Modularity and Neural Integration in Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition

This Thesis tackles the problems of modularity in Large-Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition with use of Neural Network

Empirical studies in translation and discourse

The present volume seeks to contribute some studies to the subfield of Empirical Translation Studies and thus aid in extending its reach within the field of translation studies and thus in making our discipline more rigorous and fostering a reproducible research culture. The Translation in Transition conference series, across its editions in Copenhagen (2013), Germersheim (2015) and Ghent (2017), has been a major meeting point for scholars working with these aims in mind, and the conference in Barcelona (2019) has continued this tradition of expanding the sub-field of empirical translation studies to other paradigms within translation studies. This book is a collection of selected papers presented at that fourth Translation in Transition conference, held at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona on 19–20 September 2019

Can humain association norm evaluate latent semantic analysis?

This paper presents the comparison of word association norm created by a psycholinguistic experiment to association lists generated by algorithms operating on text corpora. We compare lists generated by Church and Hanks algorithm and lists generated by LSA algorithm. An argument is presented on how those automatically generated lists reflect real semantic relations

The Effect of Speech Elicitation Method on Second Language Phonemic Accuracy

The present study, a One-Group Posttest-Only Repeated-Measures Design, examined the effect of speech elicitation method on second language (L2) phonemic accuracy of high functional load initial phonemes found in frequently occurring nouns in American English. This effect was further analyzed by including the variable of first language (L1) to determine if L1 moderated any effects found. The data consisted of audio recordings of 61 adult English learners (ELs) enrolled in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses at a large, public, post-secondary institution in the United States. Phonemic accuracy was judged by two independent raters as either approximating a standard American English (SAE) pronunciation of the intended phoneme or not, thus a dichotomous scale, and scores were assigned to each participant in terms of the three speech elicitation methods of word reading, word repetition, and picture naming. Results from a repeated measures ANOVA test revealed a statistically significant difference in phonemic accuracy (F(1.47, 87.93) = 25.94, p = .000) based on speech elicitation method, while the two-factor mixed design ANOVA test indicated no statistically significant differences for the moderator variable of native language. However, post-hoc analyses revealed that mean scores of picture naming tasks differed significantly from the other two elicitation methods of word reading and word repetition. Moreover, the results of this study should heighten attention to the role that various speech elicitation methods, or input modalities, might play on L2 productive accuracy. Implications for practical application suggest that caution should be used when utilizing pictures to elicit specific vocabulary words–even high-frequency words–as they might result in erroneous productions or no utterance at all. These methods could inform pronunciation instructors about best teaching practices when pronunciation accuracy is the objective. Finally, the impact of L1 on L2 pronunciation accuracy might not be as important as once thought

The Effectiveness of Using Multimedia for Teaching Phrasal Verbs in Community-College ESL Classes

This mixed-methods study investigated the effectiveness of multimedia instruction for phrasal-verb education with community-college English as a second-language learners (ESL) in Northern California. Previous researchers have found that ESL learners have difficulties and barriers in learning phrasal verbs, and other researchers have found that how using multimedia teaching techniques in different fields of education have been effective, but no studies have investigated using multimedia instruction with community-college ESL students in learning phrasal verbs for second-language acquisition. In this mixed-methods research, there were 35 community-college ESL students, including 22 students in the multimedia-treatment group and 13 students in the text-based-comparison group, who participated in this study. The multimedia-treatment group was instructed through the phrasal-verb multimedia lessons for 12 sessions with 48 new phrasal verbs. The text-based-comparison group was instructed through the phrasal-verb text-based lessons for 12 sessions with the same 48 new phrasal verbs. Two-way analysis of variance was used to analyze the pretest, posttest, test-score difference, questionnaire, and engagement data. All participants’ learning interest, usefulness, and success were measured through the MUSIC model questionnaire and individual interviews. The quantitative findings revealed a statistically significant difference in terms of prior knowledge and learning engagement between the comparison and treatment groups. Qualitative findings revealed that students in the multimedia-treatment group had positive opinions about the phrasal-verb multimedia lessons. Most participants enjoyed the phrasal-verb multimedia lessons and expressed interests in using multimedia techniques for furthering their English learning. Thus, the qualitative and quantitative findings suggested a new conceptual framework in second-language acquisition. Based on the evidence of this dissertation’s research, the text-based techniques had positive effects on the community-college ESL students’ phrasal-verb learning. This study has implications for the fields of distance learning and English phrasal-verb instruction. Additional research on using multimedia instruction, such as using comics, pictures, music, animation, and movies, for different age ranges and different ESL group levels, and for online-synchronized and asynchronized class settings would further expand the current findings of the effects on phrasal-verb multimedia instruction

Empirical studies on word representations

One of the most fundamental tasks in natural language processing is representing words with mathematical objects (such as vectors). The word representations, which are most often estimated from data, allow capturing the meaning of words. They enable comparing words according to their semantic similarity, and have been shown to work extremely well when included in complex real-world applications. A large part of our work deals with ways of estimating word representations directly from large quantities of text. Our methods exploit the idea that words which occur in similar contexts have a similar meaning. How we define the context is an important focus of our thesis. The context can consist of a number of words to the left and to the right of the word in question, but, as we show, obtaining context words via syntactic links (such as the link between the verb and its subject) often works better. We furthermore investigate word representations that accurately capture multiple meanings of a single word. We show that translation of a word in context contains information that can be used to disambiguate the meaning of that word