An exploration of the rhythm of Malay

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in speech rhythm. However we still lack a clear understanding of the nature of rhythm and rhythmic differences across languages. Various metrics have been proposed as means for measuring rhythm on the phonetic level and making typological comparisons between languages (Ramus et al, 1999; Grabe & Low, 2002; Dellwo, 2006) but the debate is ongoing on the extent to which these metrics capture the rhythmic basis of speech (Arvaniti, 2009; Fletcher, in press). Furthermore, cross linguistic studies of rhythm have covered a relatively small number of languages and research on previously unclassified languages is necessary to fully develop the typology of rhythm. This study examines the rhythmic features of Malay, for which, to date, relatively little work has been carried out on aspects rhythm and timing. The material for the analysis comprised 10 sentences produced by 20 speakers of standard Malay (10 males and 10 females). The recordings were first analysed using rhythm metrics proposed by Ramus et. al (1999) and Grabe & Low (2002). These metrics (∆C, %V, rPVI, nPVI) are based on durational measurements of vocalic and consonantal intervals. The results indicated that Malay clustered with other so-called syllable-timed languages like French and Spanish on the basis of all metrics. However, underlying the overall findings for these metrics there was a large degree of variability in values across speakers and sentences, with some speakers having values in the range typical of stressed-timed languages like English. Further analysis has been carried out in light of Fletcher’s (in press) argument that measurements based on duration do not wholly reflect speech rhythm as there are many other factors that can influence values of consonantal and vocalic intervals, and Arvaniti’s (2009) suggestion that other features of speech should also be considered in description of rhythm to discover what contributes to listeners’ perception of regularity. Spectrographic analysis of the Malay recordings brought to light two parameters that displayed consistency and regularity for all speakers and sentences: the duration of individual vowels and the duration of intervals between intensity minima. This poster presents the results of these investigations and points to connections between the features which seem to be consistently regulated in the timing of Malay connected speech and aspects of Malay phonology. The results are discussed in light of current debate on the descriptions of rhythm

Improving Search via Named Entity Recognition in Morphologically Rich Languages – A Case Study in Urdu

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. February 2018. Major: Computer Science. Advisors: Vipin Kumar, Blake Howald. 1 computer file (PDF); xi, 236 pages.Search is not a solved problem even in the world of Google and Bing's state of the art engines. Google and similar search engines are keyword based. Keyword-based searching suffers from the vocabulary mismatch problem -- the terms in document and user's information request don't overlap. For example, cars and automobiles. This phenomenon is called synonymy. Similarly, the user's term may be polysemous -- a user is inquiring about a river's bank, but documents about financial institutions are matched. Vocabulary mismatch exacerbated when the search occurs in Morphological Rich Language (MRL). Concept search techniques like dimensionality reduction do not improve search in Morphological Rich Languages. Names frequently occur news text and determine the "what," "where," "when," and "who" in the news text. Named Entity Recognition attempts to recognize names automatically in text, but these techniques are far from mature in MRL, especially in Arabic Script languages. Urdu is one the focus MRL of this dissertation among Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, and Russian, but it does not have the enabling technologies for NER and search. A corpus, stop word generation algorithm, a light stemmer, a baseline, and NER algorithm is created so the NER-aware search can be accomplished for Urdu. This dissertation demonstrates that NER-aware search on Arabic, Russian, Urdu, and English shows significant improvement over baseline. Furthermore, this dissertation highlights the challenges for researching in low-resource MRL languages

Programme of the 21st European Conference on Eye Movements

About ECEM ECEM was initiated by Rudolf Groner (Bern), Dieter Heller (Bayreuth at the time) and Henk Breimer (Tilburg) in the 198 to provide a forum for an interdisciplinary group of scientists interested in eye movements. Since the inaugural meeting in Bern, the conference has been held every two years in different venues across Europe until 2021, when it was planned to take place in Leicester but was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. It was decided to hold the meeting in Leicester in August 2022 instead, and as an in person meeting rather than an online or hybrid event. Incidentally, the present meeting is the third time the conference has come to the English East Midlands, now in Leicester following previous meetings in the neighbouring cities of Derby and Nottingham. The sites of previous ECEMs and webpages can be found here

Machine transliteration of proper names between English and Persian

Machine transliteration is the process of automatically transforming a word from a source language to a target language while preserving pronunciation. The transliterated words in the target language are called out-of-dictionary, or sometimes out-of-vocabulary, meaning that they have been borrowed from other languages with a change of script. When a whole text is being translated, for example, then proper nouns and technical terms are subject to transliteration. Machine translation, and other applications which make use of this technology, such as cross-lingual information retrieval and cross-language question answering, deal with the problem of transliteration. Since proper nouns and technical terms - which need phonetical translation - are part of most text documents, transliteration is an important problem to study. We explore the problem of English to Persian and Persian to English transliteration using methods that work based on the grapheme of the source word. One major problem in handling Persian text is its lack of written short vowels. When transliterating Persian words to English, we need to develop a method of inserting vowels to make them pronounceable. Many different approaches using n-grams are explored and compared in this thesis, and we propose language-specific transliteration methods that improved transliteration accuracy. Our novel approaches use consonant-vowel sequences, and show significant improvements over baseline systems. We also develop a new alignment algorithm, and examine novel techniques to combine systems; approaches which improve the effectiveness of the systems. We also investigate the properties of bilingual corpora that affect transliteration accuracy. Our experiments suggest that the origin of the source words has a strong effect on the performance of transliteration systems. From the careful analysis of the corpus construction process, we conclude that at least five human transliterators are needed to construct a representative bilingual corpus that is used for the training and testing of transliteration systems

Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption