Uprooted and replanted: recontextualizing a genre.

Decontextualized cultural material presents an interpretive challenge. A list of proverbs gives no indication of the range of social purposes for which speakers deploy them, nor how the proverbs came about. Such proverbs could easily be deemed as worthless as potshards excavated without attention to their archaeological context; yet this essay uses a corpus of proverbs without conversational context to explore the extent and limits of interpretation via linguistic and anthropological means. Context can be discovered as discourse chunks such as proverbs move between communicative genres. When speakers of a language are, in addition, shifting to using a dominant language, proverbs are an important resource of rememberers, one that may also be the locus of language shift to that dominant language. The analysis draw on language contact and narrative memory to explore how some Turkic Salar speakers (ISO 639-3: slr) deploy this flexible medium.Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad. Volkswagen Foundation, DOBES Programme

Speech Recognition

Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes

Film policy and the emergence of the cross-cultural: exploring crossover cinema in Flanders (Belgium)

With several films taking on a cross-cultural character, a certain ‘crossover trend’ may be observed within the recent upswing of Flemish cinema (a subdivision of Belgian cinema). This trend is characterized by two major strands: first, migrant and diasporic filmmakers finally seem to be emerging, and second, several filmmakers tend to cross the globe to make their films, hereby minimizing links with Flemish indigenous culture. While paying special attention to the crucial role of film policy in this context, this contribution further investigates the crossover trend by focusing on Turquaze (2010, Kadir Balci) and Altiplano (2009, Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth)