tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Towards a model of formal and informal address in English"

Informal and formal (“T/V”) address in dialogue is not distinguished overtly in modern English, . by pronoun choice like in many other languages such as French (“tu”/“vous”). Our study investigates the status of the T/V distinction in English literary texts. Our main findings are: (a) human raters can label monolingual English utterances as T or V fairly well, given sufficient context; (b), a bilingual corpus can be exploited to induce a supervised classifier for T/V without human annotation. It assigns T/V at sentence level with up to 68% accuracy, relying mainly on lexical features; (c), there is a marked. | Towards a model of formal and informal address in English Manaal Faruqui Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur India manaalfar@ Sebastian Padó Institute of Computational Linguistics Heidelberg University Heidelberg Germany pado@ Abstract Informal and formal T V address in dialogue is not distinguished overtly in modern English . by pronoun choice like in many other languages such as French tu vous . Our study investigates the status of the T V distinction in English literary texts. Our main findings are a human raters can label monolingual English utterances as T or V fairly well given sufficient context b a bilingual corpus can be exploited to induce a supervised classifier for T V without human annotation. It assigns T V at sentence level with up to 68 accuracy relying mainly on lexical features c there is a marked asymmetry between lexical features for formal speech which are conventionalized and therefore general and informal speech which are text-specific . 1 Introduction In many Indo-European languages there are two pronouns corresponding to the English you. This distinction is generally referred to as the T V dichotomy from the Latin pronouns tu informal T and vos formal V Brown and Gilman 1960 . The V form such as Sie in German and Vous in French can express neutrality or polite distance and is used to address social superiors. The T form German du French tu is employed towards friends or addressees of lower social standing and implies solidarity or lack of formality. English used to have a T V distinction until the 18th century using you as V pronoun and thou for T. However in contemporary English you has taken over both uses and the T V distinction is not marked anymore. In NLP this makes generation in English and translation into English easy. Conversely many NLP tasks suffer from the lack of information about formality . the extraction of social relationships or notably machine .