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A survey of web ontology languages and semantic web services

Author(s): Napoleon Alexandru Sireteanu / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2013

In the beginning World Wide Web was syntactic and the content itself was only readable by humans. The modern web combines existing web technologies with knowledge representation formalisms. In this sense, the Semantic Web proposes the mark-up of content on the web using formal ontology that structure essential data for the purpose of comprehensive machine understanding. On the syntactical level, standardization is an important topic. Many standards which can be used to integrate different information sources have evolved. Beside the classical database interfaces like ODBC, web-oriented standard languages like HTML, XML, RDF and OWL increase in importance. As the World Wide Web offers the greatest potential for sharing information, we will base our paper on these evolving standards.

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Adaptacja Chińskich hieroglifów w Japonii a kultura przekładu

Author(s): Isamu Yamada / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 10/2016

In the third century one part of elite of the ancient Japanese society adopted Chinese writing and began to learn it. It is assumed that at the beginning Japanese read Chinese characters following the sound patterns of the ancient Japanese language approximating the Chinese sounds. However, Japanese sounds applied the Chinese characters, and at the same time the word order was changed into Japanese word order. This was the beginning of kanbun kundoku, or Chinese writing with Japanese readings. The term ‘Japanese readings’ is used here in the sense of both: to read each individual character as a Chinese character, or, to read them replacing the word order of Chinese writing into a Japanese translation. When Chinese characters were adopted for use in Japan, they were at first read as Chinese sounds with a Japanese pronunciation approximating that of the Chinese reading. Thereafter, this type of Japanese translation for individual readings of Chinese characters known as ‘kundoku’ began. ‘Kundoku’ (reading characters with their Chinese pronunciations) is still used today along with ‘ondoku’ for reading Chinese characters used in Japanese, i.e. in ‘kanbun kundoku’. This first reading is important in the history of modern Japanese translation. The reason is that when Japanese first encountered western languages, this method of Chinese translation readings was used for English translation, French translation, and so on. In short, Japanese people created another style of written Japanese for translation, dating back to Chinese writing system, apart from the traditional ancient Japanese language system. In Japan, however, after Chinese characters were introduced from China, Japanese created a style of native Japanese readings. Japanese translators have translated naturally according to their own logic and style.

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Affinal Kinship Terminology in the Corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian Parallel Texts

Author(s): Ivan Derzhanski,Olena Siruk / Language(s): English / Issue: VI/2016

In this study we examine the occurrences and correspondences of terms for affinal kinship in a Bulgarian–Ukrainian parallel corpus of fiction. All instances of the terms selected for study, matching and non-matching, were located and counted, and the frequencies compared. Some of the asymmetries found may have roots in culture and history whilst others reflect diverse features of language and the practice of literary translation.

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ANTIKINIŲ VARDŲ LIETUVINIMAS:TARP TRADICIJOS IR NAUJOVIŲ

Author(s): Audrone Kucinskiene,Audorne Kairiene,Dalia Staškeviciene / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 57 (3)/2015

The problem of Lithuanization of Ancient names was and still is relevant and not fully resolved. It is manifested by varied spelling of names as well as by ongoing discussions and considerations of this matter in the media. Translated books are often subject to criticism: the translators and editors do not have the competences necessary to understand the patterns of ancient languages so that they could Lithuanize the names properly themselves, nor have they a unified reference. Development of the Digital Database of Ancient Names may be a solution to the problem. The tradition of spelling Latin and Greek ancient names is not stable or prevalent in Lithuanian writings. It is obvious from various cases of use in Lithuanian writings, collected in the Digital Database of Ancient Names.In fact, there are no grounds for speaking about traditions of Lithuanization, because such tradition was not formed or established. This is particularly true for transcription of proper names of Greek origin. We can only note certain tendencies and influences of other languages in different periods.

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Application of New Information and Computer Technologies in the Teaching of Foreign Languages

Author(s): Irena Miculeviciene / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

The paper describes the up-to-date methods of teaching or learning foreign languages, which are conditioned by the integration of information technologies in the teaching process. Internet gives a perfect opportunity to enliven the lectures of foreign languages, to improve their quality and effectiveness. The main advantage of internet is its authentic material in an authentic context. The examples of such authentic material can be Web 2.0 (website of second generation), Wiki, blogs and podcasts. The second advantage of internet is that it helps the learners to cooperate together. The teachers can lead the learners more effectively, consult each learner individually. It diversifies the teaching process, encourages the activity of students, who have learning difficulties.

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Are online forums a useful resource for the study of health needs and related information behaviour? Linguistic analysis of two online forums for people with mental disorders

Author(s): Barbara Niedzwiedzka,Paloma Korycinska / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2016

Knowledge of people’s health information needs and information behaviour can be used in planning health interventions in a way that they would meet people’s needs as accurately as possible and reflect how health information is acquired and processed. Aim. The aim of the study presented in this paper was to analyze the usefulness of online forums as a source of scientific knowledge about people’s health needs and information behaviour, which could then be actively used in the area of public health. Method. The content, a total of 1,575 entries, derived from two open forums devoted to depression in the years 2012–2015 was analysed using a set of mixed methods, including: a formal (quantitative) analysis of the material using the tools of computational linguistics (QDAMiner Simsat), inductive theme analysis EMIC, in the so-called hard variety, reinforced by elements of Awdiejew’s conversational grammar, and comparative method. Results. Both health information needs and behaviour can be identified on Internet forums dedicated to health problems. Linguistic analysis of online forums can give very interesting results and clues that cannot be obtained using questionnaires or personal interviews. It seems, however, that it should never be the only method used in investigating this matter. Since there are several intervening factors that may distort reliability of findings, determining whether we are dealing with real or created needs or behaviour requires confirming the results of the linguistic analysis of the forums using other methods.

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Bare Quantifier Fronting as Contrastive Topicalization

Author(s): Ion Giurgea / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2015

I argue that indefinite (in particular bare quantifiers such as ‘something’, ‘somebody’, etc.) which are neither existentially presupposed nor in the restriction of a quantifier over situations, can undergo topicalization in a number of Romance languages (Catalan, Italian, Romanian, Spanish), but only if the sentence contains “verum” focus, i.e. focus on a high degree of certainty of the sentence. I analyze these indefinite as contrastive topics, using Büring’s (1999) theory (where the term ‘S-topic’ is used for what I call ‘contrastive topic’). I propose that the topic is evaluated in relation to a scalar set including generalized quantifiers such as {P x P(x), P MANYx P(x), P MOSTx P(x), P xP(x)} or {P xP(x), P P(a), P P(b) ...}, and that the contrastive topic is the weakest generalized quantifier in this set. The verum focus, which is part of the “comment” that co-occurs with the “Topic”, introduces a set of alternatives including degrees of certainty of the assertion. The speaker asserts that his claim is certainly true or highly probable, contrasting it with stronger claims for which the degree of probability is unknown. This explains the observation that in downward entailing contexts, the fronted quantified DPs are headed by ‘all’ or ‘many’, whereas ‘some’, small numbers or ‘at least n’ appear in upward entailing contexts. Unlike other cases of non-specific topics, which are property topics, these are quantifier topics: the topic part is a generalized quantifier, the comment is a property of generalized quantifiers. This explains the narrow scope of the fronted quantified DP.

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Can We Use Second Life For Language Learning And Instruction?

Author(s): Yavuz Samur / Language(s): English / Issue: 145/2009

Over the last few years there has been an increased interest in Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs), or virtual worlds, by instructional designers and developers. One of these MUVEs is a very well known world, Second Life (SL). There are many instructional activities taking place in Second Life and language learning, English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learning is just one of them. Gartner Inc. (2007) says that 80 percent of active internet users will have a “Second Life” in the virtual world by the end of 2011. In this paper, the researches and use of SL in language instruction is examined and some suggestions are offered to both instructors and designers on how they can leverage of SL especially in higher education settings.

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Change in Word Meanings as One of the Features Signifying the Development of Computer Terms

Author(s): Vilija Celiešiene / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

The article aims to analyse the change in meanings of standard language words viewed as a result of the development of computer terms. Words that, in the process of terminologisation and transterminologisation, have been transferred to computer terms from standard language or other subject fields and included in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Computer Terms (Enciklopedinis kompiuterijos žodynas 2012) are analysed. The objects of the research were simple semantic formations and caiques, all of which were standard Lithuanian language words that either turned into terms in the field of computer terms or were transferred from other subject fields by inner borrowing. The research carried out has shown that most of the terms studied are semantic caiques formed – albeit merely outwardly – using own linguistic means yet having borrowed, most likely from English, their very concept and its definition. The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Computer Terms contains only a few single-word computer terms whose new meaning originated from the Lithuanian language and that could be regarded as semantic formations.

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Chinese Dream (中国梦) – kolektywistyczny konstrukt ucieleśniający ducha współczesnych Chin

Author(s): Arkadiusz Gut,Michal Wilczewski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2015

This article presents an attempt to explicate the concept of Chinese Dream on the basis of the political thought and guidelines of Chinese President Xi Jinping, as well as to show the sociopolitical and cognitive context of its implementation, and its place in the philosophy of the Communist Party of China. Aside from the theoretical framework of the concept, the Chinese people’s opinions from social networking sites (huxiu.com, blogchina.com, sohu.com) and the Chinese edition of Financial Times will be provided. The second part of the article constitutes a textual reconstruction of the Chinese Dream in international press, taking into account such newspapers as New York Times, Financial Times, Global Times, Economist, China Digital Times, China Daily USA, South China Morning Post Columns.

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Complementation of light verb constructions in world Englishness: a corpus-based study

Author(s): Judita Giparaite / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2016

Light verb constructions (LVCs) have been studied not only in native Englishness, but also in a number of non-native varieties. The present research focuses on the constructions with the light verbs have, get, give, make, and do combined with the deverbal noun laugh. The study aims at giving a descriptive analysis of the structures in question in twenty English varieties on the basis of corpus data. All the data for analysis are collected from the GloWbE corpus. Constructions have/get/give a laugh is investigated in terms of frequency and complementation patterns.

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Digital Presentation of Bulgarian Language Heritage - Tools and Web-applications

Author(s): Ralitsa Dutsova / Language(s): English / Issue: VI/2016

The article describes a model of integrating language techniques with leading-edge technology to develop a web-based on-line tool for heritage language preservation and e-learning. Bulgarian language resources - parallel corpora and bilingual dictionary are presented in an interactive way using a common web-interface which is accessible for students, faculty, and affiliated Heritage language communities.

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Dovanota vertybė ar įsiūlytas paveldas? Lietuvos rusakalbių nuostatos gimtosios kalbos atžvilgiu

Author(s): Ala Lichaciova,Svetlana Markova / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 4/2014

So far there has been no detailed research done in Lithuania that would allow to analyze the attitudes of the Russian-speaking citizens towards their native language. In this article, an attempt is made to determine the subtle relation between the Lithuanian citizens of non-Lithuanian nationality and the Russian language which is considered to be native in their families, while they either are Russians or identify themselves as Russians.Certain questions concerning this problem are taken into consideration: do Russian-speaking citizens feel good about using their native language; do they feel affinity to Russia as their symbolic homeland or the mother country of their language; do they want their children to have a good command of Russian and consider it their native language; is their relationship with their native language affected by the manifestation of Russophobia in public discourse and mass media.The data of the sociolinguistic projects Language Use and Ethnic Identity in Lithuanian Cities (2007–2009) and A Sociolinguistic Map of Lithuania (2010–2012) focussing on Vilnius, Klaipėda and Visaginas is discussed. These cities have been selected as the ones with the largest Russian-speaking population as compared to other regions of Lithuania.The analysis of in-depth interviews reveals that for the Russian-speaking people in Lithuania the native language remains the only real indicator of their ethnic self-identification. Most of the respondents do not regard Russia as a country close to them in terms of lifestyle and mentality, they do not perceive Russia as a symbolic concept defining their self-identity; it is for them the space of their mother tongue. The respondents claim that they value their mother tongue, see it as emotionally closest and stress the relation between the Russian language and culture as well as the pragmatic value of knowing Russian nowadays. Young respondents declare that they intend to do their best to pass their mother tongue to their future children.However, the intentions of the Russian-speaking people of Lithuania to support the vitality of their native language, which requires more effort than is usual for people living in the environment of a different language. In the Lithuanian media and online comment sections, ethnic and linguistic intolerance towards local people who speak another language is livened up periodically. Therefore Russian-speaking residents of Lithuania need to be psychologically strong in order to resist the pressure of public discourse and to sustain their native language.

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Ensembles of Classifiers for Parallel Categorization of Large Number of Text Documents Expressing Opinions

Author(s): Frantisek Darena,Jan Žižka / Language(s): English / Issue: 1 (47)/2017

Opinions provided by people that used some services or purchased some goods are a rich source of knowledge. The opinion classification, applying mostly supervised classifiers, is one of the essential tasks. Computer’s technological capabilities are still a major obstacle, especially when processing huge volumes of data. This study proposes and evaluates experimentally a parallelism application to the classification of a very large number of contrary opinions expressed as freely written text reviews. Instead of training a single classifier on the entire data set, an ensemble of classifiers is trained on disjunctive subsets of data and a group decision is used for the classification of unlabeled items. The main assessment criteria are computational efficiency and error rates, combined into a single measure to be able to compare ensembles of different sizes. Support vector machines, artificial neural networks, and decision trees, belonging to frequently used classification methods, were examined. The paper demonstrates the suggested method viability when the number of text reviews leads to computational complexity, which is beyond the contemporary common PC’s capabilities. Classification accuracy and the values of other classification performance measures (Precision, Recall, F-measure) did not decrease, which is a positive finding.

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Globalni memi u lokalnom konekstu: Kontakt bosanskoga i engleskog jezika na internetu

Author(s): Edina Špago-Cumurija / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 12/2014

In accordance with the biological language model, memes are ideas and values, which spread within a community like viruses. They seem to have a cooperative function, enabling social coordination and a biologically based need for the defense and identification of potential intruders. Memes relate to cultural and language communities, language being the strongest link between people and their social reality, including their physical experiences and psychological and physical reactions to it. Today’s society functions locally, within cultural and language communities, and globally, beyond the nation and its limited territory. Such a global approach has been creating new, very often hybrid values, and consequently, new elements in language, mostly in the lexicon. Bosnian language and society inevitably interact with other cultures, languages and values, mostly through media and the Internet as a typical global platform for communication. This paper analyzes the linguistic content of the most popular Bosnian-Herzegovinian websites, with special emphasis on the global memes/lexical units that are entering its linguistic and cultural space, and which create new values as they adjust themselves to the local context. Analysis shows how much the Internet language reflects global values in this local context, and how this indicates trends of social change in Bosnia & Herzegovina.

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Ideologiczne obrazy świata w mediach alternatywnych – nacjonalistów i anarchistów

Author(s): Marcin Pieluzek / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 4/2015

The starting point of this article is Helmut Gipper’s conception of the ideological worldviews which states that worldviews incorporate definite outlook of life (mindset), beliefs, evaluations, norms and values. The main aim of the article is to explore the worldviews constructed by the far- left and far- right movements in their online publications. By adopting a communication perspective and by analyzing contexts and reconstructing the semantics of the most frequent words (key- words) the author tries to discover the patterns and regularities in the communication of the radical political movements, identify core elements of their identity and, on such basis, reconstruct key elements of their ideological worldviews. The author refers to the constructivist theories, conceptions of the linguistic as well as textual worldviews and uses the methods and techniques of the corpus linguistics.

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Improving language disorders in the case of children through the use of multiplatform technology with Romanian applications

Author(s): Georgeta Pâni?oara,Cristina Marina Sandu,Silvia Fat,Doru-Vlad Popovici,Iulia Lazar,Liliana Mata,Daniela Mihaescu / Language(s): Romanian / Issue: 37/2016

The role of communication skills of a child is essential because it is closely related to normal child development (cognitive, emotional, motivational) considered major instruments for participation and involvement in all daily social activities, family , group of friends and school environment. From this perspective, we consider necessary to carry out a program of recovery therapy through computer technology access and use of video games as positive indicators for correcting and improving language through highly motivational role instruments.

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Internetikeele automaatne süntaktiline analüüs kitsenduste grammatikaga

Author(s): Dage Särg / Language(s): Estonian / Issue: 12/2016

The paper provides an overview of an attempt to adapt the Estonian Constraint Grammar rule set for netspeak. The rule set has been developed by Kaili Müürisep and Tiina Puolakainen for shallow and dependency parsing of standard written Estonian, and it has previously been adapted for shallow parsing of spoken Estonian by Kaili Müürisep and Heli Uibo. First, in order to adapt the rules, a chatroom corpus was parsed with the existing rule set. The corpus was manually revised and based on the errors that were found, changes were made to the rule set. The changes regarded detection of clause boundaries and particle verbs, as well as assignment of syntactic tags and dependency relations. Extensive use of discourse particles and direct addresses, short sentence length, and small percentage of attributes among the syntactic functions used in text appeared to be the most distinctive features of netspeak, as well as the large amount of elliptical sentences from which, in addition to other syntactic functions, a predicate can be left out. As a result of adapting the rule set, the results of both shallow and dependency parsing improved. The most error-prone syntactic functions were subjects, predicatives, and adverbials. In dependency parsing, the largest number of errors was made in determining the governors of adverbials.

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Językowy obraz psa zawarty w inskrypcjach nagrobnych na wirtualnych cmentarzach zwierzęcych

Author(s): Urszula Kolberová / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 09/2016

The purpose of this paper was lexical and metaphorical analysis of tombstone inscriptions for dogs found on Polish-language websites in the study of the linguistic worldview (LWV) and showing the view of the dog, the attitude of the contemporary human being (a Pole) to the dog. The subject of this paper was taken up as part of the research project carried out by the Department of Slavic Studies of the University of Ostrava The view of the dog in the languages and culture of Slavic nations. The analysis showed that the dog is defined very positively here, as a family member, a friend, happiness, an angel, a sweetheart, a treasure, etc. The similarity between the choice of vocabulary on humans’ and dogs’ tombstone inscriptions is striking.

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Kompiuterijos srities naujieji skoliniai

Author(s): Sonata Vaiciakauskiene / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 1/2016

A rapid spread of modern technologies determines a notably rich flow of new loanwords in computing. The article analyses the tendencies of adaptation and integration of new loanwords into text in computing as well as discusses the reasons of arrival of loanwords into the Lithuanian language, their functions in a text, origin, and semantic groups. The study material is represented by 248 loanwords in computing, their 479 variations forms, and 803 examples illustrating their usage. The study material is analyzed using descriptive-analytical and comparative methods. Quantitative analysis is invoked in highlighting the tendencies of adaptation and integration of computing loanwords into text. The study is absolutely relevant in the context of computing discourse as well as in the borrowed lexical context of the past decade. This is the first thorough and coherent study of new loanwords in computing reflecting the peculiarities and tendencies of their real usage. According to the study data, the majority (88 percent) of new title loanwords in computing adapt to the Lithuanian language system to the maximum; they possess an orthographically and morphologically functioning form, which completely conforms to the Lithuanian language system. The use of orthographically adapted computing loanwords is the rarest (1.2 percent of all titles). It is noteworthy that the real tendencies of the study area loanwords are reflected through the variability of loanword forms. The study reveals that almost a half (47 percent) of loanword forms used in computing discourse is adapted both morphologically and orthographically. Slightly more than a fourth (27 percent) of the analyzed forms is represented by the authentic expression of computing loanword forms which are not adapted at all. The abundance of the usage of the authentic expression of computing loanword forms is determined by the specification of the usage itself: the computing discourse contains a number of symbolic names, such as programs, tools, buttons, social networks and other naming. The analysis of the study material shows that new computing loanwords are usually (62 percent of usage cases) integrated into text graphically: the loanwords are distinguished by using italics, quotes and/or brackets. Less frequently (38 percent cases), a computing loanword that is new, unknown or partially known to an addressee is explained through metalinguistic comments.

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