Distances derived from word embeddings can measure a range of gradational relations--similarity, hierarchy, entailment, and stereotype--and can be used at the document- and author-level in ways that overcome some of the limitations of weighted dictionary methods. We provide a comprehensive introduction to using word embeddings for relation…

Research has shown that food metaphors play an important role in humans' conceptualization of various domains of experience. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the phraseology of food metaphors. This research aims to investigate food metaphors and their phraseology. Particularly, this paper focuses on the lemmas "consume"…

Knowing functions and functional thinking have recently moved from just knowledge for older students to incorporating younger students, and functional thinking has been identified as one of the core competencies for algebra. Although it is significant for mathematical understanding, there is no unified view of functional thinking and how different…

A tension exists between rationalists and empiricists regarding the nature of knowledge: innate then activated/discovered (rationalists) or constructed then invented (empiricists). The assumption is that, to a certain extent, basic knowledge seems to be innate in our mind and develops through experience by thinking processes to construct meanings.…

This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

The purpose of this research is to explore three English synonyms, namely critical, serious, and crucial, with a particular focus on meanings, degrees of formality, collocations, and semantic preferences. Two dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, as well as the Corpus…

Verb-marking errors are a characteristic feature of the speech of typically-developing (TD) children and are particularly prevalent in the speech of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). However, both the pattern of verb-marking error in TD children and the pattern of verb-marking deficit in DLD vary across languages and interact…

German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne ('without') in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne 'with without'. We argue that this…

Recent developments in computerized scoring via semantic distance have provided automated assessments of verbal creativity. Here, we extend past work, applying computational linguistic approaches to characterize salient features of creative text. We hypothesize that, in addition to semantic diversity, the degree to which a story includes…

This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…

This paper undertakes an analysis of two divergent strategies aimed at driving culture towards the extremes: one involving stark minimalism and the other, gaudy maximalism. The former approach is predominantly embraced by the avant-garde, who possess the means to surround themselves with an array of commodities, thereby creating a distinguishing…

Most printed Chinese words are compounds built from the combination of meaningful characters. Yet, there is a poor understanding of how individual characters contribute to the recognition of compounds. Using a megastudy of Chinese word recognition (Tse et al., 2017), we examined how the lexical decision of existing and novel Chinese compounds was…

In this thesis, I use a combination of simulations and empirical data to demonstrate that a small set of structural and functional principles - the basic tenets of predictive coding theory - succinctly accounts for a very wide range of properties in the language processing system. Predictive coding approximates hierarchical Bayesian inference via…

Automatic essay scoring (AES) is an essential educational application in natural language processing. This automated process will alleviate the burden by increasing the reliability and consistency of the assessment. With the advances in text embedding libraries and neural network models, AES systems achieved good results in terms of accuracy.…

Unfolding models are frequently used to develop scales for measuring attitudes. Recently, unfolding models have been applied to examine rater severity and accuracy within the context of rater-mediated assessments. One of the problems in applying unfolding models to rater-mediated assessments is that the substantive interpretations of the latent…