Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (185)
- Part of Periodical (69)
- Preprint (62)
- Book (37)
- Part of a Book (29)
- Conference Proceeding (27)
- Working Paper (15)
- Report (8)
- Doctoral Thesis (4)
- Other (3)
Language
- English (443) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (443) (remove)
Keywords
- Computerlinguistik (28)
- Deutsch (20)
- Syntax (16)
- Japanisch (15)
- new species (11)
- Grammatik (10)
- Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar (9)
- Optimalitätstheorie (9)
- Maschinelle Übersetzung (8)
- Syntaktische Analyse (8)
Institute
- Extern (443) (remove)
Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammars (MCTAG) is a formalism that has been shown to be useful for many natural language applications. The definition of MCTAG however is problematic since it refers to the process of the derivation itself: a simultaneity constraint must be respected concerning the way the members of the elementary tree sets are added. This way of characterizing MCTAG does not allow to abstract away from the concrete order of derivation. In this paper, we propose an alternative definition of MCTAG that characterizes the trees in the tree language of an MCTAG via the properties of the derivation trees (in the underlying TAG) the MCTAG licences. This definition gives a better understanding of the formalism, it allows a more systematic comparison of different types of MCTAG, and, furthermore, it can be exploited for parsing.
This paper investigates the relation between TT-MCTAG, a formalism used in computational linguistics, and RCG. RCGs are known to describe exactly the class PTIME; simple RCG even have been shown to be equivalent to linear context-free rewriting systems, i.e., to be mildly context-sensitive. TT-MCTAG has been proposed to model free word order languages. In general, it is NP-complete. In this paper, we will put an additional limitation on the derivations licensed in TT-MCTAG. We show that TT-MCTAG with this additional limitation can be transformed into equivalent simple RCGs. This result is interesting for theoretical reasons (since it shows that TT-MCTAG in this limited form is mildly context-sensitive) and, furthermore, even for practical reasons: We use the proposed transformation from TT-MCTAG to RCG in an actual parser that we have implemented.
Arthropods use fluid medium motion-sensing filiform hairs on their exoskeleton to detect aerodynamic or hydrodynamic stimuli in their surroundings that affect their behaviour. The hairs, often of different lengths and organized in groups or arrays, respond to particular fluid motion amplitudes and frequencies produced by prey, predators, or conspecifics, even in the presence of background noise peculiar to the environment. While long known to biologists and experimentally investigated by them, it is only relatively recently that comprehensive physical-mathematical models have emerged offering an alternative methodology for investigating the biomechanics of filiform hair motion. These models have been developed and applied to quantitatively predict the performance characteristics of filiform hairs in air and water as a function of the relevant parameters that affect their physical behaviour. They even allow the exploration of possible biological evolutionary paths for filiform hair changes resulting from physical selection pressures. In this chapter we review the state of knowledge of filiform hair biomechanics and discuss two physical-mathematical models to predict hair dynamical behaviour. One modelling approach is analytically exact, serving for quantitative purposes, while the other, derived from it, is approximate, serving for qualitative guidance concerning the parameter dependencies of hair motion. Using these models we look in turn at the influence of these parameters and the fluid media physical properties on hair motion, including the possibility of medium-facilitated viscous coupling between hairs. The models point to areas where data is currently lacking and future research could be focused. In addition, new results are presented pertaining to transient tlows. We qualitatively explore the possibility of an overlapping water-air niches adaptation potential that may explain how, over many generations, the filiform hairs of an arthropod living in water could have evolved to function in air. Because flow-sensing hairs have served to inspire corresponding artificial medium motion microsensors, we discuss recent advances in this area. Significant challenges remain to be overcome, especially with respect to the materials and fabrication techniques used. In spite of the impressive technological advances made, nature still remains unrivalled.
In a charter issued on 5 May 1513, the mayor and city council of the city of Freiburg/Breisgau reported that several citizens wanted to be allowed to establish a bruderschaft der sengerye, a confraternity of singing. “God, the almighty, would be praised thereby, the souls would be consoled, and all men listening to the concerts would be kept from blasphemy, gaming and other secular vices” (“gott der allmechtig [würde] dardurch gelopt, die selen getröst und die menschen zu zyten, so sy dem gesang zuhorten, von gotslesterung, ouch vom spyl vnd anderer weltlicher uppigkeyt gezogen”). Considering not least the “positive effects on the pour souls” (“guettaeten, so den armen selen dardurch nachgeschechen mocht”), the request was allowed. But the petitioners had to establish their bruderschaft in exactly the form that is described in detail in the regulations (ordnung) added to the request and cited “word for word” (“von wort zu wort”) in 17 articles in the foundation charter of the confraternity.
The ACL 2008 Workshop on Parsing German features a shared task on parsing German. The goal of the shared task was to find reasons for the radically different behavior of parsers on the different treebanks and between constituent and dependency representations. In this paper, we describe the task and the data sets. In addition, we provide an overview of the test results and a first analysis.
The problem of vocalization, or diacritization, is essential to many tasks in Arabic NLP. Arabic is generally written without the short vowels, which leads to one written form having several pronunciations with each pronunciation carrying its own meaning(s). In the experiments reported here, we define vocalization as a classification problem in which we decide for each character in the unvocalized word whether it is followed by a short vowel. We investigate the importance of different types of context. Our results show that the combination of using memory-based learning with only a word internal context leads to a word error rate of 6.64%. If a lexical context is added, the results deteriorate slowly.
How to compare treebanks
(2008)
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in developing standards for linguistic annotation, with a focus on the interoperability of the resources. This effort, however, requires a profound knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of linguistic annotation schemes in order to avoid importing the flaws and weaknesses of existing encoding schemes into the new standards. This paper addresses the question how to compare syntactically annotated corpora and gain insights into the usefulness of specific design decisions. We present an exhaustive evaluation of two German treebanks with crucially different encoding schemes. We evaluate three different parsers trained on the two treebanks and compare results using EVALB, the Leaf-Ancestor metric, and a dependency-based evaluation. Furthermore, we present TePaCoC, a new testsuite for the evaluation of parsers on complex German grammatical constructions. The testsuite provides a well thought-out error classification, which enables us to compare parser output for parsers trained on treebanks with different encoding schemes and provides interesting insights into the impact of treebank annotation schemes on specific constructions like PP attachment or non-constituent coordination.
The Kaiserchronik is generically puzzling. In essence it is a spiritual world chronicle, but it lacks the usual historiographical systematisations of its theological content. However it does have three disputations, an unusual feature in a chronicle which has to date not been adequately explained. This essay argues, on the basis of comparisons with works in other literary forms, that these passages function as key expressions of the controlling idea of the entire work, namely the progress of the Gospel from the heathen to the Christian Empire, and that they are strategically located within the chronicle at the turning points in the success of Christian mission.
This article presents linguistic features of and educational approaches to a new variety of German that has emerged in multi-ethnic urban areas in Germany: Kiezdeutsch (‘Hood German’). From a linguistic point of view, Kiezdeutsch is very interesting, as it is a multi-ethnolect that combines features of a youth language with those of a contact language. We will present examples that illustrate the grammatical productivity and innovative potential of this variety. From an educational perspective, Kiezdeutsch has also a high potential in many respects: school projects can help enrich intercultural communication and weaken derogatory attitudes. In grammar lessons, Kiezdeutsch can be a means to enhance linguistic competence by having the adolescents analyse their own language. Keywords: German, Kiezdeutsch, multi-ethnolect, migrants’ language, language change, educational proposals
"Ich mag so Wasserpfeifeladen" : the interaction of grammar and information structure in Kiezdeutsch
(2008)
German linking elements are sometimes classified as inflectional affixes, sometimes as derivational affixes, and in any case as morphological units with at least seven realisations (e.g. -s-, -es-, -(e)n-, -e-). This article seeks to show that linking elements are hybrid elements situated between morphology and phonology. On the one hand, they have a clear morphological status since they occur only within compounds (and before a very small set of suffixes) and support the listener in decoding them. On the other hand, they also have to be analysed on the phonological level, as will be shown in this article. Thus, they are marginal morphological units on the pathway to phonology (including prosodics). Although some alloforms can sometimes be considered former inflectional endings and in some cases even continue to demonstrate some inflectional behaviour (such as relatedness to gender and inflection class), they are on their way to becoming markers of ill-formed phonological words. In fact, linking elements, above all the linking -s-, which is extremely productive, help the listener decode compounds containing a bad phonological word as their first constituent, such as Geburt+s+tag ‘birthday’ or Religion+s+unterricht ‘religious education’. By marking the end of a first constituent that differs from an unmarked monopedal phonological word, the linking element aids the listener in correctly decoding and analysing the compound. German compounds are known for their length and complexity, both of which have increased over time—along with the occurrence of linking elements, especially -s-. Thus, a profound instance of language change can be observed in contemporary German, one indicating its typological shift from syllable language to word language.
Buli is an Oti-Volta tone language spoken in Northern Ghana. This paper outlines the basic features of its tonal system and explores whether and in which way pitch respectively phonemic tone is approached as a means to indicate the pragmatic category of focus. Pursued are cases with focus-related surface tone changes as well as cases where pitch could help to disambiguate between broad and narrow foci. It is argued that focus is not consistently encoded by pitch or tone. Parallel findings for the closely related languages Kopen o (phonetic symbol)nni and Dagbani suggest that the apparent lack of significant prosodic focus signals in Buli might pertain to a larger group of tonal languages of the Gur family.
The present article illustrates that the specific articulatory and aerodynamic requirements for voiced but not voiceless alveolar or dental stops can cause tongue tip retraction and tongue mid lowering and thus retroflexion of front coronals. This retroflexion is shown to have occurred diachronically in the three typologically unrelated languages Dhao (Malayo-Polynesian), Thulung (Sino-Tibetan), and Afar (East-Cushitic). In addition to the diachronic cases, we provide synchronic data for retroflexion from an articulatory study with four speakers of German, a language usually described as having alveolar stops. With these combined data we supply evidence that voiced retroflex stops (as the only retroflex segments in a language) did not necessarily emerge from implosives, as argued by Haudricourt (1950), Greenberg (1970), Bhat (1973), and Ohala (1983). Instead, we propose that the voiced front coronal plosive /d/ is generally articulated in a way that favours retroflexion, that is, with a smaller and more retracted place of articulation and a lower tongue and jaw position than /t/.
This monograph describes the overall language situation in Luxembourg, a highly multilingual country in Western Europe, from a language policy and planning perspective. The first part discusses the social and historical contexts, including major societal changes and uncertainties about the future, which are bound up with Europeanisation and the accelerated processes of globalisation. It also deconstructs the notions of Luxembourgish as a 'minority language' and French as the 'language of prestige', and describes a two-pronged language ideology that allows for either monolingual identification with Luxembourgish or trilingual identification with the languages recognised by the language law of 1984 (Luxembourgish / German / French). The second part discusses the trilingual school-system, a system in which large numbers of romanophone students are forced to go through a German-language literacy programme. The third part provides an overview of language spread in the areas of the media and literary writing. The fourth part examines language purism and tensions concerning the standardisation of Luxembourgish, as well as the debates about language requirements for citizenship. The discussion shows how language policy scholarship needs to be approached from a multidimensional perspective, that is, by taking into account dynamics on the global, regional and local levels in addition to those at the state level.
The Göttingen conference Systematics 2008 is the first joint meeting of the Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik (GfBS) and the German Botanical Society, section Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (DBG), being the 10th Annual Meeting of the GfBS and the 18th International Symposium Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology of the DBG. The conference programme covers biological systematics in the widest sense and provides ample opportunities for oral and poster presentations on new advances in plant, animal and microbial systematics. This volume brings together the abstracts of invited speaches from the plenary sessions on Progress in Deep Phylogeny, Speciation and Phylogeography, and New Trends in Biological Systematics as well as those of submitted talks and poster sessions.The Göttingen conference Systematics 2008 is the first joint meeting of the Gesellschaft für Biologische Systematik (GfBp. and the German Botanical Society, section Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (DBG), being the 10th Annual Meeting of the GfBS and the 18th International Symposium Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology of the DBG. The conference programme covers biological systematics in the widest sense and provides ample opportunities for oral and poster presentations on new advances in plant, animal and microbial systematics. This volume brings together the abstracts of invited speaches from the plenary sessions on Progress in Deep Phylogeny, Speciation and Phylogeography, and New Trends in Biological Systematics as well as those of submitted talks and poster sessions.
Spiders were collected at the massif 'Panský diel' near the city of Banská Bystrica (Central Slovakia). We recorded 252 spider species for the territory and one new species for Slovakia. Although the summit reaches an altitude of 1.100 m a.s.l., more or less thermophilous species apparently prevail here, especially at lower moderate sites. On the other hand, only several typical oreophilous species were documented. Many recorded species are scarce or even very rare. This indicates the very high value of this territory from both a genetic and an environmental perspective.
A glimpse of the tropics : spiders (Araneae) in the greenhouses of the Botanic Garden Berlin-Dahlem
(2008)
In a survey of the spider fauna in greenhouses of the Botanic Garden Berlin-Dahlem, 30 spider species were recorded. Two species are new to Europe: Theotima minutissima (Petrunkevitch, 1929) and Heteroonops spinimanus (Simon, 1891). T. minutissima is the first member of the family Ochyroceratidae reported from Europe. Oecobius navus Blackwall, 1859 is new to Central Europe. Triaeris stenaspis Simon, 1891, is recorded from Germany for the first time. Zodarion italicum (Canestrini, 1868) is new to eastern Germany. Despite the discovery of some species previously unknown to Germany, the spider fauna in the Botanic Garden consisted mainly of wellknown synanthropic species and common inhabitants of greenhouses. Several alien spiders recently found in greenhouses, garden centers and houses were not recorded in the Botanic Garden. The species composition of the exotic spider fauna in greenhouses seems to depend chiefly on the specific modes of acquisition of plants and plant substrate.
In this paper, we present an open-source parsing environment (Tübingen Linguistic Parsing Architecture, TuLiPA) which uses Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG) as a pivot formalism, thus opening the way to the parsing of several mildly context-sensitive formalisms. This environment currently supports tree-based grammars (namely Tree-Adjoining Grammars (TAG) and Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammars with Tree Tuples (TT-MCTAG)) and allows computation not only of syntactic structures, but also of the corresponding semantic representations. It is used for the development of a tree-based grammar for German.
TT-MCTAG lets one abstract away from the relative order of co-complements in the final derived tree, which is more appropriate than classic TAG when dealing with flexible word order in German. In this paper, we present the analyses for sentential complements, i.e., wh-extraction, thatcomplementation and bridging, and we work out the crucial differences between these and respective accounts in XTAG (for English) and V-TAG (for German).
Developing linguistic resources, in particular grammars, is known to be a complex task in itself, because of (amongst others) redundancy and consistency issues. Furthermore some languages can reveal themselves hard to describe because of specific characteristics, e.g. the free word order in German. In this context, we present (i) a framework allowing to describe tree-based grammars, and (ii) an actual fragment of a core multicomponent tree-adjoining grammar with tree tuples (TT-MCTAG) for German developed using this framework. This framework combines a metagrammar compiler and a parser based on range concatenation grammar (RCG) to respectively check the consistency and the correction of the grammar. The German grammar being developed within this framework already deals with a wide range of scrambling and extraction phenomena.
In this paper we present a parsing architecture that allows processing of different mildly context-sensitive formalisms, in particular Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TAG), Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammar with Tree Tuples (TT-MCTAG) and simple Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG). Furthermore, for tree-based grammars, the parser computes not only syntactic analyses but also the corresponding semantic representations.
Science in Wonderland
(2008)
Lewis Carroll's Alice, who first explores Wonderland (1865) and later on the country behind the Looking-Glass (1872), belongs to the most well-known characters in world literature. [...] The scientific reception of Carroll's stories – concerning physics as well as the humanities – has taken place on different levels. On the one hand, […] various Carrollian ideas and episodes obviously correspond to topics, subjects and models that are treated in the contexts of scientific discourses. Therefore, they can be quoted or alluded to in order to represent theories and questions […] – as […] physical models of the world […]or theoretical models of language and communication. […] On a more abstract level of observation, Carroll's stories have been used in order to explain and to discuss the pre-conditions, the procedures, and the limits . of scientific modeling as such. Above all, they make it possible to narrate on the problem of defining and observing an 'object' of research. […] According to Deleuze, the paradox structures of the world that Alice experiences give an idea of all meaning being groundless and all logic being subverted by the illogical. Finally, besides all affinities of Alice's adventures to scientific attempts to explain the world, the absolutely incomprehensible is present in Carroll's books as well. Especially the self proves to be something profoundly incomprehensible […].
A wall-sized canvas by Twombly hanging in a purpose-built pavilion by Renzo Piano, commissioned by the Menil Collection in Houston, bears the scrawled inscription »Anatomy of Melancholy.« Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) is the culminating statement of the artist’s maturity: begun in 1972, it was first exhibited in 1994. In this monumental cenotaph, Twombly’s painting displays phrases from Archilochos, Catullus, Keats and Rilke, as well as the title of Burton’s famous tome, worked into the fabric of the composition, integral to the iconic content. It is the aching heart of the select permanent exhibition of his oeuvre at the pavilion, known as the Twombly Gallery (www.menil.org/twombly.html). The austerity of Piano’s architectural setting, as well as the cunningly filtered Texas sunlight, makes this a site of cult, like the chapel containing the dark, final canvases of Mark Rothko, situated around the corner in the same urban grove of old oak. The setting is a modern Dodona, remote seat of the oaken oracle of Zeus, and it makes an evocative home for Twombly’s enigmatic constructions. These disarm conventional vocabularies of aesthetic response, drawing attention to words and snatches of verse as points of association and recognition. Looking at them involves siting a phrase such as »Anatomy of Melancholy« in other dimensions – in lines, patches, figures, colors.
The content of this book will explain A For various reasons Europeans and Germans left their Homeland. B How they travelled in groups and individually. C How they landed in South Australia. D The Newcomers reception in a British colony. E The treatment they received in Australia. F What the Germans and Europeans achieved in Australia.
The focus of this paper is the perspectivization of thematic roles generally and the recipient role specifically. Whereas perspective is defined here as the representation of something for someone from a given position (Sandig 1996: 37), perspectivization refers to the verbalization of a situation in the speech generation process (Storrer 1996: 233). In a prototypical act of giving, for example, the focus of perception (the attention of the external observer) may be on the person who gives (agent), the transferred object (patient) or the person who receives the transferred object (recipient). The languages of the world provide differing linguistic means to perspectivize such an act of giving, or better: to perspectivize the participants of such an action. In this article, the linguistic means of three selected continental West Germanic languages –German, Dutch and Luxembourgish– will be taken into consideration, with an emphasis on the perspectivization of the recipient role.
New data on the distribution were the reported: Buksendya river (153º15’E, 59º12’N), Yama valley (152º59’E, 60º00’N) and Nayakhan river (158º15’E, 62º33’N), mostly single birds in late summer, autumn or early winter. Resident breeding pairs regularly occur only in the Chelomdzha and further to the west – in Inya and Ulbeya valleys, and upper heads of the Kava valley (Fig. 1). New observations in the Inya valley (July-August 1999) and in the Chelomdzha valley (July 2003) have proved that the Blakiston’s Fish Owl dwells in lush flood-plain woods along the middle and lower streams of both of these valleys. Currently, the Blakiston’s Fish Owl steadily occurs within the limits of Kava-Chelomdza forestry of the Magadansky State Reserve (Tarkhov & Potapov 1986), and, most likely, the Chelomdzha valley forms currently the north-eastern limit of the species range. In the Chelomdzha valley the regular duet singing of the Blakiston’s Fish Owl begins from early February. Usually the birds display in the evenings, 20-40 min after sunset. The longevity of evening vocalizations increases from 3-5 min in first week of February to 30-50 min in mid-March. The intervals between strophes vary from 14-55 s, 27 s on average (n = 48). The chicks hatched between 2nd and 5th of May. Daytime hours the parents spend nearby the nest in the crowns of larches. During intense chick’s growth the parents visit the nest 4-5 times in a night. Search for food and hunting takes from 40-60 min. According to photo documents, the parents feed the chicks with sculpins and graylings (18–30 cm in length). The parents spend midnight hours nearby the nest. Becoming 50 days old the chicks leave the nest and roams around supervised by the parents.
The northern plains of Saudi Arabia are an area of approximately 231,000 km2, or roughly equivalent to the size of the whole of the United Kingdom. During previous ABBA Surveys in this area in late winter and spring significant numbers of wintering species such as Dotterel Charadrius morinellus, sandgrouse Pterocles sps and eagles and vultures have been recorded, as well as the threatened Sociable Plover Vanellus gregarius. The main objective of ABBA Survey 40 (30 January - 28 February 2009) was to assess wintering populations of these birds in northern Arabia through sampling methods. In all 21 timed walked censuses in the early morning and 25 driven transect counts (over a total distance of 1511 km) were carried out. Unfortunately most of the region had suffered a severe drought over an extended period, perhaps the previous ten years or longer, and in most of the survey area there had been no rain at all during the winter/spring period of 2008/2009. This lack of rain had resulted in a complete lack of green vegetation in most of the western part of the area studied. Consequently the census results showed low species diversity and small populations.
Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammars (MCTAGs) are a formalism that has been shown to be useful for many natural language applications. The definition of non-local MCTAG however is problematic since it refers to the process of the derivation itself: a simultaneity constraint must be respected concerning the way the members of the elementary tree sets are added. Looking only at the result of a derivation (i.e., the derived tree and the derivation tree), this simultaneity is no longer visible and therefore cannot be checked. I.e., this way of characterizing MCTAG does not allow to abstract away from the concrete order of derivation. In this paper, we propose an alternative definition of MCTAG that characterizes the trees in the tree language of an MCTAG via the properties of the derivation trees (in the underlying TAG) the MCTAG licences. We provide similar characterizations for various types of MCTAG. These characterizations give a better understanding of the formalisms, they allow a more systematic comparison of different types of MCTAG, and, furthermore, they can be exploited for parsing.
This paper investigates the class of Tree-Tuple MCTAG with Shared Nodes, TT-MCTAG for short, an extension of Tree Adjoining Grammars that has been proposed for natural language processing, in particular for dealing with discontinuities and word order variation in languages such as German. It has been shown that the universal recognition problem for this formalism is NP-hard, but so far it was not known whether the class of languages generated by TT-MCTAG is included in PTIME. We provide a positive answer to this question, using a new characterization of TT-MCTAG.
We present a CYK and an Earley-style algorithm for parsing Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG), using the deductive parsing framework. The characteristic property of the Earley parser is that we use a technique of range boundary constraint propagation to compute the yields of non-terminals as late as possible. Experiments show that, compared to previous approaches, the constraint propagation helps to considerably decrease the number of items in the chart.
In this paper, we argue that difficulties in the definition of coreference itself contribute to lower inter-annotator agreement in certain cases. Data from a large referentially annotated corpus serves to corroborate this point, using a quantitative investigation to assess which effects or problems are likely to be the most prominent. Several examples where such problems occur are discussed in more detail, and we then propose a generalisation of Poesio, Reyle and Stevenson’s Justified Sloppiness Hypothesis to provide a unified model for these cases of disagreement and argue that a deeper understanding of the phenomena involved allows to tackle problematic cases in a more principled fashion than would be possible using only pre-theoretic intuitions.
Traditionally, parsers are evaluated against gold standard test data. This can cause problems if there is a mismatch between the data structures and representations used by the parser and the gold standard. A particular case in point is German, for which two treebanks (TiGer and TüBa-D/Z) are available with highly different annotation schemes for the acquisition of (e.g.) PCFG parsers. The differences between the TiGer and TüBa-D/Z annotation schemes make fair and unbiased parser evaluation difficult [7, 9, 12]. The resource (TEPACOC) presented in this paper takes a different approach to parser evaluation: instead of providing evaluation data in a single annotation scheme, TEPACOC uses comparable sentences and their annotations for 5 selected key grammatical phenomena (with 20 sentences each per phenomena) from both TiGer and TüBa-D/Z resources. This provides a 2 times 100 sentence comparable testsuite which allows us to evaluate TiGer-trained parsers against the TiGer part of TEPACOC, and TüBa-D/Z-trained parsers against the TüBa-D/Z part of TEPACOC for key phenomena, instead of comparing them against a single (and potentially biased) gold standard. To overcome the problem of inconsistency in human evaluation and to bridge the gap between the two different annotation schemes, we provide an extensive error classification, which enables us to compare parser output across the two different treebanks. In the remaining part of the paper we present the testsuite and describe the grammatical phenomena covered in the data. We discuss the different annotation strategies used in the two treebanks to encode these phenomena and present our error classification of potential parser errors.
Parsing coordinations
(2009)
The present paper is concerned with statistical parsing of constituent structures in German. The paper presents four experiments that aim at improving parsing performance of coordinate structure: 1) reranking the n-best parses of a PCFG parser, 2) enriching the input to a PCFG parser by gold scopes for any conjunct, 3) reranking the parser output for all possible scopes for conjuncts that are permissible with regard to clause structure. Experiment 4 reranks a combination of parses from experiments 1 and 3. The experiments presented show that n- best parsing combined with reranking improves results by a large margin. Providing the parser with different scope possibilities and reranking the resulting parses results in an increase in F-score from 69.76 for the baseline to 74.69. While the F-score is similar to the one of the first experiment (n-best parsing and reranking), the first experiment results in higher recall (75.48% vs. 73.69%) and the third one in higher precision (75.43% vs. 73.26%). Combining the two methods results in the best result with an F-score of 76.69.
Distributional approximations to lexical semantics are very useful not only in helping the creation of lexical semantic resources (Kilgariff et al., 2004; Snow et al., 2006), but also when directly applied in tasks that can benefit from large-coverage semantic knowledge such as coreference resolution (Poesio et al., 1998; Gasperin and Vieira, 2004; Versley, 2007), word sense disambiguation (Mc- Carthy et al., 2004) or semantical role labeling (Gordon and Swanson, 2007). We present a model that is built from Webbased corpora using both shallow patterns for grammatical and semantic relations and a window-based approach, using singular value decomposition to decorrelate the feature space which is otherwise too heavily influenced by the skewed topic distribution of Web corpora.
The re-emergence of tuberculosis in its present-day manifestations - single, multiple and extensive drug-resistant forms and as HIV-TB coinfections - has resulted in renewed research on fundamental questions such as the nature of the organism itself, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the molecular basis of its pathogenesis, definition of the immunological response in animal models and humans, and development of new intervention strategies such as vaccines and drugs. Foremost among these developments has been the precise chemical definition of the complex and distinctive cell wall of M. tuberculosis, elucidation of the relevant pathways and underlying genetics responsible for the synthesis of the hallmark moieties of the tubercle bacillus such as the mycolic acid-arabinogalactan-peptidoglycan complex, the phthiocerol- and trehalose-containing effector lipids, the phosphatidylinositol-containing mannosides, lipomannosides and lipoarabinomannosides, major immunomodulators, and others. In this review, the laboratory personnel who have been the focal point of some to these developments review recent progress towards a comprehensive understanding of the basic physiology and functions of the cell wall of M. tuberculosis.
In this contribution I shall be interested, among other things, in finding a place for the European phenomenon of the ›Speculum humanae salvationis‹ within German literary history, which will inescapably involve revisiting the unfashionable discussion of date and origins. I also intend to ask about the place of this text in the ‘didactic’ literature of the Middle Ages. Is a religious text structured according to sacred history didactic? Much didactic poetry is in the vernacular: What does it mean that the ›Speculum‹ was composed in Latin? And what place should be accorded to its vernacular reception? The ›Speculum‹ is inscribed within a set of oppositions that would appear to be recurrent in the didactic literature of the later Middle Ages: Latin and vernacular, verse and prose, words and pictures, religious and profane, moral
teaching and devotion, clerical and lay. In view of its exceptionally broad transmission in the German lands, both in Latin and in vernacular reworkings, is it possible to describe this text so that it takes a place within a larger picture? In some respects it may stand at a threshold in the history of European didacticism.
The Invertebrate section of the Museum of Zoology QCAZ at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito maintains nearly two million curated specimens, and comprises Ecuador's largest collection of native taxa. We review 1902 type specimens from 6 subspecies and 320 species in 121 genera and 42 families, currently kept in the Museum. The list includes 116 holotypes, 10 allotypes, 1774 paratypes and 2 neoparatypes. The collection of type specimens is particularly strong in the Coleoptera (family Carabidae and Staphylinidae) and Hymenoptera. However, other insect orders such as Diptera and Lepidoptera and non-insect arthropods such as Acari, Aranea and Scorpiones, are moderately represented in the collection. This report provides original data from labels of every type specimen record. An analysis of the geographic distribution of type localities showed that collection sites are clustered geographically with most of them found. towards the northern region of Ecuador, in Pichincha, Cotopaxi and Napo provinces. Sites are mainly located in highly accessible areas near highways and towns. Localities with a high number of type species include the cloud forest reserve Bosque Integral Otonga and Parque Nacional Yasunf in the Amazon rainforest near PUCE's Yasuni Scientific Station. Type localities are not well represented in the Ecuadorian National System of Protected Areas. Future fieldwork Sllould include. localities in the southern region of Ecuador but also target less accessible areas not located near highways or towns. We discuss the value of the collection as a source of information for conservation and biodiversity policies in Ecuador.
This essay examines the differing contexts and modes of encounter with Islamic culture in the travel writing of two contrasting women, the Prussian Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn and the Austrian Maria Schuber: both travelled to and wrote from the Middle East in the 1830s and 1840s and published their letters as collections. The encounters both women had with Islam were conditioned, at least in part, by their respective stance on religion, issues of gender and social class, and by the obligations of patronage and the expectations of distinct readerships. Whilst both women can be seen to write about Islam as a religion and culture defined by its difference to Christianity, both can also be seen in differing ways and to differing extents to represent Islam and Muslims as simultaneously belonging to a universal and inclusive notion of humanity and human religion. Thus, without embracing high philosophical discourse of Kant or Hegel, both women can be seen to demonstrate cosmopolitan impulses towards Islam, although these jostle for ascendancy with a more Eurocentric, Christian and indeed völkisch vision of the relationship between cultures.
Mwani : grammatical sketch
(2010)
Kimwani, the language of the Wamwani or Mwani people, is spoken by about 80,000 people in the Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique. The language is related to Swahili, but the two are not mutually intelligible.
The prestige dialect of Kimwani is KiWibu, spoken on Ibo Island and surroundings, as well as by the majority of Mwani in the provincial capital, Pemba. KiWibu forms have consistently been followed in this write-up, unless otherwise indicated. For differences with other dialects, see Appendix E "Dialectical variations and their characteristics".
The Birds of the Highlands of South-West Saudi Arabia and adjacent parts of the Tihama: July 2010
(2010)
The objective of the survey was to compare habitats and bird life in the Asir region, particularly Jebal Souda and the Raydah escarpment protected area of the Saudi Wildlife Commission, and adjacent regions of the tihama, with those observed in July 1987 (Jennings, et al., 1988). The two surveys were approximately the same length and equal amounts of time were spent in the highlands and on the tihama. A number of walked censuses were carried out during 2010 on Jebal Souda, using the same methodology as walked censuses in 1987, and the results are compared. Broadly speaking the comparison of censuses revealed that in 2010 there were less birds and reduced diversity on the Jebal Souda plateau, compared to 1987. However in the Raydah reserve the estimates of breeding bird populations compiled in the mid 1990s was little changed as far as could be assessed in 2010. The highland region of south-west Saudi Arabia, especially Jebal Souda, has been much developed since the 1987 survey and is now an important internal recreation and resort area. This has lead to a reduction in the region’s importance for terraced agriculture. These changes may be a contributing factor to changes in bird numbers on the plateau. Subsidiary tasks that arose during the 2010 survey were to help locate satellite tagged Bald Ibises Geronticus eremita from Syria which were transiting Saudi Arabia at the time. Secondly to search for the Asir subspecies of the Eurasian Magpie Pica pica asirensis, which is endemic to the south-west Saudi Arabia highlands, and is reported to be in decline. A separate team searching for the Bald Ibis located some individuals and one was found dead. Few Magpies were located and it seems clear that this very scarce bird has declined further in numbers in recent years. A number of interesting records of birds were obtained, especially on the tihama, where two new birds for Saudi Arabia were observed, Black-headed Heron Ardea melanocephala and Painted Snipe Rostratula benghalensis and one species, Glossy Ibis Plegadis falcinellus was found breeding for the first time in the Arabian Peninsula. Some recommendations for the protection and management of the Raydah reserve are presented. A systematic list of all birds seen is provided.
Contributing to NABE News - Guidelines 2 ; Letter from the President 4 ; NABE 2010 Conference Highlights 5 ; Student Essay Winners 7 ; Teacher of the Year 9 ; Dissertation Award Winners 10 ; Innovating Scholarship Through Technology, Social Networking and the Community Along the U.S. and Mexico Border - Dr. Edith Esparza-Young 11 ; Indigenous Bilingual Education Alaska Native Education: Views From Within - Navin Singh and Jon Reyhner 15 ; Asian and Pacific Islanders Working with Asian Immigrant Parents of Young Children - Kerry Lee 18
Contributing to NABE News - Guidelines for Writers 2 ; Letter from the President 4 ; Conceptualizing a Schoolwide Bilingual Literacy Model: Closing the Achievement Gap through Systematic Formative Assessment - Doris Luft Baker 6 ; Asian and Pacific Islanders Asian American English Language Learners’ Identity Formation and Dynamic Transformation - Deoksoon Kim 10 ; Indigenous Bilingual Education Mother Tongue Education - Jon Reyhner, Northern Arizona University 12 ; Improving the Literacy Skills of Children and Young Adults - Leo Gómez 12
During the period 24 May to 1 June 2010 observations were made of the flora, fauna and habitats of two study areas in the Rub al Khali in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Firstly the route of an existing pipeline, known as Shabab 1, which runs from the Jafurah desert south of Abqaiq to a point 211 km west of the Shaybah oil field, a distance of 422 km. Secondly the Shaybah oilfield area (administered by Saudi ARAMCO), paying particular attention to the sites listed at paragraph 6. (See also the map at Fig. 1.) In the following paragraphs the two sites are often identified simply as Shabab and Shaybah.
Letter from the President 4 ; Indigenous Bilingual Education in Vietnam: Initiatives and Lessons America’s Schools Can Learn From Eirini Gouleta 5 ; The Effects of Music on Spanish- Dominant Kindergarteners - Sandra B. Chong 10 ; Indigenous Bilingual Education “Essie’s Story” Insightful Words from an Old Teacher to Teachers Today - Chelsea Bergner, Northern Arizona University 14 ; Asian and Pacific Islanders Supporting Asian Immigrant Families of Children with Disabilities Effectively - Lusa Lo, Ed.D., University of
Massachusetts, Boston 16 ; Peace Corps, an undervalued source of bilingual support? - Brock Brady 19