2. However, it is with deep disappointment that, at the conclusion of this process, it is clear our voices have not been heard and reflected in the conference outcomes. The negotiations started with analyses of the failings of the Brussels Programme of Action, also reflected in UNCTAD’s LDC report 2010. These showed that development partners failed to deliver their commitments to provide adequa...

Linguistic politeness (LP) refers to the set of “linguistic features mediating norms of social behaviour, in relation to such notions as courtesy, rapport, deference and distance” (Crystal 2008). Although researchers (e.g. Eelen 2001, Watts 2003) agree that it is intimately connected to normativity, group hierarchy and cooperation – the core questions of human ethology and human behavioural eco...

Large-scale corpus development demands substantial infrastructure. As part of this infrastructure, the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) has adopted the Annotation Graph Toolkit (AGTK) as a primary resource for annotation tool development. This paper reports on LDC’s experiences using AGTK to develop and implement highly customized annotation tools for a variety of large-scale corpus creation ef...

Despite the growth in the number of linguistic data centers around the world, their accomplishments and expansions and the advances they have help enable, the language resources that exist are a small fraction of those required to meet the goals of Human Language Technologies (HLT) for the world’s languages and the promises they offer: broad access to knowledge, direct communication across lang...

In response to the need expressed by the UN General Assembly, an economic vulnerability index (EVI) has been defined by the Committee for Development Policy. The present paper, which refers to this index, first examines how a structural economic vulnerability index can be designed for the low-income countries in particular. It recalls the conceptual and empirical grounds of the index, considers...

This paper introduces the parallel Chinese-English Entities, Relations and Events (ERE) corpora developed by Linguistic Data Consortium under the DARPA Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) Program. Original Chinese newswire and discussion forum documents are annotated for two versions of the ERE task. The texts are manually translated into English and then annotated for the same ERE ta...

This paper describes a data corpus which is being made available through the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC) that codes lenition of syllable-final /s/ in Latin American Spanish in the LDC’s CallHome Spanish corpus. This lenition is a process whereby the /s/ may be aspirated (pronounced [h]) or deleted altogether. Since syllable-final /s/ is frequent in Spanish, lenition has a great effect on o...

The paper argues that an economy’s industry/technology structure is endogenously determined by the economy’s endowment structure. For the convergence to occur, the government of an LDC should target the upgrading of endowment structure instead of the industry/technology structure in its development strategy. If the government chooses to pursue an industry/technology structure, which is inconsis...

Several choice processes of alternatives for non-homogeneous group decision making problems, assuming linguistic preference relations for expressing the opinions of individuals and linguistic values for expressing their respective power or importance degrees, are presented. These processes are designed using two choice degrees of alternatives based on the concept of fuzzy majority: quanti-er gu...

In the present cross-linguistic study two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of age and linguistic background on response tendencies of preschoolers toward forced-choice questions. A total of 163 2to 5-year-old children, including 63 Persian speakers, 57 Kurdish speakers and 43 English speakers, were asked a set of forced-choice, two option questions about familiar and unfami...