Runnel, Pille, juhendajaPruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Pille, juhendajaKalm, Kristjan2010-10-212010-10-212006http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15556This 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 facilitatorapplication/pdfH Social Sciences (General)bakalaureusetöödmeediauus meediaThesis