Learning about spin-one-half fields

It is hard to understand spin-one-half fields without reading Weinberg. This paper is a pedagogical footnote to his formalism with an emphasis on the boost matrix, spinors, and Majorana fields.Comment: Fixed typo in this 19-page pedagogical paper on spinors and Majorana and Dirac field

Using same-language machine translation to create alternative target sequences for text-to-speech synthesis

Modern speech synthesis systems attempt to produce speech utterances from an open domain of words. In some situations, the synthesiser will not have the appropriate units to pronounce some words or phrases accurately but it still must attempt to pronounce them. This paper presents a hybrid machine translation and unit selection speech synthesis system. The machine translation system was trained with English as the source and target language. Rather than the synthesiser only saying the input text as would happen in conventional synthesis systems, the synthesiser may say an alternative utterance with the same meaning. This method allows the synthesiser to overcome the problem of insufficient units in runtime

Usted es haragan pero vos sos lazy: initialization in Honduran Sign Language

Initialization, an outcome of language contact common to signed languages, has become a global phenomenon. I define initialization as the incorporation of the orthography of a word of a dominant spoken language via the cultural construct of a manual orthography into signs with a semantic correspondence to that word. Despite its being very common within (relatively) well-documented sign languages such as American Sign Language (Padden & Brentari, 2001), Australian Sign Language (Schembri & Johnston, 2007) and Québec Sign Language (Machabée, 1995), the literature on the subject is very small. To assist in expanding the nascent fields of sociolinguistics and anthropology of Deaf communities, ethnographic research involving primarily corpus building, interviews and participant observation was performed within the Deaf community of central Honduras to offer preliminary insights into how the personal and group identities of the Honduran Deaf are negotiated through linguistic interactions. Variable initialization is quite a salient marker because of its use in the diverging sociolects of Deaf Honduras. This poses the questions: what instances of variable initialization exist in the community; how are these variable forms manipulated to construct identities; how does variant initialization mark social differentiation in the community? How are linguistic variation and social differentiation intertwined? Social relationships and individual identity are studied by means of this linguistic marker as language is used to build social meaning. In particular, I argue that linguistic variation is polarizing as variant initialization is used to both reflect and justify the social division of the community into central and peripheral

Constructions of biangular tight frames and their relationships with equiangular tight frames

We study several interesting examples of Biangular Tight Frames (BTFs) - basis-like sets of unit vectors admitting exactly two distinct frame angles (ie, pairwise absolute inner products) - and examine their relationships with Equiangular Tight Frames (ETFs) - basis-like systems which admit exactly one frame angle. We demonstrate a smooth parametrization BTFs, where the corresponding frame angles transform smoothly with the parameter, which "passes through" an ETF answers two questions regarding the rigidity of BTFs. We also develop a general framework of so-called harmonic BTFs and Steiner BTFs - which includes the equiangular cases, surprisingly, the development of this framework leads to a connection with the famous open problem(s) regarding the existence of Mersenne and Fermat primes. Finally, we construct a (chordally) biangular tight set of subspaces (ie, a tight fusion frame) which "Pl\"ucker embeds" into an ETF.Comment: 19 page