Deep Transfer Learning & Beyond: Transformer Language Models in Information Systems Research

AI is widely thought to be poised to transform business, yet current perceptions of the scope of this transformation may be myopic. Recent progress in natural language processing involving transformer language models (TLMs) offers a potential avenue for AI-driven business and societal transformation that is beyond the scope of what most currently foresee. We review this recent progress as well as recent literature utilizing text mining in top IS journals to develop an outline for how future IS research can benefit from these new techniques. Our review of existing IS literature reveals that suboptimal text mining techniques are prevalent and that the more advanced TLMs could be applied to enhance and increase IS research involving text data, and to enable new IS research topics, thus creating more value for the research community. This is possible because these techniques make it easier to develop very powerful custom systems and their performance is superior to existing methods for a wide range of tasks and applications. Further, multilingual language models make possible higher quality text analytics for research in multiple languages. We also identify new avenues for IS research, like language user interfaces, that may offer even greater potential for future IS research.

Construing the scene in Julian of Norwich’s “A Revelation of Love”

Julian of Norwich’s “A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman” and “A Revelation of Love” are texts which present two accounts (short and long, respectively) of her mystical experience. Julian was an anchoress whose work is known for its vivid imagery and bodily resonance it provokes in the reader. New research on Julian’s work has focused scholarly attention on the significance of embodied cognition for the exploration of the mystic’s writing. The present paper identifies a gap in this research in that cognitive-linguistic aspects of the anchoress’s text are still largely ignored. The article discusses the connection between perception and cognition and its potential role in structuring Julian’s longer text, “A Revelation of Love”. The Cognitive Linguistic analysis focuses on selected excerpts from the long version portraying scenes from Julian’s visions, where visualisation is particularly significant for meaning construction. Providing a link between recent findings from cognitive science and current cognitively-oriented studies of Julian’s texts, the paper draws on the concept of construal pertinent to the fact that the language user may conceive and present some conceptual content (an apprehended scene) in alternate ways. The Cognitive Linguistic investigation connects Julian’s work to the visual and material culture of her day, revealing how the mystic transforms the familiar imagery into vivid, dynamically unfolding images. It is concluded that cognitively-informed research is likely to shed new light onto long-standing issues in scholarship on Julian, particularly those that concern the interplay of language, culture and cognition.

Design of Belarusian and Russian natural language interfaces for online help systems

O b j e c t i v e s. The main goal of the work is a research of the natural language user interfaces and the developmentof a prototype of such an interface. The prototype is a bilingual Russian and Belarusian question-and-answer dialogue system. The research of the natural language interfaces was conducted in terms of the use of natural language for interaction between a user and a computer system. The main problems here are the ambiguity of natural language and the difficulties in the design of natural language interfaces that meet user expectations.M e t ho d s. The main principles of modelling the natural language user interfaces are considered. As an intelligent system, it consists of a database, knowledge machine and a user interface. Speech recognition and speech synthesis components make natural language interfaces more convenient from the point of view of usability.R e s u l t s. The description of the prototype of a natural language interface for a question-and-answer intelligent system is presented. The model of the prototype includes speech-to-text and text-to-speech Belarusian and Russian subsystems, generation of responses in the form of the natural language and formal text.An additional component is natural Belarusian and Russian voice input. Some of the data, required for human voice recognition, are stored as knowledge in the knowledge base or created on the basis of existing knowledge. Another important component is Belarusian and Russian voice output. This component is the top required for making the natural language interface more user-friendly.Co n c l u s i o n. The article presents the research of natural language user interfaces, the result of which provides the development and description of the prototype of the natural language interface for the intelligent question- and-answer system.

Znaczenie intuicji językowej w procesie antycypacji – na przykładzie komunikacji obcojęzycznej

This paper presents the phenomenon of anticipation which is one of the manifestations of linguistic maturity and language user rationality. Anticipation, taking place essentially in implicit structures and based on evolutionary old intuition, improves speech comprehension and increases the efficiency of cognitive processes. The phenomenon in question is presented on the example of foreign language communication, because it is there that the mechanisms governing the formulation of accurate hypotheses about form and content are particularly evident. The first part of the article discusses speech perception, and with it the categorization and selection of an appropriate cognitive schema conditioning accurate anticipation. The second part presents factors that facilitate and hinder the right hypothesis. Finally, conclusions and directions for future research on anticipation are formulated.

Universal Dependencies for Tweets in Brazilian Portuguese: Tokenization and Part of Speech Tagging

Automatically dealing with Natural Language User-Generated Content (UGC) is a challenging task of utmost importance, given the amount of information available over the web. We present in this paper an effort on building tokenization and Part of Speech (PoS) tagging systems for tweets in Brazilian Portuguese, following the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies (UD) project. We propose a rule-based tokenizer and the customization of current state-of-the-art UD-based tagging strategies for Portuguese, achieving a 98% f-score for tokenization, and a 95% f-score for PoS tagging. We also introduce DANTEStocks, the corpus of stock market tweets on which we base our work, presenting preliminary evidence of the multi-genre capacity of our PoS tagger.

Conclusions

This chapter closes this book by summarizing the arguments made in the previous chapters and considering the implications for the study of language and political economy. Subjectivities of English in neoliberalism jointly work to present neoliberal subjecthood as the ideal way of living, thereby rationalizing the structures of control inherent in neoliberalism. Research on language and political economy has much to gain by attending to aspects of subjectivity that underlie the way language gets incorporated into the conditions of the changing economy, as language serves as an important channel through which neoliberalism extends its control over our minds, bodies, and sense of being. For this, we need to recognize that subjective experiences of being a language user is fraught with tensions based on material relations, and make them a serious focus for the study of language and political economy.

A Semantic Analysis of Corona Virus Pandemic Terms

Various epidemics in recent years have introduced myriad of challenges to the entire world. COVID-19 disease is the latest crisis with its attendant health and language issues. With its emergence, COVID-19 introduced into the global linguistic repertoire an avalanche of unknown vocabulary to the ordinary language user. In today’s world, language is not only available for communication; it is a tool that contributes to maintaining global peace and order. In bridging diverse communities of humanities in the world, shared meaning becomes a platform for mutual understanding, promoting intellectual development and collaborative research efforts. The current study aims to explore and explicate the novel language of COVID-19, thereby making meaning accessible for clarity of communication. The qualitative method of analysis which relied on secondary data from different online COVID-19 glossaries was utilised. Data collection was a total of 149 terms, out of which 34 were purposively selected for analysis. This was to examine their semantic meaning and also ascertain their word relations. The study investigates the process of developing meaning mechanisms in the use COVID-19 terms among language users. The study found that the COVID-19 has a distinct vocabulary that can be analysed linguistically. The literature review in this study highlighted past researches on COVID-19 as descriptive, others on the frequency count of words and the etymology of terms.

On classifiers and affect in the nominal domain

This chapter presents six case studies on the encoding of affective-expressive information in the Dutch nominal domain. Each affective phenomenon that is discussed, displays a formal property that, from a surface perspective, could be qualified as ‘disorganizing.’ It is proposed that disorganization is only apparent and that the affective-expressive nominal expression has an organized structure that falls within the variation space as defined by UG. It is the different formal organization, compared to the organization of nominal expressions with descriptive contents, which yields ‘the feel of disorganization.’ The availability of different grammatical routes provided by UG allows the language user to use her language for distinct communicative functions, including the expression of one’s affective feelings. It is proposed that the Classifier Projection plays an important role in the manifestation of those routes.

The Process of Retrieval in the Comprehension of Arabic Discourse

The current study aims at finding out how retrieval of discourse takes place during the process of comprehension. It is hypothesized that the process of retrieval is relative among language users in its capacity and ways. Most important , it is also hypothesized that this process is patterned in nature and such pattering is also relative from one language user into another. In other words, language users look for different patterns when comprehending discourse. The above aim and hypotheses have been verified through an experiment conducted on 100 secondary school students. The subjects are asked to read an Arabic story and a mathematic text. Then , those participants are asked to answer a questioner conducted for the study to see how they could retrieve the materials given. McDermott and Roediger model (2021) of analysis has been proposed as the model of comprehension adopted in this study. It is concluded that subjects look for specific patterns in the discourse in order to memorize and retrieve the data chosen. These patterns could be : rhematic, schematic, relevance, enjoyment, distinctiveness, familiarity, and linguistic. It is, also, found out that there are different factors which affect the process of retrieval including : interest, background knowledge, subjects capacity, emotions and frequency of repetition.