• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.235-251
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• 2001

According to Chomskyan grammar, humans can generate and understand an unbounded number of grammatical sentences. Against the background of pure and idealized linguistic competence, this linguistic productivity is argued and understood. In actual utterances, however, there are many limitations of productivity but they are said to come from the general constraints on performances such as capacity of short term memory or attention. In this paper I discuss a problem raised against idealized productivity. I argue that linguistic productivity idealizes our linguistic competence too much. By separating idealized competence from the various constraints of performance, Chomskyan theorists can argue for unlimited productivity. However, the absolute distinction between grammar (pure competence) and parser (actual psychological processes) makes little sense when we explain the low acceptability(intelligibility) of center embedded sentences. Usually, the problem of center embedded sentence is explained in terms of memory shortage or other performance constraints. To explain the low acceptability, however, we need to assume specialized memory structure because the low acceptability occurs only with a specific type of syntactic pattern. 1 argue that this special memory structure should not be considered as a general performance constraint. It is a domain specific (specifically linguistic) constraints and an intrinsic part of human language processing. Recent development of Chomskyan grammar, i.e., minimalist approach seems to close the gap between pure competence and this type of specialized constraints. Chomsky's earlier approach of generative grammar focuses on end result of the generative derivation. However, economy principle (of minimalist approach) focuses on actual derivational processes. By having less mathematical or less idealized grammar, we can come closer to the actual computational processes that build syntactic structure of a sentence. In this way, we can have a more concrete picture of our linguistic competence, competence that is not detached from actual computational processes.

• Journal of the Korea Academia-Industrial cooperation Society
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.548-556
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• 2016

Cognitive-linguistic changes that normally accompany aging are often simply an annoyance, but in some instances they may herald a more perilous course of decline to a state of neurological disease. This study investigated the correlation between subjective and objective tests on cognitive-linguistic abilities in older adults and the predictors of objective performances. Healthy elders over 65 years of age (n=63) and their informants (n=63) completed the subjective and objective cognitive-linguistic tests (ISCOLE and CAPTBI) from July of 2015 to February of 2016. The main findings were as follows: performance on the self-report test was not significantly different from that on the informant-report test. Additionally, eight domains in older adults group and 15 domains in the informants group were significantly associated with performance on the objective test. Finally, language on the informant-report test was a predictor of several abilities including problem solving and memory on the informant-report test predicted executive function and language. The present study demonstrates that two groups have significant differences in correlation between subjective and objective tests on the cognitive-linguistic abilities, and there are more relevant domains in rating by informants. These findings have implications for the use of cognitive-linguistic evaluation and preventive intervention in clinical settings.

• Knowledge Management Research
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.253-276
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• 2022

Online reviews attract much attention because they play an essential role in consumer decision-making. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the review attributes that affect the perceived helpfulness of consumers. However, most previous studies on the helpfulness of online reviews mainly focus on quantitative factors such as review volume and reviewer attributes. Recently, some studies have investigated the impact of review content and linguistic style matching on consumers' purchase decision-making. Those studies show that consumers consider additional review attributes when evaluating reviews in decision-making. To fill the research gap with existing literature, we investigated the impact of review content and linguistic style matching on review helpfulness. Moreover, this study investigated how the reviewers' expertise moderates the effect of the review content and linguistic style matching on the review helpfulness. The empirical results show that positive affective content has a negative effect on the review helpfulness. The negative affective content and linguistic style matching positively affect review helpfulness. Review expertise relieved the impact of negative affective content and linguistic style matching on review helpfulness. According to the mechanism confirmed in this study, online e-commerce companies can achieve corporate sales growth by identifying factors affecting review helpfulness and reflecting them in their marketing strategies.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.125-132
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• 2022

Sentence compression is a natural language processing task that generates concise sentences that preserves the important meaning of the original sentence. For grammatically appropriate sentence compression, early studies utilized human-defined linguistic rules. Furthermore, while the sequence-to-sequence models perform well on various natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation, there have been studies that utilize it for sentence compression. However, for the linguistic rule-based studies, all rules have to be defined by human, and for the sequence-to-sequence model based studies require a large amount of parallel data for model training. In order to address these challenges, Deleter, a sentence compression model that leverages a pre-trained language model BERT, is proposed. Because the Deleter utilizes perplexity based score computed over BERT to compress sentences, any linguistic rules and parallel dataset is not required for sentence compression. However, because Deleter compresses sentences only considering perplexity, it does not compress sentences by reflecting the linguistic information of the words in the sentences. Furthermore, since the dataset used for pre-learning BERT are far from compressed sentences, there is a problem that this can lad to incorrect sentence compression. In order to address these problems, this paper proposes a method to quantify the importance of linguistic information and reflect it in perplexity-based sentence scoring. Furthermore, by fine-tuning BERT with a corpus of news articles that often contain proper nouns and often omit the unnecessary modifiers, we allow BERT to measure the perplexity appropriate for sentence compression. The evaluations on the English and Korean dataset confirm that the sentence compression performance of sentence-scoring based models can be improved by utilizing the proposed method.

• Lingua Humanitatis
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• v.7
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• pp.57-92
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• 2005

The main driving force behind Chomskyan theory of language that is gaining ground under the title of the "minimalist program" has been the urge to reduce the variety of natural languages to a minimal number of theoretical concepts and devices and to formulate the strongest possible hypothesis about linguistic structures. This has led to a long series of proposals of ever greater abstractness, with concomitant modifications in a number of theoretical constructs. The minimalist approach is the latest development of these constant changes, for which there is really "only one computational system and one lexicon," the differences among languages being reducible to parametric variation in "nonsubstantive parts of the lexicon"(Chomaky 1995:169-70). Chomsky thus differs, now more than ever, from other linguists by his sweepingly programmatic, rather than empirical, approach to language. The proposals he makes are too complicated to discuss here in any technical details. We rather focus on a series of lectures delivered by an ardent adherent of the minimalist program, with the view to demonstrating how this theory may mislead and distort the whole prospect of linguistic investigation. The rationale of the so-called 'minimalism' per se will be called into question.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.33-40
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• 2010

This study aims at investigating the linguistic and educational factors affecting TOEFL scores, focusing on three OECD countries, Korea, Japan, and Finland. The data comprise document analysis on curriculums, websites, and literature. The findings reveal that the number of Korean test-takers and their TOEFL scores gradually increased year by year. Finnish test-takers consistently gained greatly high scores, and Japanese examinees showed the lowest scores. The languages Korean, Japanese, and Finnish are all far distant from English and receive little support on historical grounds from the Indo-European family tree. In Finland, however, Swedish which belongs to Indo-European languages is still used as an official language with Finnish. Korea and Finland adopt English education from Year 3 in primary school, whereas English is not an official subject in primary school at present in Japan. Finnish students are taught a foreign language in addition to English from primary school. These seem to support the result of the high TOEFL scores of Finnish test-takers. This study concludes that social context which includes linguistic and educational environments are the main factors which affect TOEFL scores.

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.6
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• pp.89-111
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• 2000

Since speaking is correlated with time and time is metaphorically conceptualized in terms of space, it is natural for us to conceptualize language metaphorically in terms of space. For example, we think that the future is in front and the past is behind. Reddy(1979) suggested in his conduit metaphor that linguistic expressions are containers. According to him, the speaker puts his ideas(objects) into words{containers)and sends them along a conduit to a hearer who takes the idea(object) out of the word(container). As a result we are able to know that the larger linguistic expressions have more meaning in it. In other words the space of a linguistic form has close relationship with meaning. Moreover we are able to see that formal distance between arguments or elements of linguistic expressions shows semantic influences between them. If two elements keep close distance, a preceeding element has a strong, direct and whole influence upon the following element. Sometimes even the results of the influence can be brought out implicitly by the formal relation between two elements. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to show that tins difference in meaning which is due to formal distance of sentence elements can be explained by the metaphorical concept presented by Lakoff and Johnson(1980).

• English Language & Literature Teaching
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• no.1
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• pp.69-108
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• 1995

Listening comprehension can be defined as a process of an integrative, positive and creative activity through which listeners get the message of speakers' production using linguistic or non-linguistic redundancy as well as linguistic or non-linguistic knowledge. Compared with reading comprehension, it has many difficulties especially for foreigners. while it can be transferred to the other skills: speaking, reading, writing. With this said, listening comprehension can be taught effectively using the following teaching strategies. First. systematic and intensive instruction of segmental phonemes, suprasegmental phonemes and sound changes must be given to remove the difficulties of listening comprehension concerned with the identification of sounds. Second, vocabulary drill through various games and other activities is absolutely needed until words can be unconsciously recognized. Without this, comprehension is almost impossible. Third, instruction of sentence structures is thought to be essential considering grammar is supplementary to listening comprehension and reading comprehension for academic purpose. So grammar translation drills, mechanical drills, meaningful drills and communicative drills should be performed in succession with common or frequently used structures. Fourth, listening activities for overall comprehension should teach how to receive overall meaning of intended messages intact. Linguists and literatures have listed some specific activities as follows: Total Physical Response, dictation, role playing, singing songs, selective listening, picture recognition, list activities, completion, prediction, true or false choice, multiple choice, seeking of specific information, summarizing, problem-solving and decision-making, recognization of relationships between speakers, recognition of mood, attitude and behavior of speakers.

• International Journal of Fuzzy Logic and Intelligent Systems
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.165-170
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• 2011

Due to advances in hardware performance, user-friendly interfaces are becoming one of the major concerns in information systems. Linguistic conversation is a very natural way of human communications. Fuzzy techniques have been employed to liaison the discrepancy between the qualitative linguistic terms and quantitative computerized data. This paper deals with linguistic queries using clustering results on data sets, which are intended to retrieve the close clusters or distant clusters from the clustering results. In order to support such queries, a fuzzy technique-based method is proposed. The method introduces distance membership functions, namely, close and distant membership functions which transform the metric distance between two objects into the degree of closeness or farness, respectively. In order to measure the degree of closeness or farness between two clusters, both cluster closeness measure and cluster farness measure which incorporate distance membership function and cluster memberships are considered. For the flexibility of clustering, fuzzy clusters are assumed to be formed. This allows us to linguistically query close or distant clusters by constructing fuzzy relation based on the measures.

• Language and Information
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.93-121
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• 2013

Identifying the speakers of individual utterances mentioned in textual stories is an important step towards developing applications that involve the use of unique characteristics of speakers in stories, such as robot storytelling and story-to-scene generation. Despite the usefulness, it is a challenging task because not only human entities but also animals and even inanimate objects can become speakers especially in fairytales so that the number of candidates is much more than that in other types of text. In addition, since the action of speaking is not always mentioned explicitly, it is necessary to infer the speaker from the implicitly mentioned speaking behaviors such as appearances or emotional expressions. In this paper, we investigate a method to exploit linguistic clues to identify the speakers of utterances from textual fairytale stories in Korean, especially in order to handle such challenging issues. Compared with the previous work, the present work takes into account additional linguistic features such as vocative roles and pairs of conversation participants, and proposes the use of discourse-level turn-taking behaviors between speakers to further reduce the number of possible candidate speakers. We describe a simple rule-based method to choose a speaker from candidates based on such linguistic features and turn-taking behaviors.