Towards Syntactic Iberian Polarity Classification

Lexicon-based methods using syntactic rules for polarity classification rely on parsers that are dependent on the language and on treebank guidelines. Thus, rules are also dependent and require adaptation, especially in multilingual scenarios. We tackle this challenge in the context of the Iberian Peninsula, releasing the first symbolic syntax-based Iberian system with rules shared across five official languages: Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. The model is made available.Comment: 7 pages, 5 tables. Contribution to the 8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA-2017) at EMNLP 201

Iberian writing and language

The Iberian language: methodological, geographical, and chronological questions 1.1. At present, any attempt at describing the Iberian language will encounter a series of substantial obstacles of varying nature: – First and foremost is the fact that Iberian is still an undeciphered language. Furthermore, if we were to endeavour to distinguish different categories among undeciphered languages based on our ability to appreciate their linguistic features, Iberian would rank among the most hermetic: not only is there no agreement on the translation of a single word in the language, but we are also only able to determine the parts of speech in the case of some ten terms, while the structure of the texts is almost always impenetrable. – The second problem lies in our still uncertain level of knowledge of the signaries in which Iberian texts were written. In spite of the progress made in this field in recent years, the meaning of some signs continues to be in doubt: this has direct repercussions on our knowledge of the phonetics and phonology of the language, but in addition it leads to difficulties when it comes to detecting possible homographs or homonyms

Indigenous naming practices in the Western Mediterranean: the case of Iberian

The Iberian language is directly attested by ca. 2,250 inscriptions spanning the period from the 5th century BC to the 1st century AD, distributed between Eastern Andalusia and Languedoc. Although it must be considered a non-deciphered language, a large number of personal names have been identified in Iberian texts. The document that enabled the understanding of the basic structure of Iberian names is a Latin inscription from Italy (the Ascoli Bronze) recording the grant of Roman citizenship to Iberians who had fought for Rome during the Social War (90-88 BC). The study of this document paved the way for the identification of Iberian names in texts written in local languages, on the one hand, and in Latin and Greek epigraphic and literary sources on the other. This paper provides a state-of-the-art overview of research on Iberian onomastics, by synthesising the main recent achievements along with the remaining lines of research; it also investigates our understanding of the grammatical and syntactic structure of Iberian names, and analyses the evolution of Iberian naming patterns under Roman domination, by taking into account both Iberian and Latin documents

Pan-Hispanic oral tradition

We are concerned here with the oral traditions of Hispanic or Iberian peoples: speakers of Spanish (Castilian), Portuguese, Catalan, and Judeo-Spanish, and also various Spanish and Portuguese creoles in South America, Africa, and Asia. Basque, as an indigenous language of the Iberian Peninsula, should also definitely be counted as part of the Hispanic world. Oral tradition involves any manifestation of folk culture that includes the use of language. Creativity, ongoing evolution, and chronological depth are also essential factors.Not

Jitter and Shimmer measurements for speaker diarization

Jitter and shimmer voice quality features have been successfully used to characterize speaker voice traits and detect voice pathologies. Jitter and shimmer measure variations in the fundamental frequency and amplitude of speaker's voice, respectively. Due to their nature, they can be used to assess differences between speakers. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of these voice quality features in the task of speaker diarization. The combination of voice quality features with the conventional spectral features, Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), is addressed in the framework of Augmented Multiparty Interaction (AMI) corpus, a multi-party and spontaneous speech set of recordings. Both sets of features are independently modeled using mixture of Gaussians and fused together at the score likelihood level. The experiments carried out on the AMI corpus show that incorporating jitter and shimmer measurements to the baseline spectral features decreases the diarization error rate in most of the recordings.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The Moral Dimensions of Sufism and the Iberian Mystical Canon

This study explores the shared spaces and common ground between the moral theosophies of Sufism and Christian mysticism in Spain. This article focuses on how Sufis, Carmelites and other mystical authors expressed spiritual concepts, establishing networks of mutual influence. Medieval and Golden Age mystics of Islam and Christianity shared a cultural canon based on universal moral principles. Both their learned and popular traditions used recurrent spiritual symbols, often expressing similar ethical coordinates. Spiritual dialogue went beyond the chronological and geographical frameworks shared by Christianity and Islam in the Iberian Peninsula: this article considers a selection of texts that contain expansive moral codes. Mystical expressions of Islam and Christianity in Spain are viewed as an ethical, cultural and anthropological continuum

Retelling the Future: Don Juan Manuel's "Exenplo XI" and the Power of Fiction

In this paper I look at how “Exenplo XI” is both product and reflection of the various traditions and cultures of medieval Iberia and how Juan Manuel forges a new version of this story from these inherited traditions in order to showcase problems of concern to his fourteenth-century audience, namely, the tension between ecclesiastical and Andalusi systems of thought and their representatives and how the author’s manipulation of the frame and the power of fiction itself echoes Don Yllán’s manipulation of magic to test the dean’s mettle. Then I turn to the lessons of “Exenplo XI” regarding the transmission of knowledge and who controls it, as well as the function of speculative fiction and its ability to explore alternative realities and potential futures for both fictional audience (Conde Lucanor) and contemporary twenty-first-century readers

Engineering Education in Iberian America

The large Continent of America has in its territory besides overseas regions, dependencies and colonies 35 sovereign countries, 25 in North America and 12 in South America. Among them there are two big countries Brazil, which official language is Portuguese and Argentina, which official language is Spanish. Both are of political and economical importance in South America. They both belong to the so called Iberian America, which is a term used since the second half of the 19th century to refer collectively to the countries in the Americas, which were formerly colonies of Spain or Portugal. The Iberian countries in Europe are Portugal, Spain, Andorra and Gibraltar. The objective of this paper is to present the history and he current status of engineering education in Iberian America countries Brazil and Argentina followed by the countries that originated the engineering education in these countries, Portugal and Spain

The effect of L1 regional variation on the perception and production of standard L1 and L2 vowels

This study reports on the perception and production of Standard Dutch and Standard British English vowels by speakers of two regional varieties of Belgian Dutch (East Flemish and Brabantine) which differ in their vowel realizations. Twenty-four native speakers of Dutch performed two picture-naming tasks and two vowel categorization tasks, in which they heard Standard Dutch or English vowels and were asked to map these onto orthographic representations of Dutch vowels. The results of the Dutch production and categorization tasks revealed that the participants’ L1 regional variety importantly influenced their production and especially perception of vowels in the standard variety of their L1. The two groups also differed in how they assimilated non-native English vowels to native vowel categories, but no major differences could be observed in their productions of non-native vowels. The study therefore only partly confirms earlier studies showing that L1 regional variation may have an influence on the acquisition of non-native language varieties

Forenames and Surnames in Spain in 2004

This paper quantifies the corpus of forenames and surnames in Spain in 2004 using the telephone directory. It describes their frequency patterns, major measurable characteristics, and gives some geographical distributions, international comparisons, and historical explanations. The research presented here is set in a context of a broader study of the quantitative properties of the corpus of personal names in several countries undertaken by Tucker. Amongst the most significant findings are a much more highly skewed distribution towards the most popular surnames than in other countries, the permanence of language regions since the Middle Ages, and important differences in top Hispanic names frequencies between five countries across the Atlantic. It is also suggested that the innovative techniques presented here, combining geographical and statistical analysis of names and their language of origin, opens up enormous possibilities for multidisciplinary work on onomastics