Multimodal person recognition for human-vehicle interaction

Next-generation vehicles will undoubtedly feature biometric person recognition as part of an effort to improve the driving experience. Today's technology prevents such systems from operating satisfactorily under adverse conditions. A proposed framework for achieving person recognition successfully combines different biometric modalities, borne out in two case studies

Robust Dependency Parsing of Spontaneous Japanese Speech and Its Evaluation

Spontaneously spoken Japanese includes a lot of grammatically\ud ill-formed linguistic phenomena such as fillers,\ud hesitations, inversions, and so on, which do not appear in\ud written language. This paper proposes a method of robust\ud dependency parsing using a large-scale spoken language\ud corpus, and evaluates the availability and robustness\ud of the method using spontaneously spoken dialogue\ud sentences. By utilizing stochastic information about the\ud appearance of ill-formed phenomena, the method can robustly\ud parse spoken Japanese including fillers, inversions,\ud or dependencies over utterance units. As a result of an experiment,\ud the parsing accuracy provided 87.0%, and we\ud confirmed that it is effective to utilize the location information\ud of a bunsetsu, and the distance information between\ud bunsetsus as stochastic information

Metaphoric competence and communicative language ability

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance as well as the ubiquity of metaphor in language. Despite this, the ability of second language learners to use metaphors is often still not seen as a core ability. In this paper, we take a model of communicative competence that has been widely influential in both language teaching and language testing, namely Bachman (1990), and argue, giving a range of examples of language use and learner difficulty, that metaphoric competence has in fact an important role to play in all areas of communicative competence. In other words, it can contribute centrally to grammatical competence, textual competence, illocutionary competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Metaphor is thus highly relevant to second language learning, teaching and testing, from the earliest to the most advanced stages of learning

Designing Teaching Materials for the Development of Conversation. The use of films in online environments.

Not all scholars are aware that successful foreign language teaching must be based on authentic language input, so that the proficiency level reached is appropriate to the initial goal set for our target cohort. Most textbooks haven’t got enough material with authentic or natural language. After all, we still expect students to reproduce grammatically correct sentences following a specific well-known grammatical rule. That is the main reason why the language we find in these books is rather “artificial”, something we cannot consider to be “daily language”. Teaching oral skills in a foreign language is a complex issue. For this reason, we propose film dialogues to be a more natural model of conversation than textbook dialogues. This paper is based on the most popular theories of spoken discourse analysis (Austin (1962), Searle (1969), Schmidt and Richards, (1980)), focusing on students’ familiarity with speech acts as essential components for them to be communicatively appropriate. Likewise, teachers’ updating is essential since they have to master both verbal and non-verbal language, discourse theories and their application to the teaching context. Thus, students have the opportunity to get more in touch with natural conversation. This proposal is focused on naturally occurring conversation and virtual learning. Methodology suggested is as follows: the teacher selects extracts leading to the subsequent design of activities. Later on, students will watch them, paying attention only to very specific aspects of language and culture previously discussed. It is understood that, if students are not fully guided or watch the whole film, they get lost or learn erratically. The aim of this type of activity is to reinforce students’ awareness of how native speakers behave and interact in their daily lives. A foreign language is a constantly changing activity, determined by many factors, which cannot be taught unless it is offered in the right context and through the right medium

Statistical natural language generation for dialogue systems based on hierarchical models

Due to the increasing presence of natural-language interfaces in our life, natural language processing (NLP) is currently gaining more popularity every year. However, until recently, the main part of the research activity in this area was aimed to Natural Language Understanding (NLU), which is responsible for extracting meanings from natural language input. This is explained by a wider number of practical applications of NLU such as machine translation, etc., whereas Natural Language Generation is mainly used for providing output interfaces, which was considered more as a user interface problem rather than a functionality issue. Generally speaking, natural language generation (NLG) is the process of generating text from a semantic representation, which can be expressed in many different forms. The common application of NLG takes part in so called Spoken Dialogue System (SDS), where user interacts directly by voice with a computer- based system to receive information or perform a certain type of actions as, for example, buying a plane ticket or booking a table in a restaurant. Dialogue systems represent one of the most interesting applications within the field of speech technologies. Usually the NLG part in this kind of systems was provided by templates, only filling canned gaps with requested information. But nowadays, since SDS are increasing its complexity, more advanced and user-friendly interfaces should be provided, thereby creating a need for a more refined and adaptive approach. One of the solutions to be considered are the NLG models based on statistical frameworks, where the system’s response to user is generated in real-time, adjusting their response to the user performance, instead of just choosing a pertinent template. Due to the corpus-based approach, these systems are easy to adapt to the different tasks in a range of informational domain. The aim of this work is to present a statistical approach to the problem of utterance generation, which uses cooperation between two different language models (LM) in order to enhance the efficiency of NLG module. In the higher level, a class- based language model is used to build the syntactic structure of the sentence. Inthe second layer, a specific language model acts inside each class, dealing with the words. In the dialogue system described in this work, a user asks for an information regarding to a bus schedule, route schemes, fares and special information. Therefore in each dialogue the user has a specific dialogue goal, which needs to be met by the system. This could be used as one of the methods to measure the system performance, as well as the appropriate utterance generation and average dialogue length, which is important when speaking about an interactive information system. The work is organized as follows. In Section 2 the basic approaches to the NLG task are described, and their advantages and disadvantages are considered. Section 3 presents the objective of this work. In Section 4 the basic model and its novelty is explained. In Section 5 the details of the task features and the corpora employed are presented. Section 6 contains the experiments results and its explanation, as well as the evaluation of the obtained results. The Section 7 resumes the conclusions and the future investigation proposals

The Next Generation: Aspects of Grammatical Variation in the Speech of some London Preadolescents

PhDThis thesis is a sociolinguistic investigation into aspects of non-phonological variation in a group of preadolescents recorded in outer east London. Focusing on the analysis of selected grammatical variables, it aims to explore the nature and development of linguistic variation in an age group which has not figured prominently in the foundational sociolinguistic literature. The study is embedded within a variationist framework, and examines how the distribution of vernacular variables selected from different levels of the grammar can provide important insights into the maturing sociolinguistic competence of preadolescent speakers. The distribution of specific grammatical variables is correlated with the broad social dimensions of age and gender in order to examine the social and linguistic constraints which operate on aspects of variation in this age group. Furthermore, the findings which emerge from this study are contextualized in relation to patterns of variation used by older speakers, and are more broadly situated with regard to related patterns of variation in other dialects of English. Another primary aim of the study is to contribute to empirical characterisations of grammatical variation in southeastern England, an area in which there has been little systematic quantitative investigation of non-phonological variation. Given that London has been identified in the sociolinguistic literature as the site of considerable dialect levelling and a major locus of linguistic innovation, the study explores preadolescents' active participation in some of the burgeoning linguistic changes that are affecting not only southeasten dialects, but also other contemporary varieties of English

Inferentials in spoken English

Although there is a growing body of research on inferential sentences (Declerck 1992, Delahunty 1990, 1995, 2001, Koops 2007, Pusch 2006), most of this research has been on their forms and functions in written discourse. This has left a gap with regards to their range of structural properties and allowed disagreement over their analysis to linger without a conclusive resolution. Most accounts regard the inferential as a type of it-cleft (Declerck 1992, Delahunty 2001, Huddleston and Pullum 2002, Lambrecht 2001), while a few view it as an instance of extraposition (Collins 1991, Schmid 2009). More recently, Pusch's work in Romance languages proposes the inferential is used as a discourse marker (2006, forthcoming). Based on a corpus study of examples from spoken New Zealand English, the current paper provides a detailed analysis of the formal and discoursal properties of several sub-types of inferentials (positive, negative, as if and like inferentials). We show that despite their apparent formal differences from the prototypical cleft, inferentials are nevertheless best analysed as a type of cleft, though this requires a minor reinterpretation of “cleft construction.” We show how similar the contextualized interpretations of clefts and inferentials are and how these are a function of their lexis and syntax

Students´ language in computer-assisted tutoring of mathematical proofs

Truth and proof are central to mathematics. Proving (or disproving) seemingly simple statements often turns out to be one of the hardest mathematical tasks. Yet, doing proofs is rarely taught in the classroom. Studies on cognitive difficulties in learning to do proofs have shown that pupils and students not only often do not understand or cannot apply basic formal reasoning techniques and do not know how to use formal mathematical language, but, at a far more fundamental level, they also do not understand what it means to prove a statement or even do not see the purpose of proof at all. Since insight into the importance of proof and doing proofs as such cannot be learnt other than by practice, learning support through individualised tutoring is in demand. This volume presents a part of an interdisciplinary project, set at the intersection of pedagogical science, artificial intelligence, and (computational) linguistics, which investigated issues involved in provisioning computer-based tutoring of mathematical proofs through dialogue in natural language. The ultimate goal in this context, addressing the above-mentioned need for learning support, is to build intelligent automated tutoring systems for mathematical proofs. The research presented here has been focused on the language that students use while interacting with such a system: its linguistic propeties and computational modelling. Contribution is made at three levels: first, an analysis of language phenomena found in students´ input to a (simulated) proof tutoring system is conducted and the variety of students´ verbalisations is quantitatively assessed, second, a general computational processing strategy for informal mathematical language and methods of modelling prominent language phenomena are proposed, and third, the prospects for natural language as an input modality for proof tutoring systems is evaluated based on collected corpora