If we want to describe the action of someone who is looking out a window for an extended time, how do we choose between the words gazing, staring, and peering? What exactly is the difference between an argument, a dispute, and a row? In this paper, we describe our research in progress on the problem of lexical choice and the representations of world knowledge and of lexical structure and meanin...

A significant part of the meaning of any text lies in the author's style. Different choices of words and syntactic structure convey different nuances in meaning, which must be carried through in any translation if it is to be considered faithful. Up to now, machine translation systems have been unable to do this. Subtleties of style are simply lost to current MT systems. The goal of the present...

Information retrieval systems are built to handle texts as topical items: texts are tabulated by occurrence frequencies of content words in them, under the assumption that text topic is reasonably well modeled by content word occurrence. But texts have several interesting characteristics beyond topic. The experiments described in this text investigate stylistic variation. Roughly put, style is ...

The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the behaviour of 5 phonotactic phenomena in French, which have been shown to be rather sensitive to regional and/or stylistic variation: schwa deletion at the initial of polysyllabic words and in monosyllabic grammatical words, liaison, deletion of final postobstruent /l/ and /R/ and of /l/ in the 3 personal clitic subject pronoun ‘il’. The analysis...

Texts vary not only by topic, but by style; indeed, often the variation between texts ‘about the same thing’ can be just as noticeable as the variation between texts ‘about different things’. Some facets of this variation are quite easy to detect, and quite predictable when applied to categorization of texts by genre, functional style, or tentatively quality. Making use of such variation in an ...

Authorship identification is a task of identifying authors of anonymous texts given examples of the writing of authors. The increasingly large volumes of anonymous texts on the Internet enhance the great yet urgent necessity for authorship identification. It has been applied to more and more practical applications including literary works, intelligence, criminal law, civil law, and computer for...

Tourism English belongs to the English for Specific Purpose (ESP) and it has its own stylistic features. This paper aims at analyzing the stylistic features of tourism English. Firstly, a large amount of authentic materials are collected from official tourism websites of Britain and the U.S., and then a corpus named Tourism English Corpus (TEC) is compiled. Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British Englis...

Results are reported for stylistic and developmental aspects of vocabulary composition for 1,803 children and families who participated in the tri-city norming of a new parental report instrument, the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories. We replicate previous studies with small samples showing extensive variation in use of common nouns between age 0; 8 and 1;4 (i.e. 'referential sty...

In this paper, we focused on profiling authors on age, gender, and five personality traits. The corpus consists of anonymized twitter posts categorized into 4 different languages. Our proposed approach was to use a combination of tfidf, function words, stylistic features, and text bigrams, and used an SVM for each task.