57,538 research outputs found
Asymmetric discrimination of non-speech tonal analogues of vowels
Published in final edited form as: J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform. 2019 February ; 45(2): 285ā300. doi:10.1037/xhp0000603.Directional asymmetries reveal a universal bias in vowel perception favoring extreme vocalic articulations, which lead to acoustic vowel signals with dynamic formant trajectories and well-defined spectral prominences due to the convergence of adjacent formants. The present experiments investigated whether this bias reflects speech-specific processes or general properties of spectral processing in the auditory system. Toward this end, we examined whether analogous asymmetries in perception arise with non-speech tonal analogues that approximate some of the dynamic and static spectral characteristics of naturally-produced /u/ vowels executed with more versus less extreme lip gestures. We found a qualitatively similar but weaker directional effect with two-component tones varying in both the dynamic changes and proximity of their spectral energies. In subsequent experiments, we pinned down the phenomenon using tones that varied in one or both of these two acoustic characteristics. We found comparable asymmetries with tones that differed exclusively in their spectral dynamics, and no asymmetries with tones that differed exclusively in their spectral proximity or both spectral features. We interpret these findings as evidence that dynamic spectral changes are a critical cue for eliciting asymmetries in non-speech tone perception, but that the potential contribution of general auditory processes to asymmetries in vowel perception is limited.Accepted manuscrip
Discriminating word senses with tourist walks in complex networks
Patterns of topological arrangement are widely used for both animal and human
brains in the learning process. Nevertheless, automatic learning techniques
frequently overlook these patterns. In this paper, we apply a learning
technique based on the structural organization of the data in the attribute
space to the problem of discriminating the senses of 10 polysemous words. Using
two types of characterization of meanings, namely semantical and topological
approaches, we have observed significative accuracy rates in identifying the
suitable meanings in both techniques. Most importantly, we have found that the
characterization based on the deterministic tourist walk improves the
disambiguation process when one compares with the discrimination achieved with
traditional complex networks measurements such as assortativity and clustering
coefficient. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such deterministic
walk has been applied to such a kind of problem. Therefore, our finding
suggests that the tourist walk characterization may be useful in other related
applications
Weakly-supervised appraisal analysis
This article is concerned with the computational treatment of Appraisal, a Systemic Functional Linguistic theory of the types of language employed to communicate opinion in English. The theory considers aspects such as Attitude (how writers communicate their point of view), Engagement (how writers align themselves with respect to the opinions of others) and Graduation (how writers amplify or diminish their attitudes and engagements). To analyse text according to the theory we employ a weakly-supervised approach to text classification, which involves comparing the similarity of words with prototypical examples of classes. We evaluate the method's performance using a collection of book reviews annotated according to the Appraisal theory
- ā¦