The aim of this article was to examine three advanced textbooks in Iran Language Institute (ILI) in an attempt to establish if they differ in the extent to which they represent dimension of big ‘C’ culture and little ‘c’ culture, their stance in distribution of references of cultural category, and also what themes predominate. The analysis identifies just the cultural elements, and culture–free...

This thesis is about the problem of compositionality in distributional semantics. Distributional semantics presupposes that the meanings of words are a function of their occurrences in textual contexts. It models words as distributions over these contexts and represents them as vectors in high dimensional spaces. The problem of compositionality for such models concerns itself with how to produc...

This report concerns the theoretical development and subsequent evaluation of n-gram language models based on word categories. In particular, part-of-speech word classifications have been employed as a means of incorporating significant amounts of a-priori grammatical information into the model. The utilisation of categories diminishes the problem of data sparseness which plagues conventional w...

The main goal of this work is to study if a language model based on categories could improve the performance of a dialogue system application as it does when not spontaneous and bigger English corpora are used. Firstly, several sets of categories, which are generated on the basis of different classification criteria, are obtained. Then, for each criterion, two language models are generated: A l...

The present study addresses a long-standing assumption in the field of applied linguistics: that presenting new second language (L2) vocabulary in semantically grouped sets is an effective method of teaching. Participants learned 32 new L2 labels for concepts from four different semantic categories in either a related or unrelated condition. At test, participants translated words in both transl...

The ability to identify the grammatical category of a word (e.g., noun, verb, adjective) is a fundamental aspect of competence in a natural language. Children show evidence of categorization by as early as 18 months, and in some cases younger. However, the mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well understood. The lexical co-occurrence patterns of words in sentences could provide inform...

Cross-lingual taxonomy alignment (CLTA) refers to mapping each category in the source taxonomy of one language onto a ranked list of most relevant categories in the target taxonomy of another language. Recently, vector similarities depending on bilingual topic models have achieved the state-of-the-art performance on CLTA. However, these models only model the textual context of categories, but i...

During sentence comprehension, older adults are less likely than younger adults to predict features of likely upcoming words. A pair of experiments assessed whether such differences would extend to tasks with reduced working memory demands and time pressures. In Experiment 1, event-related brain potentials were measured as younger and older adults read short phrases cuing antonyms or category e...