An Associative Model of Word Use Scott A. Waterman A dissertation submitted to the Department of Computer Science and the Graduate Faculty of Brandeis University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy I describe a model of word usage in context that uses the co-occurrence of words with syntactic environments as evidence of the underlying grammatical co...

We propose a probabilistic model for estimating influences among speakers from conversation data with multiple people. In conversations, people tend to mimic their companions’ behavior depending on their level of trust. With the proposed model, we assume that the word use of a speaker depends on the word use of previous speakers as well as their own earlier word use and the general word distrib...

conclusions the findings of this study indicate that the frequency of disfluencies was increased in difficult syllable structures in comparison to simple syllable structures. according to the results, it seems that certain linguistic features, such as syllable structure can affect speech-motor output in people who stutter through affecting phonological encoding. background stuttering is one of ...

Over the past few years we have seen an odd change, or extension, in the use of the word 'epigenetic' when describing matters of gene regulation in eukaryotes. Although it may generally be that it is not worth arguing over definitions, this is true only insofar as the participants in the discussion know what each other means. I believe the altered use of the term carries baggage from the standa...

Jurimetrics, the empirical study of legal phenomena, is generally associated with the quantitative analysis of legal cases. However, an interesting field, which can also be seen as a part of jurimetrics, is the analysis of legal word use. The subject matter of this examination was a broad selection of British legal documents, both case reports and legislation. Using quantitative methods develop...

Hierarchy building from dictionaries and free texts is often viewed as an application of NLP for domain modeling. The reversal (i.e. building and using such hierarchy for Word Sense Disambiguation) is also definitively useful in NLP. Indeed, we do observe that, even in very specialized texts, polysemous terms as well as blurring linguistic phenomena like metonymy or metaphor are frequent. Conce...