8,851 research outputs found
Learning Recursive Segments for Discourse Parsing
Automatically detecting discourse segments is an important preliminary step
towards full discourse parsing. Previous research on discourse segmentation
have relied on the assumption that elementary discourse units (EDUs) in a
document always form a linear sequence (i.e., they can never be nested).
Unfortunately, this assumption turns out to be too strong, for some theories of
discourse like SDRT allows for nested discourse units. In this paper, we
present a simple approach to discourse segmentation that is able to produce
nested EDUs. Our approach builds on standard multi-class classification
techniques combined with a simple repairing heuristic that enforces global
coherence. Our system was developed and evaluated on the first round of
annotations provided by the French Annodis project (an ongoing effort to create
a discourse bank for French). Cross-validated on only 47 documents (1,445
EDUs), our system achieves encouraging performance results with an F-score of
73% for finding EDUs.Comment: published at LREC 201
French Optical Telegraphy, 1793-1855: Hardware, Software, Administration
The relatively stable contribution of technological change to aggregate growth masks technological trajectories which are, at the sectoral level, often highly discontinuous. For decades, even centuries, the capabilities used to produce a particular good or service may continue essentially unchanged or with relatively minor evolutionary modifications. Sometimes without much warning a breakthrough innovation will create a new technological paradigm, along with an accompanying gale of creative destruction, which is then followed by a period of consolidation within a maturing framework
Engaging the articulators enhances perception of concordant visible speech movements
PURPOSE
This study aimed to test whether (and how) somatosensory feedback signals from the vocal tract affect concurrent unimodal visual speech perception.
METHOD
Participants discriminated pairs of silent visual utterances of vowels under 3 experimental conditions: (a) normal (baseline) and while holding either (b) a bite block or (c) a lip tube in their mouths. To test the specificity of somatosensory-visual interactions during perception, we assessed discrimination of vowel contrasts optically distinguished based on their mandibular (English /É/-/ĂŠ/) or labial (English /u/-French /u/) postures. In addition, we assessed perception of each contrast using dynamically articulating videos and static (single-frame) images of each gesture (at vowel midpoint).
RESULTS
Engaging the jaw selectively facilitated perception of the dynamic gestures optically distinct in terms of jaw height, whereas engaging the lips selectively facilitated perception of the dynamic gestures optically distinct in terms of their degree of lip compression and protrusion. Thus, participants perceived visible speech movements in relation to the configuration and shape of their own vocal tract (and possibly their ability to produce covert vowel production-like movements). In contrast, engaging the articulators had no effect when the speaking faces did not move, suggesting that the somatosensory inputs affected perception of time-varying kinematic information rather than changes in target (movement end point) mouth shapes.
CONCLUSIONS
These findings suggest that orofacial somatosensory inputs associated with speech production prime premotor and somatosensory brain regions involved in the sensorimotor control of speech, thereby facilitating perception of concordant visible speech movements.
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.9911846R01 DC002852 - NIDCD NIH HHSAccepted manuscrip
Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives
The Meaning First Approach offers a model of the relation between thought and language that includes a Generator and a Compressor. The Generator build non-linguistic thought structures and the Compressor is responsible for its articulation through three processes: structure-preserving linearization, lexification, and compression via non-articulation of concepts when licensed. One goal of this paper is to show that a range of phenomena in child language can be explained in a unified way within the Meaning First Approach by the assumption that children differ from adults with respect to compression and, specifically, that they may undercompress in production, an idea that sets a research agenda for the study of language acquisition. We focus on dependencies involving pronouns or gaps in relative clauses and wh-questions, multi-argument verbal concepts, and antonymic concepts involving negation or other opposites. We present extant evidence from the literature that children produce undercompression errors (a type of commission errors) that are predicted by the Meaning First Approach. We also summarize data that childrenâs comprehension ability provides evidence for the Meaning First Approach prediction that decompression should be challenging, when there is no 1-to-1 correspondence.Peer Reviewe
Southern Europe
This chapter reviews the prosodic systems and intonational phonology of a group of Southern European languages: Italian, French, Greek, and Maltese. It describes their stress, phrasing, rhythm, and intonational phonology, with particular attention to phonologically informed experimental work. In the case of Italian, given the lack of a spoken standard (which is only used by professional speakers) and the descriptions of quite a number of varieties (e.g. Bari, Florence, Naples, Palermo, Pisa, and Rome, inter alia), this review highlights common prosodic and phrasing features first, and subsequently covers any definable variety-specific intonational features. For French, the survey focuses on hexagonal French, while Athenian Greek is the representative variety for Greek, with some excursions into regional varieties. For Maltese, the chapter only focuses on its standard
A Multilingual Study of Multi-Sentence Compression using Word Vertex-Labeled Graphs and Integer Linear Programming
Multi-Sentence Compression (MSC) aims to generate a short sentence with the
key information from a cluster of similar sentences. MSC enables summarization
and question-answering systems to generate outputs combining fully formed
sentences from one or several documents. This paper describes an Integer Linear
Programming method for MSC using a vertex-labeled graph to select different
keywords, with the goal of generating more informative sentences while
maintaining their grammaticality. Our system is of good quality and outperforms
the state of the art for evaluations led on news datasets in three languages:
French, Portuguese and Spanish. We led both automatic and manual evaluations to
determine the informativeness and the grammaticality of compressions for each
dataset. In additional tests, which take advantage of the fact that the length
of compressions can be modulated, we still improve ROUGE scores with shorter
output sentences.Comment: Preprint versio
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