Parakeele kasutus uues meedias
Date
2006
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Description
This thesis presents a hypothesis, that it is possible to learn a significant part of the
paralanguage in new media by imitation and tests the hypothesis by using a connectionist
neural network learning on new media text corpus.
A connectionist neural network is created, which is trained to detect patterns in the corpus,
which relate the use of paralanguage to its context. For this purpose, the corpus is divided into
training and testing data. Both sets of data consist of pairs of identical sentences from the
corpus, only the latter part of the pair is without paralanguage syntax. The network is trained
to predict the use of paralanguage by comparing the sentences with and without the
paralanguage. No guidelines or rules concerning paralanguage are given to the network, it
learns by comparing the prediction to the correct answer in the training set and back-
propagating the error until significant part of the predictions turn out to be true. By this
method, the network starts to “learn” the paralanguage. The thesis investigates how much of
the new media paralanguage can be learned by using the method and can the process of
learning be described as imitational.
The analysis of the network is conducted by
investigating the global learning error rate and by
coding the corpus with different levels of information.
The results show that if we code the sentences from new media texts with context information
– like punctuation, the number and position of the sentence in dialogue – the network is able
to predict approximately 30% of the paralanguage usage correctly in separated sentences or
speech acts. The thesis concludes that 30% is a significant part of the paralanguage and the
learning process can be described more as imitational as opposed to rule-based semantic
learning.
The result leads to several conclusions
a significant part of the paralanguage in new media can be generated correctly without the
knowledge of their actual meanings
although we can describe the learning process as imitational, the learning is not possible
until context information about the conversation and dialogue is presented to the network
that leads to the conclusion that paralanguage in new media has a significant role as a
communications facilitator
Keywords
H Social Sciences (General), bakalaureusetööd, meedia, uus meedia