Japanese ToBI Labelling Guidelines

The work reported in this paper was supported in part by a Title VI Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, and by a university relations summer fellowship from AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories

Programmed schedule holds for improving launch vehicle holds

Baseline definition and system optimization are used for the analysis of programmed holds developed through prelaunch system analysis. Identification of design specifications for ground support equipment and maintenance concepts, and design specifications are used to describe the functional utilization of the overall flow process

Tagging Prosody and Discourse Structure in Elicited Spontaneous Speech

This paper motivates and describes the annotation and analysis of prosody and discourse structure for several large spoken language corpora. The annotation schema are of two types: tags for prosody and intonation, and tags for several aspects of discourse structure. The choice of the particular tagging schema in each domain is based in large part on the insights they provide in corpus-based studies of the relationship between discourse structure and the accenting of referring expressions in American English. We first describe these results and show that the same models account for the accenting of pronouns in an extended passage from one of the Speech Warehouse hotel-booking dialogues. We then turn to corpora described in Venditti [Ven00], which adapts the same models to Tokyo Japanese. Japanese is interesting to compare to English, because accent is lexically specified and so cannot mark discourse focus in the same way. Analyses of these corpora show that local pitch range expansion serves the analogous focusing function in Japanese. The paper concludes with a section describing several outstanding questions in the annotation of Japanese intonation which corpus studies can help to resolve.Work reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Ohio State University Office of Research, to Mary E. Beckman and co-principal investigators on the OSU Speech Warehouse project, and by an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship to Jennifer J. Venditti

Intonation and discourse processing

This paper describes intonational cues to discourse structure, and the role that intonation plays in spoken discourse processing. We begin by discussing two main structures in discourse that one must consider when doing research on discourse processing: segmentation and information status. We then review a number of key studies from the phonetics literature which have investigated the intonational marking of these structures. Next, we discuss in detail the psycholinguistic research to date which has examined the role that intonation can play in facilitating or inhibiting the processing of discourse in English and other related languages. We conclude by outlining directions for future research in the area of intonation-discourse processing

‘Residual diversity estimates’ do not correct for sampling bias in palaeodiversity data

1 It is widely accepted that the fossil record suffers from various sampling biases – diversity signals through time may partly or largely reflect the rock record – and many methods have been devised to deal with this problem. One widely used method, the ‘residual diversity’ method, uses residuals from a modelled relationship between palaeodiversity and sampling (sampling-driven diversity model) as ‘corrected’ diversity estimates, but the unorthodox way in which these residuals are generated presents serious statistical problems; the response and predictor variables are decoupled through independent sorting, rendering the new bivariate relationship meaningless. 2. Here, we use simple simulations to demonstrate the detrimental consequences of independent sorting, through assessing error rates and biases in regression model coefficients. 3. Regression models based on independently sorted data result in unacceptably high rates of incorrect and systematically, directionally biased estimates, when the true parameter values are known. The large number of recent papers that used the method are likely to have produced misleading results and their implications should be reassessed. 4. We note that the ‘residuals’ approach based on the sampling-driven diversity model cannot be used to ‘correct’ for sampling bias, and instead advocate the use of phylogenetic multiple regression models that can include various confounding factors, including sampling bias, while simultaneously accounting for statistical non-independence owing to shared ancestry. Evolutionary dynamics such as speciation are inherently a phylogenetic process, and only an explicitly phylogenetic approach will correctly model this process

Non-linear IVIV characteristics in two-dimensional superconductors: Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless physics vs inhomogeneity

One of the hallmarks of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition in two-dimensional (2D) superconductors is the universal jump of the superfluid density, that can be indirectly probed via the non-linear exponent of the current-voltage $IV$ characteristics. Here, we compare the experimental measurements of $IV$ characteristics in two cases, namely NbN thin films and SrTiO$_3$-based interfaces. While the former display a paradigmatic example of BKT-like non-linear effects, the latter do not seem to justify a BKT analysis. Rather, the observed $IV$ characteristics can be well reproduced theoretically by modelling the effect of mesoscopic inhomogeneity of the superconducting state. Our results offer an alternative perspective on the spontaneous fragmentation of the superconducting background in confined 2D systems.Comment: Final version, as publishe

Dinosaurs in decline tens of millions of years before their final extinction

Whether dinosaurs were in a long-term decline or whether they were reigning strong right up to their final disappearance at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction event 66 Mya has been debated for decades with no clear resolution. The dispute has continued unresolved because of a lack of statistical rigor and appropriate evolutionary framework. Here, for the first time to our knowledge, we apply a Bayesian phylogenetic approach to model the evolutionary dynamics of speciation and extinction through time in Mesozoic dinosaurs, properly taking account of previously ignored statistical violations. We find overwhelming support for a long-term decline across all dinosaurs and within all three dinosaurian subclades (Ornithischia, Sauropodomorpha, and Theropoda), where speciation rate slowed down through time and was ultimately exceeded by extinction rate tens of millions of years before the K-Pg boundary. The only exceptions to this general pattern are the morphologically specialized herbivores, the Hadrosauriformes and Ceratopsidae, which show rapid species proliferations throughout the Late Cretaceous instead. Our results highlight that, despite some heterogeneity in speciation dynamics, dinosaurs showed a marked reduction in their ability to replace extinct species with new ones, making them vulnerable to extinction and unable to respond quickly to and recover from the final catastrophic event