• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.824-836
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• 2018

The automatic extraction of temporal information from written texts is a key component of question answering and summarization systems and its efficacy in those systems is very decisive if a temporal expression (TE) is successfully extracted. In this paper, three different approaches for TE extraction in Uyghur are developed and analyzed. A novel approach which uses lexical semantics as an additional information is also presented to extend classical approaches which are mainly based on morphology and syntax. We used a manually annotated news dataset labeled with TIMEX3 tags and generated three models with different feature combinations. The experimental results show that the best run achieved 0.87 for Precision, 0.89 for Recall, and 0.88 for F1-Measure in Uyghur TE extraction. From the analysis of the results, we concluded that the application of semantic knowledge resolves ambiguity problem at shallower language analysis and significantly aids the development of more efficient Uyghur TE extraction system.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.36
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• pp.211-240
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• 2014

This is a cross-sectional study designed to analyze the correlation between the structural and social variables and the pattern of contraction and deletion of the copula verb in the speech of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers in Athens in Georgia, USA using a questionnaire. The results show that the frequency of copula contraction is higher than that of deletion in all factor groups including the age of the speakers where this study found that younger speakers tend to have higher frequency of contraction and deletion of the copula than older speakers. This study analyzes this as a function of the fact that younger speakers of AAVE are conscious of the linguistic and social differences between AAVE speakers and speakers of Standard American English (SAE) and they consciously make choices regarding which norm to use at which contexts to satisfy their communicative and socio-cultural needs. This sort of conscious social behavior is not likely to disappear with age rather it might increase as a correlate of the perceived physical, socio-cultural and psychological distance between AAVE speakers and speakers of other varieties. This study shows that such perceived linguistic, socio-cultural and psychological distance has negative effects on pedagogy and I proffer the remedy.

• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.381-388
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• 2020

This paper discusses English Hedges or Hedging Expressions on the basis of their morphosyntactic-pragramatic properties within the perspective of sociolinguistics. The term, 'Hedges' for the past decades since Lakoff(1973), has received little attention from the English grammar circles such as morphosyntax and the generative grammar theories. This paper presents a more comprehensive approach to the identification, distributions, functions, and the morphosyntactic properties of English Hedges. The earlier research on English Hedges in the 70's show that hedges are metalinguistic or mitadiscourse expressions which constitute a means for executing Politeness strategy in pragmatics. Nonetheless, research from the interface of syntactic-pragmatics has been scarce. This article suggests a more complex body of English hedges that have not been extensively discussed in the literature. Additionally, their configurational domain is to be proposed as part of the PolP with [±hedged] above CP⁺ (or CP beyond). The ramifications of the current study are suggested in terms of comparative linguistics, EFL/ESL studies of English for global communication, and pragmatics-sensitive machine translation studies in the forseeable future.