An infrastructure for Turkish prosody generation in text-to-speech synthesis

Text-to-speech engines benefit from natural language processing while generating the appropriate prosody. In this study, we investigate the natural language processing infrastructure for Turkish prosody generation in three steps as pronunciation disambiguation, phonological phrase detection and intonation level assignment. We focus on phrase boundary detection and intonation assignment. We propose a phonological phrase detection scheme based on syntactic analysis for Turkish and assign one of three intonation levels to words in detected phrases. Empirical observations on 100 sentences show that the proposed scheme works with approximately 85% accuracy

An open, extendible, and fast Turkish morphological analyzer

In this paper, we present a two-level morphological analyzer for Turkish which consists of five main components: finite state transducer, rule engine for suffixation, lexicon, trie data structure, and LRU cache. We use Java language to implement finite state machine logic and rule engine, Xml language to describe the finite state transducer rules of the Turkish language, which makes the morphological analyzer both easily extendible and easily applicable to other languages. Empowered with a comprehensive lexicon of 54,000 bare-forms including 19,000 proper nouns, our morphological analyzer is amongst the most reliable analyzers produced so far. The analyzer is compared with Turkish morphological analyzers in the literature. By using LRU cache and a trie data structure, the system can analyze 100,000 words per second, which enables users to analyze huge corpora in a few hours.Publisher's Versio

Orta-Üstü Düzeydeki İngilizce Öğrencilerinin Yazılarındaki Yazım Hataları: Kuram Ve Niceliksel Bir Çözümleme

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of an un-elicited corpus of English spelling errors from Turkish learners. It focuses on the issues raised by an earlier corpus-based analysis of errors made by native speakers and on the theoretical significance of the findings of both these studies.A review of the theoretical background to spelling error analysis is followed by a quantitative analysis of spelling mistakes made by upper intermediate level Turkish learners of English. The results indicate that native and foreign writers share a number of cognitive and perceptual processes in the production of English spellings, notably those concerning a degree of independence of orthography from phonology, sensitivity to word length, and the relative perceptual salience of segmental positions within the word.Bu çalışma Türk öğrencilerin yaptığı İngilizce yazım hatalarından oluşan bir bütüncenin niceliksel bir analizini yapmaktadır. Çalışma, anadili İngilizce olanların yaptığı yazım hatalarına dayalı bir analizin ortaya koyduğu sorunlar ve bu çalışma ile daha önceki bir çalışmanın bulgularının kuramsal önemi üzerine odaklaşmaktadır. Çalışmada, yazım hatalarına ilişkin kuramsal bir arka plan incelemesini, İngilizceleri orta-üst düzeydeki öğrencilerin yaptığı yazım hatalarının niceliksel bir analizi izlemektedir. Elde edilen sonuçlar, yazımın sesbilimden bağımsızlık derecesi, sözcük uzunluğuna duyarlılık ve sözcük içindeki parçaların göreli algılanabilirliği ile ilgili konular başta olmak üzere, bilişsel ve algılama süreçlerinde anadili İngilizce olanlar ile anadili Türkçe olanların İngilizce yazım üretiminde ortak yanları olduğunu göstermektedir

Dutch and German 3-year-olds’ representations of voicing alternations

The voicing contrast is neutralised syllable and word finally in Dutch and German, leading to alternations within the morphological paradigm (e.g. Dutch ‘bed(s)’, be[t] be[d]en, German ‘dog(s)’, Hun[t]-Hun[d]e). Despite structural similarity, language-specific morphological, phonological and lexical properties impact on the distribution of this alternation in the two languages. Previous acquisition research has focused on one language only, predominantly focusing on children’s production accuracy, concluding that alternations are not acquired until late in the acquisition process in either language. This paper adapts a perceptual method to investigate how voicing alternations are represented in the mental lexicon of Dutch and German 3-year-olds. Sensitivity to mispronunciations of voicing word-medially in plural forms was measured using a visual fixation procedure. Dutch children exhibited evidence of overgeneralising the voicing alternation, whereas German children consistently preferred the correct pronunciation to mispronunciations. Results indicate that the acquisition of voicing alternations is influenced by language-specific factors beyond the alternation itself