within The General Population, But with Opposite Effects

Leveraging linguistic traits and semi-supervised learning to single out informational content across how-to community question-answering archives

Community Question-Answering sites (e.g., Yahoo! Answers) have become large-scale knowledge bases of natural language questions formulated by their own members. In other to provide quick answers, these sites are compelled to make the best out of the content stored in their repository. Researchers have discovered that, on the one hand, many of these services are the confluence of an information-seeking and a social network that are constantly overlapping, and on the other hand, how-to questions are frequently published across these platforms. By and large, informational procedural questions are highly likely to expect informational answers, while non-informational manner questions target at socially interacting with other members of the community. In order to enhance user experience by reducing the delay in answering, these services are heartened to identify, retrieve and revitalize the content maintained in their knowledge bases. For this purpose, it is key to match the intent of new posted questions with the intention of archived answers that will be presented to the asker.By manually annotating a reduced number of how-to questions and answers, we carried out an exploratory analysis that unveils a dichotomy between the interaction of these two networks. More precisely, we corroborate previous findings indicating that procedural questions are more likely to bear an informational goal, but our analysis is also extended to their answers, and it reveals that they exhibit a more conspicuous confluence. In substance, we find out that informational and non-informational answers are very likely to show up regardless of the end of the question. Then, we take advantage of this tagged set and of massive unlabelled material for exploiting two state-of-the-art single-view semi-supervised approaches aimed at discriminating informational from non-informational how-to content.Moreover, our proposed models leverage assorted linguistically-motivated features, such as sentiment analysis and dependency parsing as well as named entity recognition. Our outcomes show that attributes, harvested from morphological and sentiment analysis, proven to be effective under a semi-supervised framework. At the expenses of low annotation costs, these linguistically-motivated semi-supervised models reached an accuracy of 84.25% and 74.41% for classifying questions and answers, respectively. In addition, we quantify the impact of automatically detecting informational/non-informational intents on the retrieval of best answers, i.e., an improvement of 4.12% in terms of precision at one.

Ambivalence and Discourse in Alien Nation

The 1988 film Alien Nation depicts the immigrant experience in historical and contemporary America where these groups come to comprise minorities who feel not only the social ostracism of alienation, but also that they form a nation within a nation because of their different linguistic traits, physical appearances, and social customs. Furthermore, the title, in all its ambivalence, emphasizes this rift since the word alienation has been split in two; hence, despite affirmative action policies, while assimilation occurs to some degree, social acceptance does not-not in the film, and not in reality. Because of this scission minorities must seek bonding through solidarity within their own ethnic group, forming enclave communities, which upholds a systemic bondage from which they must continually strive to free themselves since the majority denies them positions of true authority as well as the respect that they deserve.Perspective determines which culture is the alien nation here; accordingly, several questions arise. First, do the Newcomers regard America as an alien nation to which they must assimilate and into which they must integrate? Second, do Americans deem the Newcomers as a displaced alien nation that seeks refuge in the much ballyhooed land of the free that ostensibly welcomes the poor, the tired, and the hungry? Third, do Americans consider themselves as turning into a nation of aliens where mainstream society is threatened?The film is set in 1991 in Los Angeles. Three hundred thousand aliens from an extraterrestrial, mining slave-ship have landed and ACLU has worked to free them from quarantine. This sounds suspiciously like the boatloads of Caribbean exiles that throngedAmerica's shores in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Mariel boatlift as well as the undocumented economic refugees from Mesoamerica. America's selective, open-door policy to take in the disenfranchised from other cultures is parodied at this point to illustrate the hypocrisy of rhetoric and action, when Cubans were welcomed as political refugees (prior to the Wetfoot/Dryfoot policy enacted in the wake of the Elian Gonzalez debacle in 1994) as compared to the policy regarding Mexican and Haitian refugees who faced deportation if they were apprehended without proper visa documentation since they were considered economic refugees.The film shows a flashback news clip of former President Ronald Reagan, who in the early 1980s proposed federal budget cuts to alleviate the deficit by stating, We have come to a turning point ... a moment for hard decisions. If not us, who? And if not now, when? Within the film, Reagan's message implied that America must harbor refugees by default since they have nowhere else to turn. Nevertheless, immigration laws tended to favor whites rather than blacks: consider how Cubans were welcomed while Haitians were repatriated during the 1990s when desperate refugees braved crossing the Caribbean on makeshift rafts to escape their dire conditions. The appropriation of Reagan's text removed from its original context changes the meaning, especially since he was no longer president in 1991. As his speech, shown on a bar television, diminishes into an indistinguishable hum, the bartender turns and we see that he is an extraterrestrial Alien.This apparently inconsequential juxtaposition of images is ambivalent also since the freedom and opportunity that America connotes provide the Alien (minority) with a servile position, complete with bowtie, reminiscent of the menial positions that blacks were relegated to until very recently in America's history. As the first image of the Aliens (minorities), it perpetuates the idea of a uniformly and uniformed, service culture in the ilk of the McDonald's commercials from that time period in which Calvin, the young black lad, becomes the happy, hard-working assistant manager from 19902 and the segue from 19923. It is an example of subtle racism, a theme that runs throughout the film in which you can have a nice title, be a part of the team, and . …

Impartiality and Hierarchical Evaluations in the Japanese Development Aid Community

This article presents a discourse analytic study of how the concept of impartiality is socially constructed by members of the development aid community through an examination of linguistic traits and patterns within (a) inter- and intraorganizational interactions and (b) relevant aid evaluation policy documents. A qualitative analysis of unstructured and semistructured interviews with development professionals in Japan and a content analysis of relevant evaluation policies and documents have revealed observable evidence of distinct institutional practices of impartiality via project evaluations. Most notably, in contrast to a notion of evaluator impartiality that is strengthened through the principle of independence, development professionals in Japan perceive evaluations (‘ hyouka’) to be a fundamentally hierarchical construct in which evaluator impartiality can be strengthened or legitimized through authoritative or hierarchical means.

Darwinian perspectives on the evolution of human languages

Human languages evolve by a process of descent with modification in which parent languages give rise to daughter languages over time and in a manner that mimics the evolution of biological species. Descent with modification is just one of many parallels between biological and linguistic evolution that, taken together, offer up a Darwinian perspective on how languages evolve. Combined with statistical methods borrowed from evolutionary biology, this Darwinian perspective has brought new opportunities to the study of the evolution of human languages. These include the statistical inference of phylogenetic trees of languages, the study of how linguistic traits evolve over thousands of years of language change, the reconstruction of ancestral or proto-languages, and using language change to date historical events.

ANALISIS RAGAM BAHASA SISWA KELAS X H SMA NEGERI 2 KOTA BENGKULU DI FACEBOOK (KAJIAN SOSIOLINGIUISTIK)

This research is aimed to obtain a descriptive about Analysis of Various Students’ Language of Class X H SMA Negeri 2 Bengkulu City Used in Their Facebook of the this research is about how the theme of students’ sentences status in their Facebook are, what kind of language and non-language characteristic s of their sentences status in Facebook of students class X H are the research. The data that are collected use purposive sampling technic by taking the samples from sentence status of the students’ Facebook accounts which have been collected. The technics used in data analysis are : (1) data collecting, data presenting, (2) conclusion or verification in document. The research findings are guile diverse themes that emerge, but in a sense more positive tone expression (91,6%) consisting of : interaction, special interaction, expression activity, adage, expression of feeling, expression of feelings provoke cancern, the phrase specifically, and information. While the expression of negative feelings (8,3%). Likewise, the original identity (the original name of the account status) consists of 19 students with a percentage (79,1%) and the remaining 5 students with a pseudonym identity (account status pseudonym) by percentage (20,8%). Linguistic traits often arises is the use of regional languages, although there are also English-speaking. Non-linguistic traits characterized by the use of icons/symbols ( stiker’s or emotion) which describes the feeling.

The Serbian Redaction of the Church Slavonic Language: From St. Clement, the Bishop of the Slavs, to St. Sava, the Serbian Archbishop

The paper seeks to outline the overall framework for the reception of St. Clement’s tradition in Slavic literacy in northern, Serb-populated areas; the paper also analyzes major Serbian literary monuments, both Glagolitic and Cyrillic, which may be brought into a close relationship with the literacy tradition of St. Clement. They are presented individually, also taking into account an earlier linguistic background from which they stemmed. These older linguistic traits which are Old Slavonic as well as some later characteristics are generally possible to arrange in an ideal chronological sequence. This makes it possible to suggest a relative chronology of the formation of some Serbian literary monuments. There are also some local linguistic traits and other parameters that allow one to date Serbian literary monuments more precisely and, sometimes, even to delimit their territory of origin. This series begins with the Codex Marianus and continues with Miroslav’s Gospel, the Mihanović Fragment, the Gršković Fragment, Bratko’s Menaion, the Jerusalem Palimpsest, and the Belgrade Prophetologion, ending with the Serbian Prophetologion from St. Petersburg and Kiev. One must keep in mind that the Serbian language, which underlies the spoken background of the Serbian redaction of the Church Slavonic language, was, shortly after its formation (up to the end of the 11th century), still dialectically undiversified (regardless of the potentially heterogeneous situation before the 9th century); thus, based on the current body of knowledge, it is not possible to identify dialectical traits that would provide more specific information about individual writings. However, traces of the general logic of the developmental dynamics of the folk language can be identified in the language of the only 11th-century source presented in this paper: the Codex Marianus. This literary monument is temporally and spatially located in the third quarter of the 11th century and the southeastern boundary of Raška (roughly in Poibarje), near the fortress of Zvečan and the early medieval settlement of Čečan. Miroslav’s Gospel is dated to the period between 1161 and 1170 (ca. 1165) and is linguistically associated with the territory of the Bishopric of Raška because its scribes were the bearers of a dialect typical of this region: the manuscript either originates from Raška or it was written by Rascian scribes in some other area. Based on a rather large number of literary monuments, it is possible to get insight into the third stage in the life of this form of literacy in Polimlje, where the hereditary estates of the Nemanjićs and their relatives were located. From the early Middle Ages this area witnessed lively ecclesiastical activities, though they were based on the Roman Rite. One of the cultural centers must have been located around the trefoil church of St. John at Zaton (9th–11th centuries). In this wider area, a more conservative Serbian literary tradition, which can be traced in the Mihanović Fragment, could have persisted slightly longer. The Mihanović Fragment was the purest representative of the Serbian redaction, without secondary shadings typical of the innovative southern Slavic areas in the 11th century (with the mildest divergence from the vernacular variety when pronouncing the literary language), and it was still based on the linguistic background shaped by St. Clement. The linguistic picture of this literary monument indicates that it could have originated from an area where an ancient linguistic redaction dating back to the early 10th century, or perhaps an even older variety of a literary language from the 9th century (associated with the Roman Rite) combined with a later South Slavic layer of undetermined age (10th–11th centuries), persisted.

Overview: Debating the effect of environment on language

If languages do indeed evolve then they must show the three crucial aspects of an evolving system: variation of traits, inheritance of those traits, and the differential survival—that is selection—of those traits (Lewontin 1970). We know that languages vary (otherwise the fields of linguistic typology and sociolinguistics would be boring). We know that variation is passed through speech communities and inherited from parent language to its daughters (otherwise historical linguistics would likewise be boring). However, whether linguistic traits are selected for is much less clear (Ramsey and De Block 2016). Nor is it clear just where selection might operate (Dediu et al. 2013). Despite these issues, many possible candidates for selective effects have been proposed in the linguistic literature. Selection might operate at the level of the speech act . For example, the more lexical items are used, the more stable they are over time, which may be consistent with frequency-dependent selection (Pagel et al. 2007; Calude and Pagel 2011), while the length of these more frequent words appears to be shorter to increase communication efficiency (Piantadosi et al. 2011). Alternatively, perhaps rate of speech is constrained as there …

Understanding the Spanish heritage language speaker/learner

While the linguistic traits and specific needs of heritage speakers have been recognized for several decades, academic interest in the different dimensions of this type of bilingualism has increased exponentially in the last ten years. Because of this, significant progress has been made in all areas of inquiry. From formal/theoretical investigations into the mental architecture of the heritage language to explorations of social factors, as well as other pedagogical concerns, numerous research strands are currently shaping our understanding of the field. With this in mind, the goal of this introduction is twofold. First, we aim to provide an overview of the themes and discussions that are currently taking place in the field of Spanish heritage-speaker bilingualism. To this end, we will consider key issues pertaining to a wide variety of areas including, but not limited to, sociolinguistic attitudes, identity, language competency, and language instruction. Secondly, in so doing, the critical presentation and discussion of each of these areas will also serve to contextualize the articles included in this special issue.