Summary: Due to the increasing number of text mining resources (tools and corpora) available to biologists, interoperability issues between these resources are becoming significant obstacles to using them effectively. UIMA, the Unstructured Information Management Architecture, is an open framework designed to aid in the construction of more interoperable tools. U-Compare is built on top of the UIMA framework, and provides both a concrete framework for out-of-the-box text mining and a sophisticated evaluation platform allowing users to run specific tools on any target text, generating both detailed statistics and instance-based visualizations of outputs. U-Compare is a joint project, providing the world's largest, and still growing, collection of UIMA-compatible resources. These resources, originally developed by different groups for a variety of domains, include many famous tools and corpora. U-Compare can be launched straight from the web, without needing to be manually installed. All U-Compare components are provided ready-to-use and can be combined easily via a drag-and-drop interface without any programming. External UIMA components can also simply be mixed with U-Compare components, without distinguishing between locally and remotely deployed resources.Availability: http://u-compare.org/Contact: kano@is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp
Consonants and vowels are processed differently and they seem to have distinct neural representations (Caramazza et al. 2000). Böe et al. (2017) insist that vowel-like systems must be inferred to the last common ancestor of Baboons and humans, 25mya. Unlike vowels, however, consonants appear to be a later innovation in the communication systems of Hominids. Primates, including chimpanzees and orangutans, employ a repertoire of voiceless calls (so-called raspberries), which show homology with voiceless consonants (Lameira et al. 2014). During the course of human evolution, smaller orofacial cavities, increased neuro-cognitive abilities, and more precise motor control of the articulators led to greater phonetic variation, particularly among consonants, which have become phonologized in many ways in different language families. In comparison to vowels, there are over three times as many consonant phonemes in the world's languages. Their number and diversity ranges greatly, from 6 in Rotokas to over 90 in !Xu (Maddieson 1984); compare vowel systems which range in size from 2 to 14. Why are there are so many more consonants in the world's languages?The answer to this question is complex, with factors involving a need for increased number of lexical contrasts in order to accommodate a growing vocabulary throughout the evolution of language, and the greater possibility for consonants rather than vowels to increase the number of contrastive sounds in a language through secondary articulations. Two strands of evidence support this conclusion. First, comparing a database of proto-language reconstructions (Marsico et al, accepted; n=100) with modern languages in UPSID (Maddieson 1984), Marsico (1999) notes an increase in the number of consonants in modern
Abstract. Linguistic politeness (LP) refers to the set of "linguistic features mediating norms of social behaviour, in relation to such notions as courtesy, rapport, deference and distance" (Crystal 2008). Although researchers (e.g. Eelen 2001, Watts 2003 agree that it is intimately connected to normativity, group hierarchy and cooperation -the core questions of human ethology and human behavioural ecology -linguistic politeness has largely been neglected from those perspectives (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989 being a notable exception). In this paper we spell out the significance of a naturalistically oriented study of LP, outline a research agenda, and identify a number of methodological problems whose resolution is a prerequisite for such an approach.
Linguistics is the study of two separate but related phenomena, human languages and our unique ability to speak them. This unique ability, often referred to as the Language Faculty (LF), is a biologically determined adaptation that is essentially universal among humans. We do not know the exact sequence of historic stages this faculty went through during its evolution, or exactly what selection pressures it evolved in response to, and it has been argued that due to a lack of data, we never will (Fitch et al. 2005). But thanks to work in molecular biology over the last 150 years, we now have a fairly good understanding of the genetic mechanisms underlying its evolution, and are beginning to identify gene sequences and pathways directly related to it (Lai et al. 2001; Dediu & Ladd 2007).
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