• Research in Mathematical Education
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.149-170
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• 2014

The Vietnamese language has a specific property related to the zero in the name-number system. This study was conducted to examine the impact of linguistic differences and of the zero's position in a number on a transcoding task (verbal number into Arabic number). Vietnamese children and French-speaking Belgian children, from grades 3 to 6, participated in the study. The success rate and the type of errors they made varied, depending on their grade and language. At Grade 4, Vietnamese children showed performances equivalent to Grade 6 Belgian children. Our results confirmed the support provided by language to the understanding and performances in a transcoding task. Results also showed that a syntactic zero is easier to manipulate than a lexical zero for Vietnamese children. The relative influence of language and the source of errors are discussed.

• Language and Information
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.129-152
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• 2002

This paper argues for a need to adopt a conceptually radical approach to zero anaphora resolution in Korean. It is shown that a number of apparently conflicting constraints, mostly motivated by lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors, are involved in determining the referential identity of zero pronouns in Korean. It is also argued that some of the major concepts of Optimality Theory can provide a good theoretical framework to predict the antecedents to zero pronouns in general. A partial formalization of 07-based constraints at the morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantical level is provided. It is argued that the lexico-semantic restrictions on adjacent expressions play the most important role in the anaphora resolution process along with a variant of the binding principle, formulated in semantic terms. Other pragmatically motivated constraints that incorporate some important intuitions of Centering Theory are proposed too.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Language and Information Conference
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• 2007.11a
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• pp.57-66
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• 2007

Case markers in Korean are omissible in colloquial speech. Previous discourse studies of Caseless bare NPs in Korean show that the information structure of zero Nominative not only differs from that of overt Nominative but it also differs from that of zero Accusative in many respects. This paper aims to provide a basis for these semantic/pragmatic properties of Caseless NPs through the syntactic difference between bare subjects and bare objects: namely, the former are left-dislocated NPs, whereas the latter form complex predicates with the subcategorizing verbs. Our analysis will account for the facts that (i) the distribution of bare subject NPs are more restricted than that of bare object NPs; (ii) bare subject NPs must be specific or topical; (iii) Acc-marked NPs in canonical position tend to be focalized.

• Language and Information
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.51-71
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• 2016

The status of the Korean morphological marker '-e ci' has been controversial whether it is a passive marker, an anticausative marker, or a passive/anticausative marker. However, the previous approaches that tried to classify '-e ci' constructions based on the syntactic verb classes (i.e. intransitive or transitive) were short of explaining the properties of the constructions. In this study, the '-e ci' constructions were distinguished based on agentivity, following Levin & Rappaport Hovav (1995) and Alexiadou et al. (2006). Moreover, how the verbal root meaning is associated with the passive/anticausative construction was investigated by means of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Embick 2010; Marantz 1997). I argued that the morphological marker '-e ci' is the instantiation of the absence of external arguments. With respect to the behavior of the Korean '-e ci' constructions with the semantics of each verbal root class, I found out that the '-e ci' constructions can form passives with the verbal roots that require the external arguments; whereas, the anticausatives cannot be formed with the roots that necessarily require the agentive arguments. However, contrary to the previous arguments that '-e ci' passives can be only formed with transitive verbs, it is discovered that non-agentive transitive roots do form anticausatives. Moreover, I argued that there are two types of the anticausatives - zero and '-e ci' anticausatives. Since the valency reduction is marked by the non-active voice morphology, the zero anticausatives appear only with the roots that do not require external arguments. The different '-e ci' constructions (passives, '-e ci', and zero anticausatives) are represented by the distinct syntactic structures. I proposed that the morphological similarity between the passives and the '-e ci' anticausatives is due to the presence of VoiceP, which introduces the external arguments. Moreover, the lack of the voice morphology in the zero anticausatives is explained by the absence of the VoiceP.

• International Journal of Advanced Culture Technology
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.112-116
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• 2021

The aim of this study is to analyze the complementizer that-deletion in embedded complement clauses in English. This paper is concerned with the alternation between the overt that-complementizer and the zero complementizer by the complementizer deletion (C-deletion or that-deletion) in constructions with a nominal complement that-clause, i.e. [VP Verb [CP that-TP]]. In this paper, we compare that-complementation and zero-complementation in a diachronic grammaticalization and corpus, and show that the complementizer that has its origin in pronouns diachronically and finally becomes to form a C-head of the functional category CP. We provide the syntactic and semantic explanation on the optionality of that-deletion while answering the question why and how that-deletion is getting increasing in use especially with the verb, think, in the informal contexts. With the major causes for the currently increasing use of that-deletion, we are concerned with the contexts in which the overt complementizers or the covert complementizers are preferred.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.24-32
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• 1997

This study aims to describe, at one aspect, the relativity between syntactic structure and prosodic phrasing, and at the other, to establish a suitable phrasing pattern to produce more natural synthetic speech. To get meaningful results, all the word boundaries in the prosodic database were statistically analyzed, and assigned by the proper boundary type. The resulting 10 types of prosodic boundaries were classified into 3 types according to the strength of the breaks, which are zero, minor, and major break respectively. We have found out that the durational information was a main cue to determine the major prosodic boundary. Using the bigram and trigram of syntactic information, we predicted major and minor classification of boundary types. With brigram model, we obtained the correct major break prediction rates of 4.60%, 38.2%, the insertion error rates of 22.8%, 8.4% on each Test-I and Test-II text database respectively. With trigram mode, we also obtained the correct major break prediction rates of 58.3%, 42.8%, the insertion error rates of 30.8%, 42.8%, the insertion error rates of 30.8%, 11.8% on Test-I and Test-II text database respectively.

• Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.9-24
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• 2000

This paper analyzes the distribution and classification of unrealized arguments of a predicate often called zero pronouns. in spoken Korean. Based on the transcript of a one-hour-Iong dialogue. recorded from public radio stations. I present the statistical data on argument ellipsis in Korean with respect to the frequency of zero ronouns as well as the nature of their antecedents. I go further to review some of the previous efforts to identify the discourse- theoretic functions of zero-pronouns in the framework of Centering Theory. and propose that the zero-pronouns in spoken Korean be divided into center-insensitive vs. center-sensitive classes. I also point out a couple of language-particular idiosyncrasies found in Korean, such as morpho-syntactic elements and encyclopaedic knowledge. that interact with center management in on-going discourse and often lead to difficulties in applying the centering rules and constraints to Korean.

• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.29 no.10
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• pp.736-746
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• 2002

Zero anaphora occurs frequently in Korean complex sentences, and it makes the interpretation of sentences difficult. This paper proposes splitting algorithms and zero anaphora recovery rules for the purpose of handling zero anaphora, and also presents a resolution methodology. The paper covers quotations, conjunctive sentences and embedded sentences out of the complex sentences shown in the newspaper articles, with an exclusion of embedded sentences of auxiliary verb. We manage the quotations using the equivalent noun phrase deletion rule according to subject person constraint, the nominalized embedded sentences using the equivalent noun phrase deletion rule, the adnominal embedded sentences using the relative noun phrase deletion rule and the conjunctive sentences using the conjunction reduction rule in reverse. The classified table of the endings which relate to a formation of the complex sentences is used for splitting the complex sentences, and the syntactic rules, applied when being omitted, are used in reverse for recovering zero anaphora. The presented rule showed the result of 83.53% in perfect resolution and 11.52% in partial resolution.

• Language and Information
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.53-76
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• 2007

Case markers in Korean are omissible in colloquial speech. Previous discourse studies of Caseless bare NPs in Korean show that the information structure of zero Nominative not only differs from that of overt Nominative but it also differs from that of zero Accusative in many respects. This paper aims to provide a basis for these semantic/pragmatic properties of Caseless NPs through the syntactic difference between bare subjects and bare objects: namely, the former are left-dislocated NPs, whereas the latter form complex predicates with the subcategorizing verbs. Our analysis will account for the facts that (i) the distribution of bare subject NPs are more restricted than that of bare object NPs; (ii) bare subject NPs must be specific or topical; (iii) Acc-marked NPs in canonical position tend to be focalized.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.131-150
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• 2015

Omission of noun phrases for obligatory cases is a common phenomenon in sentences of Korean and Japanese, which is not observed in English. When an argument of a predicate can be filled with a noun phrase co-referential with the title, the argument is more easily omitted in Encyclopedia texts. The omitted noun phrase is called a zero anaphor or zero pronoun. Encyclopedias like Wikipedia are major source for information extraction by intelligent application systems such as information retrieval and question answering systems. However, omission of noun phrases makes the quality of information extraction poor. This paper deals with the problem of developing a system that can restore omitted noun phrases in encyclopedia documents. The problem that our system deals with is almost similar to zero anaphora resolution which is one of the important problems in natural language processing. A noun phrase existing in the text that can be used for restoration is called an antecedent. An antecedent must be co-referential with the zero anaphor. While the candidates for the antecedent are only noun phrases in the same text in case of zero anaphora resolution, the title is also a candidate in our problem. In our system, the first stage is in charge of detecting the zero anaphor. In the second stage, antecedent search is carried out by considering the candidates. If antecedent search fails, an attempt made, in the third stage, to use the title as the antecedent. The main characteristic of our system is to make use of a structural SVM for finding the antecedent. The noun phrases in the text that appear before the position of zero anaphor comprise the search space. The main technique used in the methods proposed in previous research works is to perform binary classification for all the noun phrases in the search space. The noun phrase classified to be an antecedent with highest confidence is selected as the antecedent. However, we propose in this paper that antecedent search is viewed as the problem of assigning the antecedent indicator labels to a sequence of noun phrases. In other words, sequence labeling is employed in antecedent search in the text. We are the first to suggest this idea. To perform sequence labeling, we suggest to use a structural SVM which receives a sequence of noun phrases as input and returns the sequence of labels as output. An output label takes one of two values: one indicating that the corresponding noun phrase is the antecedent and the other indicating that it is not. The structural SVM we used is based on the modified Pegasos algorithm which exploits a subgradient descent methodology used for optimization problems. To train and test our system we selected a set of Wikipedia texts and constructed the annotated corpus in which gold-standard answers are provided such as zero anaphors and their possible antecedents. Training examples are prepared using the annotated corpus and used to train the SVMs and test the system. For zero anaphor detection, sentences are parsed by a syntactic analyzer and subject or object cases omitted are identified. Thus performance of our system is dependent on that of the syntactic analyzer, which is a limitation of our system. When an antecedent is not found in the text, our system tries to use the title to restore the zero anaphor. This is based on binary classification using the regular SVM. The experiment showed that our system's performance is F1 = 68.58%. This means that state-of-the-art system can be developed with our technique. It is expected that future work that enables the system to utilize semantic information can lead to a significant performance improvement.