Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Article usage'

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Language Education, 2007.<br>Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-07, Section: A, page: 2859. Adviser: Martha Nyikos. Title from dissertation home page (viewed Apr. 9, 2008).

Artificial Intelligence techniques are increasingly being used to enhance the area of Computer-Aided Instruction. This thesis is concerned with the area of Computer-Aided Language Learning, a subset of Computer-Aided Instruction, and demonstrates how various Artificial Intelligence techniques can be incorporated into a language system to produce an intelligent educational tool. In this thesis, the focus is on the use of English articles, which is a subtle area of the English language with which even advanced students of English have difficulty. This thesis describes <i>Artcheck</i>, an intelligent Computer-Aided Language Learning (ICALL) system which detects, analyses and responds to English article usage errors. This system has three main features: it has knowledge of the article usage domain; it dynamically creates a <i>model</i> of the student; and it <i>adapts</i> to the individual student. The system's <i>knowledge</i> of the domain consists of a set of article usage rules which reflect standard teaching practice. The information necessary to apply the rules is extracted at the natural language processing stage, and includes structural and contextual information. The system <i>models</i> the state of the student's knowledge at all times, in order to give informative explanations to the student about any errors which are made. It is able to generate mal-rules which account for consistent errors made by the student, using <i>version spaces</i> and the <i>candidate elimination algorithm</i>. The student model can be described as <i>dynamic</i> because the generation of mal-rules can create new parts of the student model, in response to student behaviour, which are not pre-determined by the system designer. The system <i>responds</i> to individual students by giving explanations of errors which are tailored to the student's level of ability and preferred learning style.

The ways in which someone’s first language (L1) influences his or her second language (L2) to create errors, that is negative transfer, is a topic that has received much attention in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Previous research has suggested that negative transfer is responsible for many errors. The primary aim of this study is to investigate article and preposition errors in the production of Swedish learners of English and to discuss these errors in relation to negative transfer. The secondary aim is to compare transfer errors by L1 Swedish and L1 Portuguese learners of English.   The first and main part of the study is a corpus investigation of the written production of 80 students in upper secondary school (high school). The second part is a multiple-choice test constructed to provoke transfer errors. It was distributed to students in upper secondary school in Sweden and in Brazil. The results from the corpus analysis are largely in line with those of previous research, for example with regards to how definite article errors are more common than indefinite article errors, and how contexts with definite articles and generic noun phrases seem prone to create transfer errors. The corpus study also shows that substitution was the most common preposition error and that many transfer preposition errors supposedly were caused by direct translations. Through the multiple-choice test, the degree to which the first language had an impact on individual errors could be revealed. All in all, the study reveals several aspects of negative transfer that perhaps a single-language investigation could not, because it is in the comparison of English-learners with different L1s that the most interesting results occur.<br>De sätt som någons första språk påverkar hans eller hennes andra språk så att fel uppstår, det vill säga negativ språköverföring (negative transfer), är ett ämne som har fått mycket uppmärksamhet inom forskning kring språkinlärning. Tidigare studier har visat på hur negativ språköverföring orsakar många fel. Det primära syftet i denna uppsats är att undersöka artikel- och prepositionsfel i skrift hos svenska elever som lär sig engelska och att diskutera dessa fel i relation till negativ språköverföring. Det sekundära målet är att jämföra hur negativ språköverföring yttrar sig hos svenska och portugisiska elever som lär sig engelska. Den första delen av denna uppsats, som även är huvuddelen, är en korpusundersökning av 80 uppsatser skrivna av högstadieelever. Den andra delen är ett flervalstest som konstruerats för att provocera fram språköverföringsfel. Deltagarna var högstadie- och gymnasieelever från Sverige och Brasilien. Resultaten från korpusundersökningen stämmer i stor utsträckning överens med vad tidigare forskning visat, till exempel att det är vanligare att fel uppstår med bestämda artiklar än med obestämda artiklar och hur bestämda artiklar och tillsammans med generiska nominalfraser tenderar att generera negativ språköverföring. Korpusstudien visar också på hur felaktigt utbyte (substitution) var det vanligaste prepositionsfelet och att många språköverföringsfel förmodligen orsakats av direkta översättningar från svenska. I analysen av resultateten från flervalstestet kunde graden av inflytande från första språket på enskilda fel påvisas. Sammantaget avslöjar undersökningen i denna uppsats på flera aspekter av negativ språköverföring som troligen ej uppenbarats om enkom elever med ett förstaspråk inkluderats, detta eftersom det är i jämförelsen mellan engelska-elever med olika förstaspråk som de mest intressanta resultaten framkommer.

This study focuses on the clitic pronoun usage by Spanish-Quechua bilingual speakers in Cuzco, Peru when faced with a question that includes a definite article preceding the direct object. Answers are analyzed to determine whether or not the definite article has an effect on the presence or absence of the clitic pronoun. Direct objects tested were both [+human] and [-human] objects to determine if these variables affect clitic pronoun use as well. Speakers who have identified themselves as bilingual in both Spanish and Quechua were given a survey to complete in order to see what factors may contribute to the use or omission of the clitic pronouns.

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, 1977.<br>Made available in DSpace on 2013-12-05T18:57:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 321796.pdf: 2709666 bytes, checksum: c94936800c560d172bb945a686e66eb7 (MD5)

This study aims to test Robertson’s lexical transfer principle, which posits that Chinese learners use demonstratives (particularly this) and the numeral one as markers of definiteness and indefiniteness. This is tested by analysing Chinese learners’ written production collected from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners 2.0 (SWECCL 2.0). The purpose is to understand the variation of article usage by adult Chinese learners of English. More specifically, the study examines to what extent articles, possessive and demonstrative pronouns are used in Chinese learners’ English and how definite and indefinite articles are used by the Chinese learners. Findings suggest that Robertson’s lexical transfer principle was corroborated by the present study. In addition, Chinese learners prefer to use demonstrative determiners, the possessive determiner our, and the numeral one to perform the function of marking definiteness and indefiniteness. In particular, the learners try to use the demonstrative determiners that and this in the anaphoric function instead of the definite article, and the demonstrative determiner those is frequently used in the cataphoric function. What is more, the learners use the numeral one as a marker of indefiniteness, and it is also used as a marker of definiteness in the anaphoric function. Further, the possessive determiner our is used as a marker of definiteness in larger situation uses referring to something unique. To this end, the study is able to show that the definite article is used to perform the function of marking indefiniteness, and in some particular contexts the definite article functions as a Chinese specifier in Chinese learners’ English. Also, the indefinite article is frequently used in quantifier phrases but is rarely used in other functions. There are three main reasons that may explain why Chinese learners use determiners variously. Firstly, the choice of determiners by Chinese learners is influenced by linguistic contexts. Secondly, because of learning strategies, Chinese learners try to ignore the anaphoric function and cataphoric function that they are not yet ready to process in article usage. Thirdly, interlanguage grammar influences the optionality in the use of articles.

Le mémoire qui suit accompagne l’exposition Paysages Financiers, présentée à la galerie Art Mûr de Montréal, du 17 janvier au 28 février 2015. Dans cette exposition, j’aborde les thèmes de la sacralisation de l’objet d’art, de son potentiel de profanation ainsi que la notion de valeur des œuvres. J’y présente un corpus d’œuvres constitué de : « Chemin de fer de fortune, Espaces publicitaires, Monuments, Bongzaïs, Paysages financiers, Venise 2015, Guichets manuels ainsi que Joseph le mendiant ». Issu d’une réflexion sur l’utilisation d’objets usuels possédant une valeur marchande précise dans la sphère des arts, mon corpus de maitrise questionne la possibilité d’usage de l’objet d’art et les tensions qui en découlent. En utilisant différents objets, images, symboles et codes de notre société que je détourne, je crée des œuvres picturales et sculpturales dont la notion symbolique, la notion de valeur et d’échange se métamorphosent. Je pose ainsi un regard sur les objets qui nous entourent ainsi que sur notre approche face au système de l’art. Je m’intéresse aux relations de sens (parfois disjonctifs) entre ces codes, mais surtout sur la relation entre le spectateur et l’objet d’art. Mots clefs : objet d’art - jeu (ludique) – sacralisation/profanation – détournement – marché de l’art

La recommandation personnalisée d'article de recherche filtre les publications selon les centres d'intérêt spécifiques en recherche des utilisateurs, et, bien menée, pourrait considérablement alléger le problème de la surcharge d'informations. Le filtrage basé sur le contenu est une solution prometteuse pour cette tâche parce qu'elle exploite efficacement la nature textuelle des articles de recherche. En général, la recommandation d'articles de recherche basée sur le contenu pose trois questions essentielles : la représentation des articles candidats, la construction du profil utilisateur, et la conception d'un modèle qui permette de comparer la représentation du contenu des articles candidats avec la représentation des intérêts de l'utilisateur cible. Dans cette thèse, nous développons tout d'abord une technique d'extraction automatique d'expressions-clés pour représenter les articles scientifiques. Cette technique améliore les approches existantes en utilisant une localisation plus précise des expressions-clés potentielles et une nouvelle stratégie pour éliminer le chevauchement dans la liste de sortie. Cette technique est un acteur majeur du système : en effet, non seulement elle fournit une représentation de l'article candidat, mais elle est également réutilisée pour la construction de l'ontologie de domaine, et pour l'analyse des articles appartenant à l'histoire des utilisateurs. Ensuite, pour la construction du profil utilisateur, nous proposons une nouvelle approche basée sur les ontologies. Le profil ontologique de l'utilisateur peut être décrit comme suit : tous les utilisateurs partagent une ontologie de domaine commune qui représente la base de connaissances des utilisateurs. Pour chaque utilisateur, nous créons alors une instance personnelle de l'ontologie étendue pour représenter ses besoins spécifiques. Cette instance personnelle contient tous les concepts intéressants pour l'utilisateur, et chaque concept est annoté par un score d'intérêt qui reflète le degré d'intérêt de l'utilisateur pour ce concept. On distingue les chercheurs chevronnés et les jeunes chercheurs en dérivant leurs intérêts en recherche individuelle à partir des différents ensembles de leur histoire. Nous utilisons également la structure des ontologies et appliquons l'algorithme de propagation nommé "spreading activation" pour déduire les intérêts possibles de l'utilisateur. Finalement, nous explorons un nouveau modèle pour produire des recommandations en recourant à la théorie Dempster-Shafer. On observe que quand un chercheur veut décider si oui ou non un article de recherche l'intéresse, il peut considérer le texte de l'article comme une suite d'expressions. Les expressions relatives à ses centres d'intérêt en recherche encouragent une lecture poussée de l'article, tandis que les expressions relevant de sujets qui ne l'intéressent pas diminuent son intérêt pour l'article. Notre modèle simule ce processus d'évaluation. Du point de vue de la théorie de croyance, les termes clés extraits à partir d'un article candidat peuvent être considérés comme des sources de croyance. A ces parts de croyance, notre modèle associe des degrés d'intérêt de l'utilisateur. Dés lors, comme ces croyances s'accumulent et se renforcent, une inclination prend forme et devient graduellement plus nette. Différentes d'autres mesures basées sur la similarité entre la représentation des articles candidats et les profils utilisateur, nos recommandations, produites en combinant toutes les parts de croyance, peuvent directement mesurer à quel point l'utilisateur pourrait être intéressé par l'article candidat. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que le système que nous avons développé surpasse la plupart des approches actuelles. De plus, la méthode proposée est suffisamment générique pour permettre la résolution d'autres tâches de recommandation<br>Personalized research paper recommendation filters the publications according to the specific research interests of users, which could significantly alleviate the information overload problem. Content-based filtering is a promising solution for this task because it can effectively exploit the textual-nature of research papers. A content-based recommender system usually concerns three essential issues: item representation, user profiling, and a model that provides recommendations by comparing candidate item's content representation with the target user's interest representation. In this dissertation, we first propose an automatic keyphrase extraction technique for scientific documents, which improves the existing approaches by using a more precise location for potential keyphrases and a new strategy for eliminating the overlap in the output list. This technique helps to implement the representation of candidate papers and the analysis of users' history papers. Then for modeling the users' information needs, we present a new ontology-based approach. The basic idea is that each user is represented as an instance of a domain ontology in which concepts are assigned interest scores reflecting users' degree of interest. We distinguish senior researchers and junior researchers by deriving their individual research interests from different history paper sets. We also takes advantage of the structure of the ontology and apply spreading activation model to reason about the interests of users. Finally, we explore a novel model to generate recommendations by resorting to the Dempster-Shafer theory. Keyphrases extracted from the candidate paper are considered as sources of evidence. Each of them are linked to different levels of user interest and the strength of each link is quantified. Different from other similarity measures between user profiles and candidate papers, our recommendation result produced by combining all evidence is able to directly indicate the possibility that a user might be interested in the candidate paper. Experimental results show that the system we developed for personalized research paper recommendation outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed method can be used as a generic way for addressing different types of recommendation problems

博士<br>國立臺灣師範大學<br>圖書資訊學研究所<br>101<br>With the wide application of Web 2.0, various social networking platforms allow taggers to use uncontrolled, free keywords (i.e., social tags) to organize information. In library and information science, professional indexers are guided by the principles of authority control and thesaurus control to organize information with controlled vocabularies. Both social taggers and professional indexers regard keywords as concepts that represent their cognitions and mental models of information content, according to their prior experience and knowledge. Existing studies have focused on examining the sources and usage of individual keywords, and comparing the similarity between tags and controlled vocabularies. However, the results of such studies only reflect scattered debris rather than a whole picture of the mental models used by social taggers and professional indexers for article indexing. A better understanding of the mental models of taggers and professional indexers and their usage gap may inspire better selection of appropriate keywords for organizing information, facilitating resource discovery, and guiding users to find the right information. This study explores the mental models used by taggers and professional indexers to designate keywords for article indexing. Using a dataset of 3,972 CiteULike tags and 6,708 Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) descriptors from 1,489 scholarly articles in 13 library and information science journals, this study attempts to analyze the keyword usage of taggers and professional indexers to capture and build up their mental models for article indexing, and generalize their structures and patterns. To achieve this end, in this study social network analysis and frequent-pattern growth methods were employed. When measured with respect to terms used, power law distribution, a comparison of terms used as tags and descriptors, social network analysis (including centrality, overall structure and role equivalence) and frequent-pattern growth analysis (including frequent-pattern tree), little similarity was found between the mental models of taggers and professional indexers in article indexing. The results of this study are summarized as follows:  Taggers’ mental models for article indexing are more diverse than those of professional indexers.  Social taggers have a higher preference than professional indexers to select terms for article indexing from title keywords.  There is little similarity between social tags and controlled vocabularies and they complement each other.  Keywords in content-related categories were not used independently by social taggers, but they were often used with those from topic-related categories. On the other hand, keywords of other-related categories were often co-used with those of title-, topic- or content-related categories by professional indexers.  Social taggers may prefer to assign co-occurring keywords with more sets of fewer facets’ viewpoints (almost always two-facets); however, professional indexers may be inclined to offer keywords with fewer sets of more facets’ viewpoints (i.e., two-, three- and seven-facets).  Social taggers may be inclined to assign keywords with fewer path-based rules comprising fewer keyword categories. Professional indexers may tend to offer keywords with more path-based rules comprising more keyword categories. According to the research results mentioned above, the key contributions of this study are as follows:  Development of a generic model of mental models of social taggers and professional indexers for article indexing.  Analysis of the structures and patterns embedded in maps of mental models of social taggers and professional indexers in article indexing.  Analysis of the characteristics of keyword usage and co-occurring keywords’ associations.  Presentation of a theoretical basis to explain the reason why social tags complement controlled vocabularies.  Extension of the tag category model by feasibility examination and explanation. Furthermore, the results of this study also inform the design of information systems, including term recommendations and user interfaces for indexing, as well as frequent-pattern based classification trees for browsing and navigation.

碩士<br>國立中山大學<br>資訊管理學系研究所<br>92<br>Literature digital library is one of the most important resources to preserve civilized asset. To provide more effective and efficient information search, many systems are equipped with a browsing interface that aims to ease the article searching task. A browsing interface is associated with a subject directory, which guides the users to identify articles that need their information need. A subject directory contains a set (or a hierarchy) of subject categories, each containing a number of similar articles. How to group articles in a literature digital library is the theme of this thesis. Previous work used either document classification or document clustering approaches to dispatching articles into a set of article clusters based on their content. We observed that articles that meet a single user’s information need may not necessarily fall in a single cluster. In this thesis, we propose to make use of both Web log and article content is clustering articles. We proposed two hybrid approaches, namely document categorization based method and document clustering based method. These alternatives were compared to other content-based methods. It has been found that the document categorization based method effectively reduces the number of required click-through at the expense of slight increase of entropy that measures the content heterogeneity of each generated cluster.

碩士<br>中國文化大學<br>英國語文學系<br>107<br>The study aims to investigate the usage of Konglish in Online Korean News articles. The phenomenon of globalization results in changes and borrowings in languages around the world. Likewise, Korean language has been borrowing English words since several decades ago. Thus, there are many hybridity words of Korean and English (i.e. Konglish) in Korean language. After Olympic Games in 1988 there seems to be more Konglish words used in the Korean society. The primary purpose of the study is to answer the following three research questions. First, in what forms is Konglish manifested in the discourse of Korean news articles? Second, how frequently various types of Konglish words are applied in the online newspaper? Third, why are some Konglish types used more often than the others in the newspaper? The data of this study is composed of Korean-English news articles on entertainment, technology, and culture. The corpus includes articles in The Korea Herald online from September 2017 to February 2018. The internationalized phenomenon generates new words and phrases in Korean that demonstrate that many Konglish words are applied by both Korean people and native speakers of English who want to learn Korean language. Linguistically, Konglish words can be classified into five types: Formal Preservation, Loanword + Bound Morphemes, Truncations, Fabrications, and Initialisms (Shaffer, 2014). Most Konglish words are pronounced similarly to their English counterparts. Sketch Engine, a corpus software, was employed to identify the frequency of occurrences of these different types of Konglish words. The results show that the most frequently used type is Formal Preservation, indicating language of new technologies and new cultures are easily adapted by Koreans to describe technological applications and cross-cultural exchanges that occur at high frequency in modern life. This type of Konglish words are made because they are easily comprehended and thus convenient to use. Konglish reflects the localization of English language in Korean contexts. Another implication is language teachers should make learners aware of the differences between English and Konglish and guide them to apply the right expressions for different contexts.

This thesis examined the factors of L1, input frequency and emergent productivity in child L2 acquisition. This thesis is the first study to look at the interplay of L1 and usage factors in children learning a L2. The focus of the thesis was an investigation of these factors in the acquisition of article and auxiliary systems of English, which have been proven to be problematic areas for both L1 and L2 learners. While accounts of L1 transfer in L2 are better developed in generative theory, the roles of input frequency and emergent productivity are better developed in constructivist theory. The thesis assessed these two approaches against the data from L2 children from various L1 backgrounds. The children’s accuracy and error patterns with articles and auxiliaries were investigated. The main findings were as follows. L1 typology facilitated the acquisition of the structure of the NP and VP, but it only extended as far as the awareness of the presence of the functional morpheme (article or auxiliary). L1 transfer effects were observed only in the first 1.5 years of acquisition, which could be due to the unstable L1 knowledge in child L2 learners. The use of articles and auxiliaries was also influenced by their input frequencies and distribution, as more frequent forms were supplied more accurately and were substituted for less frequent forms. Different forms of articles and auxiliaries emerged separately and followed different paths of development. It was argued that they were acquired piecemeal and that productivity with these forms emerged gradually. It was concluded that constructionist theories were better supported by the data, since the findings on input frequency and productivity were not compatible with the generative approach, and L1 transfer was incorporated into the constructionist approach to account for the findings. It was argued that by the onset of acquisition, child L2 learners had established constructions in their L1 that were abstract enough to be transferred to L2 and did not rely on lexically specific information. As all children learned specific morphological forms of L2 piecemeal, in doing so they demonstrated input effects that held across all L1 backgrounds.

碩士<br>東吳大學<br>日本語文學系<br>97<br>In Taiwanese daily life, it is common to hear or see Mandarin idioms. The usage and multifunction of Mandarin idioms are very important. Also, it is necessary for people who study Mandarin to learn them. Yet the difficult usage of idioms can cause confusion which can lead learners into predicaments. Nevertheless, one must study the practical usage of Mandarin idioms to use them appropriately. This essay first analyzes the definition of both Mandarin and Japanese Idioms and then unequivocally indicates the relationship between proverbs and Idioms. Speaking of the actually usage of investigation, I have used three ways of sampling investigation: The main investigation, which is a one month length investigation that takes Japanese and Taiwanese editorials as the object; the supplementary investigation, which contains a one year length investigate on Japanese editorials and a one month length investigation on Japanese on short article commentary. In order to understand the diversity that is caused by culture differences between Japan and Taiwan, I selected fifty people from both Japanese and Taiwanese origin to complete this investigation. Furthermore, according to the structure analysis, I categorized 230 Mandarin Idioms from 234 investigation Mandarin idioms into 7 classifications: object, predicate, attributive, complement of circumstance, complement, subject, and independent clause to identify the ratio and sequences of Mandarin idiom usage. Moreover, to indicate the characteristics of sentence structure, constitution and also functions of Idioms in articles.