The rebellious and heroic city of Santiago de Cuba welcomes biennially national and international social scientists, linguists and journalists, who are summoned to attend the International Symposium on Social Communication. For over three decades, the Symposium has become the right setting for scientific exchanges. This year, the 18th edition was convened for January 24 to 27.
As is customary, two short courses were scheduled before the start of the Symposium, which on this occasion took place on January 23 at the conference room in the venue of the host institution the Center for Applied Linguistics.
The first course entitled Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts was presented in the morning session by renowned scholar Dr. Izaskun Etxeberria Uztarroz, member of the University of the Basque Country IXA research group, focused on computational linguistics studies.
Based on the findings relating to the construction of the historical corpus of the Basque language obtained by her research team, Dr. Etxeberria referred to the challenges entailed in digital processing of historical texts. Unlike modern languages, historical languages lack the characteristics that enable language processing. For instance, they do not have a spelling variant or standard spelling; they exist mostly in printed form only, thus, requiring digitalization; and are not widespread. Consequently, there are no Natural Language Processing resources or tools for their study. In addition, it is not always possible to understand historical documents provided their variable level of conservation, either because there are fully or partially illegible, or because they have been damaged and/or some fragments are missing. However, historical texts corpora are very useful not for linguists, but also for historians, teachers, archaeologists, and others. They would help linguists understand historical languages both synchronically and diachronically.
In the afternoon session, Dr. Romualdo Ibáñez Orellana and Andrea Santana Covarrubias, from the Pontifical Catholic University of Valparaíso, Chile, presented the second short course entitled School Textbook and Coherence Relations: Theory, Methods and Implications.
These scholars claim that school textbooks are a fundamental aid for teachers throughout the teaching-learning process. This is a reality in Latin America and in Chile as well. Taking into account the importance of this pedagogical tool, the question was posed as to whether school textbooks had to be adapted to students’ discursive skills.
Using Text Linguistics and Discursive-Functional Grammar concepts, Dr. Ibáñez and Dr. Santana suggested a new practical method for relational coherence analysis based on four description criteria: basic operation, source of coherence, order of events and polarity.
The academicians presented their experiences and results of relational coherence analysis in Chilean school textbooks.
This was a very fruitful pre-symposium day that enabled the practice of science and enriching exchanges of views. (02/01/2023)