Interest in the phonetics of sound change is as old as scientific linguistics (Osthoff and Brugman 1878). The prevalent view is that a key component of sound change is what Hyman (1977) dubbed phonologization: the process or processes by which automatic phonetic patterns give rise to a language’s phonological patterns. Sound patterns have a variety of other sources, including analogical change,...

This article surveys the major topics of Caucasian phonetics and phonology focusing on those aspects that bear broader implications for general phonetics and phonological theory. The article first presents an acoustic phonetic treatment of phonemic inventories in the three Caucasian families that involves both a review of recent instrumental data on the topic as well as a new analysis of experi...

This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fal...

Spectral differences among varieties of American English have been widely studied, typically recognizing three major regionally diagnostic vowel shift patterns [Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (De Gruyter, Berlin)]. Durational variability across dialects, on the other hand, has received relatively little attention. This p...

Most tools and resources developed for natural language processing of Arabic are designed for Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and perform terribly on Arabic dialects, such as Egyptian Arabic. Egyptian Arabic differs from MSA phonologically, morphologically and lexically and has no standardized orthography. We present a linguistically accurate, large-scale morphological analyzer for Egyptian Arabic...

This work presents a system for Automatic Arabic punctuation marks. Existing approaches for automatic punctuation marks do not provide suitable performance for and do not satisfy user interests in Arabic texts. The importance and rising need to automate the correct insertion of punctuation marks in Arabic texts led to a need of specific analysis of the Arabic language to introduce approaches th...

Building a system to extract Arabic named entities is a complex task due to the ambiguity and structure of Arabic text. Previous approaches that have tackled the problem of Arabic named entity recognition relied heavily on Arabic parsers and taggers combined with a huge set of gazetteers and sometimes large training sets to solve the ambiguity problem. But while these approaches are applicable ...