Event-related potentials (ERPs) to task-relevant target and task-irrelevant novel stimuli were recorded in a somatosensory discrimination task. Subjects pressed a button to mechanical taps of the fifth finger (targets, P = 0.12), randomly interposed in sequences of taps to the second finger (standards, P = 0.76). Two types of infrequent novel stimuli were delivered; one was a mechanical tap to ...

In this study, the notions of homelessness and unhomeliness are studied in 2 novels by Naipaul: Half a Life (2001) and Magic Seeds (2004). Naipaul has been viewed by many postcolonial critics as an imperially complicit writer, for his controversial views of places and societies, particularly his disdain for non-Western societies. This study examines whether the imperatives of the postcolonial c...

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) Approach claims that there are some universalities in all languages. Speech acts seem to be present in all languages, but considering this approach, research has not indicated whether request speech act differs from one language to another. Thus, this study intended to investigate whether request strategies are used differently in English and Persian roma...

Noam Chomsky argues that only a meager percentage of the world, consisting of mainly large corporations and developed nations, prosper from globalization. As stated in Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-System Theory, the modern system of the world, which is constructed according to the economic status of nations, can be divided into three levels: the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery. Whil...

For the past year academics and policy makers have been discussing Thomas Piketty’s economics bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It documents the considerable rise over the past 40 years in national wealth relative to national income in the eight richest economies – the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada and Australia. For each of these countr...

To date, document clustering by genres or authors has been performed mostly by means of stylometric and content features. With the premise that novels are societies in miniature, we build social networks from novels as a strategy to quantify their plot and structure. From each social network, we extract a vector of features which characterizes the novel. We perform clustering over the vectors o...

Speaker identification is the task of attributing utterances to characters in a literary narrative. It is challenging to automate because the speakers of the majority of utterances are not explicitly identified in novels. In this paper, we present a supervised machine learning approach for the task that incorporates several novel features. The experimental results show that our method is more a...

Identifying plot structure in novels is a valuable step towards automatic processing of literary corpora. We present an approach to classify novels as either having a happy ending or not. To achieve this, we use features based on different sentiment lexica as input for an SVMclassifier, which yields an average F1-score of about 73%.