Italian Lemmatization by Rules with GETARUNS

We present an approach to lemmatization based on exhaustive morphological analysis and use of external knowledge sources to help disambiguation which is the most relevant issue to cope with. Our system GETARUNS was not concerned with lemmatization directly and used morphological analysis only as backoff solution in case the word was not retrieved in the wordform dictionaries available. We found out that both the rules and the root dictionary needed amending. This was started during development and before testset was distributed, but not completed for lack of time. Thus the task final results only depict an incomplete system, which has now eventually come to a complete version with rather different outcome. We moved from 98.42 to 99.82 in the testset and from 99.82 to 99.91 in the devset. As said above, this is produced by rules and is not subject to statistical evaluation which may change according to different training sets. In this version of the paper we perform additional experiments with WordForm dictionaries of Italian freely available online

Analisi Linguistica e Stilostatistica – Uno Studio Predittivo sul Campo

This paper presents a case study defining a precise evaluation scheme for text stylistics to be used to rank different documents in terms of persuasiveness and easyness of reading. The study concerns political program documents published on a public forum by candidates to rector of the University Ca’ Foscari – Venice. The documents have been analysed by our system and a rank list has been created on the basis of scores associated to eleven parameters. After voting has taken place, we graded the different analyses and discovered that the system had predicted the name of the actual winner in advance. The result has been published on a local newspaper

Exploring Speech Technologies for Language Learning

The teaching of the pronunciation of any foreign language must encompass both segmental and suprasegmental aspects of speech. In computational terms, the two levels of language learning activities can be decomposed at least into phonemic aspects, which include the correct pronunciation of single phonemes and the co-articulation of phonemes into higher phonological units; as well as prosodic aspects which include  the correct position of stress at word level;  the alternation of stress and unstressed syllables in terms of compensation and vowel reduction;  the correct position of sentence accent;  the generation of the adequate rhymth from the interleaving of stress, accent, and phonological rules;  the generation of adequate intonational pattern for each utterance related to communicative functions; As appears from above, for a student to communicate intelligibly and as close as possible to native-speaker's pronunciation, prosody is very important [3]. We also assume that an incorrect prosody may hamper communication from taking place and this may be regarded a strong motivation for having the teaching of Prosody as an integral part of any language course. From our point of view it is much more important to stress the achievement of successful communication as the main objective of a second language learner rather than the overcoming of what has been termed “foreign accent”, which can be deemed as a secondary goal. In any case, the two goals are certainly not coincident even though they may be overlapping in some cases. We will discuss about these matter in the following sections. All prosodic questions related to “rhythm” will be discussed in the first section of this chapter. In [4] the author argues in favour of prosodic aids, in particular because a strong placement of word stress may impair understanding from the listener’s point of view of the word being pronounced. He also argues in favour of acquiring correct timing of phonological units to overcome the impression of “foreign accent” which may ensue from an incorrect distribution of stressed vs. unstressed stretches of linguistic units such as syllables or metric feet. Timing is not to be confused with speaking rate which need not be increased forcefully to give the impression of a good fluency: trying to increase speaking rate may result in lower intelligibility. The question of “foreign accent” is also discussed at length in (Jilka M., 1999). This work is particularly relevant as far as intonational features of a learner of a second language which we will address in the second section of this chapter. Correcting the Intonational Foreign Accent (hence IFA) is an important component of a Prosodic Module for self-learning activities, as categorical aspects of the intonation of the two languages in contact, L1 and L2 are far apart and thus neatly distinguishable. Choice of the two languages in contact is determined mainly by the fact that the distance in prosodic terms between English and Italian is maximal, according to (Ramus, F. and J. Mehler, 1999; Ramus F., et al., 1999)

Speech Synthesis for Language Tutoring Systems

In this paper we shall be concerned with the use of Text-to-Speech Synthesis, or TTS for short, as a tool for Language Learning. We shall present a number of applications where TTS plays a fundamental role in helping the student in Second Language learning. TTS can be a fundamental tool in helping to recognize and get aware of the contrastive features that constitute the main learning targets of the student. TTS can also be used simply as a speaking Tutor when help is needed in any self-instructional system or just to provide feedback on some exercise the student is practicing. It can be used as a Reader for Dictation exercises where there is a need to vary voice quality and speaking rate. Eventually, it can be used to help students working on a Listening Comprehension task in giving hints on what the main task to be accomplished consists of, and other similar Oral drills. We shall be presenting all these examples of the use of TTS in a CALL without always assuming that it is the only way to cope with oral linguistic practice. In general, having a human tutor to do the same kind of tutoring activity guarantees a much better result: the question is whether a human tutor may always be available when the student needs one, which is usually not the case. So the possibility to have a substitute, for how much of lesser quality it may be, is worth pursuing. And there is at least one case in which the computer-based speaking tutor constitutes the only viable alternative to the human tutor: when mimicking the levels of speaking proficiency in L2, or levels of interlanguage, as will be explained in detail further on

Transposing Meaning into Immanence: The Poetry of Francis Webb

This article will be focussing on Webb’s poetic style, and in particular on the use of words and the creation of metaphors. In the preface to his first Collected Poems, by the famous literary critic Herbert Read, we are told that “There is a remarkable coherence in this substantial body of work – published over sixteen years – a steady development of technical virtuosity and a deepening of intellectual and emotional content.”(ibid.,v) There are comparisons that are made with Rilke, (“bot not essential, for its stillness and intensity are quite unique”), for “A Death at Winson Green”, and at end of the preface this is his comment: Browning and Hopkins are perhaps obvious influences, but we need not seek further for the sources of his prosody, which is not “modern” except in its psychological and metaphysical intensity. From the Beginning Webb has been concerned with the same tragic problems as Rilke, Eliot, Pasternak, and to mention a contemporary who presents a close parallel, Robert Lowell. I cannot, after long meditation on his verse, place his achievements on a level lower than that suggested by these names.”(ibid.,ix

COMPUTING POETRY STYLE

We present SPARSAR, a system for the automatic analysis of poetry(and text) style which makes use of NLP tools like tokenizers, sentence splitters, NER (Name Entity Recognition) tools, and taggers. Our system in addition to the tools listed above which aim at obtaining the same results of quantitative linguistics, adds a number of additional tools for syntactic and semantic structural analysis and prosodic modeling. We use a constituency parser to measure the structure of modifiers in NPs; and a dependency mapping of the previous parse to analyse the verbal complex and determine Polarity and Factuality. Another important component of the system is a phonological parser to account for OOVWs, in the process of grapheme to phoneme conversion of the poem. We also measure the prosody of the poem by associating mean durational values in msecs to each syllable from a database and created an algorithm to account for the evaluation of durational values for any possible syllable structure. Eventually we produce six general indices that allow single poems as well as single poets to be compared. These indices include a Semantic Density Index which computes in a wholly new manner the complexity of a text/poem

A QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS OF LINGUISTIC DEVIATION: FRANCIS WEBB, A SCHIZOPHRENIC POET

Poetry is a form of linguistic behaviour that deviates from the norm and that breaks the rules set up by the code established by society, which is tolerated, accepted and even extolled. In fact, poetic creation is regarded as the highest outcome of the symbolic activity of the human mind, a real act of civilization, indeed. Linguistic norm is thus violated systematically and theories have been built upon this deviation like Brecht's Entfremdung and Shklovskij's Ostranenie. Contemporary poetry has come to the point of building up a sort of antilanguage as a means to express linguistic alienation; it is a language deprived of the usual connotations - the meanings attached to symbols - of the usual denotation - the meanings attached to the signs . and of the usual referents - the objects related to the signs. Poetry means in that it is the expression of social pathologies and is nonetheless accepted as an anti-formal message. The status of poetry and of other artistic contemporary expressions is thus intrinsically ambiguous, deviating and intentionally abnormal; but its acceptability is warranted by its being a code endowed with an aesthetic function. The rules are thus reverted: the elements of expression must be new, unforeseeable, unpredictable, at the antipodes of the communicative function of linguistic praxis in usual everyday social intercourses. The aim is to stun the reader in order to release his imagination from the fetters imposed by common coding-decoding linguistic processes

Parsing with GETARUN

GETARUNS, the system for text and reference understanding which is currently used for summarization and text generation has a highly linguistically sophisticated parser which implements a number of strategies to cope with ambiguity ensuing from PP attachment and other similar problems(see Delmonte & Dolci, 1997). In this paper we present the parser from a linguistic point of view and as such implementing LFG theoretical framework within a DCG, using Xtraposition Grammars to cope with Long Distance Dependencies. The parser is multilingual and contains a lookahead mechanism, which is then used by the Well-Formed-Substring-Table to recover wrongly parser attachment

Variabilità prosodica: dalla sillaba al contenuto

L’importanza della Prosodia nella creazione di Modelli Predittivi per la Sintesi e per il Riconoscimento del Parlato è ormai un fatto acquisito a differenza di quanto si pensava dieci anni fa quando il riconoscimento si stava affermando sulla base degli HMMs e la sintesi era fondata sui modelli moltiplicativi a liste. Malgrado ciò, la costruzione di Modelli adeguati permane problematica e non è ancora chiaro quale metodologia sia la più proficua. Il problema posto dalla Prosodia è molto semplice da definire ma molto difficile da risolvere. Ormai più nessuno sostiene che la Variabilità Prosodica sia impossibile da modellizzare in quanto intrinsecamente imprevedibile e non significativa linguisticamente

A Computational Approach to Poetic Structure, Rhythm and Rhyme

In this paper we present SPARSAR, a system for the automatic analysis of English and Italian poetry. The system can work on any type of poem and produces a set of parameters that are then used to compare poems with one another, of the same author or of different authors. In this paper, we will concentrate on the second module, which is a rule-based system to represent and analyze poetic devices. Evaluation of the system on the basis of a manually created dataset - including poets from Shakespeare's time down to T.S.Eliot and Sylvia Plath - has shown its high precision and accuracy approximating 90%