Reading Room
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The reading room is updated every month so you have access to the latest journal articles and chapters taken from Cambridge's most recent publications.
Journal articles
The following articles are provided from Cambridge Journals Online.
'Extracting paraphrase patterns from bilingual parallel corpora' (PDF)
Shiqi Zhao, Haifeng Wang, Ting Liu And Sheng Li
Natural Language Engineering, Volume 15, Special Issue 04, October 2009, pp503–526
Paraphrase patterns are semantically equivalent patterns, which are useful in both paraphrase recognition and generation. This paper presents a pivot approach for extracting paraphrase patterns from bilingual parallel corpora, whereby the paraphrase patterns in English are extracted using the patterns in another language as pivots. We make use of log-linear models for computing the paraphrase likelihood between pattern pairs and exploit feature functions based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), lexical weighting (LW), and monolingual word alignment (MWA). Using the presented method, we extract more than 1 million pairs of paraphrase patterns from about 2 million pairs of bilingual parallel sentences. The precision of the extracted paraphrase patterns is above 78%. Experimental results show that the presented method significantly outperforms a well-known method called discovery of inference rules from text (DIRT). Additionally, the log-linear model with the proposed feature functions are effective. The extracted paraphrase patterns are fully analyzed. Especially, we found that the extracted paraphrase patterns can be classified into five types, which are useful in multiple natural language processing (NLP) applications.
'Air Safety, Language Assessment Policy, and Policy Implementation: The Case of Aviation English' (PDF)
J. Charles Alderson
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Volume 29, March 2009, pp 168–187
The language of international aviation communication is English, but numerous aviation incidents and accidents have involved miscommunication between pilots and air traffic controllers, many of whom are not native speakers of the language. In 2004 the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) published a set of Language Proficiency Requirements and a Proficiency Rating Scale, and by 5 March 2008, air traffic controllers and pilots were required by the ICAO to have a certificate attesting to their proficiency in the language used for international aeronautical communication. Although some organizations made efforts to produce tests by the deadline, in the event an implementation period was allowed, with a new deadline of March 2011. This article describes a number of surveys of tests of aviation English, the implementation of the ICAO requirements, and the rating scales. It concludes that many of the assessment procedures appear not to meet international professional standards for language tests, the implementation of the language assessment policy is inadequate, and much more careful and close monitoring is needed of the quality of the tests and assessment procedures required by the policy.
'Crossing boundaries: The nexus of time, space, person, and place in narrative' (PDF)
Deborah Schiffrin
Language in Society, Volume 38, Issue 04, September 2009, pp 421–445
Recent research on narrative has widened the scope of analysis, suggesting the value of reexamining the canonical Labovian view of the structure and function of personal-experience narrative. This article suggests that narrative is not simply a way of evoking and shaping experience in time. Rather, narrative can evoke and shape cultural 'chronotopes' (Bakhtin 1981) or nexuses of time, space, and identity. To illustrate this, I analyze a narrative from an oral history related in 1972 by a young woman whose volunteer work in the mid-1960s led to the rehabilitation of a small African American enclave in a middle-class White suburb. Analysis of clause types, constructed dialogue, existential there, deixis, verb chains, and referring expressions shows that the narrative is a blend of genres evoking place as well as personal identity linked to complex coordinates of time and space, and dependent intertextually on other parts of a larger story. (Narrative, oral history, chronotope, space, place, identity, genre)
Book chapters
Personality and good language learners (PDF)
Madeline Ehrman
(Chapter 4 of Lessons from Good Language Learners, edited by Carol Griffiths, 2008)
'According to the findings of this study, the best language learners tend to have introverted personalities, a finding which runs contrary to much of the literature, and, even, to pedagogical intuition. The best language learners are intuitive and they are logical and precise thinkers who are able to exercise judgment.'
The corpus as object: Design and purpose (PDF)
Susan Hunston
(Chapter 2 of Corpora in Applied Linguistics, 2002)
'As corpora have become larger and more diverse, and as they are more frequently used to make definitive statements about language, issues of how they are designed have become more important. Four aspects of corpus design are discussed in this chapter: size, content, representativeness and permanence.'