Prosodic Realization of Topics

This paper presents the results of a pilot study aiming to investigate the prosodic realization of topichood in Greek, focusing particularly on the realization of different types of topics. Topic-less sentences, “simple”, contrastive and corrective topics were compared through controlled data collection on the basis of both phonological and phonetic criteria. Analysis showed that only corrective topics bear distinct phonological (L+H* pitch accent) and phonetic (increased F0, duration and intensity) correlates. Having ascribed this distinct prosodic marking to a contrast feature operating within the topic rather than the topic itself, we consider the above results as evidence supporting the claim that topichood is not reflected on prosody at least with regards to pitch accent type and the phonetic parameters assessed

Designing User Interfaces for Social Media Driven Digital Preservation and Information Retrieval

Abstract. Social Media provide a vast amount of information identifying stories, events, entities that play the crucial role of shaping the community in an everyday heavy user involvement. This work involves the study of social media information in terms of type (multimodal: text, video, sound, picture) and role players (agents, users, opinion leaders) and the potential of designing accessible, usable interfaces that integrate that information. This case examines the design of a user interface that uses an underlying engine for modality components (plain text, sound, image, video) analysis, social media crawling, contextual search fusion and semantic analysis. The interface is the only point of user interaction to the world of knowledge. This work reports on the usability and accessibility methods and concerns for the user requirements phase and the design control and testing. The findings of the pilot user testing and evaluation provide indications on how the semantic analysis of the social media information can be integrated to the design methodologies for user interfaces resulting in maximization of user experience in terms of social information involvement