El-WOZ: a client-server wizard-of-oz open-source interface

International audienceWizard of Oz (WOZ) prototyping employs a human wizard to simulate anticipated functions of a future system. In Natural Language Processing this method is usually used to obtain early feedback on dialogue designs, to collect language corpora, or to explore interaction strategies. Yet, existing tools often require complex client-server configurations and setup routines, or suffer from compatibility problems with different platforms. Integrated solutions, which may also be used by designers and researchers without technical background, are missing. In this paper we present a framework for multi-lingual dialog research, which combines speech recognition and synthesis with WOZ. All components are open source and adaptable toIn this paper, we present a speech recording interface developed in the context of a project on automatic speech recognition for elderly native speakers of European Portuguese. In order to collect spontaneous speech in a situation of interaction with a machine, this interface was designed as a Wizard-of-Oz (WOZ) plateform. In this setup, users interact with a fake automated dialog system controled by a human wizard. It was implemented as a client-server application and the subjects interact with a talking head. The human wizard chooses pre-defined questions or sentences in a graphical user interface, which are then synthesized and spoken aloud by the avatar on the client side. A small spontaneous speech corpus was collected in a daily center. Eight speakers between 75 and 90 years old were recorded. They appreciated the interface and felt at ease with the avatar. Manual orthographic transcriptions were created for the total of about 45 minutes of speech. different application scenario

Referring to discourse participants in Ibero-Romance languages

Synopsis: This volume brings together contributions by researchers focusing on personal pronouns in Ibero-Romance languages, going beyond the well-established variable of expressed vs. non-expressed subjects. While factors such as agreement morphology, topic shift and contrast or emphasis have been argued to account for variable subject expression, several corpus studies on Ibero-Romance languages have shown that the expression of subject pronouns goes beyond these traditionally established factors and is also subject to considerable dialectal variation. One of the factors affecting choice and expression of personal pronouns or other referential devices is whether the construction is used personally or impersonally. The use and emergence of new impersonal constructions, eventually also new (im)personal pronouns, as well as the variation found in the expression of human impersonality in different Ibero-Romance language varieties is another interesting research area that has gained ground in the recent years. In addition to variable subject expression, similar methods and theoretical approaches have been applied to study the expression of objects. Finally, the reference to the addressee(s) using different address pronouns and other address forms is an important field of study that is closely connected to the variable expression of pronouns. The present book sheds light on all these aspects of reference to discourse participants. The volume contains contributions with a strong empirical background and various methods and both written and spoken corpus data from Ibero-Romance languages. The focus on discourse participants highlights the special properties of first and second person referents and the factors affecting them that are often different from the anaphoric third person. The chapters are organized into three thematic sections: (i) Variable expression of subjects and objects, (ii) Between personal and impersonal, and (iii) Reference to the addressee

Translating Trademarks: Towards the Equal Treatment of Foreign- Language Marks

Part A of this dissertation tells the story of The Coca-Cola Companys trademark registrations in Canada in order to illustrate the linguistic issues faced by trademark administrators. A trademarks registrability depends on its distinctiveness, which is its ability to can distinguish its traders goods and services from those of another trader. Knowing how well a trademark will function to distinguish means ascertaining first what has already been registered, which is no easy task when the databases cannot administer foreign-language marks that are not Romanized. Part A proposes the solution of transcribing foreign-language marks that are not Romanized, so they can be filed/searched appropriately in databases. Part B of this dissertation tells the story of two competing Chinese bakeries in Canada in order to illustrate the linguistic struggles of the judiciary. These struggles are nothing new, as academics have noted that [l]ong before the introduction of the registration system [by what was then England in 1875], owners of marks containing terms in foreign languages or scripts could in certain circumstances prevent their use by trade rivals and that by 1905 English and North American case law has been fruitful of conflicting holdings. What is new in the 21st Century is the increasing frequency of foreign-language marks that are not Romanized, as the added complexity of foreign scripts makes it harder for courts to assess and compare trademarks that they cannot even read or sound out, much less understand. Part B proposes the solution of assuming linguistic knowledge for all foreign-language marks, so they can be assessed and compared appropriately in the case law

Translating Trademarks: Towards the Equal Treatment of Foreign- Language Marks

Part A of this dissertation tells the story of The Coca-Cola Companys trademark registrations in Canada in order to illustrate the linguistic issues faced by trademark administrators. A trademarks registrability depends on its distinctiveness, which is its ability to can distinguish its traders goods and services from those of another trader. Knowing how well a trademark will function to distinguish means ascertaining first what has already been registered, which is no easy task when the databases cannot administer foreign-language marks that are not Romanized. Part A proposes the solution of transcribing foreign-language marks that are not Romanized, so they can be filed/searched appropriately in databases. Part B of this dissertation tells the story of two competing Chinese bakeries in Canada in order to illustrate the linguistic struggles of the judiciary. These struggles are nothing new, as academics have noted that [l]ong before the introduction of the registration system [by what was then England in 1875], owners of marks containing terms in foreign languages or scripts could in certain circumstances prevent their use by trade rivals and that by 1905 English and North American case law has been fruitful of conflicting holdings. What is new in the 21st Century is the increasing frequency of foreign-language marks that are not Romanized, as the added complexity of foreign scripts makes it harder for courts to assess and compare trademarks that they cannot even read or sound out, much less understand. Part B proposes the solution of assuming linguistic knowledge for all foreign-language marks, so they can be assessed and compared appropriately in the case law

Design of a Controlled Language for Critical Infrastructures Protection

We describe a project for the construction of controlled language for critical infrastructures protection (CIP). This project originates from the need to coordinate and categorize the communications on CIP at the European level. These communications can be physically represented by official documents, reports on incidents, informal communications and plain e-mail. We explore the application of traditional library science tools for the construction of controlled languages in order to achieve our goal. Our starting point is an analogous work done during the sixties in the field of nuclear science known as the Euratom Thesaurus.JRC.G.6-Security technology assessmen

Do grafema ao gesto : contributos linguísticos para um sistema de síntese de base articulatória

Doutoramento em LinguísticaMotivados pelo propósito central de contribuir para a construção, a longo prazo, de um sistema completo de conversão de texto para fala, baseado em síntese articulatória, desenvolvemos um modelo linguístico para o português europeu (PE), com base no sistema TADA (TAsk Dynamic Application), que visou a obtenção automática da trajectória dos articuladores a partir do texto de entrada. A concretização deste objectivo ditou o desenvolvimento de um conjunto de tarefas, nomeadamente 1) a implementação e avaliação de dois sistemas de silabificação automática e de transcrição fonética, tendo em vista a transformação do texto de entrada num formato adequado ao TADA; 2) a criação de um dicionário gestual para os sons do PE, de modo a que cada fone obtido à saída do conversor grafema-fone pudesse ter correspondência com um conjunto de gestos articulatórios adaptados para o PE; 3) a análise do fenómeno da nasalidade à luz dos princípios dinâmicos da Fonologia Articulatória (FA), com base num estudo articulatório e perceptivo. Os dois algoritmos de silabificação automática implementados e testados fizeram apelo a conhecimentos de natureza fonológica sobre a estrutura da sílaba, sendo o primeiro baseado em transdutores de estados finitos e o segundo uma implementação fiel das propostas de Mateus & d'Andrade (2000). O desempenho destes algoritmos – sobretudo do segundo – mostrou-se similar ao de outros sistemas com as mesmas potencialidades. Quanto à conversão grafema-fone, seguimos uma metodologia baseada em regras de reescrita combinada com uma técnica de aprendizagem automática. Os resultados da avaliação deste sistema motivaram a exploração posterior de outros métodos automáticos, procurando também avaliar o impacto da integração de informação silábica nos sistemas. A descrição dinâmica dos sons do PE, ancorada nos princípios teóricos e metodológicos da FA, baseou-se essencialmente na análise de dados de ressonância magnética, a partir dos quais foram realizadas todas as medições, com vista à obtenção de parâmetros articulatórios quantitativos. Foi tentada uma primeira validação das várias configurações gestuais propostas, através de um pequeno teste perceptual, que permitiu identificar os principais problemas subjacentes à proposta gestual. Este trabalho propiciou, pela primeira vez para o PE, o desenvolvimento de um primeiro sistema de conversão de texto para fala, de base articulatória. A descrição dinâmica das vogais nasais contou, quer com os dados de ressonância magnética, para caracterização dos gestos orais, quer com os dados obtidos através de articulografia electromagnética (EMA), para estudo da dinâmica do velo e da sua relação com os restantes articuladores. Para além disso, foi efectuado um teste perceptivo, usando o TADA e o SAPWindows, para avaliar a sensibilidade dos ouvintes portugueses às variações na altura do velo e alterações na coordenação intergestual. Este estudo serviu de base a uma interpretação abstracta (em termos gestuais) das vogais nasais do PE e permitiu também esclarecer aspectos cruciais relacionados com a sua produção e percepção.Motivated by the central purpose of contributing for the construction, in the long term, of a complete text-to-speech system based in articulatory synthesis, we develop a linguistic model for European Portuguese (EP), based on TADA system (TAsk Dynamic Application), that aimed at the automatic attainment of the articulators trajectory from the input text. The specification of this purpose determined the development of a set of tasks, namely the 1) implementation and evaluation of two automatic syllabification systems and two grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion systems, in view of the transformation of the input in an appropriate format to the TADA; 2) the creation of a gestural database for the EP sounds, in so that each phone obtained at the output of the g2p system could have correspondence with a set of articulatory gestures adapted for EP; 3) the dynamic analysis of nasality, on the basis of an articulatory and perceptive study. The two automatic syllabification algorithms implemented and tested make appeal to phonological knowledge on the structure of the syllable, being the first one based in finite state transducers and the second one a faithful implementation of Mateus & d'Andrade (2000) proposals. The performance of these algorithms – especially the second - was similar to the one of other systems with the same potentialities. Regarding grapheme-to-phone conversion, we follow a methodology based on manual rules combined with an automatic learning technique. The evaluation results of this system motivated the exploitation of others automatic approaches, finding also to evaluate the impact of the syllabic information integration in the systems. The gestural description of the European Portuguese sounds, anchored on the theoretical and methodological tenets of the Articulatory Phonology, was based essentially on the analysis of magnetic resonance data (MRI), from which all the measurements were carried out, aiming to obtain the quantitative articulatory parameters. The several gestural configurations proposed have been validated, through a small perceptual test, which allowed identifying the main underlying problems of the gestural proposal. This work provided, for the first time to PE, the development of a first articulatory based text-to-speech system. The dynamic description of nasal vowels relied either on the magnetic resonance data, for characterization of the oral gestures, either on the data obtained through electromagnetic articulography (EMA), for the study of the velum dynamic and of its relation with the remaining articulators. Besides that, a perceptive test was performed, using TADA and SAPWindows, to evaluate the sensibility of the Portuguese listeners to the variations in the height of velum and alterations in the intergestural coordination. This study supported an abstract interpretation (in gestural terms) of the EP nasal vowels and allowed also to clarify crucial aspects related with its production and perception

Comprehending the New World in the Early Modern Period: descriptions of Dutch Brazil (1624-1654)

The dissertation deals with the textual legacy of Dutch Brazil in four 17th-century Dutch publications. The chosen descriptions not only demonstrate the Dutch impact on Brazil, but were in their turn products of a particular Dutch approach whereby the colony was appropriated and understood through descriptions, or what will be referred to as the comprehension of Dutch Brazil

The prolegomena of La Cerda's commentary on Virgil : a commented edition from the Cologne 1642 imprint, with English translation and explanatory notes

This thesis presents a new Latin text of the Prolegomena and accompanying prefatory material of the Cologne 1642 edition of the Virgil commentary by the Spanish Jesuit scholar Juan Luis De La Cerda. It provides an original English translation of this material along with explanatory notes which focus upon the social, educational, intellectual and political influences that informed La Cerda's work. The notes also take account of some of the rhetorical and stylistic aspects of La Cerda's work. An introduction situates the work in its cultural and intellectual context and provides a clear overview of the structure and composition of the Prolegomena