We propose a statistical test for measuring grammatical productivity. We show that very young children’s knowledge is consistent with a systematic grammar that independently combines linguistic units. To a testable extent, the usage-based approach to language and language learning, which emphasizes the role of lexically specific memorization, is inconsistent with the child language data. We als...

In this work, we study the drowsy state of a speaker, induced by alcohol intoxication or sleep deprivation. In particular, we investigate the coherence between the two pivotal causes of drowsiness, as featured in the Intoxication and Sleepiness tasks of the INTERSPEECH Speaker State Challenge. In this way, we aim to exploit the interrelations between these different, yet highly correlated speak...

Mahalanobis’s famous paper on Fractile Graphical Analysis introduced a plethora of new statistical concepts and techniques [see Mahalanobis (1960)]. The method was originally proposed to compare two regression functions. We discuss and re-interpret some of his work, highlighting his contributions and some of the difficulties encountered. We develop a bootstrap based hypothesis test to compare t...

Fast and eeective unsupervised clustering is a fundamental tool in unsupervised learning. Here is a new method to explore large datasets that enjoys many favorable properties. It is fast and eeective, and produces a hierarchical structure on the underlying dataset, without using a training set. It also yields auxiliary information on the signiicance of the diierent attributes.

Wavelet analysis is now frequently used to extract information from ecological and epidemiological time series. Statistical hypothesis tests are conducted on associated wavelet quantities to assess the likelihood that they are due to a random process. Such random processes represent null models and are generally based on synthetic data that share some statistical characteristics with the origin...