In customizing the neutral model for language transmission , Reali & Griffiths [1] have added a new, 'Bayesian' learning interpretation to a neutral model that has been used in cultural evolution studies for some time (e.g. [2 –6]). While Reali & Griffiths [1, p. 435] dismiss previous applications of this neutral model as being used merely 'as a metaphor', it has been explored in quantitative d...

This paper describes how richly annotated corpora can be created with the annotation tool MMAX2. The description is from the point of view of Computational Linguistics, a discipline where annotated corpora are often used as resources for software development. The paper outlines the important steps in the life cycle of an annotation and details how the tool MMAX2 can be employed in each of them.

Following the road in-between purely linguistic annotation and solely ontology-based annotations for the Semantic Web, a hybrid (ontological and linguistic) model and platform, called OntoTag, has been created, aiming at better machine communication, interoperability and language understanding. These capabilities, which are the main topic of this paper, are derived from the incorporation into t...

In this paper, we develop an RST-style textlevel discourse parser, based on the HILDA discourse parser (Hernault et al., 2010b). We significantly improve its tree-building step by incorporating our own rich linguistic features. We also analyze the difficulty of extending traditional sentence-level discourse parsing to text-level parsing by comparing discourseparsing performance under different ...

Parallel texts are enriched by alignment algorithms, thus establishing a relationship between the structures of the implied languages. Depending on the alignment level, the enrichment can be performed on paragraphs, sentences or words, of the expressed content in the source language and its translation. There are two main approaches to perform word-level alignment: statistical or linguistic. Du...

Children rapidly learn a tremendous amount about language despite limitations imposed on them by their developing cognitive abilities. One possible explanation for this rapid learning is that caregivers tune the language they produce to these limitations, titrating the complexity of their speech to developmentally-appropriate levels. We test this hypothesis in a large-scale corpus analysis, mea...

High quality linguistic features is the key to the success of speech synthesis. Traditional linguistic feature extraction methods are usually relied on a word-level natural language processing (NLP) parser. Since, a good parser requires a lot of feature engineering to build, it is usually a genral-purpose one and often not specially designed for speech synthesis. To avoid these difficulties, we...

This paper focuses on improving a specific opinion spam detection task, deceptive spam. In addition to traditional word form and other shallow syntactic features, we introduce two types of deep level linguistic features. The first type of features are derived from a shallow discourse parser trained on Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), which can capture inter-sentence information. The second type ...

The current study examines the relation between cognitive control and linguistic competition resolution at the sublexical level in bilinguals. Twenty-one Spanish-English bilinguals and 23 English monolinguals completed a non-linguistic Stroop task (indexing inhibitory control) and a linguistic priming/lexical decision task (indexing Spanish phonotactic constraint competition during English comp...