The performance of most NLP applications relies upon the quality of linguistic resources. The creation, maintenance and enrichment of those resources are a labour-intensive task. In this paper we present the NLP architecture OAL, designed to assist computational linguists in the whole process of the development of resources in an industrial context: from corpora compilation to quality assurance...

Coherence is a central construct in attachment interviews. Nevertheless, the concept has never been the main focus of a study in the attachment field. The present study examined whether coherence in attachment interviews is defined differently by experts trained in attachment theory, by linguists, and by non-experts. The 72-item Coherence Q-sort (CQS) was used to determine the profile of a prot...

In this paper I bring several perspectives from languagechange and diachronic linguistics more generally to bear on thequestion of how broad linguists’ generalizations about speakers’linguistic behavior should be, and the extent to which they correspondto what speakers actually do themselves. Examples are drawn from thedevelopment of Greek, of English, and of Slavic, and fro...

This paper argues that an evolutionary perspective is natural when investigating cognitive adaptations related to language. This is because there appears to be correspondence between traits that linguists consider interesting and traits that have undergone selective pressure related to language. The paper briefly reviews theoretical results that shed light on what kind of adaptations we can exp...

In recent years, new developments in the area of lexicography have altered not only the management, processing and publishing of lexicographical data, but also created new types of products such as electronic dictionaries and thesauri. These expand the range of possible uses of lexical data and support users with more flexibility, for instance in assisting human translation. In this article, we...

We present experiments in incrementally learning a dependency parser. The parser will be used in the WordsEye Linguistics Tools (WELT) (Ulinski et al., 2014a; Ulinski et al., 2014b) which supports field linguists documenting a language’s syntax and semantics. Our goal is to make syntactic annotation faster for field linguists. We have created a new parallel corpus of descriptions of spatial rel...

Which languages convey the most information in a given amount of space? This is a question often asked of linguists, especially by engineers who often have some information theoretic measure of “information” in mind, but rarely define exactly how they would measure that information. The question is, in fact remarkably hard to answer, and many linguists consider it unanswerable. But it is a ques...