Hungarian neutral vowels

In Hungarian, stems containing only front unrounded (neutral) vowels fall into two groups: one group taking front suffixes, the other taking back suffixes in vowel harmony. The distinction is traditionally thought of as purely lexical. Beňuš and Gafos (2007) have recently challenged this position, claiming that there are significant articulatory differences between the vowels in the two groups. Neutral vowels also occur in vacillating stems. These typically contain one back vowel and one or more neutral vowels, and accept both front and back suffixes, with extensive inter- and intra-speaker variation. Based on Beňuš and Gafos’s line of argument, the expectation is that vacillating stems will display a kind of phonetic realisation that is distinct from both harmonic and anti-harmonic stems. We present the results of an ongoing acoustic study on the acoustics of neutral vowels, partly re-creating Beňuš and Gafos’s conditions, but also including vacillating stems. To map the extent of individual and dialectal variation regarding vacillating stems, a grammaticality judgement test was also carried out on speakers of two dialects of Hungarian, crucially differing in the surface inventory of neutral vowels. We present our first findings about how this phonetic difference influences the phonological behaviour of vacillating stems

Knowledge Sharing in Emerging Economies

One of the new factors in Eastern European countries (and there is an acknowledgement that this aspect is inherent in other countries too) is this concept of freely sharing information i.e. the concept of what is known in KM literature of “Knowledge Sharing”. Sharing only takes place where there is trust and where there is a shared feeling of ownership of goals. The reasons behind the tendency to share are based on the kind of interpersonal relations between co- workers inherent within the organization and the effects of social relationships within organizational teams. Strengthening the social relationships between individuals in the team is crucial in motivating team members to share knowledge. New research is currently investigating the concept of “sharing social relationships” and one of the aims of the project is to investigate the barriers to sharing information in a particular type of business - that of the small to medium sized enterprises (the SME) in order to form a comparative study. The results of the study will be used to from a model of “information sharing best practice” for SME who are setting up or using KM systems. The work will examine the barriers to sharing in two newly emerging economies (Poland and Hungary) and one relatively established economy (the UK). At the time of writing the work with Poland and Hungary has been completed and this paper gives the initial results from the Hungarian study

Guide to Good Practice in using Open Source Compilers with the AGCC Lexical Analyzer

Quality software always demands a compromise between users' needs and hardware resources. To be faster means expensive devices like powerful processors and virtually unlimited amounts of RAM memory. Or you just need reengineering of the code in terms of adapting that piece of software to the client's hardware architecture. This is the purpose of optimizing code in order to get the utmost software performance from a program in certain given conditions. There are tools for designing and writing the code but the ultimate tool for optimizing remains the modest compiler, this often neglected software jewel the result of hundreds working hours by the best specialists in the world. Even though, only two compilers fulfill the needs of professional developers, a proprietary solution from a giant in the IT industry, and the Open source GNU compiler, for which we develop the AGCC lexical analyzer that helps producing even more efficient software applications. It relies on the most popular hacks and tricks used by professionals and discovered by the author who are proud to present them further below.registers, dynamic linkage, cache, null pointers, tweaking

Comparative Analysis of Word Embeddings for Capturing Word Similarities

Distributed language representation has become the most widely used technique for language representation in various natural language processing tasks. Most of the natural language processing models that are based on deep learning techniques use already pre-trained distributed word representations, commonly called word embeddings. Determining the most qualitative word embeddings is of crucial importance for such models. However, selecting the appropriate word embeddings is a perplexing task since the projected embedding space is not intuitive to humans. In this paper, we explore different approaches for creating distributed word representations. We perform an intrinsic evaluation of several state-of-the-art word embedding methods. Their performance on capturing word similarities is analysed with existing benchmark datasets for word pairs similarities. The research in this paper conducts a correlation analysis between ground truth word similarities and similarities obtained by different word embedding methods.Comment: Part of the 6th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (NATP 2020

Enhanced journals - a case study with general remarks

The Information Bulletin on Variable Stars - a small astronomy journal published in Hungary - was an early Open Access journal. Now it offers several enhanced features to its reader community. Relying on the rather unique publishing environment existing in the field of astronomy, and on software developed locally, this journal is markedly different from other enhanced journals in certain aspects. We explore the key features of enhanced and common electronic journals: reference linking, database connections, data linking, multi-media content, feedback from the reader community, quality control. We argue that while exploring new avenues of scientific publishing, one should conservatively preserve some traditional values and features. Some aspects of article disassembly - dealing with items smaller than the usual basic publication unit, the article - are explored too. Figures, for example, are article components which might be re-used, used outside the original context