Syntactic Features Research Articles

Comparison of algorithms for the recognition of ChatGPT paraphrased texts

The rapid development of artificial intelligence, especially AI assistants, is leading to new forms of plagiarism that are difficult to detect using existing methods. Paraphrasing tools make this problem even more complex and challenging especially in minor languages with inadequate resources and tools. This study explores strategies to help detect plagiarism generated by ChatGPT 4.0 and altered by paraphrasing tools. We propose two new datasets consisting of abstracts of doctoral theses in English and Serbian. Both datasets were subjected to ChatGPT paraphrasing, which allowed us to form two classes of texts: human-written and AI-generated, i.e., AI-paraphrased. We then comprehensively compare 19 widely used classification algorithms based on two feature sets: word unigrams and character multigrams. In addition, we compare these to the results of a commercially available pre-trained ChatGPT content detector, ZeroGPT. The results on the English corpus turn out to be very accurate, achieving an accuracy of 95% or more. In contrast, the results on the Serbian corpus were less accurate, achieving an accuracy of just over 85%. Syntax analysis of the training datasets has shown that in Serbian GPT-paraphrased texts, 33.2% of sentences remain the same, and they are found in 63% of documents. GPT-paraphrased English texts showed that 3.2% of sentences remain the same, and they are found in 16% of documents. Syntax analysis of the test datasets has shown that the change of the model temperature influences syntactic features (average number of words and sentences) in English texts and slightly or not in Serbian texts. We attribute all these differences to GPT’s lower paraphrasing ability in minor languages such as Serbian. Presented findings underscore the necessity for making persistent effort in developing tools made for detecting AI-paraphrased texts in academic and professional settings, particularly for minor languages with limited NLP resources, to preserve content integrity and authenticity.

한국어 재귀사 교육을 위한 한 연구: 한국어 화자 말뭉치와 한국어 교재의 대조를 중심으로

This study started from the problem that Korean learners frequently make errors in using Korean reflexives and have difficulty using them. Based on the premise that the usage patterns of Korean reflexives and their antecedents in the native speaker’s corpus should be well reflected in Korean language textbooks in order to facilitate education on the syntactic and semantic characteristics of reflexives, this study examined the syntactic combination patterns of reflexives/antecedents in the Korean corpus and compared them with the patterns of reflexives/antecedents presented in Korean language textbooks to suggest directions for improving Korean language textbooks and to provide meaningful data for teaching Korean reflexives.

The Predictive Processing of Number Information in L1 and L2 Arabic Speakers

Prior research has shown that people can predict the syntactic features of an upcoming word during sentence comprehension. However, evidence for morphosyntactic predictive processing has been limited to gender or case marking in a small subset of Indo-European languages. In the current study, we implemented the eye-tracking visual world paradigm to investigate whether L1 (n = 18) and L2 (n = 40) Arabic speakers could extract number information from singular-marked verbs to anticipate the next noun. In a between-subject design, L1 and L2 speakers heard the singular verb in the simple past form (Exp 1) and the progressive past form (Exp 2). The effect of L2 proficiency (measured using a C-test and a receptive vocabulary test) on number prediction was also examined. L1 Arabic speakers showed earlier and stronger number prediction effects regardless of verb aspect. In contrast, L2 speakers exhibited delayed (Exp 1) or limited (Exp 2) prediction, suggesting a mediating role for verb aspect. Increased L2 proficiency did not influence anticipatory eye-movements during the verb region, and only emerged as significant during the noun region. These results confirm and extend earlier research on L1 and L2 number predictive processing.

Does productive agreement morphology increase sensitivity to agreement in a second language?

Adult language learners have variable performance with subject-verb number agreement. But it is unclear whether their performance additionally depends on the availability of agreement morphology in their first language. To address this question, we conducted a self-paced reading task comparing different speaker groups: (a) first vs. second language speakers of German; (b) intermediate-to-advanced German learners whose first language had more or less productive number agreement morphology (Spanish vs. English). Two manipulations were used to diagnose number processing: agreement violations and agreement attraction. Our results showed decreased sensitivity to agreement violations in language learners, irrespective of the morphological productivity of their first language. Meanwhile, differences in attraction effects were inconclusive in all between-group comparisons. We suggest that second language variability with subject-verb agreement is unlikely to result from increased retrieval interference – the effect underlying attraction. Instead, variable performance more likely arises because learners have difficulties in the real-time mapping of inflectional morphemes to syntactic features.

Refining the network for the Chinese analytic causative constructicon: insights from corpus analysis and psycholinguistic experimentation

Abstract This study explores the network of the Chinese analytic causative constructicon adopting a cross-variety perspective. Unlike prior research focusing solely on the causative marker, this study acknowledges the multi-level nature of the constructicon and examines the descriptive causative construction identified by Zhang, Lili. (2005. Cong shiyi dao zhishi [The causativisation of Chinese shi-yi constructions]. Taida Wenshi Zhexue Bao (62). 119–152), which features a syntactically specified causee slot and a semantically defined effect predicate slot, distinguishing it from general causatives. Combining corpus analysis and psycholinguistic experimentation, our research reveals a consistent preference for using lìng as the causative marker within the descriptive causative construction, observed in both Mainland and Taiwan Chinese. By analyzing the syntactic and semantic features of the descriptive causative construction and its association with the causative marker lìng, we argue that this construction is stored at a separate level. Furthermore, we propose that the Chinese analytic causative constructicon is best represented by a radial network, accommodating both hierarchical and associative relationships, rather than a purely hierarchical structure as illustrated in Pijpops, Dirk, Dirk Speelman, Freek Van De Velde & Stefan Grondelaers. (2021. Incorporating the multi-level nature of the constructicon into hypothesis testing. Cognitive Linguistics 32(3). 487–528).

A Report On World English Variety – Tok Pisin

Tok Pisin, one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea, has evolved into a lingua franca spoken by over six million people in the country. This study aims to analyze the history, sociolinguistic context, as well as the morphological and syntactic features of Tok Pisin, one of the official languages of Papua New Guinea. The research is qualitative descriptive in nature. The population includes Tok Pisin speakers in Papua New Guinea, with a sample of 15 Papua New Guinean students in Melbourne selected using purposive sampling. Data were collected through literature analysis and surveys. Data analysis was conducted thematically with triangulation. The findings highlight the significant role of Tok Pisin as a lingua franca connecting more than 800 language groups in Papua New Guinea, despite the diverse opinions among its speakers. Morphologically, the language exhibits strong English influence through the use of affixes "-im" and "-pela," while syntactically, it maintains an SVO word order. The conclusion of this study emphasizes the value of Tok Pisin as a cultural identity and a unifying tool, although a small number of speakers perceive it as a barrier to English proficiency. This research provides critical insights into the dynamics of contact languages in multilingual societies.

The resultative construction with “verbs of cooking” and “verbs of colouring” in English and Spanish: a contrastive lexical-constructional study

Despite the extensive interest in cross-linguistic constructional research over the past few decades, the resultative construction in Spanish has largely been overlooked. Unlike its high productivity in English, in Spanish, this construction is confined to very specific contexts such as the culinary or gastronomic scenario or situations involving chromatic change. The present study is contrastive in two senses: on the one hand, it provides a descriptive analysis of the formal and functional differences and similarities of this construction in both languages, and on the other hand, it adopts a lexical-constructional approach combining the theoretical and methodological principles of Goldberg’s (1995) and Boas’s (2003) Construction Grammars. Both principles, traditionally opposed in the literature, aim to determine to what extent the observed properties of the construction under study can be predicted from Goldberg’s generalisations at the constructional level, the event-frame evoked by the predicate as advocated by Boas, or any other factor such as contextual background information or pragmatics. The results of this study are based on the analysis of 1,173 corpus examples of English and Spanish resultative expressions with verbs of cooking and colouring drawn from Levin’s (1993) classification. The data reveal distinctive traits of the Spanish resultative construction with no parallel in English: (i) the unacceptability of inanimate instrument subjects and the prepositional form of the resultative phrase in resultatives with verbs of cooking, (ii) the preference for the prepositional realization of the resultative phrase in examples with verbs of colouring, (iii) the collocational restrictions of the predicates pintar (“paint”) and manchar (“stain”) with regards to the semantic nature of the subject or the form of the RP respectively. In addition, this study demonstrates that finergrained analyses of the predicates’ event-frames, as those put forward by Boas (2003), make it possible to arrive at more accurate predictions about the idiosyncratic properties of each language than Goldberg’s (1995) broad-scale generalizations, some of which have been refuted. Furthermore, it demonstrates that contextual background information largely determines the observed syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features of the resultative construction.

Interaction of Linguistic and Literary Aspects in the Context of the Cultural Diversity of the Turkic Peoples of Central Asia

Abstract The purpose of the study was to investigate the linguistic and literary components within the framework of the cultural diversity of Central Asian peoples of the Turkic ethnic group. The study analysed the linguistic features of the Turkic languages and their mutual influence through literary texts and oral traditions, with an emphasis on the processes of borrowing and adaptation of linguistic elements in a multilingual environment. The study examined scientific sources on linguistics and ethnolinguistics, and compared phonetic, morphological, and syntactic features of the Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz languages in a historical context. The analysis of borrowings from Persian, Arabic, and Russian languages, content analysis of literary texts and folklore works, and an assessment of the role of mass media and the Internet in popularising Turkic languages were also included in the study. The results showed that the Turkic languages have gone through a difficult path of evolution under the influence of various cultural and political factors, such as the Mongol conquests and Russification in the Soviet period. The languages were significantly enriched with borrowings from Persian, Arabic, and Russian, which affected their vocabulary and grammar.

Gramatyczna kategoria liczby w przedgramatycznej tradycji filozoficznej Grecji (Grammatical Category of Number in Pre-grammatical Philosophical Tradition of Greece)

The aim of the paper is to present the way in which the grammatical category of number was referred to by the Greeks before its description took the standard shape known particularly from the Τέχνη γραμματική, attributed to Dionysios Thrax. The research in this field shows that it was Aristotle who first pointed to this category in the 20th chapter of his Poetics, where the expression πτῶσις κατὰ τὸ ἑνὶ ἢ πολλοῖς [σημαῖνον] presents it as one of the bases of word variance peculiar to the name (ὄνομα) and verb (ῥῆμα). The next references to the category of number, already designated with the term ἀριθμοί (‘numbers’), are to be found in the Stoic lingustic doctrine. On the one hand, we come across them when specific classes of words (parts of speech) are being described, which is to say the verb (ῥῆμα), defined as a part of speech signifying something relating to one or many [objects], and the article (ἄρθρον), which is described as a part of speech discerning the genders and numbers of names, whereby the category of number was shown from an apecific relative perspective, i.e. as a characteristic of objects, which are implied by the semantics of a verb, and as a characteristic of names, which finds its indicator in the article. On the other hand, within this branch of Stoic logic, which includes discussions about things signified by the language, the syntactic features of the verb’s number (and person), i.e. following (or not) the rules of agreement with the number (and person) of the nominal exponent of the subject of predication, were given the status of a criterion of the classification of predicates expressed by the very verbs; on the basis of this criterion, the predicate of the σύμβαμα kind contrasts with the παρασύμβαμα one.

A meta-analysis of relationships between syntactic features and writing performance and how the relationships vary by student characteristics and measurement features

A meta-analysis of relationships between syntactic features and writing performance and how the relationships vary by student characteristics and measurement features

Request for confirmation sequences in Czech

Abstract This article provides a first description of request for confirmation (RfC) sequences in spoken Czech. Based on 204 sequences from video-recorded ordinary conversations, it provides a quantitative overview of the main syntactic, lexical, prosodic and sequential features of both requests for confirmation and their responses. RfCs in Czech are typically of declarative clausal format, realized in positive polarity, and receive a confirmation. The epistemic asymmetry between the speaker of the RfC and their interlocutor seems to be mainly expressed and negotiated by a complex taxonomy of tags appended to the confirmable, response tokens, and syntactically non-minimal responses. These features represent promising topics for future, more qualitatively oriented investigations of RfCs in spoken Czech.

An Updated Overview of the Austroasiatic Components of Vietnamese

This article presents an updated view of the language history of Vietnamese from its native Austroasiatic roots, including key historical phonological, morphological, and syntactic features and developments; a characterization of its Austroasiatic etyma; and the context of this information in Vietnamese linguistic ethnohistory. It is now possible to make better supported claims and more precise characterizations due to improved understanding of the history of Austroasiatic and Vietic and their reconstructions, the nature and effect of language contact with Chinese, and the process of typological convergence of the ancestral language of Vietnamese. This study shows that, while Vietnamese is not a typologically characteristic Austroasiatic language, the Austroasiatic components of the Vietnamese lexicon and linguistic structure are more prominent than previously supposed.

Observations on the Language of Liturgical Interpretation in MSS RGADA 88 and BOGISHICH 52: A Verbal System Survey

The article focuses on the morphological specifics of the verbal system in the liturgical interpretation in MSS RGADA 88 and BOGISHICH 52. The linguistic analysis aims at obtaining linguistic data about the era when the works originated and about the literary school to which their author belonged. The observations have revealed that the verbal system of the language contemporary to the author of the manuscripts does not show significant changes compared to that of Old Bulgarian. The paradigm of Old Bulgarian conjugations is intact. The use of the infinitive is regular. The innovations established are of a limited number. In terms of its morphological and syntactic characteristics (sporadic dropping of adverbial -т from the present ending for the 3rd person singular; usage of the future simple tense; registration of an archaic form for the first sigmatic aorist of the verb рещи; predominance of contracted forms of the imperfect tense; preference for passive voice forms with the the particle се; transformation of personal into impersonal forms and vice versa), the translation bears the characteristic features of South Slavic literary language dating from the 14th – 15th centuries. It corresponds to the linguistic norms established probably already in the scriptoria of the monasteries on Mount Athos in the early 14th century. These norms were also adopted by the writers of the Tarnovo Literary School, and later laid down in the foundations of the Resava Literary School in Serbia. The scribe who compiled the Slavic epitome of the liturgical interpretation demonstrated considerable freedom of choice in his translation. This distinguished him from the characteristic manners of the translators belonging to the schools of Tarnovo and to the Mount Athos monasteries, who were striving to find a formal similarity to the Greek text. The specificity of the verbal system in the text discussed can be explained by the fact that it is a summary translation, as well as by the unofficial nature of the document.

A Knowledge‐Guided Spatio‐Temporal Correlation Measure Considering Rules and Dependency Syntax for Knowledge Graph Adaptive Representation

ABSTRACTGeographic knowledge graphs (KGs) mainly describe static facts and have difficulty representing changes, greatly limiting their application in geographic information retrieval and geographic spatio‐temporal processes. By analyzing the spatio‐temporal features and evolution of geographic elements, this paper measures the degree of correlation between spatio‐temporal information and tuples and further accurately characterizes the semantic knowledge of tuples to support accurate computation and inference of KGs. This paper proposes a novel knowledge‐guided quantitative measure framework for spatio‐temporal correlation by considering rules and dependency syntax from natural language texts. Firstly, the natural language processing (NLP) stage preprocess the texts and extracts the candidate tuples by dependency syntactic analysis and rule matching. Secondly, we model the spatio‐temporal correlation measures by considering semantic (entity types and tuple predicate) and syntactic features (dependency distance and dependency path). Finally, we establish a specific threshold value with the extracted candidates and performing multiple levels of categorization to form the final spatio‐temporal correlation strength (strong, moderate, and weak). The experimental results with a large dataset indicate that the proposed method achieves an F‐score of over 0.73, which is better than those of the existing methods. The proposed spatio‐temporal correlation framework has more advantages in representing geographic evolutionary knowledge, revealing the evolution mechanism of geographic elements and the evolutionary reasons.

On the syntax of the relative complementizer deto

The object of analysis in the article are the uses of the lexeme дето in colloquial Bulgarian and in written informative and commentary media texts. The research aims at presenting the syntactic features of дето as an indicator of subordinating conjunction in the complex sentences and comparing the functions of дето-clauses in oral texts from everyday informal communication and in written texts from public media sphere. The purpose of the analysis is to make generalizations about the status of дето in Bulgarian oral and written texts.

Refining code-line-level bugginess identification: Getting the best of both worlds by fusing syntactic and semantic features

Background: Code-line-level bugginess identification (CLBI) is an important area within software quality assurance, aiming to pinpoint potential buggy source code lines in a given software product. Recently, two concurrent approaches, GLANCE and DeepLineDP, have showcased impressive performance by respectively leveraging syntactic and semantic features compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in this field. Problem: Yet, the literature lacks a thorough investigation that fuses these two types of features to enhance CLBI. Such fusion holds the promise of significantly improving the efficacy of identifying defective lines. Objective: We aim to advance CLBI by fusing syntactic and semantic features, thereby harnessing their respective strengths. Method: We propose to build a CLBI approach, SPLICE (boo S ting dee P Linedp w I th synta C tic f E atures), by fusing syntactic features from GLANCE and semantic features from DeepLineDP. SPLICE comprises three variants—SPLICE-S, SPLICE-G, and SPLICE-F—each utilizing a unique line-level sorting approach. We make a comprehensive comparison with existing SOTA approaches using six performance metrics. Result: Through an analysis of nine open-source projects, our experimental results reveal that SPLICE is competitive with current SOTA CLBI approaches. Notably, SPLICE-F demonstrates superiority over all SOTA CLBI approaches, including GLANCE and DeepLineDP, across all six metrics, indicating a substantial improvement. Conclusion: This discovery underscores the critical importance of future CLBI research in fusing syntactic and semantic features to construct more effective bugginess identification approaches. It is worth noting that the analysis was conducted within the context of Java programs, which highlights the potential for exploring similar methods in other programming languages in future research.

Single-Stage Entity–Relation Joint Extraction of Pesticide Registration Information Based on HT-BES Multi-Dimensional Labeling Strategy

Pesticide registration information is an essential part of the pesticide knowledge base. However, the large amount of unstructured text data that it contains pose significant challenges for knowledge storage, retrieval, and utilization. To address the characteristics of pesticide registration text such as high information density, complex logical structures, large spans between entities, and heterogeneous entity lengths, as well as to overcome the challenges faced when using traditional joint extraction methods, including triplet overlap, exposure bias, and redundant computation, we propose a single-stage entity–relation joint extraction model based on HT-BES multi-dimensional labeling (MD-SERel). First, in the encoding layer, to address the complex structural characteristics of pesticide registration texts, we employ RoBERTa combined with a multi-head self-attention mechanism to capture the deep semantic features of the text. Simultaneously, syntactic features are extracted using a syntactic dependency tree and graph neural networks to enhance the model’s understanding of text structure. Subsequently, we integrate semantic and syntactic features, enriching the character vector representations and thus improving the model’s ability to represent complex textual data. Secondly, in the multi-dimensional labeling framework layer, we use HT-BES multi-dimensional labeling, where the model assigns multiple labels to each character. These labels include entity boundaries, positions, and head–tail entity association information, which naturally resolves overlapping triplets. Through utilizing a parallel scoring function and fine-grained classification components, the joint extraction of entities and relations is transformed into a multi-label sequence labeling task based on relation dimensions. This process does not involve interdependent steps, thus enabling single-stage parallel labeling, preventing exposure bias and reducing computational redundancy. Finally, in the decoding layer, entity–relation triplets are decoded based on the predicted labels from the fine-grained classification. The experimental results demonstrate that the MD-SERel model performs well on both the Pesticide Registration Dataset (PRD) and the general DuIE dataset. On the PRD, compared to the optimal baseline model, the training time is 1.2 times faster, the inference time is 1.2 times faster, and the F1 score is improved by 1.5%, demonstrating its knowledge extraction capabilities in pesticide registration documents. On the DuIE dataset, the MD-SERel model also achieved better results compared to the baseline, demonstrating its strong generalization ability. These findings will provide technical support for the construction of pesticide knowledge bases.

Analysis of Arabic Translations of English Implied Sentences: Difficulties and Implications

English implied conditionals pose a challenge when translated into Arabic for syntactic and semantic reasons. This study therefore aims to identify some potential problems when translating conditional sentences without the conditional marker ‘if’ or any other conditional marker. To accomplish this goal, thirty Arab students from Yarmouk University were requested to translate a list of inferred conditional structures into their target language (TL) equivalents. The study demonstrates that Arabic conditionals do not accurately convey the syntactic and semantic characteristics of English conditionals that are presented without the conditional particle "if". It also demonstrates that the implicit conditionals cannot be fully translated into non-conditional forms. The study concludes with a discussion of the study’s implications for class from a pedagogical perspective.

A corpus-based dependency study of the syntactic complexity in the connected speech of Alzheimer’s disease

ABSTRACT Background While numerous studies observed notable changes in syntactic complexity among individuals with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), these studies predominantly concentrated on isolated internal structures of language but rarely defined the syntactic complexity variation in AD on a continuum. Given that working memory load exhibits a continuous rather than binary pattern in populations and plays a crucial role in syntactic processing and generation, research on syntactic complexity changes in AD could benefit from expanding to include this perspective. Aims To examine the probabilistic distribution of syntactic complexity in AD under controlled sentence length conditions from the perspective of working memory, and to develop a comprehensive linguistic profile of syntactic complexity variation in AD by analyzing fine-grained syntactic features. Methods & procedures The corpus materials consist of descriptions based on the Cookie-Theft picture component provided by 70 individuals with AD (mean MMSE = 20.97) and 70 cognitively intact elderly individuals (mean MMSE = 29.21) from the DementiaBank clinical language transcript dataset. We employed dependency distance to quantify working memory load and syntactic complexity. Additionally, three finer-grained dependency metrics, namely adjacent dependency distribution (1dd%), mean dependency distance (MDD) and dependency direction distribution, enable a deeper interpretation of the syntactic complexity variations in AD from different perspectives. Results (1) The distribution of dependency distances in AD was similar to that in the healthy control (HC) group, both following the Zipf-Alekseev model, and the variations of the parameters within the model were analogous between the two treebanks; (2) The performance of AD patients in adjacent dependency, MDD and dependency direction differed from that of the HC group across varying sentence lengths; (3) “Simplified” and “ungrammatical” structures were the primary syntactic features in AD. Conclusions These findings confirmed the presence of syntactic impairments in AD. The decline of syntactic complexity can be attributed to the failure of the “End Weight” principle due to working memory deficits in AD patients. The study contributes to the easier identification of AD patients and more effective working memory interventions, thereby improving language production in AD patients.

COMMUNICATIVE TACTICS OF POSITIVE EMOTIONAL IMPACT IN ENGLISH FICTIONAL DETECTIVE DISCOURSE

The paper documents several key contributions made by linguists to the strategic aspect of communication, discourse studies, theory of emotions, and speech impact. The paper identifies and analyses the communicative tactics manifesting the strategy of emotional impact in modern English fictional detective discourse. These advanced tactics have been investigated from the perspective of the lexical, morphological and syntactic characteristics that exemplify them in detective discourse.