This study investigated the use of cognitive state verbs (CSVs) and complement clauses in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and their typically developing (TD) peers. In Study 1, conversational samples from 23 children with SLI (M = 6;2), 24 age-matched TD children (M = 6;2) and 21 vocabulary-matched TD children (M = 4;9) were analysed for the proportional use of CSVs, verb types...

Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words can appear more than once in a conversation or over a period of time. Such multiple instances of the same OOV word provide valuable information for estimating the pronunciation or the part-of-speech (POS) tag of the word. But in a conventional OOV word detection system, each OOV word is recognized and treated individually. We therefore investigated how to identify ...

This paper reports the early language development of a Germanspeaking girl who produced referential as well as expressive utterances. Expressive speech style is illustrated by the use of babbling strings with target intonation, universal words, filler syllables, pivot constructions and a smooth transition to syntax. Referential style is characterized by the gradual development of phonology, the...

We present our recent work on developing large-vocabulary Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English speech-to-text translation systems for the January 2008 Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) retest evaluation. Two audio genres were involved in the evaluation: broadcast news and broadcast conversation. Our system, following the hierarchical phrase-based translation approach, has a two...

The contributions of social processes and computational processes to early lexical development were evaluated. A re-analysis and review of previous research cast doubt on the sufficiency of social approaches to word learning. An empirical investigation of the relation of social-pragmatic and data-providing features of input to the productive vocabulary of sixty-three 2-year-old children reveale...

In this paper, we take a bag of visual words approach to investigate whether it is possible to distinguish conversational scenarios from observing human motion alone, in particular gestures in 3D. The conversational interactions concerned in this work have rather subtle differences among them. Unlike typical action or event recognition, each interaction in our case contain many instances of pri...

Thread disentanglement is the task of separating out conversations whose thread structure is implicit, distorted, or lost. In this paper, we perform email thread disentanglement through pairwise classification, using text similarity measures on non-quoted texts in emails. We show that i) content text similarity metrics outperform style and structure text similarity metrics in both a class-balan...

Conversation Theory and a dynamic protolanguage, Lp, are used to illustrate an al'gulllent in favour of reflective and relativistic theories in Cybernetics and Systems Studies.

We investigate the interaction of power, gender, and language use in the Enron email corpus. We present a freely available extension to the Enron corpus, with the gender of senders of 87% messages reliably identified. Using this data, we test two specific hypotheses drawn from the sociolinguistic literature pertaining to gender and power: women managers use face-saving communicative strategies,...