All in 1 Vocabulary Site

Tom Cobb

The Compleat Lexical Tutor is a long-standing vocabulary resource that has seen many developments, and remains a great resource for any language teacher. Developed by Tom Cobb, it is everything a teacher can ask for: quick, easy and flexible.

Paul Nation

The basic idea is that you can use the site to develop language learning materials from ANY text that you might have. It relies heavily on Paul Nation's work on the different levels of vocabulary, and even uses an online version of the old reliable 'VocabProfile' programme. This allows you to identify which words in a text belong to the 1st, 2nd or 3rd most frequent 1000 words, or to the Academic Word List. Using this information, the language teacher can then identify which words to focus on when developing exercises for their students. Language teachers will also be happy to hear that the site offers tools for 'instant' exercises and activities using word lists and concordances.

But this site is not just for language teachers. The tools offered will help a wide range of researchers that want help in examining the vocabulary of texts. As well as the VocabProfile, you can also find n-gram and other statistics, concordances, a programme to run priming experiments, and much more - with plenty added every time I visit. Plus, a little digging takes you to a lot more resources from the good work that Tom has been involved in for some time. Highly recommended. Keep up the good work Tom.

A Little Mae West

Mae West, actor & writer

If you could have such a thing! Here are a few choice quotes* from the woman who put sass into equality, inspired even Dali (right) & created an intonation pattern all her own (even when she sang - try the player below). “I speak two languages, Body and English.” “Opportunity knocks for every man, but you have to give a woman a ring.” “When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.” “When women go wrong, men go right after them."

Mae West by Salvador Dali

Mae West - Come Up And See Me Sometime Found at abmp3 search engine

*Acknowledgment: http://en.thinkexist.com/

Computational Linguistics - for free!!

Hats off to Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) & MIT Press for making the excellent journal Computational Linguistics FREE!

That's right. You heard right. It's free. Under the banner of an Open Access Journal, and thanks to the support of the ACL, you can now access a lot of groundbreaking articles from the 'noughties' whenever, wherever via your internet-connected device of choice. (For more on ACL's commitment to Open Access for proceedings and journals see the ACL Anthology.)

Below are a few mouth-watering samples from areas that interest me to get you browsing. In just a few minutes you should find something that relates to your field, and you can be sure of the highest standards of work.

• Keller & Lapata, 2003, "Using the Web to Obtain Frequencies for Unseen Bigrams" from Computational Linguistics 29/3
• Poesio, Stevenson, Di Eugenio & Hitzeman, 2004, "Centering: A Parametric Theory and Its
  Instantiations" from Computational Linguistics 30/3
• Wolf & Gibson, 2005, "Representing Discourse Coherence: A Corpus-Based Study" from Computational Linguistics 31/2
• Lapata, 2006, "Automatic Evaluation of Information Ordering: Kendall's Tau" AND
  
• Marino, Banchs, Crego, Gispert, Lambert, Fonollosa & Costa-jussa, 2006, "N-gram-based Machine Translation" from Computational Linguistics 32/4
• Li & Church, 2007, "A Sketch Algorithm for Estimating Two-Way and Multi-Way Associations" from Computational Linguistics 33/3
• Eryigit, Nivre & Oflazer, 2008, "Dependency Parsing of Turkish" from Computational Linguistics 34/3
• O’Hara & Wiebe, 2009, "Exploiting Semantic Role Resources for Preposition Disambiguation" from Computational Linguistics 35/2
• Finally, the full content of the last volume from 2010

Volume 36, Issue 4 - December 2010

Obituary

Fred Jelinek
Mark Liberman
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 595–599.

ACL Lifetime Achievement Award
The Right Tools: Reflections on Computation and Language
William A. Woods
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 601–630.

Squibs
An Asymptotic Model for the English Hapax/Vocabulary Ratio
Fan Fengxiang
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 631–637.

On Paraphrase and Coreference
Marta Recasens, Marta Vila
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 639–647.

Articles
String-to-Dependency Statistical Machine Translation
Libin Shen, Jinxi Xu, Ralph Weischedel
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 649–671.

Distributional Memory: A General Framework for Corpus-Based Semantics
Marco Baroni, Alessandro Lenci
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 673–721.

A Flexible, Corpus-Driven Model of Regular and Inverse Selectional Preferences
Katrin Erk, Sebastian Padó, Ulrike Padó
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 723–763.

Book Review

Introduction to Linguistic Annotation and Text Analytics Graham Wilcock (University of Helsinki) Princeton, NJ: Morgan & Claypool (Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, edited by Graeme Hirst, volume 2, No. 1), 2009, x+149 pp; paperbound, ISBN 978-1-59829-738-6, $40.00; ebook, ISBN 978-1-59829-739-3, $30.00 or by subscription
Udo Hahn
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 765–766.

Natural Language Processing with Python Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper (University of Melbourne, University of Edinburgh, and BBN Technologies) Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, 2009, xx+482 pp; paperbound, ISBN 978-0-596-51649-9, $44.99; on-line free of charge at nltk.org/book
Michael Elhadad
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 767–771.

Statistical Machine Translation Philipp Koehn (University of Edinburgh) Cambridge University Press, 2010, xii+433 pp; ISBN 978-0-521-87415-1, $60.00
Colin Cherry
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 773–776.

Introduction to Chinese Natural Language Processing Kam-Fai Wong, Wenjie Li, Ruifeng Xu, and Zheng-sheng Zhang (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, City University of Hong Kong, and San Diego State University) Princeton, NJ: Morgan & Claypool (Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, edited by Graeme Hirst, volume 4), 2010, x+148 pp; paperbound, ISBN 978-1-59829-932-8, $40.00; e-book, ISBN 978-1-59829-933-5, $30.00 or by subscription
Min Zhang
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 777–780.

Spoken Dialogue Systems Kristiina Jokinen and Michael McTear (University of Helsinki, University of Ulster) Princeton, NJ: Morgan & Claypool (Synthesis Lectures on Language Technologies, edited by Graeme Hirst, volume 5), 2009, xiv+151pp; paperback, ISBN 978-1-59829-599-3, $40.00; ebook, ISBN 978-1-59829-600-6, doi 10.2200/S00204ED1V01Y200910HLT005, $30.00 or by subscription
Mary Ellen Foster
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 781–783.

Machine-Aided Linguistic Discovery: An Introduction and Some Examples Vladimir Pericliev (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) London: Equinox, 2010, ix+330 pp; hardbound, ISBN 978-1-84553-660-2, $90.00, £60.00
Eric J. M. Smith
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 785–787.

Briefly Noted
Essential Programming for Linguistics
Martin Weisser
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 789–789.

Commentary and Discussion
A Response to Richard Sproat on Random Systems, Writing, and Entropy
Rob Lee, Philip Jonathan, Pauline Ziman
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 791–794.

Entropy, the Indus Script, and Language:A Reply to R. Sproat
Rajesh P. N. Rao, Nisha Yadav, Mayank N. Vahia, Hrishikesh Joglekar, Ronojoy Adhikari, Iravatham Mahadevan
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 795–805.

Reply to Rao et al. and Lee et al.
Richard Sproat
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 807–816.

Last Words
Are We Near the End of the Journal?
Nat Lang
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 817–821.

Reviewers
Reviewers for Volume 36
Computational Linguistics December 2010, Vol. 36, No. 4: 823–823.

ISFC Plenary - Jim Martin

In this next installment of plenary speakers at the International System Functional Congress, held at UBC, Canada, Jim Martin delves deep into the assumptions behind different theories of the schools in systemic functional linguistics. Contrary to the expectations of most that consider SFL to be a unified theory that entertains different 'dialects', Professor Martin suggests that the schools are now so far apart in how they view the paradgmatic and syntagmatic axes that there is very little common ground left.

J. R. Martin: Metalinguistic Divergence: Axial Argumentation in SFL

This session was delivered on Friday July 23rd. Unfortunately, the microphone does not pick up everything Jim is saying very clearly and at times you have to strain to hear what he says.