La Linguistica Computazionale a Venezia

Questo saggio ha come argomento lo sviluppo della Linguistica Computazionale a Venezia con l’intenzione di mettere in luce le interrelazioni con gli altri componenti del Dipartimento di Linguistica, quelli di glottodidattica e quellidella linguistica teorica con le quali ha interagito nel tempo. Lo sviluppo temporale permette anche di legare gli eventi locali all'avanzamento della tecnologia e della scienza linguistica sperimentale in ambito internazionale

Speech Synthesis for Language Tutoring Systems

In this paper we shall be concerned with the use of Text-to-Speech Synthesis, or TTS for short, as a tool for Language Learning. We shall present a number of applications where TTS plays a fundamental role in helping the student in Second Language learning. TTS can be a fundamental tool in helping to recognize and get aware of the contrastive features that constitute the main learning targets of the student. TTS can also be used simply as a speaking Tutor when help is needed in any self-instructional system or just to provide feedback on some exercise the student is practicing. It can be used as a Reader for Dictation exercises where there is a need to vary voice quality and speaking rate. Eventually, it can be used to help students working on a Listening Comprehension task in giving hints on what the main task to be accomplished consists of, and other similar Oral drills. We shall be presenting all these examples of the use of TTS in a CALL without always assuming that it is the only way to cope with oral linguistic practice. In general, having a human tutor to do the same kind of tutoring activity guarantees a much better result: the question is whether a human tutor may always be available when the student needs one, which is usually not the case. So the possibility to have a substitute, for how much of lesser quality it may be, is worth pursuing. And there is at least one case in which the computer-based speaking tutor constitutes the only viable alternative to the human tutor: when mimicking the levels of speaking proficiency in L2, or levels of interlanguage, as will be explained in detail further on

Computing Linguistic Knowledge for Text-To-Speech Systems With PROSO

In this paper we present a computer program PROSO a linguistic rule compiler which applies a number of prosodic rules inserting appropriate markers to any text inputted, on the basis of phonological rules and of syntactic structure, this one computed separately by an RTN parser(see Delmonte & Dolci, 1989) and made visible to PROSO only at a certain structural level, though. The output of this program can then be passed on to a system like VOXPC, the text-to-speech module commercialized by Olivetti, which allows the user to provide explicit phonetic and prosodic information in order to modify the internal coding procedures. VOXPC is a system completely lacking in linguistic knowledge apart from the well-known distinction between content and function words: the quality of the system is very poor both at word level and at sentence and text level

Seminario di Linguistica e Didattica delle Lingue. Scritti in onore degli ottant’anni di Giovanni Freddi

Include, di Balboni: “La glottodidattica veneziana: una ‘scuola’?”, pp. 19-54