Hello, bonjour, and salvete EAMT members, I contact you all today to inform you of the summer research that I will be conducting for my senior honors thesis in linguistics at William & Mary, where I am currently a junior majoring in French and in Linguistics. This research deals with cross-linguistic, computational semantics, and so I thought it might be of interest to you. Here is a brief summary of my project, along with fundraising information:
*Title*: Computational Semantics of Words Describing Nebulous Human Concepts (in French, Latin, and English) *Research question*: How do words describing abstract concepts in French, English, and Latin differ semantically across the three languages? *Description*: Translators often do not fully understand the wealth of semantic nuance encoded in every word; it is easy enough to claim equivalence between cat and chat, but can anyone say for certain that honor and honneur describe the exact same concept? I propose a comparison of the semantics of words describing such nebulous, human concepts as honor, justice, love, humor, etc., across the French, English, and Latin languages. A thorough treatment of this question would generate not only new understanding of semantic methods in natural (i.e., computational) language processing, but would also allow insight into pre-existing formal linguistic methods of semantics, not to mention constitute a valuable resource for speakers and learners of languages. At the advice of the scholarship department at William & Mary (the Charles Center), I humbly present to you the following link to a donation page, the sole means by which my research will be funded: http://www.givecampus.com/midnyn <https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.givecampus.com%2Fmidnyn&data=02%7C01%7C%7C989fd0b0a1904515d0ae08d7c55874ff%7C569df091b01340e386eebd9cb9e25814%7C0%7C1%7C637194856032282158&sdata=dcySwi%2FL1RspWIoZfk5odJsU2V3YWfLO%2FU%2F1iK1MRz0%3D&reserved=0> Should you wish to share this link with other interested parties, or should you wish to donate any amount to fund my research efforts, I would be exceedingly grateful. Funding would go towards purchasing textbooks on semantics and on natural language processing, as well as towards increasing the computing power available to me. Finally, a stipend would enable me to do this research instead of a summer job; without funding, I am not sure if I could complete the research. If you are interested, I would gladly keep you updated about the status of the research, whether or not you should choose to contribute to my fundraising effort. Please let me know what you think. Sincerely and humbly, Tristan Ramage
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