This paper describes an audio and textual dataset of debating speeches, a first-of-a-kind resource for the growing research field of computational argumentation and debating technologies. We detail the process of speech recording by professional debaters, the transcription of the speeches with an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, their consequent automatic processing to produce a text ...

Aiming at identification of the components of competence-based vocational training, and its status in textbooks used in technological high schools, a content analysis of five textbooks on non-technological competencies, commonly used in all fields, was undertaken utilizing a check list considered as valid by curriculum experts. Furthermore, a perusal of related texts and documents revealed thre...

We investigate whether one can determine from the transcripts of U.S. Congressional floor debates whether the speeches represent support of or opposition to proposed legislation. To address this problem, we exploit the fact that these speeches occur as part of a discussion; this allows us to use sources of information regarding relationships between discourse segments, such as whether a given u...

This study draws from a large corpus of Congressional speeches from the 101st to the 110th Congress (1989–2008), to examine gender differences in language use in a setting of political debates. Female legislators’ speeches demonstrated characteristics of both a feminine language style (e.g. more use of emotion words, fewer articles) and a masculine one (e.g. more nouns and long words, fewer per...

Spoken language has a complex multi-dimensional compositional structure that enables the rich productivity so characteristic of this most important human biosignal. Even the utterance of a single vowel sound, such as [o] or [i], requires the talker to coordinate gestures of the lip and tongue with gestures of the respiratory-laryngeal system, to combine the timbre properties of the vowel with a...

English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) uses the results of needs analysis for curriculum development and materials production. ESAP courses should be based on students’ academic needs. Consequently, the present study investigated the English language needs of Iranian undergraduate students of Law. Participants included 218 undergraduate students, 33 graduate students, and 10 content teac...

We study in this paper the cohesion of a leader’s speeches over time. This is part of a larger project that aims at investigating the language of leaders and how their language changes over their stay in power. Here, we analyze the speeches of a leader who stayed in power for a long period of time, i.e. more than 30 years. We measure cohesion of speeches in the original language, which is...

Glottal marking of vowel-initial German words by glottalization and glottal stop insertion were investigated in dependence on speech rate, word type (content vs. function words), word accent, phrasal position and the following vowel. The analysed material consisted of speeches of Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann and Richard von Weizsäcker. The investigation shows that not only the left boundary of ...

It is our contention that information technology is a cultural commodity whose influence is spread through economic and political action of institutions such as the government and corporations. Informed by Bourdieu’s sociology of language, we conduct a content analysis of political speeches regarding “digital opportunities” delivered by U. S. government officials. In this analysis we demonstrat...