Abstracts and Short Bios for JWLLP-28 (2019/12): The 28th Joint Workshop on Linguistics and Language Processing

abstracts

The Chinese Verb Embodiment Database (CVED), James Britton and Chu-Ren Huang
　　The Chinese Verb Embodiment Database is a newly collected set of embodiment norms for 689 of the most frequently-occurring verbs in the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese. It aims to provide a resource for research into the role of embodiment in the conceptualisation of Chinese verbs. The norms were collected from 65 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese who completed an online survey in simplified Chinese. The research also aimed to discover which verbal features, such as detailed part-of-speech and Chinese character structure, can predict relative embodiment ratings. Statistical analysis has shown that whether a verb is active or stative is a strong predictor of its embodiment rating.
The meanings of power in English and Chinese: a corpus-based contrastive lexical description, Xian Wang
　　The notion of power is at the heart of socially-oriented language studies, i.e., (critical) discourse analysis, politeness research, and workplace communication. This study examines the keyword power in English and 權力quanli in Chinese in terms of their core and connotative meanings. We draw on large scale corpora (e.g., enTenTen15, zhTenTen17 accessible in Sketch Engine) to investigate the use of the keywords in a number of comparable contexts and to look at their major collocates. We draw on conceptual ontology frameworks (SUMO, Wordnet) to map the keywords in conceptual networks and contrast their similarities and differences. The study attempts to attest the hypothesis that 權力quanli (or its synonym 力量liliang) in Chinese closely related to the relevant social networks in which the participants play a role, and power in English is largely derived from individual’s right, ability and creativity.
The roles of English alphabet in Cantonese word construction: evidence from large scale corpora, Lily Lim
　　Cantonese speakers are comparatively more bilingual (with Chinese and English) than Mandarin speakers, frequently borrowing from the English language while tending to co-activate the two languages for conveying meaning. This manifests in the way English alphabets participate in word construction in Cantonese. Cantonese speakers seem to be at ease using English alphabets to spell out Cantonese words and even to coin new words and expressions. This study explores a large-scale Cantonese corpus available in Sketch Engine (SkE). Our attempt is to capture the fashions in which English alphabets participate in Cantonese word formation. We found that English alphabets present handy tools for spelling out Cantonese words and creating abbreviations, and frequently occur in loan words in Cantonese, which are often truncated in a “Cantonese-fashion”. We identified numerous instances in which English alphabets mix with Chinese characters to create vivid expressions. We further discovered that Cantonese neologisms coined with English alphabets do not even need to have their original Chinese characters (中文本字). At the morpho-syntactic level, some Cantonese speakers borrow inflectional forms “-ing” and “-ed” to express verb aspect information.
Alternative questions in Korean: A Construction-based Perspective, Jong-Bok Kim
　　
Task Influence on Learner Speeches: An Analysis of the ICNALE Spoken Dialogue Module, Shin'ichiro Ishikawa
　　
Frames of Reasoning: Metaphor, Politics, and Novel Expressions, Kathleen Ahrens
　　In discourse, abstract topics such as economics are often discussed through metaphors (Alejo, 2010; Charteris-Black & Ennis, 2001; Fukuda, 2009). Many studies have demonstrated that such metaphorical frames can have important real-life effects, both by influencing individual voters and by dominating political discourse (Boeynaems et al., 2017). While such studies have generated important insights, the dynamic nature of frames over time has received less empirical attention (Lecheler et al., 2015). An important aspect remaining underexplored is how metaphorical frames for societal topics themselves change over time. A second unexplored aspect has to do with whether or not framing may be influenced by the level of novelty of the metaphor. This talk will present a diachronic corpus-based study and an experimental study to examine these two questions.
What we should expect when a Japanese restaurant is offering "Hot Sands" and "Waves against a Rock", Yasunari Harada, Miwa Morishita, Yuko Hiramatsu and Masashi Saraki
　　Many of menu items in Japanese restaurants, coffee shops and sweet shops are influenced by foreign words and phrases and are sometimes expressed or written in Katakana characters. Some of those may be transcribed into English, French and Italian that would make sense, but others may produce expressions that are incomprehensible to native speakers of those languages. As an example, sandwiches are borrowed into Japanese as サンドイッチ or sandoicchi, which is then truncated into サンド or sando. Some restaurants and eateries in Japan mistakenly express this as "sand", most typically in "hot sand", which in English cannot mean anything edible. Interestingly, there are uses of "sandos" on some of the more recent youtube video clips, most notably with reference to "tamago sandos" or "boiled egg salad sandos".
Linguistic Landscapes in Nikko and Kobe, Yuko Hiramatsu and Miwa Morishita
　　With 2020 Tokyo Olympics close at hand, shrines and temples in the Nikko World Heritage area are struggling to convey the historical significance of the traditional cultural values of the area in multiple languages for inbound tourists from various countries and regions and linguistic landscape of signage and postings along the pilgrimage path leading from Nikko Station to Shinkyo is also changing. New shops and restaurants can be found which cleverly utilizes formerly abandoned old houses in traditional styles. We will report some of our findings based on our surveys conducted in 2017 and 2018.
Translation and Synesthesia of Chinese-English Bilingual Wine Reviews Corpus, Xi Chen, Songnan Quan and Chu-Ren Huang
　　This study on synaesthesia and translation is conducted by Nvivo 12 Plus and Python based on our Chinese-English Parallel Corpus of Wine Reviews. Synaesthesia as a cross-sense phenomenon has drawn the attention of researchers in neuropsychology and linguistics (Huang, 2016). We attempt to test the linguistic mapping models of synaesthesia, i.e. Williams (1976) and Zhao and Huang (2018) by our textual data of wine reviews. In addition, our parallel corpus also serves as a dataset for machine translation between Chinese and English in the specific domain of wine reviews. Therefore, this research will address: 1. the differences of synaesthesia use between Chinese and English in wine reviews; 2. the translation of key words between Chinese and English in wine reviews.
Vector Space Models and Semantic Relations, Emmanuele Chersoni
　　
Effects of radicals' structures and functions on processing traditional and simplified Chinese characters, Yu-Yin Hsu 　　We investigated how adult native Chinese speakers who are traditional Chinese character users (n=30) processed traditional Chinese characters of two radical structures (Top-Bottom, and Left-Right). These types of characters are known to have one of the radicals presents the meaning related information, and the other presents the pronunciation related information. We used the eyetracking measurements and metalinguistic judgments to study these readers’ processing of the radical function-structure associations, and whether such associations affect the character recognition. Then, we report results about how such readers processed simplified characters of the same types of radical structures but with more opaque pronounciation-meaning association.
Generating Derivational Relations for the Japanese WordNet: The Case of Agentive Nouns, Ryan Lim Dao Wei and Francis Bond
　　
Wanderword Wanders and Wonders, Chu-Ren Huang
　　Wanderwords (wanderworter) are loanwords that have spread in many languages. They typically have some variants, and often play central roles in our everyday life and are richly embedded with contextual information of cultural contact and language change. Some of the best examples are discussed in Jurafsky’s (2014) book The Language of Food. In this talk, I will look at words borrowed into and from the Chinese languages, and often through contact with Japanese. I will start with the word 'ketchup', as earlier discussed by Jurafsky and myself, to expand to other seasonings and spices, followed by discussion of the well explored term of 'tea' and other beverages. Lastly, I will discuss how wanderwords travel through space, time, and conceptual domains.
　　Some of the words to be covered: badiane, castella, cha, chai, copitiam, coriander/Chinese parsley, cumin/zireh, fennel, fagara, ketchup, hodai, lapsang souchong, pekoe, sago, siok phang, sago, tea, tempura, te, udon, wonton

short biographical notes of the invited participants

Kathleen Ahrens is a Professor in the Department of English and the Director of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is Chair of the Executive Board for the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (18-22), former President of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities (18-19), and a member of the International Advisory Board for the Metaphor Lab Amsterdam. She takes an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of metaphor, running behavioural crowd-sourcing, neuro-imaging, and reaction times studies, as well as analysing metaphor use through corpus-based and ontological-based approaches.
Francis Bond
James Britton
Xi Chen is a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Macau and a research assistant at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Emmanuele Chersoni
Yasunari Harada is Director at Admissions Center, Professor at Faculty of Law, Director at the Institute for Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Development and researcher at the Institute for the Study of Language and Information, Waseda University.
Yuko Hiramatsu
Yu-Yin Hsu is Assistant Professor of Chinese linguistics in the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include syntax theory, information structure, focus prosody, psycholinguistic sentence processing, pedagogical grammar, and teaching Chinese as a second/foreign language.
Chu-Ren Huang PhD (Cornell), Chair Professor of Applied Chinese Language Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Editor, Lingua Sinica, Studies in Natural Language Processing, The Humanities in Asia, Frontiers in Chinese Linguistics, Studies in East Asian Linguistics
Dr. Shin'ichiro (Shin) Ishikawa is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the School of Languages & Communication, Kobe University, Japan. His research interests cover corpus linguistics, statistical linguistics, TESOL, and SLA. He has published many academic papers and books on branches of applied linguistics. He is a leader in the ICNALE learner corpus project.
Yasuhiro Katagiri is President of Future University of Hakodate.
　　2019/12/13 9:11
　　Greetings from Taiwan (where I'm staying for a business trip).
　　While looking at the program Yasunari dutifully compiled with a number of enticing presentation titles, I feel very sorry for not being able to join you in the JWLLP-28 this time. I reminisce about the wonderful time we had in JWLLP-27, together with PACLIC33, in Hakodate. JWLLP provides us with an invaluable venue for the cross-fertilization between linguistics and language processing, particularly in Asia-Pacific region. I wish you all a good discussion and camaraderie in the conference.
　　Yasu Katagiri
Mayumi Kawamura is a language annotator, working with Yasunari Harada for the past 13 years on segmentation, transcription and behavioral annotation of Japanese EFL learners' interactional learning activities.
Jong-Bok Kim, Alexeder von Humboldt Research Award Winner, is Professor at Dept of English Language and Literature and Director at Institute for the Study of Language and Information in Kyung Hee University, Seoul, Korea.
http://web.khu.ac.kr/~jongbok/
Lily Lim
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lily_Lim6
Miwa Morishita, Associate Professor at Faculty of Global Communication, Kobe Gakuin University, visiting researcher at the Institute for Digital Enhancement of Cognitive Development, Waseda University and visiting researcher at the Institute for Service Innovation Studies, Meiji University
http://researchmap.jp/read0142634/?lang=english
Songnan Quan is PhD student of Computational Linguistics at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Masashi Saraki
Sachiko Shudo is Professor of English and Linguistics in Waseda University's Faculty of Law in Tokyo. She obtained her PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University in 1998. Her dissertation, The Presupposition and the Discourse Function of the Japanese Particle mo, was published in Routledge's Outstanding Dissertation in Linguistics Series in 2002. Her main research interests include pragmatic issues involving presupposition. She is currently Principal Investigator for Waseda University Grant for Special Research Projects (Continuing Research) entitled "Politeness-triggered manipulation of pragmatic constraints and its influence on semantic change."
Makiko Takekuro is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at Waseda University and Principal Investigator for the Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) No.24720193, entitled, "A linguistic anthropological analysis of social interaction: The intersection of language, gesture, and environment in Ishigaki." She is editor-in-chief of the proceeding volume (to be published online soon) for the first International Workshop on Linguistics of BA held in December of 2011 at Waseda University.
Xian Wang
Ryan Lim Dao Wei

notices

First drafted September 8th, 2015. Last revised December 13th, 2019.
The meeting and talks announced in this web page are subject to change without prior notice. The organizers should not be held responsible for any purported or actual damages by prospective participants due to those changes.