Subsidies to Employee Health Insurance Premiums and the Health Insurance Market

One approach to covering the uninsured that is frequently advocated by policy makers is subsidizing the employee portion of employer-provided health insurance premiums. But, since the vast majority of those offered employer-provided health insurance already take it up, such an approach is only appealing if there is a very high takeup elasticity among those who are offered and uninsured. Moreover, if plan choice decisions are price elastic, then such subsidies can at the same time increase health care costs by inducing selection of more expensive plans. We study an excellent example of such subsidies: the introduction of pre-tax premiums for postal employees in 1994, and then for the remaining federal employees in 2000. We do so using a census of personnel records for all federal employees from 1991 through 2002. We find that there is a very small elasticity of insurance takeup with respect to its after-tax price, and a modest elasticity of plan choice. Our results suggest that the federal government did little to improve insurance coverage, but much to increase health care expenditures, through this policy change.

Multi-Script Morphological Transducers And Transcribers For Seven Turkic Languages

This paper describes ongoing work to augment morphological transducers for seven Turkic languages with support for multiple scripts each, as well as respective IPA transcription systems. Evaluation demonstrates that our approach yields coverage equivalent to or not much lower than that of the base transducers

UD Annotatrix: An Annotation Tool For Universal Dependencies

In this paper we introduce the UD Annotatrix annotation tool for manual annotation of Universal Dependencies. This tool has been designed with the aim that it should be tailored to the needs of the Universal Dependencies (UD) community, including that it should operate in fully-offline mode, and is freely-available under the GNU GPL licence. In this paper, we provide some background to the tool, an overview of its development, and background on how it works. We compare it with some other widely-used tools which are used for Universal Dependencies annotation, describe some features unique to UD Annotatrix, and finally outline some avenues for future work and provide a few concluding remarks

Syllable-aware Neural Language Models: A Failure to Beat Character-aware Ones

Syllabification does not seem to improve word-level RNN language modeling quality when compared to character-based segmentation. However, our best syllable-aware language model, achieving performance comparable to the competitive character-aware model, has 18%-33% fewer parameters and is trained 1.2-2.2 times faster.Comment: EMNLP 201

An Investigation of the Articulatory Correlates of Vowel Anteriority in Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish using Ultrasound Tongue Imaging

This paper presents an articulatory study of vowel production in three Turkic languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Turkish) using ultrasound tongue imaging in order to determine what aspects of tongue position correspond to the vowel anteriority contrasts in these languages, especially regarding the tongue body (TB) and tongue root (TR). The results of this study suggest that the Turkish vowel anteriority contrast involves mainly TB position, whereas the Kazakh and Kyrgyz vowel anteriority contrasts involve both TR and TB position. This latter pattern appears to confirm the existence of a type of vowel anteriority contrast whose existence has been hypothesised but not previously verified instrumentally

Turkic Nasal Harmony as Surface Correspondence

Turkic languages are well known for syllable contact phenomena – sonority-driven processes where suffix-initial sonorants surface as obstruents in certain environments. These alternations interact with nasal harmony, a less studied phenomenon where underlying stops and nasals surface as nasals between two nasals. Nasal harmony is attested in about ten Turkic languages (Shor, various Khakas varieties, northern and southern Altay varieties, Kazakh, Qaraqalpaq, Noghay, possibly Karachay-Balkar, and Kazan and Siberian Tatar varieties), and it varies in its scope and how it interacts with syllable contact phenomena. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of nasal harmony in Kazakh, which has one of the richest nasal harmony systems, and explore an analysis within Surface Correspondence Theory

Delineating Turkic non-finite verb forms by syntactic function

In this paper, we argue against the primary categories of non-finite verb used in the Turkology literature: “participle” (причастие ‹pričastije›) and “converb” (деепричастие ‹dejepričastije›). We argue that both of these terms conflate several discrete phenomena, and that they furthermore are not coherent as umbrella terms for these phenomena. Based on detailed study of the non-finite verb morphology and syntax of a wide range of Turkic languages (presented here are Turkish, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Tuvan, and Sakha), we instead propose delineation of these categories according to their morphological and syntactic properties. Specifically, we propose that more accurate categories are verbal noun, verbal adjective, verbal adverb, and infinitive. This approach has far-reaching implications to the study of syntactic phenomena in Turkic languages, including phenomena ranging from relative clauses to clause chaining

A phonetic study of length and duration in Kyrgyz vowels

This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz to address a range of questions about the nature of this contrast, and also explores factors that affect (phonetic) duration in short vowels. Measurement and analysis of the vowels confirms that there is indeed a significant duration distinction between the Kyrgyz vowel categories referred to as short and long vowels. Preliminary midpoint formant measurements show that there may be some accompanying spectral component to the length contrast for certain vowels, but findings are not conclusive. A comparison of F0 dynamics and spectral dynamics through long and short vowels does not yield evidence that some long vowels may in fact be two heterosyllabic short vowels. Analysis shows that duration is associated with a vowel’s presence in word-edge syllables in Kyrgyz, as anticipated based on descriptions of word-final stress and initial prominence. However, high vowels and non-high vowels are found to consistently exhibit opposite durational effects. Specifically, high vowels in word-edge syllables are longer than high vowels in medial syllables, while non-high vowels in word-edge syllables are shorter than non-high vowels in medial syllables. This suggests either a phenomenon of durational neutralisation at word edges or the exaggeration of durational differences word-medially, and is not taken as a case of word-edge strengthening. Proposals for how to select from between these hypotheses in future work are discussed

A Phonetic Study Of Length And Duration In Kyrgyz Vowels

This paper examines the phonetic correlates of the (phonological) vowel length contrast in Kyrgyz to address a range of questions about the nature of this contrast, and also explores factors that affect (phonetic) duration in short vowels. Measurement and analysis of the vowels confirms that there is indeed a significant duration distinction between the Kyrgyz vowel categories referred to as short and long vowels. Preliminary midpoint formant measurements show that there may be some accompanying spectral component to the length contrast for certain vowels, but findings are not conclusive. A comparison of F0 dynamics and spectral dynamics through long and short vowels does not yield evidence that some long vowels may in fact be two heterosyllabic short vowels. Analysis shows that duration is associated with a vowel’s presence in word-edge syllables in Kyrgyz, as anticipated based on descriptions of word-final stress and initial prominence. However, high vowels and non-high vowels are found to consistently exhibit opposite durational effects. Specifically, high vowels in word-edge syllables are longer than high vowels in medial syllables, while non-high vowels in word-edge syllables are shorter than non-high vowels in medial syllables. This suggests either a phenomenon of durational neutralisation at word edges or the exaggeration of durational differences word-medially, and is not taken as a case of word-edge strengthening. Proposals for how to select from between these hypotheses in future work are discussed

A Free/Open-Source Morphological Analyser and Generator for Sakha

We present, to our knowledge, the first ever published morphological analyser and generator for Sakha, a marginalised language of Siberia. The transducer, developed using HFST, has coverage of solidly above 90%, and high precision. In the development of the analyser, we have expanded linguistic knowledge about Sakha, and developed strategies for complex grammatical patterns. The transducer is already being used in downstream tasks, including computer assisted language learning applications for linguistic maintenance and computational linguistic shared tasks.Peer reviewe