The pervasive ambiguity of language allows sentences that differ in just one lexical item to have rather different inference patterns. This would be no problem if the different lexical items fell into clearly definable and easy to represent classes. But this is not the case. To draw the correct inferences we need to look how the referents of the lexical items in the sentence (or broader context...

Computer programs that make inferences about natural language are easily fooled by the often haphazard relationship between words and their meanings. This thesis develops Lexical Semantic Analysis (LxSA), a general-purpose framework for describing word groupings and meanings in context. LxSA marries comprehensive linguistic annotation of corpora with engineering of statistical natural language ...

The article examines the linguistic features of diary-chronicle “War” by I. Bazhansky, in particular dialect vocabulary. language Bazhansky's works is valuable because it allows to draw conclusions about peculiarities Ukrainian early ХХ century on territory Bukovina. relevance research determined need studing dialectical diary-chronicle“War” Bukovinian teacher and writer Ivan Bazhanskyi. Explor...

Lexical bundles are empirically derived formulaic units of language which are register-specifi c and perform a variety of discourse functions. Because these units of language contribute to the linguistic make up of specifi c registers, they can be important indicators for determining the success of language users within these discourse communities. Therefore, language learners need to assimilat...

It seems likely that all languages make a distinction between words belonging to functional categories and those belonging to lexical categories, a distinction which roughly coincides with the sets of open and closed class items. Nouns, verbs and adjectives constitute the class of lexical categories in English, conjunctions and other sorts of particles fall into the class of functional categori...

Background: This study investigates the role of lexical information in normal and aphasic sentence comprehension. Effects of verb biases in normal comprehension have been well documented in previous studies (e.g., Spivey-Knowlton & Sedivy, 1995; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993), but their role in aphasic language processing has largely been ignored (with the exceptions of Menn et al., 1998,...

Partial overlaps in initial position between prime and target usually give rise to a null effect or to inhibitory effects. Priming effects are interpreted as resulting either from competition among lexical forms that present phonological similarity or from a decisional bias. In this experiment, the competitor set was strongly reduced. Auditory primes were nonwords containing a single initial-em...

Lexical Simplification is the task of modifying the lexical content of complex sentences in order to make them simpler. Due to the lack of reliable resources available for the task, most existing approaches have difficulties producing simplifications which are grammatical and that preserve the meaning of the original text. In order to improve on the state-of-the-art of this task, we propose use...

the desire and drive for excellence in any endeavor in life requires an effort from the individual; in addition it requires a constellation of features around such individuals that help them to become successful. for surgeons, it is the operating room staff, the administrative and medical assistants and our residents and fellows. however, perhaps the most important contribution to a physician’s...

This PhD thesis focuses on the problems encountered when developing automatic speech recognition for under-resourced languages with a writing system without explicit separation between words. The specificity of the languages covered in our work requires automatic segmentation of text corpus into words in order to make the n-gram language modeling applicable. While the lack of text data has an i...