Phonologists and psycholinguists draw a three-way distinction amongst real words, possible words, and impossible words.The distinction between real words and possible words provides the foundation for lexical decision experiments. The distinction between possible words and impossible words reveals implicit cognitive generalizations about words in a language, and thereby contributes to the under...

The goal of this paper is to present a particular type of lexicon, elaborated within a formal theory of natural language called Meaning-Text Theory (MTT). This theory puts strong emphasis on the development of highly structured lexica. Computational linguistics does of course recognize the importance of the lexicon in language processing. However, MTT probably goes further in this direction tha...

We adapt the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm to the context of formal language theory. Specifically, we use the algorithm to distinguish between trivial and nontrivial words in groups given by finite presentations, under the promise that a word is of a certain type. This is done by extending the original algorithm to functions of arbitrary length binary output, with the introduction of a more general c...

Acquiring a lexicon requires segmenting the continuous speech stream into words (or morphemes). In previous work, we suggested that the speech stream may be spontaneously perceived as a string of prosodic units, roughly corresponding to phonological phrases (Christophe & Dupoux, 1996; Christophe, Guasti, Nespor, Dupoux, & van Ooyen, 1997). Phonological phrases typically contain one or two conte...

Most new words, or neologisms, bubble beneath the surface of widespread usage for some time, perhaps even years, before gaining acceptance in conventional print dictionaries [1]. A shorter, yet still significant, delay is also evident in the life-cycle of NLP-oriented lexical resources like WordNet [2]. A more topical lexical resource is Wikipedia [3], an open-source community-maintained encycl...

This paper describes a new grapheme-tophoneme framework, based on a combination of formal linguistic and statistical methods. A context-free grammar is used to parse words into their underlying syllable structure, and a set of subword “spellneme” units encoding both phonemic and graphemic information can be automatically derived from the parsed words. A statistical -gram model can then be train...

E-mail has become a key mechanism of electronic communication. This is true for professional organizations that like to communicate with their subjects online and are slowly shifting to paper-less office. The current paper focuses specifically on academic institutions offering Engineering course in Gujarat state and attempts for textual analysis of the usernames of the institutional e-mail addr...

Language software applications encounter new words, e.g., acronyms, technical terminology, names or compounds of such words. In order to add new words to a lexicon, we need to indicate their inflectional paradigm. We present a new generally applicable method for creating an entry generator, i.e. a paradigm guesser, for finite-state transducer lexicons. As a guesser tends to produce numerous sug...