Approaching Language Transfer Through Text Classification


Book Description

This book explains the detectionbased approach to investigating crosslinguistic influence and illustrates the value of the approach through a collection of five empirical studies that use the approach to quantify, evaluate, and isolate the subtle and complex influences of learners’ nativelanguage backgrounds on their English writing.




Cross-Linguistic Influence: From Empirical Evidence to Classroom Practice


Book Description

This book presents the latest research in various areas of cross-linguistic influence (CLI), providing educators with insights into how previously learned languages influence the learning of an additional language at different levels, such as phonetics/phonology, morphosyntax, vocabulary, pragmatics, writing style and learning context. While the majority of the chapters have English as the target language, one investigates the acquisition of French. The L1s of the learners include Arabic, Basque, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Galician, Georgian, German, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Each chapter ends with a reflection on possible pedagogical implications of the findings and offers recommendations on how to make the most of cross-linguistic influence in the classroom.




The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Corpora


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Corpora is a state-of-the-art collection of cutting-edge scholarship at the intersection of second language acquisition and learner corpus research. It draws on data-driven, statistical analysis to outline the background, methods, and outcomes of language learning, with a range of global experts providing detailed guidelines and findings. The volume is organized into five sections: Methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of learner language using corpora – setting the scene Key aspects in corpus design, annotation, and analysis for SLA Corpora in SLA theory and practice SLA constructs and corpora Future directions This is a ground-breaking collection of essays offering incisive and essential reading for anyone with an interest in second language acquisition, learner corpus research, and applied linguistics.




Interlanguage


Book Description

Few works in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) can endure multiple reads, but Selinker's (1972) "Interlanguage" is a clear exception. Written at the inception of the field, this paper delineates a disciplinary scope; asks penetrating questions; advances daring hypotheses; and proposes a first-ever conceptual and empirical framework that continues to stimulate SLA research. Sparked by a heightened interest in this founding text on its 40th anniversary, 10 leaders in their respective fields of SLA research collectively examine extrapolations of the seminal text for the past, the present, and the future of SLA research. This book offers a rare resource for novices and experts alike in and beyond the field of SLA.




Automatic Language Identification in Texts


Book Description

This book provides readers with a brief account of the history of Language Identification (LI) research and a survey of the features and methods most used in LI literature. LI is the problem of determining the language in which a document is written and is a crucial part of many text processing pipelines. The authors use a unified notation to clarify the relationships between common LI methods. The book introduces LI performance evaluation methods and takes a detailed look at LI-related shared tasks. The authors identify open issues and discuss the applications of LI and related tasks and proposes future directions for research in LI.




Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings


Book Description

The majority of natural language processing (NLP) is English language processing, and while there is good language technology support for (standard varieties of) English, support for Albanian, Burmese, or Cebuano--and most other languages--remains limited. Being able to bridge this digital divide is important for scientific and democratic reasons but also represents an enormous growth potential. A key challenge for this to happen is learning to align basic meaning-bearing units of different languages. In this book, the authors survey and discuss recent and historical work on supervised and unsupervised learning of such alignments. Specifically, the book focuses on so-called cross-lingual word embeddings. The survey is intended to be systematic, using consistent notation and putting the available methods on comparable form, making it easy to compare wildly different approaches. In so doing, the authors establish previously unreported relations between these methods and are able to present a fast-growing literature in a very compact way. Furthermore, the authors discuss how best to evaluate cross-lingual word embedding methods and survey the resources available for students and researchers interested in this topic.




Heritage and School Language Literacy Development in Migrant Children


Book Description

This book discusses literacy development in heritage language speakers and presents the results of four different quantitative studies that investigate the transfer of literacy skills in bi- and multilingual language development. The empirical studies focus on different populations of pupils, most of them located in various parts of Switzerland, and emphasise the potential residing in shared or transferred resources between their heritage languages and the languages spoken in the region to which their family has immigrated. The goal of all studies was to gain an understanding of the factors, both linguistic and non-linguistic in nature, that contribute to the development of language skills in both the heritage and school languages. Theoretical assumptions are put to the test via hypothesis testing and the generally shared assumptions on bilingual education are questioned based on the data. Furthermore, methodological problems in the investigation of linguistic interdependence are discussed. This book contributes to the scholarly investigation of potential beneficial effects in academic proficiency across languages in migrant children.




Approaching Language Transfer Through Text Classification


Book Description

This volume explains the detection-based approach to investigating crosslinguistic influence and illustrates the value of the approach through a collection of five empirica studies that use the approach to quantify, evaluate, and isolate the influences of learners' native-language backgrounds on their English writing.




Practical Natural Language Processing


Book Description

Many books and courses tackle natural language processing (NLP) problems with toy use cases and well-defined datasets. But if you want to build, iterate, and scale NLP systems in a business setting and tailor them for particular industry verticals, this is your guide. Software engineers and data scientists will learn how to navigate the maze of options available at each step of the journey. Through the course of the book, authors Sowmya Vajjala, Bodhisattwa Majumder, Anuj Gupta, and Harshit Surana will guide you through the process of building real-world NLP solutions embedded in larger product setups. You’ll learn how to adapt your solutions for different industry verticals such as healthcare, social media, and retail. With this book, you’ll: Understand the wide spectrum of problem statements, tasks, and solution approaches within NLP Implement and evaluate different NLP applications using machine learning and deep learning methods Fine-tune your NLP solution based on your business problem and industry vertical Evaluate various algorithms and approaches for NLP product tasks, datasets, and stages Produce software solutions following best practices around release, deployment, and DevOps for NLP systems Understand best practices, opportunities, and the roadmap for NLP from a business and product leader’s perspective




The Bible Translator


Book Description