Morphological characters remain an essential tool for phylogenetic studies, even in the current age of molecular systematics (Scotland & al., 2003; Jenner, 2004; Wiens 2004; Smith & Turner, 2005; Lee, 2006). Consequently, the reliability and validity of the methods used to identify characters and define character states is highly relevant to systematics research. Although identifying appropriat...

How similar are two corpora? A measure of corpus similarity would be very useful for NLP for many purposes, such as estimating the work involved in porting a system from one domain to another. First, we discuss difficulties in identifying what we mean by 'corpus similariti: human similarity judgements are not finegrained enough, corpus similarity is inherently multidimensional, and similarity c...

A matroid is a mathematical structure that generalizes the notion of linear independence. Remarkably, this simple and elegant mathematical structure can be used to systematically develop efficient and simple “greedy” algorithms for a variety of discrete optimization problems. Moreover, matroids provide some insight into why other discrete optimization problems are apparently computationally int...

This paper describes the development of a model for identifying points of prominence in speech. This model can be used as a first step in intonational labeling of corpora that are used in some speech synthesis systems (Black and Taylor, 1995). The working definition of prominence is that starred ToBI accents (Silverman et al., 1992), that is, H*, L*, L*+H, L+H*, and H+!H*, are prominent. The pr...

In this article, we show how grammar can account for Benglish verbs, a particular type of complex predicate, which are constituted of an English word and a Bengali verb (e.g. /EksiDenT kOra/ ‘to have an accident’, /in kOra/ ‘to get/come/put in’ or /kOnfuz kOra/ ‘to confuse’). We analyze these verbs in the light of a couple of models (e.g. Kageyama, 1991; Lieber, 1992; Matsumoto, 1996) which cla...

In this paper, we are interested in the mathematical analysis of a geological stratigraphic model, taking into account a limited weathering condition. Firstly, we present the physical model and the mathematical formulation, which lead to an original conservation law. Then, the definition of a solution and some mathematical tools in order to resolve the problem are given. At last, we treat the 1...

This column is a forum for discussion of mathematical communities throughout the world, and through all time. Our definition of "mathematical community" is the broadest. We include "schools" of mathematics, circles of correspondence, mathematical societies, student organizations, and informal communities of cardinality greater than one. What we say about the communities is just as unrestricted....

OO Big O Joan Krone Denison University Department of Math and CS Granville, Ohio 43023 740-587-6484 [email protected] W. F. Ogden The Ohio State University Neal Avenue Columbus, Ohio 43210 614-292-6007 [email protected] SUMMARY When traditional Big O analysis is rigorously applied to object oriented software, several deficiencies quickly manifest themselves. Because the traditional defin...

In this paper we formulate a contract design problem where a primary license holder wishes to profit from its excess spectrum capacity by selling it to potential secondary users/buyers, but needs to determine how to optimally price it to maximize its profit, knowing that this excess capacity is stochastic in nature and cannot provide deterministic service guarantees to a buyer. We address this ...