Determining Determiner Sequencing: A Syntactical Analysis for English

Most work on determiners has been concerned with purely semantic properties, the occurrence of particular determiners in certain syntactic environments such as existential-there sentences, determiners as heads of phrases (the DP hypothesis, Abney 1987) or quantifier scoping. One question that has not been extensively discussed in the literature is how the various English determiners order with respect to each other. This paper presents a syntactic account of determiner sequencing using a set of nine semantically based features. Each determiner carries with it a set of feature values that represent its properties, and a set of values for the properties of any determiners it may modify. These features also play a crucial role in deciding which determiners can participate in constructions such as the number system, genitives, and partitives, as well as which determiners can be modified by adverbs. This analysis of determiner ordering was developed as part of the XTAG project and is presented within the framework of Feature-Based Tree Adjoining Grammar

Performance of monetary policy with internal central bank forecasting

Recent models of monetary policy have analyzed the desirability of different optimal and ad hoc interest rules under the restrictive assumption that forecasts of the private sector and the central bank are homogenous. In this paper, we study the implications of heterogeneity in forecasts of the central bank and private agents for the performance of interest rules from the learning viewpoint. JEL Classification: E52, E31, D84Adaptive learning, heterogeneity, monetary policy, stability

Yes/No Questions and Answers in the Map Task Corpus

We analyze question-answer pairs in a variety of ways, for three different kinds of yes/no questions. We find that the classification of yes/no questions described in (Carletta et al., 1995) for the Edinburgh map task corpus correlates well with whether a response will be a bare yes or no, a yes or no plus additional speech, or just speech without an overt yes or no. Correlation with responses described as “direct” or “indirect” is less good. We also find that the strength of a question’s expectation for a YES response correlates with the move type, the form of the response, and lexical yes choices; and that the move type correlates with the form of the question and with turn-taking schema

Research on Spoken Dialogue Systems

Research in the field of spoken dialogue systems has been performed with the goal of making such systems more robust and easier to use in demanding situations. The term "spoken dialogue systems" signifies unified software systems containing speech-recognition, speech-synthesis, dialogue management, and ancillary components that enable human users to communicate, using natural spoken language or nearly natural prescribed spoken language, with other software systems that provide information and/or services

The interpretation and realization of focus: An experimental investigation of focus in English and Hungarian

Linguists have associated the word focus with many types of phenomena. In order to investigate one type of focus one must control for the effects of the others. That is the core of this study: investigating which interpretation is associated with which realization once the effects of other types of focus have been factored out. The Animation Corpus was collected to provide data in which context was controlled so that three types of focus, sc INFORMATION STRUCTURE FOCUS, sc DISCOURSE NEW/ sc OLD and sc RELEVANT NON- sc UNIQUENESS, could be separated and reliably coded. The Animation Corpus also provided data that was comparable for English and Hungarian since utterances were collected using the same animated context and tasks. There are four major results from this work. First this study demonstrates more convincingly than previous work that in English, entire constituents are marked as sc INFORMATION STRUCTURE FOCUS by duration and amplitude. This differs from a very common view that marking one word within a constituent serves to mark the whole constituent as focus. The second major result is showing that current syntactic accounts of focus in Hungarian do not cover all the patterns found in the Animation Corpus. I suggest that metrical constraints are an additional factor to consider in accounting for the distribution of sc INFORMATION STRUCTURE FOCUS. Another contribution of this study is the development of techniques used in collecting the Animation Corpus. These techniques, using animations and drawings in a task, succeeded in eliciting corpora in both English and Hungarian that had useful control on discourse factors and vocabulary but remained relatively spontaneous. A fourth contribution of the study is in the use of matched pairs for analysis. Matched pairs of items, in this study words, share the same values for all relevant properties except the one being investigated. My use of this pairing facilitates the isolation of factors that could affect prosody and allows me to demonstrate that sc DISCOURSE NEWNESS is not realized prosodically in English