Among the existing theories of speech recognition, the most accepted one is viewing perception as an adaptive process in which the procedure of perception is subordinated to the means of signal identification and the purpose of the hearing. The listener is found to recognize a word in isolation or in context after listening to it to the end, and the moment of recognition of a word depends on a number of physical and linguistic characteristics. The moment of recognition of a word is identified as the recognition point from which the sequence of segments is associated with a particular word. The complexity of solving the problem of automatic speech recognition is explained by a great variability of acoustic signals, which is due to a number of reasons: different implementation of phonemes, position and characteristics of acoustic receivers, changes in speech parameters of the same speaker, differences between speakers. Word boundaries can be defined only in the process of recognition, by selecting the optimal word sequence that matches the input speech flow by acoustic, linguistic and pragmatic criteria best. Among the methods of implementing automatic speech recognition is the method of consolidation of coding units, which is understood as the relationship between the elements of a particular sequence of signals, which are then most strongly related. Recognition thresholds for non-meaningful sequences, which are supposed to be considered the most successful number of meaningless sequences consisting of three sounds - trigram - are revealed. Based on a study on the difficulty of pronunciation of Russian trigrams, it is assumed that easily pronounced trigrams are recognized with a higher degree of probability than those that were difficult to pronounce. The use of trigrams during the decoding will increase the probability of speech recognition quality, because when divided into trigrams, a longer word is singled out as a syllable and is pronounced more vividly. It is pointed out, that many trigrams correspond to a typical Russian syllable that at the recognition of the speech divided into trigrams allows us to assume probability of forecasting the subsequent sounds. With such an approach it is possible to use Markov's latent models where the chain is represented as a graph whose knots are states, and arcs are possible transitions between states where each transition has its own probability of origin.

Nowadays, a field of dialogue systems and conversational agents is one of the rapidly growing research areas in artificial intelligence applications. Business and industry are showing increasing interest in implementing intelligent conversational agents into their products. There are numerous applications of chatbots in industry, banking, healthcare, and education; and it keeps on growing year-by-year. Many recent studies has tended to focus on possibility of creating intelligent bots helping users not only to accomplish specific tasks (by identifying their intents from text or voice conversations using artificial intelligence), but to capture the user’s identity, attributes, engagement data, and any feedback the user provides - to better handle a wide variety of conversational topics imitating human-like behavior. In this paper, we review the recent progress in developing intelligent conversational agents (or chatbots), its current architecture (rule-based, retrieval based and generative-based models) as well as discuss the main advantages and disadvantages of the approaches. Additionally, we conduct a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art text data vectorization methods (i. e. word/sentence embeddings) which we apply in implementation of a retrieval-based chatbot as an experiment. The results of the experiment are presented as a quality of the chatbot responses selection using various R10@k measures. We also focus on the features of open data sources providing dialogues in Russian. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the collected dialogue data are described. Both the final dataset and program code are published. In this paper, the authors also discuss the issues of assessing the quality of chatbots response selection, in particular, emphasizing the importance of choosing the proper evaluation method. We also demonstrate examples of chatbot dialogues implemented using text vectorization models (TF-IDF-weighted Word2Vec embeddings and LASER sentence embeddings) which revealed best performance. Our future work research is also briefly described in this paper.

The article, based on a specially chosen linguistic sample, deals with the systemic-functional relations between grammatical categories of number and gender, on the one hand, and with other verbal grammatical categories, on the other. Nowadays the setting and description of intercategory grammar interactions are considered to be one of the topical directions in grammar research. To study functional interconnections is important for all grammar categories, especially for that of the verb. We find it important that interactions between both close and distant categories should be studied and described. The methods of observation, description, functional-semantic analysis were used in the course of the work. Functional and paradigmatic relations and interactions between grammatical verbal categories were revealed and described on the basis of the undertaken study. Mediated relations existing between some verbal categories and categories excluding each other were identified. It was found that certain grammatical meanings, extensive, figurative types of usage appear due to the interaction of compatible categories and grammemes, as well as due to the interaction between the grammatical form and the context. There exist various paradigmatic relations between grammar categories. Some of these relations are close, others are not so close. There are even such relations that simply cannot coexist. However, other lexical means can help a verb to overcome those paradigmatic restrictions. In the interaction of the systemically incompatible grammemes there occur some paradigmatic limitations. Different cases of overcoming paradigmatic limitations have also been revealed and described (for example, inclinations, Tense forms and the infinitive). In the course of the functional interaction of verbal grammatical categories, grammatical and lexical semantics, verbal form and context some implicit grammatical meanings are often expressed; although they are not manifested explicitly, they can be recognized due to the context, situation, common background knowledge of the participants of communication.

Much research has been done on the category of evaluativeness, especially on types of evaluation. Nevertheless, there are still some controversial questions to be considered. One of such debatable matters is the distinction between rational and emotional types of evaluation. Thus, the article analyzes the practicability of distinguishing these two types of evaluation. The research is primarily based on institutional sports discourse, namely the texts obtained as a result of transcribing videos with sports commentaries on international figure skating events. The analyzed data revealed that subjective and objective components of evaluation cannot be examined separately since an evaluative judgment comprises both descriptive information (objective characteristics of an object of evaluation) and the attitude of the subject of evaluation towards the object of evaluation (a subjective opinion). What is more, the rational and the emotional make up an indissoluble unity as well: the evaluation process, on the one hand, includes rational analyzing of the characteristics of the object of evaluation, on the other hand, evaluation is always accompanied by emotional reaction of the subject of evaluation since emotions, from the psychological point of view, accompany any response to an external stimulus. Besides, the idea of emotive-evaluative unity is indispensable when it is necessary to identify an implicit evaluative statement in the text: since evaluative meanings of an implicit evaluative statement are normally realized in the context, the author’s attitude towards a supposed object of evaluation is crucial for considering this statement evaluative. Hence, emotions are indicators of implicit evaluation that also stresses the importance of the emotive component of any evaluation type. These results demonstrate that there is a very low probability that evaluation devoid of any emotions can exist. At the same time, the degree of emotionality varies on an ad hoc basis. The examples of evaluative statements analyzed in the paper also illustrate the significance of the category of expressiveness in describing the degree of the emotional intensity of evaluation.

This article considers the comical as a component of argumentation in the popular science short-film whose rhetoric schema, combining picture (video sequence) and verbal dialogue, allows us to refer it to as a typical example of mul-timodal discourse. The film called “A quand le sabre laser?” (When’s the Lightsaber?) represents the French culture of scientific thinking. It relies on the comics of a French artist and caricaturist Marion Montaigne and is a part of the series produced and broadcast since 2016 by the French-German company ARTE. The title of the series is also typically French - “Tu mourras moins bête” (“You will die less stupid”) - and its purpose is to invite the learning folk in such a funny - and slightly American - form to some optimism, promising not to bore them beyond measure. Analysing the comic of this film, we rely on its conceptualization suggested by the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his essay “Laughter” in which he considers the comic as a reaction to the funny, peculiar only to humans. According to him, the comic represents “the fun of the human mind, mental contrast and perceived absurdity” (H. Bergson). The purpose of the microfilm is to combine fascinating form and entertaining effect in order to expose scientifically some tricks from the “Star Wars” relating to the use of lasers. The contrast between the films is what attracts the audience’s attention by creating intrigue. The video sequence provides a good example of functional differences between visual and verbal presentation of the information. What is shown on the screen is not necessarily evidence or even reality, and the picture (unlike a statistical table or graph) is not an argument. The pictures are needed in this multimodal text to formulate a kind of visual logical emphasis, to highlight a point, not to supply a correct answer, while understanding is achievable only with the help of a word, through rational physical argumentation. The discursive role of fig. 4, 5, 6, for instance, which illustrate “commonplace stupidities and fantasies” - something that could not happen in reality - is to entertain not to inform. The study obviously showed that due to its form of communicating the meaning based on the “dialogue” between fictional characters, comic video sequence and real science, the audience understand physical truths better. It encourages better comprehension and acquisition of information by collective recipient / viewer which will not trust blindly any more the “truths” about laser sabers from “Star Wars”.

The article aims to give an insight into linguacognitive aspects of linguistic creativity and peculiarities of its functioning in English-language media. It, namely, considers cognitive mechanisms underlying the formation of linguacreative items, and their pragmatic potential. The study is novel and of acute interest in that, proceeding from linguacognitive analysis of material from 100 current media articles in quality English-language papers, like The Economist, it identifies and newly researches key cognitive mechanisms underlying linguistic creativity and its language manifestations (creative items of language and speech, or linguacreative items). Methodologically, the research is based on theoretical works in the field of linguistic creativity (V. Z. Demyankov, G. A. Kopnina, A. P. Skovorodnikov V. I. Zabotkina, I. V. Zykova, A. Koestler) and medialinguistics (G. Ya. Solganik). The study of identified cognitive mechanisms underlying linguistic creativity is implemented in two distinct directions. On the one hand, the article considers cognitive mechanisms of linguistic creativity from the author’s perspective as those which are employed while encoding information: deviation or variance (ref. V. I. Zabotkina), analogy and bisociation (ref. A. Koestler). On the other, cognitive mechanisms are viewed from the reader’s perspective as those employed by the recipient while attempting to fully and correctly decode texts with elements of linguistic creativity: inference and cognitive dissonance (ref. L. Festinger). The writing contains conclusions on the pragmatic potential of linguacreative items and the functions they might perform in the press (attracting the reader’s attention with a non-conventional form, providing the author’s assessment of events and phenomena, manipulating the reader’s opinion, creating a comic effect to exert indirect impact on the recipient).

Phraseological units of a language, including proverbs and anti-proverbs, take the center stage in studying cultural peculiarities of a nation. Nowadays, the reflection of gender in languages has much gained in importance and scholars are particularly interested in anti-proverbs which can be defined as alterations of traditional paremias manifesting the changes happening in the society. The ultimate aim of this study is to define the role of the anti-proverbs with gender components in the formation of women’s images and anti-images in the English and Russian languages as well as to conduct a comparative analysis of these images. To achieve this goal, the author collected relevant items from dictionaries and Internet sources, as well as analyzed the use of anti-proverbs with gender components in both languages. This analysis made it possible to identify and correlate the images of women formed by means of paremiological units. As a result, this study allowed us to conclude that in both languages the anti-proverbs emphasize the negative characteristics of women, however, unlike in English, in the Russian language, women are heavily criticized. This conclusion is supported by the lexical analysis: in the Russian anti-proverbs women are characterized not only with the help of lexis with negative connotations, but also by means of vulgarisms and taboo words. Thus, it should be noted that despite the fact that the anti-proverbs are ironic and humorous in nature, they reflect gender images fixed in a culture.

The Conceptual Metaphor Theory says that metaphorical projections reflect the experience of human interaction with the surrounding realm. Therefore, having studied the content of these metaphorical mappings, we can draw conclusions about the nature of this interaction. The present study is devoted to the problems of intracultural variation of a conceptual metaphor, namely, the dependence of the conceptual metaphor perception on professional and life experience. The author introduces the idea of the variance of conceptual metaphor perception, which is understood as the difference in the perception of implicit and explicit layers of a metaphor. The implicit plan refers to a conceptual formula for metaphorical mapping (WAR is a GAME), while the explicit plan refers to a concrete implementation of a conceptual formula (to win a war). For the empirical material of the study was chosen a conceptual metaphor with the WAR target domain for which 6 most characteristic source domains were identified: GAME, THEATER, COMPETITION, CASINO, LESSON, DEATH. The study of the metaphorical models perception was conducted by interviewing respondents with different life and professional experience in the military sphere: military professionals, combat veterans, military personnel, and civilians. Respondents were supposed to correlate the proposed language implementations of metaphors and their conceptual formulas with their language and life experience. This technique makes it possible to identify the dependence of conceptual metaphorical mappings on one’s life and professional experience. In addition, the calculation of the variance of the conceptual metaphor allows us to identify the stability of a particular metaphorical transfer, enabling us to draw conclusions about the reflection of the objective realm in the minds of native speakers. The study showed a certain difference in the metaphor perception for people with different professional backgrounds, the difference being especially strong for groups of military professionals and civilians. Considering the variance of conceptual metaphors leads us to a conclusion that the metaphorical models WAR is A LESSON and WAR is DEATH are inconstant in the Russian socioculture. As a result, it was revealed that the main components of the WAR concept structure were GAME, DEATH and LESSON, with DEATH and LESSON being unstable in respondents’ consciousness, standing out on the surface cognitive level, but rather insignificant on the deep cognitive level.

The article touches upon techniques and means of verbalization of the ethnocultural component in literary texts and illustrates it with a work by the American writer K. Hosseini who is Afghan by birth with Iranian cultural substrate. Bilingualism and biculturality of the author naturally nominates him for the role of a cultural translator, or “cultural mediator” between Afghanistan and the USA, noticeably affecting the content of the English literary text and primarily its key images. The analysis of the key images in the novel by K. Hosseini as well as the means of their verbalization and evaluation presented in the article supports the thesis about heterogenic character of these images. The image of the kite relates to the attributes of Afghan air battles as well as of American peaceful festivals. Thus, one of the manifestations of linguocultural heterogeneity in the analyzed novel is the combination of native (Afghan) elements of the author’s culture and the acquired (American) ones. The image of the kite runner in the novel embodies cultural diffusion since the knowledge that one of the participants must run for, catching a downed kite during a traditional winter tournament in Afghanistan, has an exotic cultural nature for the American reader. Ethnocultural peculiarity of artistic images is expressed in the novel both explicitly (in the descriptions of kite battles) and implicitly (in the author’s evaluative position). Moreover, processes of cultural diffusion and interference in the novel by K. Hosseini manifest themselves in the usage of lexical units naming realia of Afghan culture that are foreign for the English text. What is more, ethnocultural heterogeneity is realized in the images of major characters of the novel, who are Afghans but their actions and inner conflicts are estimated from the perspective of an American culture representative. To conclude, despite the dominating native Afghan culture, a certain synergy of artistic images in the novel lies in generating the author’s new meanings under the influence of both cultures.

The main purpose of the study is to describe the semantics of lexeme dust as far as the influence of a religious cult (Christianity) on the consciousness of native speakers of the Russian language is concerned. The objectives of the study are the following: firstly, to describe the earth as a substance from which according to the text of the Bible man was created. Secondly, to analyze the semantic components of the meanings of lexeme dust in the major explanatory and encyclopedic dictionaries of the Russian language. Thirdly, to demonstrate examples of verbalization of semantic components of the lexeme dust in the collected language material. Finally, draw conclusions about the Christian influence on the views of native speakers of the Russian language on earth. The material for the study was taken from the National Corpus of the Russian Language (www.ruscorpora.ru), from texts of fiction relating to 19th and 20th centuries, and six explanatory dictionaries. The main methods of research are descriptive, comparative, interpretative. According to the study, the semantic structure of lexeme dust comprises components that have lost religious meanings (‘dust / smallest particles of something’, ‘black earth’, ‘(dry) rot’, ‘dust’, ‘natural substance’), components that verbalize pagan concept of earth such as ‘flesh/body’, ‘ashes’, as well as components associated with the Christian cult, namely the motive for creation a man (‘decay’, ‘remains / corpse’, ‘clay’, ‘negligible / low-value’, ‘short-term’, ‘vanity’). The language material shows the relevance of all 12 semantic components of the lexeme dust in literary contexts, and, therefore, in the language. The found components of dust are mainly highlight its natural materiality and low value. In the Christian worldview the earth retains its status of material involved in the creation of man. However, it no longer gives birth to him: God creates a man from particles the dust of earth or, like a potter-master, sculpts him from clay.

The paper discusses the results of a series of experiments aimed at studying how the images of the ideal teacher and the ideal student change in the student’s mind. The hypothesis of the study was as follows: during the years of studying at the university the above mentioned images undergo significant changes due to the various activities in the academic environment as well as to self-evaluation of his/her own activities. This hypothesis was tested by a series of experiments conducted by the method of free associations and the method of unfinished sentences, the results of which complement each other. The hypothesis has been partially confirmed. During the years of studying, the images of the ideal teacher and the ideal student in the student’s language consciousness are enriched with a variety of language means, primarily expressive ones. However, they change quantitatively rather than qualitatively: new image characteristics are not found however, the existing ones become differentiated. The images of the ideal student and the ideal teacher are not a simple idealization of the student and teacher images, they are formed and changed independently of those creating them?

The article is devoted to the psycholinguistic analysis of changes the image of war has been undergoing in the Russian language consciousness. A comparative analysis of Russian associative bases obtained in different years from the 70s of the last century to the 2010s made it possible to reveal the dynamics of the connections formed by the word war in the Russian language consciousness of three generations. The word war is capable of evoking in the mind of a native speaker a specific event, either occurring in the history of the people or expected to occur in the future. Since the 40s of the last century, the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) has been such an historical landmark event in the Russian culture. The materials of psycholinguistic associative experiments conducted with students in their different years show that this image has not lost its relevance yet. Although there is a slight decrease in its intensity, and the direct reference to the Great Patriotic War is no longer the most frequent reaction to the word war. The reasons for this decrease are supposed to be the general influence of Western mass culture and the increasing time distance from this event. In Western mass culture actively absorbed by the younger generation, the notion of the Second World War is used to refer to the historical events described in the Russian culture as the Great Patriotic War. Using a psycholinguistic associative experiment conducted with cadets of one of the Russian military academies, certain professional features of the connections formed by the word war, which in the military activity frame is characterized as a set of actions aimed at achieving certain goals and implementing certain motives, are revealed. The professional identification of cadets is manifested in the fact that in their linguistic consciousness, in connection with the word war, the expected military events with the participation of a likely enemy are evoked, while references to historical wars are few, and the image of the Great Patriotic War prevails among them.

The third edition of “Corpus linguistics” is a comprehensive manual designed both for students and tutors who are engaged in some field of linguistic research. The authors have revised the structure of the book and added the data on corpus creation and usage, as well as information on web-corpora. Due to its interactive character the book can be used as a self-teaching tool to study the fundamentals of corpus linguistics.