Dawn Archer - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Journal articles by Dawn Archer

Automatic extraction of multiword expressions (MWEs) presents a tough challenge for the NLP commu... more Automatic extraction of multiword expressions (MWEs) presents a tough challenge for the NLP community and corpus linguistics. Indeed, although numerous knowledge-based symbolic approaches and statistically driven algorithms have been proposed, efficient MWE extraction still remains an unsolved issue. In this paper, we evaluate the Lancaster UCREL Semantic Analysis System (henceforth USAS (Rayson, P., Archer, D., Piao, S., McEnery, T., 2004. The UCREL semantic analysis system. In: Proceedings of the LREC-04 Workshop, Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic labelling for NLP tasks, Lisbon, Portugal. pp. 7–12)) for MWE extraction, and explore the possibility of improving USAS by incorporating a statistical algorithm. Developed at Lancaster University, the USAS system automatically annotates English corpora with semantic category information. Employing a large-scale semantically classified multi-word expression template database, the system is also capable of detecting many multiword expressions, as well as assigning semantic field information to the MWEs extracted. Whilst USAS therefore offers a unique tool for MWE extraction, allowing us to both extract and semantically classify MWEs, it can sometimes suffer from low recall. Consequently, we have been comparing USAS, which employs a symbolic approach, to a statistical tool, which is based on collocational information, in order to determine the pros and cons of these different tools, and more importantly, to examine the possibility of improving MWE extraction by combining them. As we report in this paper, we have found a highly complementary relation between the different tools: USAS missed many domain-specific MWEs (law/court terms in this case), and the statistical tool missed many commonly used MWEs that occur in low frequencies (lower than three in this case). Due to their complementary relation, we are proposing that MWE coverage can be significantly increased by combining a lexicon-based symbolic approach and a collocation-based statistical approach.

Papers by Dawn Archer

De Gruyter eBooks, Feb 27, 2008

Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities

Language Sciences, 2018

This paper explores the language of MPs and Peers, when negotiating their differences in times pa... more This paper explores the language of MPs and Peers, when negotiating their differences in times past. Specifically, I draw upon Historic Hansard data (1803-2005) representative of the two Houses (Commons and Lords), paying particular attention to exchanges involving expressive politeness features (deferential terms, polite preludes, etc.). I demonstrate how such features enabled parliamentarians to "do" deference and respect, but sometimes at a surface level only. For example, utterances containing expressive politeness features functioned as implicit accusations relating to another's inaccurate or misguided views on a particular issue and/or as a means of claiming a conflicting position. I suggest that, because such behaviour was (and remains) institutionally sanctioned and deliberately ritualistic, it did not then nor does not now constitute systematic impoliteness, in the main (cf. Harris 2001). Rather, we witness a range of facework behaviour in parliamentary debates: from face enhancement to face aggravation, and everything between (Archer, 2015).

Journal of Politeness Research, 2018

A variety of face types can be in operation in workplaces, dependent on, for example, the kind of... more A variety of face types can be in operation in workplaces, dependent on, for example, the kind of workplace, the various activities engaged in in that workplace, the status/role/gender of participants working in and/or connected with the workplace, etc. This paper offers an adapted version of Archer’s (2015) Facework Scale as a means of accounting for the different types of face in evidence in one activity - Performance Appraisals - in one workplace, relating to a UK retail organization. We will show that interlocutors used facework strategies that emphasized different or multiple facets of face on both a professional and personal level (Jagodziński 2013). This includes attempting to safeguard/support their working relationships (Haugh 2013) by managing impressions of self and/or the company (Jones and Pitman 1982) at the same time as maintaining credibility for self and/or other(s) (Bolino et al. 2016). We use our findings to argue that employers and their employees would benefit f...

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Apr 22, 2021

This chapter critically compares how the concepts of activity type and genre tend to be used with... more This chapter critically compares how the concepts of activity type and genre tend to be used within the field of pragmatics. Both concepts are broadly concerned with the way in which we categorize our experiences, and develop thereby expectations about communicative behaviour within a given context. In spite of these similarities, they have very different conceptual histories. Activity types were introduced into pragmatics by Levinson (1979), having been inspired by Wittgenstein's (1958) notion of language games. Genres can be traced back to ancient Greek literature, and have since been applied within multiple disciplines, including art and art criticism, literary studies, rhetoric, sociology, linguistics and, more specifically, pragmatics (Bazerman, 1997; Mayes, 2003). The focus of the chapter is on mapping the development and usage of these terms within the pragmatics (or a concomitant) discipline. We also comment upon concepts that seem to share "a considerable family resemblance" (Linell, 2010: 42) with activity types and/or genres. They include footing, frames (and framing), speech events, speech activities, schemas, scripts, and prototypes. 2.1 The concept of activity type, its origins, and use in pragmatics Stephen Levinson is usually credited with introducing the concept of activity type into pragmatics. 1 Inspired by Wittgenstein (1958), Levinson ([1979] 1992) sought to highlight that understanding the meaning of utterances requires us to also have an understanding of the activity within which the utterances occur. This assumes such activities are 'goal defined' as well as culturally recognisable, such that they place 'constraints on participants', especially in respect to what kinds of contributions are allowable (Levinson, 1992: 69). They are also 'bounded' in time in some way. 2 It should be noted from the outset, however, that talk was not an essential criterion of every activity type, as far as Levinson was concerned. He noted additional ways in which distinct activity types might differ too. They might involve a single participant, such as a homework task, or several participants, such as a dinner party. They might be heavily scripted, such as a Roman Mass, or largely unscripted, such as a chance meeting on the street. They might be formal, such as a city council meeting, or informal, such as small talk between friends. Some of the extant pragmatics studies that explore activity types also develop their understanding of the concept itself. Clark (1996) provides one such example. He argued that activity types can exhibit differences with respect to their cooperative traits and governance traits (i.e., how cooperative or egalitarian particular activity types are). He explains how they can 'range from cooperative activities like buying groceries to adversarial or competitive activities like playing tennis or cross-examining witnesses in court' (Clark, 1996: 31), for example. He further notes how a participant (A) might play a dominant role within a given activity type, whereby they do something 'to or for B', as in the case of lecturing, or how participants might have roughly equal roles, akin to A and B doing something together, as in the case of chess playing (Clark, 1996: 31). In a more recent study, Culpeper and McIntyre (2010) have argued that-and go on to demonstrate how-activity types (such as job interviews) can be both context-dependent and context-creating. They thus operationalise what Levinson ([1979] 1992) had only alluded to with respect to the 'inside out' view of the context being shaped by participants as well as the more frequently cited 'outside in' view of context determining language use, when it comes to activity types. Culpeper and McIntyre also emphasise another point to which Levinson alluded: how the activity type concept constitutes an indispensable bridge or the meso-level between the micro and the macro level of analysis, thereby 'rescuing' Grice's (1975) Cooperative Principle. 3 We describe Culpeper and McIntyre's study in more detail in Section 3.1 (see also Section 2.3). 2.2 The concept of genre, its origins, and use in pragmatics According to Martin (1985: 248), a genre 'is how things get done, when language' or another medium 'is used to accomplish them'. Martin (1984: 24) also delineates the concept based on 1 But note also the similarity with some of Allwood's (1976) early work exploring Linguistic Communication as Action and Cooperation. 2 One of the paradigm examples of an activity type, offered by Levinson (1979: 368), is that of teaching. Given the mention of "task in a workshop" as another paradigm example, amongst a list (job interview, jural interrogation, football game, dinner party) all of which are also bounded in time, we are assuming that Levinson had a bounded "episode" of teaching in mind, when he mentions the latter (cf. teaching as an ongoing process, and also Gumperz 1982). 3 See also Mooney's (2004: 903) argument for the recontextualization of Grice's Cooperative Principle with Levinson's activity type, in the belief that "[i]t contextualizes the maxims and allows a clearer and more relevant construal of contributions".

ICAME Journal, Mar 1, 2015

Corpora of Early Modern English have been collected and released for research for a number of yea... more Corpora of Early Modern English have been collected and released for research for a number of years. With large scale digitisation activities gathering pace in the last decade, much more historical textual data is now available for research on numerous topics including historical linguistics and conceptual history. We summarise previous research which has shown that it is necessary to map historical spelling variants to modern equivalents in order to successfully apply natural language processing and corpus linguistics methods. Manual and semiautomatic methods have been devised to support this normalisation and standardisation process. We argue that it is important to develop a linguistically meaningful rationale to achieve good results from this process. In order to do so, we propose a number of guidelines for normalising corpora and show how these guidelines have been applied in the Corpus of English Dialogues.

John Benjamins eBooks, Sep 1, 2020