Speech rhythm: a metaphor?

Is speech rhythmic? In the absence of evidence for a traditional view that languages strive to coordinate either syllables or stress-feet with regular time intervals, we consider the alternative that languages exhibit contrastive rhythm subsisting merely in the alternation of stronger and weaker elements. This is initially plausible, particularly for languages with a steep ‘prominence gradient’, i.e. a large disparity between stronger and weaker elements; but we point out that alternation is poorly achieved even by a ‘stress-timed’ language such as English, and, historically, languages have conspicuously failed to adopt simple phonological remedies that would ensure alternation. Languages seem more concerned to allow ‘syntagmatic contrast’ between successive units and to use durational effects to support linguistic functions than to facilitate rhythm. Furthermore, some languages (e.g. Tamil, Korean) lack the lexical prominence which would most straightforwardly underpin prominence alternation. We conclude that speech is not incontestibly rhythmic, and may even be antirhythmic. However, its linguistic structure and patterning allow the metaphorical extension of rhythm in varying degrees and in different ways depending on the language, and that it is this analogical process which allows speech to be matched to external rhythms

Revisiting Underapproximate Reachability for Multipushdown Systems

Boolean programs with multiple recursive threads can be captured as pushdown automata with multiple stacks. This model is Turing complete, and hence, one is often interested in analyzing a restricted class that still captures useful behaviors. In this paper, we propose a new class of bounded under approximations for multi-pushdown systems, which subsumes most existing classes. We develop an efficient algorithm for solving the under-approximate reachability problem, which is based on efficient fix-point computations. We implement it in our tool BHIM and illustrate its applicability by generating a set of relevant benchmarks and examining its performance. As an additional takeaway, BHIM solves the binary reachability problem in pushdown automata. To show the versatility of our approach, we then extend our algorithm to the timed setting and provide the first implementation that can handle timed multi-pushdown automata with closed guards.Comment: 52 pages, Conference TACAS 202

Formal Modeling of Connectionism using Concurrency Theory, an Approach Based on Automata and Model Checking

This paper illustrates a framework for applying formal methods techniques, which are symbolic in nature, to specifying and verifying neural networks, which are sub-symbolic in nature. The paper describes a communicating automata [Bowman & Gomez, 2006] model of neural networks. We also implement the model using timed automata [Alur & Dill, 1994] and then undertake a verification of these models using the model checker Uppaal [Pettersson, 2000] in order to evaluate the performance of learning algorithms. This paper also presents discussion of a number of broad issues concerning cognitive neuroscience and the debate as to whether symbolic processing or connectionism is a suitable representation of cognitive systems. Additionally, the issue of integrating symbolic techniques, such as formal methods, with complex neural networks is discussed. We then argue that symbolic verifications may give theoretically well-founded ways to evaluate and justify neural learning systems in the field of both theoretical research and real world applications

A Very Low Resource Language Speech Corpus for Computational Language Documentation Experiments

Most speech and language technologies are trained with massive amounts of speech and text information. However, most of the world languages do not have such resources or stable orthography. Systems constructed under these almost zero resource conditions are not only promising for speech technology but also for computational language documentation. The goal of computational language documentation is to help field linguists to (semi-)automatically analyze and annotate audio recordings of endangered and unwritten languages. Example tasks are automatic phoneme discovery or lexicon discovery from the speech signal. This paper presents a speech corpus collected during a realistic language documentation process. It is made up of 5k speech utterances in Mboshi (Bantu C25) aligned to French text translations. Speech transcriptions are also made available: they correspond to a non-standard graphemic form close to the language phonology. We present how the data was collected, cleaned and processed and we illustrate its use through a zero-resource task: spoken term discovery. The dataset is made available to the community for reproducible computational language documentation experiments and their evaluation.Comment: accepted to LREC 201

Harmony and Technology Enhanced Learning

New technologies offer rich opportunities to support education in harmony. In this chapter we consider theoretical perspectives and underlying principles behind technologies for learning and teaching harmony. Such perspectives help in matching existing and future technologies to educational purposes, and to inspire the creative re-appropriation of technologies

Adult ESL Oral Reading Fluency and Silent Reading Comprehension

A descriptive study of second language adults studying ESL at the beginning, intermediate, and advanced levels in a post-secondary academic program revealed that their oral reading fluency had a significant, low-to-moderate correlation with scores on a measure of silent reading comprehension. The correlation was slightly stronger for measures of accuracy than speed, and strongest for miscue ratio. The correlation increased as proficiency level increased. Among different first language groups, the correlation was highest for Hispanic learners, and lowest for Chinese. Furthermore, all fluency measures correlated better with a listening measure than with the silent reading comprehension measure. When a system of using words correct per minute was contrasted with a fluency rubric using descriptive measures of expressive reading, the correlation with silent reading was found to be almost the same, but the system of words correct per minute had higher reliability. A miscue analysis of seven intermediate learners\u27 oral reading indicated that speed does not necessarily increase as silent reading proficiency increases, but accuracy does; Chinese students are a special case who do not fit the profile of the other language groups; and the value of miscue analysis with this population is somewhat limited because of the foreign accent problem. It was also found that the fluency tools mirrored overall progress in proficiency level, and listening comprehension predicted silent reading comprehension better than any fluency measure or combination of measures, with little increase in predictive power by adding fluency measures

Complexity Hierarchies Beyond Elementary

We introduce a hierarchy of fast-growing complexity classes and show its suitability for completeness statements of many non elementary problems. This hierarchy allows the classification of many decision problems with a non-elementary complexity, which occur naturally in logic, combinatorics, formal languages, verification, etc., with complexities ranging from simple towers of exponentials to Ackermannian and beyond.Comment: Version 3 is the published version in TOCT 8(1:3), 2016. I will keep updating the catalogue of problems from Section 6 in future revision

2008 Abstracts Collection -- IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science

This volume contains the proceedings of the 28th international conference on the Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2008), organized under the auspices of the Indian Association for Research in Computing Science (IARCS)