Universal Language Research Articles

Practical English Oral Expression and Communication Skills

In this era of globalization, English has become the universal language for international communication. Whether it’s business negotiations, studying abroad, or daily communication, fluent English oral expression is crucial. For studying abroad, good English oral expression skills can not only help you better adapt to the new environment, but also allow you to have a deeper understanding of the local culture. In daily life, being able to express your thoughts fluently in English can help you better communicate with foreign friends and expand your social circle. Therefore, improving English oral expression ability is very important for everyone. Below, the author will share some practical English oral expression and communication skills to help you improve your English speaking skills and communicate more confidently with others. By mastering these practical English oral expression and communication skills, your English oral proficiency will improve and you will be more confident in communicating with others.

Talking about the deceased in the Jish linguaculture

Abstract This paper has aimed to look into the terms and expressions used in the Jish linguaculture when talking about the deceased. Seventeen such terms and expressions are presented, discussed, and explicated using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. The explications appear in simple, (semi-)universal language, which makes them relatively easily understood and readily translatable into any language. This, in turn, means that the explications are accessible by linguacultural insiders and outsiders. In addition, the study provides anthropologists and linguists with precise analysis owing to its micro-level focus; it investigates the micro-linguaculture of Jish, which belongs to the macro-culture of the Arab world. Lastly, the study documents one aspect of this undocumented linguaculture; this documentation can preserve one part of this linguaculture from fading into oblivion.

Bidirectional encoders to state-of-the-art: a review of BERT and its transformative impact on natural language processing

First developed in 2018 by Google researchers, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) represents a breakthrough in natural language processing (NLP). BERT achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of NLP tasks while using a single transformer-based neural network architecture. This work reviews BERT's technical approach, performance when published, and significant research impact since release. We provide background on BERT's foundations like transformer encoders and transfer learning from universal language models. Core technical innovations include deeply bidirectional conditioning and a masked language modeling objective during BERT's unsupervised pretraining phase. For evaluation, BERT was fine-tuned and tested on eleven NLP tasks ranging from question answering to sentiment analysis via the GLUE benchmark, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Additionally, this work analyzes BERT's immense research influence as an accessible technique surpassing specialized models. BERT catalyzed adoption of pretraining and transfer learning for NLP. Quantitatively, over 10,000 papers have extended BERT and it is integrated widely across industry applications. Future directions based on BERT scale towards billions of parameters and multilingual representations. In summary, this work reviews the method, performance, impact and future outlook for BERT as a foundational NLP technique. We provide background on BERT's foundations like transformer encoders and transfer learning from universal language models. Core technical innovations include deeply bidirectional conditioning and a masked language modeling objective during BERT's unsupervised pretraining phase. For evaluation, BERT was fine-tuned and tested on eleven NLP tasks ranging from question answering to sentiment analysis via the GLUE benchmark, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Additionally, this work analyzes BERT's immense research influence as an accessible technique surpassing specialized models. BERT catalyzed adoption of pretraining and transfer learning for NLP. Quantitatively, over 10,000 papers have extended BERT and it is integrated widely across industry applications. Future directions based on BERT scale towards billions of parameters and multilingual representations. In summary, this work reviews the method, performance, impact and future outlook for BERT as a foundational NLP technique.

Gaps of Kinship in the Yakut Heroic Epic Olonkho

Abstract This research considers issues of interaction between language and culture; it studies the phenomenon of lacunarity in general, as well as identifying lexical gaps in olonkho texts and ways of eliminating them in translation. Here, we investigate the need for more in-depth study of the translation of works of art in which a culture-specific component has a high degree of presence; the importance of studying the lacuna phenomenon as one of the main factors influencing translation, and, in turn, the need to study to the misunderstanding of a text by a foreign reader. The problem of translating culturally related phenomena necessitates a description of their origins and development, and attention to notions of linguistic worldview and linguistic universals regarding culture-specific vocabulary, including lexical gaps.

Harmony through Time: The Evolution and Impact of Music from Ancient Roots to Contemporary Realms

This paper explores the evolution of music, from its origins in traditional tunes created by unknown authors, to its current status as a multi-billion-dollar industry. It discusses how musical instruments have transformed over centuries, from ancient African drums to modern electronic synthesizers, and how these transformations have influenced different musical expressions. The paper also examines the societal, technological, and cultural shifts that have shaped the trajectory of music, with a particular emphasis on the significant impact of advancements in recording and distribution technologies. Furthermore, it explores the profound significance of music in human experience, highlighting its role as a universal language that transcends linguistic, cultural, and temporal boundaries. Drawing on biblical references and historical accounts, the paper emphasizes the enduring relevance of music as a means of emotional expression, cultural identity, and spiritual connection. Ultimately, it advocates for discernment in musical choices and the pursuit of uplifting and harmonious melodies when navigating the everchanging music landscape. Keywords: Music Evolution, Cultural Significance, Musical Instruments, Music language.

From comprehensive geriatric assessment to an integrated multidimensional assessment system: interRAI tools and their applications

The multidimensional assessment carried out with interRAI tools constitutes an operationalization of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and is adapted to the specificities of each place of care. From a single assessment, the interRAI approach makes it possible to conduct a multidimensional assessment of functional autonomy and to produce a series of indicators (health, areas of intervention, quality of care and consumption of resources). It helps to identify clinical needs to be the subject of a personalized care plan and the strengths and weaknesses of health organizations to modify the professional practices. Compared to standardized geriatric assessment, interRAI tools consider the person's expectations and resources, offer a universal common language, produce a multidimensional synthesis and facilitate the construction of an integrated information system. The basis for their development is scientificity based on evidence.

Towards a Reduced Pollution Society: Systematic Review on the Role of Storytelling, Social Media, Humor and Celebrities’ Influence for Research Communication

Humanity's pollutive activities pose significant threats to biodiversity, agricultural productivity, and human health. Effective communication about these issues is crucial for fostering awareness and understanding. To achieve a more impactful dialogue, it is essential to facilitate collaboration across disciplines through an interdisciplinary system approach. This paper specifically aims to examine the role of storytelling, humor, and celebrities' influence in reinforcing pro-environmental behaviors. The focus is on reducing pollution and its impact through experiential, emotional, and aesthetic learning. To ensure the validity of the review, articles were systematically collected from accredited journal sites indexed by Scopus, Web of Science, and other reputable sources. The analysis indicates that anthropogenic pollutants, ingested through food, soil, air, or water, can have disastrous effects on human and environmental health. The study emphasizes the potential of storytelling, humor, and celebrities' influence to significantly mitigate these impacts. The integration of humor, storytelling, and the influence of celebrities in the media, as powerful communication tools, can contribute to a drastic reduction in pollution and its associated effects. These approaches serve as universal languages that resonate with diverse audiences. The study advocates for strong advocacy and effective communication strategies employing humor, storytelling, and celebrity influence. Celebrity influencers, with their substantial social influence, can act as science communicators, translating complex pollution statistics to inform the public about their contribution to pollution and motivating behavior change for environmental health improvement.

Development and Practical Applications of Computational Intelligence Technology

Computational intelligence (CI) uses applied computational methods for problem-solving inspired by the behavior of humans and animals. Biological systems are used to construct software to solve complex problems, and one type of such system is an artificial immune system (AIS), which imitates the immune system of a living body. AISs have been used to solve problems that require identification and learning, such as computer virus identification and removal, image identification, and function optimization problems. In the body’s immune system, a wide variety of cells work together to distinguish between the self and non-self and to eliminate the non-self. AISs enable learning and discrimination by imitating part or all of the mechanisms of a living body’s immune system. Certainly, some deep neural networks have exceptional performance that far surpasses that of humans in certain tasks, but to build such a network, a huge amount of data is first required. These networks are used in a wide range of applications, such as extracting knowledge from a large amount of data, learning from past actions, and creating the optimal solution (the optimization problem). A new technique for pre-training natural language processing (NLP) software ver.9.1by using transformers called Bidirectional Encoder Representations (BERT) builds on recent research in pre-training contextual representations, including Semi-Supervised Sequence Learning, Generative Pre-Training, ELMo (Embeddings from Language Models), which is a method for obtaining distributed representations that consider context, and ULMFit (Universal Language Model Fine-Tuning). BERT is a method that can address the issue of the need for large amounts of data, which is inherent in large-scale models, by using pre-learning with unlabeled data. An optimization problem involves “finding a solution that maximizes or minimizes an objective function under given constraints”. In recent years, machine learning approaches that consider pattern recognition as an optimization problem have become popular. This pattern recognition is an operation that associates patterns observed as spatial and temporal changes in signals with classes to which they belong. It involves identifying and retrieving predetermined features and rules from data; however, the features and rules here are not logical information, but are found in images, sounds, etc. Therefore, pattern recognition is generally conducted by supervised learning. Based on a new theory that deals with the process by which the immune system learns from past infection experiences, the clonal selection of immune cells can be viewed as a learning rule of reinforcement learning.

Faith in the Stars and Architecture: Astrology as an Interpretation of Religious Permanence and the Birth of Modernity

In 1912, Aby Warburg presented his interpretation of the frescoes at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara at the 10th International Congress of Art History in Rome. The decision to expound his theory in an academic setting was no coincidence: Warburg’s work, and the subsequent studies of Fritz Saxl, sought to centre the attention of art history on the complex world of astrological studies. The history of astrology demonstrated—via iconological analysis—the migration of knowledge from East to West. Warburg’s innovation was to superimpose the trauma of historical-artistic paths on this network. Through the Schifanoia frescoes, he could reflect upon how an international comparison with the surviving figurative concepts of Eastern Mediterranean civilisations had generated the stylistic transformation of the human figure in Italian art. Warburg defined astrology as ancient religion’s most tenacious form of hidden survival. He traced a path of continuity through art and its relationship to the architectural space hosting it. Astrological illustrations not only enable us to reconstruct the warp and weft of religious permanence but serve as a tool to explain the procedures of iconographic change that led to the Renaissance. After the collapse of paganism, many astrological images survived into the Middle Ages as symbols associated with the essences appropriated by Christianity as its own. A complex store of astrological iconography that migrated from classical cultures and reappeared during the Renaissance's construction of a universal language. Some foretastes emerge in medieval buildings; after a long period in which Christianity and astrology were considered incompatible, astrological language completed and provided meaning to the architecture that welcomed it. Such is the case of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua. This paper aims to retrace the most significant paths of this migration of symbols through the analysis of such examples of Renaissance architecture as Villa Farnesina in Rome and the aforementioned Palazzo Schifanoia. It will also reflect on the position and training of the architect during the Renaissance and on how astrology was considered both magical thought and a mathematical description that would lead to the discovery of infinity. It is notable that the Farnesina’s astrological contents were dictated by Baldassarre Peruzzi, the building’s architect.

The International Convention on the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System: Legal Pillar Behind the Harmonized System

The International Convention on the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS Convention) is an international agreement that applies a systematic and manner to describe commodities in global trade. It effectively provides a universal language that communicates trade matters amongst stakeholders. Despite having a significant impact on international trade, little is known about the legal texts of the HS Convention. therefore, therefore examines the architecture of the HS Convention, discusses its objectives, analyses its impact. Coding, Commodities, Customs Cooperation Council, Description, Harmonized, Harmonized System (HS), HS Convention, Nomenclature, Trade facilitation

The city of god revisited: Digitalism as a new technological religion

A Religion of Progress has taken shape over the last 21 centuries, from the Enlightenment to present times. It is quite simple to follow a thread from Hermeticism to today, however, several facts have altered its content, therefore, reformulating some of its promises and vision of the world. This paper attempts to evaluate how that Religion of Progress has become a sort of Techno-Hermeticism 2.0. Digital technologies have redefined old hermetic myths into a high-tech religion with dire environmental consequencies. Some of those myths are the resurrection of the bodies, the construction of the City of God, the Adamic universal language and so forth. Now religion must confront the upcoming collapse, however, it is unable to provide satisfactory answers. This goes for all the different churches, from accelerationists (Nick Land) to extinctionists and believers of digital solutionism. That leaves possible imaginative responses to that sociecological crisis without any relevant proposals.

Danielle Steel’s Portrayal of Sibling’s Love in Comparison with Selected Works of Other Novelists

As English is a universal language and its richness in literature has contributed to its reach. English literature from the olden times has been portraying siblings love in diverse ways. The novels from the past to the present have depicted the relationship of brothers and sisters in a distinct manner. Danielle Fernande Dominique Schuelein-Steel, born on 14th August 1947 in New York City better known as Danielle Steel, is an American romantic novelist is best known for family drama. Steel’s novels have been sold more than 580 million copies worldwide and she is the eighth best selling writer of all time.Danielle Steel has been triumphant in rendering a great relationship among the siblings. This paper is an outcome of a comparison between Danielle Steel’s “No Greater Love” with Arundhathi Roy’s “The God of Small Things” and George Eliot’s “The Mill on the Floss”.

An Application of Syntactic Semantic Analysis in English and Arabic Translation

This paper aims at studying certain syntactic and semantic aspects in English and Arabic. It specifically applies the syntactic method of Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) and the semantic model thematic roles in certain English sentences and their Arabic translation from a linguistic point of view. It provides a theoretical background of TGG and thematic roles as the basic framework of the analysis applied in this study. The data includes selected English sentences from three different short stories along with their Arabic equivalents. The co-analysis of the English sentences and their Arabic translations is based syntactically on Chomsky's TGG (1965) and semantically on Fillmore's thematic roles (1977). The results of the study shows that syntax and semantics within these two languages make some kind of interface. This emphasizes the idea of linguistic universals advocated by Chomsky. The application of co-analysis indicates that the syntactic and semantic aspects can be relatively similar in English and Arabic particularly in terms of the type of the noun phrases in the deep and surface structures and semantic roles. The study concludes that translation is a practical field where the feasibility and utility of linguistic theories and ideas can be tested, and that integration and application of more than one approach in translation such as TGG analysis and semantic roles can help in producing more appropriate translations. However, it should be stated that syntax semantics interface and its overlapping can't be solely used in translation studies.

Linguacultural and Cognitive Peculiarities of Linguistic Universals.

The discussion about linguistic universals, initiated over 50 years ago by J. Greenberg, remains a topic of significant interest today. While there's an ongoing debate on the universality of linguistic forms - with some supporting the notion and others dismissing it as baseless-the idea of a unifying linguistic essence stands firm. The article aims to explore the linguacultural values of language, particularly how they enable the reconstruction of ideas and stereotypes within specific segments of a language system. The research found that universal language characteristics serve as a rich source of information for those studying linguacultural aspects. These traits offer nationally determined interpretations of words, drawing from associations rooted in either tangible or cultural codes. When delving into cultural codes present within every culture, the study discerned the presence of basic and universal codes. The existence of these codes provides insights into the formation of stereotypes, which encapsulate the experiences and knowledge intrinsic to the bearers of a culture. Linguistic universals, underpinned by universal grammar and semantic foundations, occupy a central position in linguacultural examinations, especially when reconstructing cultural ideas and stereotypes. Basic and universal cultural codes inherent in each culture facilitate the creation of linguistic worldviews.

Defining childhood disability: ICF-CY developmental code sets

Purpose This study describes the development of four age-based item code sets from WHO’s International classification of functioning disability and health, children and youth version (ICF-CY). Given the continuing goal of universal implementation of the ICF-CY, a reduced set of codes was identified from more than 1600 codes to facilitate the use of the classification for clinical, research and policy applications of the ICF-CY Methods The ICF-CY developmental code sets were developed by consensus using the Delphi method. A multi-disciplinary group of international experts representing 27 countries from 5 WHO world regions completed a series of iterative online surveys to rate categories of child functioning essential for inclusion in the respective age-based code set. Results Four age-based code sets covering 37, 52, 60 and 57 codes across four domains of the ICF-CY were successfully derived with a high level of participant consensus. The code sets align with developmental theory and represent essential indicators of functioning defining key stages of child development. Conclusion The ICF-CY developmental code sets offer a common, universal language of childhood functioning and disability with global application for multidisciplinary research, clinical practice and policy.

Linguistic Features of Russian Phraseological Units Expressing the Emotional State of a Person

The study of languages in comparative terms is aimed at establishing linguistic universals characteristic of all languages or a group of languages and identifying specific features - unique features inherent in only one of the compared languages.

Causal inference of diachronic semantic maps from cross-linguistic synchronic polysemy data

Semantic maps are used in lexical typology to summarize cross-linguistic implicational universals of co-expression between meanings in a domain. They are defined as networks which, using as few links as possible, connect the meanings so that every isolectic set (i.e., set of meanings that can be expressed by the same word in some language) forms a connected component. Due to the close connection between synchronic polysemies and semantic change, semantic maps are often interpreted diachronically as encoding potential pathways of semantic extension. While semantic maps are traditionally generated by hand, there have been attempts to automate this complex and non-deterministic process. I explore the problem from a new algorithmic angle by casting it in the framework of causal discovery, a field which explores the possibility of automatically inferring causal structures from observational data. I show that a standard causal inference algorithm can be used to reduce cross-linguistic polysemy data into minimal network structures which explain the observed polysemies. If the algorithm makes its link deletion decisions on the basis of the connected component criterion, the skeleton of the resulting causal structure is a synchronic semantic map. The arrows which are added to some links in the second stage can be interpreted as expressing the main tendencies of semantic extension. Much of the existing literature on semantic maps implicitly assumes that the data from the languages under analysis is correct and complete, whereas in reality, semantic map research is riddled by data quality and sparseness problems. To quantify the uncertainty inherent in the inferred diachronic semantic maps, I rely on bootstrapping on the language level to model the uncertainty caused by the given language sample, as well as on random link processing orders to explore the space of possible semantic maps for a given input. The maps inferred from the samples are then summarized into a consensus network where every link and arrow receives a confidence value. In experiments on cross-linguistic polysemy data of varying shapes, the resulting confidence values are found to mostly agree with previously published results, though challenges in directionality inference remain.

Assessing the utility of deep neural networks in detecting superficial surgical site infections from free text electronic health record data.

High-quality outcomes data is crucial for continued surgical quality improvement. Outcomes are generally captured through structured administrative data or through manual curation of unstructured electronic health record (EHR) data. The aim of this study was to apply natural language processing (NLP) to chart notes in the EHR to accurately capture postoperative superficial surgical site infections (SSSIs). Deep Learning (DL) NLP models were trained on data from 389,865 surgical cases across all 11 hospitals in the Capital Region of Denmark. Surgical cases in the training dataset were performed between January 01st, 2017, and October 30th, 2021. We trained a forward reading and a backward reading universal language model on unlabeled postoperative chart notes recorded within 30 days of a surgical procedure. The two language models were subsequently finetuned on labeled data for the classification of SSSIs. Validation and testing were performed on surgical cases performed during the month of November 2021. We propose two different use cases: a stand-alone machine learning (SAM) pipeline and a human-in-the-loop (HITL) pipeline. Performances of both pipelines were compared to administrative data and to manual curation. The models were trained on 3,983,864 unlabeled chart notes and finetuned on 1,231,656 labeled notes. Models had a test area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC AUC) of 0.989 on individual chart notes and 0.980 on an aggregated case level. The SAM pipeline had a sensitivity of 0.604, a specificity of 0.996, a positive predictive value (PPV) of 0.763, and a negative predictive value (NPV) of 0.991. Prior to human review, the HITL pipeline had a sensitivity of 0.854, a specificity of 0.987, a PPV of 0.603, and a NPV of 0.997. The performance of the SAM pipeline was superior to administrative data, and significantly outperformed previously published results. The performance of the HITL pipeline approached that of manual curation.

With a Few Square Roots, Quantum Computing Is as Easy as Pi

Rig groupoids provide a semantic model of Π, a universal classical reversible programming language over finite types. We prove that extending rig groupoids with just two maps and three equations about them results in a model of quantum computing that is computationally universal and equationally sound and complete for a variety of gate sets. The first map corresponds to an 8th root of the identity morphism on the unit 1. The second map corresponds to a square root of the symmetry on 1+1. As square roots are generally not unique and can sometimes even be trivial, the maps are constrained to satisfy a nondegeneracy axiom, which we relate to the Euler decomposition of the Hadamard gate. The semantic construction is turned into an extension of Π, called √Π, that is a computationally universal quantum programming language equipped with an equational theory that is sound and complete with respect to the Clifford gate set, the standard gate set of Clifford+T restricted to ≤2 qubits, and the computationally universal Gaussian Clifford+T gate set.

Analysis of Distribution and Content of Music Industry in the We-Media Era

The We Media Era has revolutionized the music industry, transforming both distribution and content. Music, a universal language that transcends cultures, has found new avenues of expression and connection through the internet and self-media platforms. Independent artists have gained unprecedented access to global audiences, challenging the dominance of traditional record companies. Nevertheless, concerns have arisen regarding the balance between distribution and content. In the quest for online visibility, there is a risk of compromising the quality and substance of music. This essay traces the evolution of the music industry from its inception to the We Media Era, emphasizing the profound impact on both distribution and content. While democratized distribution opens new horizons, safeguarding the integrity and artistic essence of music remains paramount. As the industry continues its evolution, it must navigate the delicate equilibrium between accessibility and quality, ensuring that music endures as a vibrant and indispensable form of human expression.