Command and Fula dum Pronominals

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on African Language Structures (1991), pp. 65-7

The Interaction of Relativization and Noun Incorporation in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu

This paper focuses on relativization in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu. Specifically, evidential expressions constitute the scope of this study since within this semantic domain a morphosyntactic layout reminiscent of internally-headed relative clauses (IHRCs) is found. Moreover, the structure of some evidential expressions suggests that what gives rise to an IHRC in those instances is classificatory noun incorporation (CNI). Following from past studies on Ainu, where IHRCs and CNI are never discussed, and with reference to cross-linguistic approaches to relativization and incorporation, this study addresses the interaction of these two processes in Southern Hokkaidō Ainu and suggests their reconsideration

Taking MT evaluation metrics to extremes : beyond correlation with human judgments

Automatic Machine Translation (MT) evaluation is an active field of research, with a handful of new metrics devised every year. Evaluation metrics are generally benchmarked against manual assessment of translation quality, with performance measured in terms of overall correlation with human scores. Much work has been dedicated to the improvement of evaluation metrics to achieve a higher correlation with human judgments. However, little insight has been provided regarding the weaknesses and strengths of existing approaches and their behavior in different settings. In this work we conduct a broad meta-evaluation study of the performance of a wide range of evaluation metrics focusing on three major aspects. First, we analyze the performance of the metrics when faced with different levels of translation quality, proposing a local dependency measure as an alternative to the standard, global correlation coefficient. We show that metric performance varies significantly across different levels of MT quality: Metrics perform poorly when faced with low-quality translations and are not able to capture nuanced quality distinctions. Interestingly, we show that evaluating low-quality translations is also more challenging for humans. Second, we show that metrics are more reliable when evaluating neural MT than the traditional statistical MT systems. Finally, we show that the difference in the evaluation accuracy for different metrics is maintained even if the gold standard scores are based on different criteria

Agreement and Fula pronouns

TIris paper is concerned with agreement patterns exhibited by pronouns in five varieties of Fula. It is argued that some pronouns show agreement in pronominality, which is an unusual type of agreement, but nonetheless extremely robust in Fula. Other types of agreement are also presented, and the consequences of the Fula data for theories of agreement is discussed

Agreement and Fula pronouns

This paper is concerned with agreement patterns exhibited by pronouns in five varieties of Fula. It is argued that some pronouns show agreement in pronominality, which is an unusual type of agreement, but nonetheless extremely robust in Fula. Other types of agreement are also presented, and the consequences of the Fula data for theories of agreement is discussed

Command and Fula dum Pronominals

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on African Language Structures (1991), pp. 65-7