Informationally Given phrases following an instance of focus are generally realized in a compressed pitch range and are assumed to lack prosodic prominences above the word level. In this paper, we address the question of the metrical representation of postfocal constituents in Tuscan Italian. The results of a production experiment show that, despite their being realized with a low and flat F0 c...

PURPOSE Evidence from children's spontaneous speech suggests that utterance length and utterance position may help explain why children omit grammatical morphemes in some contexts but not others. This study investigated whether increased utterance length (hence, increased grammatical complexity) adversely affects children's third person singular -s production in more controlled experimental con...

Language identification (LID) systems typically employ ivectors as fixed length representations of utterances. However, it may not be possible to reliably estimate i-vectors from short utterances, which in turn could lead to reduced language identification accuracy. Recently, Long Short Term Memory networks (LSTMs) have been shown to better model short utterances in the context of language iden...

Approaches to natural language processing that use a phrasal lexicon have the advantage of easily handling linguistic constructions that might otherwise be extragrammatical. However, current phrasal lexicons are often too rigid: their phrasal entries fail to cover the more flexible constructions. FLUSH, for Flexible Lexicon Utilizing Specialized and Hierarchical knowledge, is a knowledge-based ...

In this research we propose a novel speaker identification algorithm by formulating the pattern recognition task as a problem of linear regression. Essentially the concept of GMMmean supervector is used to transform variable-length utterances to fixed-length feature vectors. Training utterances from each speaker are used to develop class-specific dictionaries. The unknown test utterance is line...

Phrasal Verbs are an important feature of the English language. Properly identifying them provides the basis for an English parser to decode the related structures. Phrasal verbs have been a challenge to Natural Language Processing (NLP) because they sit at the borderline between lexicon and syntax. Traditional NLP frameworks that separate the lexicon module from the parser make it difficult to...

In this paper we investigate the phenomenon of phrasal verbs, discussing their characteristics and the challenges that they present for possible treatments. We also discuss the treatment for phrasal verbs in a particular grammar, the LinGO-ERG, and the coverage it provides. Possible ways of extending the coverage of this grammar are analysed and proposed, taking into account the regular pattern...

Recent research using the phenomenon of illusory vowels has raised our awareness of the extent to which speech perception is modulated by the listener’s native-language phonological knowledge. However, most of the focus has been limited to word-level phonological knowledge. In this article, we suggest that the perceptual system recruits segmental phonological knowledge that makes crucial refere...

Both general and domain-specific search engines have adopted query suggestion techniques to help users formulate effective queries. In the specific domain of literature search (e.g., finding academic papers), the initial queries are usually based on a draft paper or abstract, rather than short lists of keywords. In this paper, we investigate phrasal-concept query suggestions for literature sear...