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"Swedish language Text"
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Digital communication as part of family language policy: the interplay of multimodality and language status in a Finnish context
While mobile app-mediated communication between children and members of their family represents a substantial part of contemporary family communication and language input, we still know very little about the role of these technologies in family language policy (FLP). With an explorative questionnaire survey, the current study set out to examine (1) how Finnish state and language-in-education policies intersect with how families make use of their languages in spoken and in app-mediated communication, and (2) to what extent app-mediated FL practices function as a space for spoken and literacy language development. 1002 nine to twelve year-olds in minority-language Swedish-medium schools in Finland responded to the survey. The results showed the dominance of the two national, high-status languages Swedish and Finnish in the families, with texting being the most common app practice. Languages other than Swedish and Finnish (LOTSF) were used in 17% of the families and to a great extent also in the family apps. While app-mediated family communications overall were shown to serve as significant spaces for language and literacy development, in some cases of LOTSF with a lower status and less educational support, and with linguistic and writing systems deviating from Swedish and Finnish, children refrained from texting in the apps. The findings suggest that the relationship between choice of modalities in language(s) of different status and educational support is complex and needs further attention in future FLP studies.
Journal Article
Learner and teacher perspectives on robot-led L2 conversation practice
This article focuses on designing and evaluating conversation practice in a second language (L2) with a robot that employs human spoken and non-verbal interaction strategies. Based on an analysis of previous work and semi-structured interviews with L2 learners and teachers, recommendations for robot-led conversation practice for adult learners at intermediate level are first defined, focused on language learning, on the social context, on the conversational structure and on verbal and visual aspects of the robot moderation. Guided by these recommendations, an experiment is set up, in which 12 pairs of L2 learners of Swedish interact with a robot in short social conversations. These robot–learner interactions are evaluated through post-session interviews with the learners, teachers’ ratings of the robot’s behaviour and analyses of the video-recorded conversations, resulting in a set of guidelines for robot-led conversation practice: (1) societal and personal topics increase the practice’s meaningfulness for learners; (2) strategies and methods for providing corrective feedback during conversation practice need to be explored further; (3) learners should be encouraged to support each other if the robot has difficulties adapting to their linguistic level; (4) the robot should establish a social relationship by contributing with its own story, remembering the participants’ input, and making use of non-verbal communication signals; and (5) improvements are required regarding naturalness and intelligibility of text-to-speech synthesis, in particular its speed, if it is to be used for conversations with L2 learners.
Journal Article
MELHISSA: a multilingual entity linking architecture for historical press articles
Digital libraries have a key role in cultural heritage as they provide access to our culture and history by indexing books and historical documents (newspapers and letters). Digital libraries use natural language processing (NLP) tools to process these documents and enrich them with meta-information, such as named entities. Despite recent advances in these NLP models, most of them are built for specific languages and contemporary documents that are not optimized for handling historical material that may for instance contain language variations and optical character recognition (OCR) errors. In this work, we focused on the entity linking (EL) task that is fundamental to the indexation of documents in digital libraries. We developed a Multilingual Entity Linking architecture for HIstorical preSS Articles that is composed of multilingual analysis, OCR correction, and filter analysis to alleviate the impact of historical documents in the EL task. The source code is publicly available. Experimentation has been done over two historical document corpora covering five European languages (English, Finnish, French, German, and Swedish). Results have shown that our system improved the global performance for all languages and datasets by achieving an F-score@1 of up to 0.681 and an F-score@5 of up to 0.787.
Journal Article
Writing with Decoding and Spelling Difficulties—A Qualitative Perspective
Writers with decoding and/or spelling difficulties often produce short, lower-quality texts and experience less fluent writing, frequently interrupted by long pauses at the word level. Research suggests that from adolescence onward, such writers become increasingly aware of their difficulties, which influences behaviours such as avoiding difficult-to-spell words and pausing for lexical decisions. The objective of this study was to deepen the understanding of how adolescent students with decoding and spelling difficulties engage in the task of text composition. In this multiple case study, we qualitatively investigated argumentative texts and writing processes produced by three Swedish upper-secondary students with such difficulties. Data were collected through keystroke logging and analyses of texts and keystroke logs provided detailed insights into their individual writing approaches. The results generally align with previous findings but reveal notable differences depending on the severity of the difficulties. Two students with moderate challenges paused extensively to consider spelling, formulation, and word choice, while one student with more pronounced difficulties wrote rapidly and briefly to complete the task quickly. This nuanced analysis highlights the diversity of writing profiles among students with decoding and spelling difficulties and underscores the need for tailored support to help them produce higher-quality texts.
Journal Article
End-to-end pseudonymization of fine-tuned clinical BERT models
Many state-of-the-art results in natural language processing (NLP) rely on large pre-trained language models (PLMs). These models consist of large amounts of parameters that are tuned using vast amounts of training data. These factors cause the models to memorize parts of their training data, making them vulnerable to various privacy attacks. This is cause for concern, especially when these models are applied in the clinical domain, where data are very sensitive.
Training data pseudonymization is a privacy-preserving technique that aims to mitigate these problems. This technique automatically identifies and replaces sensitive entities with realistic but non-sensitive surrogates. Pseudonymization has yielded promising results in previous studies. However, no previous study has applied pseudonymization to both the pre-training data of PLMs and the fine-tuning data used to solve clinical NLP tasks.
This study evaluates the effects on the predictive performance of end-to-end pseudonymization of Swedish clinical BERT models fine-tuned for five clinical NLP tasks. A large number of statistical tests are performed, revealing minimal harm to performance when using pseudonymized fine-tuning data. The results also find no deterioration from end-to-end pseudonymization of pre-training and fine-tuning data. These results demonstrate that pseudonymizing training data to reduce privacy risks can be done without harming data utility for training PLMs.
Journal Article
English Textbooks in Parallel-Language Tertiary Education
Tertiary education in many countries is increasingly bilingual, with English used in parallel with the national language, particularly as a reading language. This article describes the results of a survey of student attitudes toward, and reading practices regarding, English language textbooks. Over 1,000 students at three Swedish universities responded to a questionnaire asking about their experiences with English textbooks. Textbooks written in English were generally unpopular, and the perception was widespread that they placed a greater burden on students. However, respondents were divided about whether their reading behavior and their learning outcomes were affected by having a textbook in English, and about whether English texts were desirable. The findings of this study have implications for teaching practices in contexts in which students are asked to read, or are being prepared to read, in a second language. Implications for the English as a foreign language or English as a second language classroom are discussed.
Journal Article
Language testing and citizenship: A language ideological debate in Sweden
This article explores a public debate that took place in Sweden in 2002 in relation to the Swedish Liberal Party's proposal to introduce a language test for naturalization. On the basis of textual analysis of relevant policy documents and newspaper articles, it examines the explicit and implicit facets of an ideology of language testing. It is argued that a seemingly liberal, anti-racist, and anti-discriminatory ideology is emerging, which, in its explicit facet, calls for the introduction of a language test for citizenship as a practical way of diminishing social differentiation. However, drawing upon Bourdieu's notion of rites of institution, it is shown that such a test would actually contribute to, rather than challenge, the reproduction of social differentiation, thereby legitimizing the exclusion of certain groups from both the civic and symbolic domains of Sweden as a nation-state.I want to acknowledge that the research that resulted in the present article was conducted at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University. However, my current affiliation and address for correspondence is Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK; email: T.Milani@leeds.ac.uk. I also want to take the opportunity to thank Kenneth Hyltenstam, Sally Johnson, Barbara Johnstone, Ingrid Piller, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this article.
Journal Article
Do textbooks support incidental vocabulary learning? - a corpus-based study of Swedish intermediate EFL materials
Learning vocabulary is a central but yet complex aspect of learning a language. Hence, researchers stress the importance of facilitating vocabulary development via a structured approach to target words and recycling. While teaching materials have the potential to provide this structure to all students in a classroom, few studies have investigated the vocabulary component of textbooks and the learning opportunities they provide. In the present study, the texts in five series of EFL materials aimed at intermediate learners in Swedish secondary school (years 7-9) were investigated, using corpus-based methods. The results indicate that the texts encompass a suitable amount of unknown vocabulary for vocabulary learning from reading and provide exposure to mid-frequency vocabulary. However, it was also found that these items are not recycled sufficiently. Rather, the materials mainly recycle lexical items that students are likely to know already. It is therefore concluded that although the materials offer input suitable for the target students, they are not structured in a way that supports vocabulary development.
Journal Article
SALDO: a touch of yin to WordNet's yang
The English-language Princeton WordNet (PWN) and some wordnets for other languages have been extensively used as lexical-semantic knowledge sources in language technology applications, due to their free availability and their size. The ubiquitousness of PWN-type wordnets tends to overshadow the fact that they represent one out of many possible choices for structuring a lexical–semantic resource, and it could be enlightening to look at a differently structured resource both from the point of view of theoretical–methodological considerations and from the point of view of practical text processing requirements. The resource described here—SALDO—is such a lexical–semantic resource, intended primarily for use in language technology applications, and offering an alternative organization to PWN-style wordnets. We present our work on SALDO, compare it with PWN, and discuss some implications of the differences. We also describe an integrated infrastructure for computational lexical resources where SALDO forms the central component.
Journal Article