The inference of evolutionary history, whether in biology or in linguistics, is aided by a carefully considered model of the evolutionary process and a reconstruction method which is expected to produce a reasonably accurate estimation of the true evolutionary history when the real data match the model assumptions and are of sufficient quantity. In molecular systematics (i.e., the inference of ...

In this paper we describe an approach that both creates crosslingual acoustic monophone model sets for speech recognition tasks and objectively predicts their performance without target-language speech data or acoustic measurement techniques. This strategy is based on a series of linguistic metrics characterizing the articulatory phonetic and phonological distances of target-language phonemes f...

This paper studies the evolution of wealth inequality in an economy with endogenous borrowing constraints. In the model economy, agents need to borrow to finance human capital investments but cannot commit to repaying their loans. Creditors can punish defaulters by banishing them permanently from the credit market. In equilibrium, loan default is prevented by imposing a borrowing limit tied to ...

We develop a model of lending and borrowing in markets where the lender has no access to physical collateral and where the borrower is heavily capital constrained. Our model of micro loans, which incorporates a) the absence of access to physical collateral, b) peer monitoring, c) threat of punishment upon default, and d) costly monitoring by lenders is used to determine the equilibrium borrowin...

Text-based plagiarism, or copying language from sources, has recently become an issue of growing concern in scientific publishing. Use of CrossCheck (a computational text-matching tool) by journals has sometimes exposed an unexpected amount of textual similarity between submissions and databases of scholarly literature. In this paper I provide an overview of the relevant literature, to examine ...

Although phrase structure grammars have turned out to be a more popular approach for analysis and representation of the natural language syntactic structures, dependency grammars are often considered as being more appropriate for free word order languages. While building a parser for Latvian, a language with a rather free word order, we found (similarly to TIGER project for German and Talbanken...

This paper analyses some general issues about human language technology evaluation, focusing on economic aspects. It first provides a scientific rationale for the need to organize evaluation in the form of campaigns, by relating this need to some basic characteristics of human language technologies, namely that they involve learning to process information in a way which reproduces human capabil...

In this article, the reason why certain terms, labels, and ideas prevail, whereas others fail to gain acceptance, will be considered. Borrowing the concept of "meme" from the study of evolution of ideas, it will be clear why language-based and phonological disorders have less widespread appeal than, for example, auditory processing and sensory integration disorders. Discussion will also center ...