Formality and its converse, informality, are important dimensions of authorial style that serve to determine the social background a particular document is coming from, and the potential audience it is targeted to. In this paper we explored the concept of formality at the sentence level from two different perspectives. One was the Formality Score (F-score) and its distribution across different ...

Identifying the different varieties of the same language is more challenging than unrelated languages identification. In this paper, we propose an approach to discriminate language varieties or dialects of Mandarin Chinese for the Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Malaysia and Singapore, a.k.a., the Greater China Region (GCR). When applied to the dialects identification of the GCR, we f...

We investigate whether 8-month-old infants can detect prosodic cues relevant in sentence structuring. We recorded event-related potentials to examine online responses to the processing of prosodic boundaries. Prior studies in adults have validated the closure positive shift as reflecting prosodic boundary perception during speech processing. The current study shows that in the event-related pot...

Humans can easily describe what they see in a coherent way and at varying level of detail. However, existing approaches for automatic video description are mainly focused on single sentence generation and produce descriptions at a fixed level of detail. In this paper, we address both of these limitations: for a variable level of detail we produce coherent multi-sentence descriptions of complex ...

We present an implementation of a discourse parsing system for a lexicalized Tree-Ajoining Grammar for discourse, specifying the integration of sentence and discourse level processing. Our system is based on the assumption that the compositional aspects of semantics at the discourse-level parallel those at the sentence-level. This coupling is achieved by factoring away inferential semantics and...

During the past decades, working memory (WM) training has attracted considerable research attention, but its transfer to untrained tasks is still controversial. In a randomized controlled trial, we investigated the possible transfer effects of a novel sentence-level WM training regime. Sixty-eight healthy Finnish adults were randomized into either a WM training group or an active control group....

For AI systems to reason about real world situations, they need to recognize which processes are at play and which entities play key roles in them. Our goal is to extract this kind of rolebased knowledge about processes, from multiple sentence-level descriptions. This knowledge is hard to acquire; while semantic role labeling (SRL) systems can extract sentence level role information about indiv...

Automated sentiment extraction from social media is enabling technology to support gathering online customer insights. The basic sentiment extraction is semantic classification of a text unit as positive or negative using lexical and/or contextual clues in a natural language system. From the input side, it is observed that social media as a sub-language often uses emoticons mixed with text to s...

Quotations are kernels not just of wisdom but also of beautiful and striking language. While recent studies have characterized the stylistic features of quotations, we characterize the order of stylistic information within quotations. Analyzing a corpus of two-sentence quotations collected from the social network Tumblr, we explore the ways that both low-level features and high-level features t...

Phonological properties of the words in a sentence have been shown to affect processing fluency and comprehension. However, the exact role of phonology in sentence comprehension remains unclear. If constituents are stored in working memory during routine processing and accessed through their phonological code, phonological information may exert a pervasive influence on post-lexical comprehensio...