A language L ⊆ A∗ is literally idempotent in case that uav ∈ L if and only if uav ∈ L for each u, v ∈ A∗, a ∈ A. Such classes result naturally by taking all literally idempotent languages in a classical (positive) variety or by considering a certain closure operator. We initiate their systematic study. Various classes of such languages can be characterized using syntactic methods. A starting ex...

Hamlet: Has this fellow no feelings of his business, that he sings at grave-making? Horatio: Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness. (Hamlet Act V, scene i) Hamlet is appalled by the gravedigger's insensitivity towards death and corpses. Horatio explains that the gravedigger is so accustomed to such things that he no longer shares Hamlet's seriousness. We contend that human dissectio...

We address the question of which syntactic representation is best suited for role-semantic analysis of English in the FrameNet paradigm. We compare systems based on dependencies and constituents, and a dependency syntax with a rich set of grammatical functions with one with a smaller set. Our experiments show that dependency-based and constituent-based analyzers give roughly equivalent performa...

Copula constructions are problematic in the syntax of most languages. The paper describes three different dependency syntactic methods for handling copula constructions: function head, content head and complex label analysis. Furthermore, we also propose a POS-based approach to copula detection. We evaluate the impact of these approaches in computational parsing, in two parsing experiments for ...

India -"Hindustan" literally means the land of Hindus. It is a secular nation since 1950. Officially, there is no place for religious, cultural or caste segregation in the society. However, the framers of the Indian Constitution decided to give special benefits to the backward classes and women by forming a reservation policy that was included in the Constitution itself. This paper tries to loo...

This article outlines the collaborative process of making a watercolour animation drawn from research with women who swim wild in rivers, lakes and seas. Discussing graphic storytelling sociology, anthropology related disciplines, we share our experiences creative collaboration, describing detail practical research-led to wider swimming community situating project within larger discussion publi...

Most binaural hearing aid systems have separate processing for each ear. Collaborative processing allows the left and right hearing aids to share information and resources. In this paper, collaborative processing is used to take advantage of head shadow effects to improve Voice Activity Detection (VAD). We emphasize here that while a variety of improvements in VAD and speech enhancement are pos...