Choosing as my vantage point the linguistically motivated Müller-Sternefeld hierarchy [23], which classifies constraints according to their locality properties, I investigate the interplay of various syntactic constraint classes on a formal level. For non-comparative constraints, I use Rogers’s framework of multi-dimensional trees [31] to state Müller and Sternefeld’s definitions in general yet...

Comparison is widely used by consumers during the process of product evaluation in order to emphasize their preference, which can contribute to a proxy for product competitiveness analysis. This paper proposes a novel method for mining comparative sentences based on the achievements of linguistic study. The definition of comparative sentence subcategory is put forward and a mixed rule pool cont...

The paper presents an ongoing project on automatic extraction of subcategorization frames of French adjectives. The extraction method is guided by syntactic corpus annotations and heuristic rules. In particular, we use general linguistic knowledge to distinguish constituents inherent to impersonal, comparative and certain adverbial constructions from subcategorized complements.

In this paper we present a cross-genre study on word order variation in Italian based on automatically dependency– parsed corpora. A comparative analysis focused on dependency direction and dependency distance for major constituents in the sentence is carried out in order to assess the influence of both textual genre and linguistic complexity on the distribution of phenonemena of syntactic mark...

The purpose of the present study was to bring together the evidence on possible cross-linguistic transfer in word order from two different perspectives: a transfer as an apparent obstacle in second language acquisition, and a transfer as a cause of attrition of the native language. The relationship between the same two languages in a contact situation was investigated. Since the majority of stu...

In this paper, we present a Conditional Random Field based approach for automatic detection of edit disfluencies in a conversational telephone corpus in French. We define disfluency patterns using both linguistic and acoustic features to perform disfluency detection. Two related tasks are considered : the first task aims at detecting the disfluent speech portion proper or reparandum, i.e. the p...

A popular tradition of studying semantic representation has been driven by the assumption that word meaning can be learned from the linguistic environment, despite ample evidence suggesting that language is grounded in perception and action. In this paper we present a comparative study of models that represent word meaning based on linguistic and perceptual data. Linguistic information is appro...

We study the detection of character types from fictional dialog texts such as screenplays. As approaches based on the analysis of utterances' linguistic properties are not sufficient to identify all fictional character types, we develop an integrative approach that complements linguistic analysis with interactive and communication characteristics, and show that it can improve the identification...

Linguistic markers of personality traits have been studied extensively, but few crosscultural studies exist. In this paper, we evaluate how native speakers of American English and Arabic perceive personality traits and naturalness of English utterances that vary along the dimensions of verbosity, hedging, lexical and syntactic alignment, and formality. The utterances are the turns within dialog...