This paper presents three different methods to develop multilingual phone models for flexible speech recognition tasks. The main goal of our investigations is to find multilingual speech units which work equally well in many languages. With this universal set it is possible to build speech recognition systems for a variety of languages. One advantage of this approach is to share acoustic-phonet...

Similarities between human languages are often taken as evidence of constraints on language learning. However, such similarities could also be the result of descent from a common ancestor. In the framework of iterated learning, language evolution converges to an equilibrium that is independent of its starting point, with the effect of shared ancestry decaying over time. Therefore, the central q...

Children's overextensions of spatial language are often taken to reveal spatial biases. However, it is unclear whether extension patterns should be attributed to children's overly general spatial concepts or to a narrower notion of conceptual similarity allowing metaphor-like extensions. We describe a previously unnoticed extension of spatial expressions and use a novel method to determine its ...

Most studies involving trilingualism have been carried out within the theoretical framework of bilingualism research. No attempt has been made to delimit trilingualism as a concept in its own right, and often it has been assumed to be an extension of bilingualism. In young children, trilingual language acquisition largely follows the path of bilingual acquisition. With regard to language behavi...

Context-Free Grammars (CFGs) and Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) have several similarities and a few differences in both their syntax and semantics, but they are usually presented through formalisms that hinder a proper comparison. In this paper we present a new formalism for CFGs that highlights the similarities and differences between them. The new formalism borrows from PEGs the use of pa...

Gaps and similarities are two important concepts used in Information System (IS) projects that deal with the evolution issue. The idea in using these concepts is to analyse what changes or what remains similar between two situations, typically the changed situation and the new one, rather than just describing the new situation. Although in the industry, the daily practice consists in expressing...

The author suggests that the following seemingly disparate phenomena have an underlying relationship: cross-language similarities in the intonation contours for statements versus questions, cross-cultural similarities in the vocal expression via intonation of attitude and affect, cross-language patterns in the use of tone, vowels, and consonants in "sound symbolic' vocabulary , cross-species us...

Though similarities between the Semantic Web language RDF(S) and languages of the Conceptual Graphs family have often been pointed out, the differences between these formalisms have been a source of difficulties while trying to translate objets of a language into the other. In this paper, we present two such transformations, that have been implemented into the CoGUI platform, and discuss their ...

We present a case study on which a model checking language (Alloy) and a non-monotonic causal language (CCalc) are used for modeling the auditing process of an information repository through a MultiAgents System. Alloy and CCalc are used for identifying inconsistencies and simulating an automatic correction process carried out by intelligent agents supervised by human users. Similarities and st...