This paper presents the ITC-irst Multilingual Question Answering system DIOGENE. The system was used successfully on the CLEF-2003, TREC-2003, TREC-2002 and TREC-2001 QA tracks. DIOGENE relies on a classical three-layer architecture: question processing, document retrieval, answer extraction and validation. DIOGENE uses MultiWordNet [Pianta et.al. 2002] (http://multiwordnet.itc.it) which facili...

Multiple cross language WordNets such as Euro WordNet (EWN), Multi WordNet, Asian WordNet and Indo WordNet, have been developed that involve mapping Princeton WordNet (PWN) with the respective language WordNet [1,2,3,4,5]. Majority of these projects have employed the transfer-and-merge method developed during the construction of Euro WordNet for WordNet linkage. This paper discusses the process...

Infants begin to vocalize very soon after birth, and they begin to babble about six months after they are born (Oller, 1980). The babbling stage is distinct from the previous phase of vocalizations in that sounds – or gestures in infants acquiring sign language – are now clearly organized in a syllabic structure. As such, these utterances are the infant’s first linguistic productions. In the wo...

Recent advances in the field of speech processing indicate that speakers of differing languages process speech relying on units that are appropriate to the rhythmical properties of their maternal tongue. Studies with young infants suggest that the acquisition of these processing routines takes place before the end of the first year of life. Further evidence shows that the left hemisphere initia...

This paper presents the results of an investigation of voicing in utterance-initial and intervocalic stops in monolingual Russian speakers. Prevoicing was found in over 97% of the lenis stops; over 97% of the intervocalic stops were fully voiced. Utterance-initial fortis stops were pronounced as voiceless unaspirated and had short positive VOT. Intervocalic fortis stops were completely voiceles...

A particular meaning can be realized by morphosyntactically distinct expressions across languages. One of the challenges for cross-linguistic research is to account for convergence in meaning in light of morphosyntactic variation. This paper examines cross-linguistic variation in the distribution and interpretation of tense in temporal adjunct clauses (TACs, e.g. English John crossed the street...

A comparison is made of the language of Broca's aphasics in English, Russian, Japanese, Turkish, and Zulu. The purpose of the £ltudy is to determine whether a particular aphasic syndrome should be analyzed in terms of the grammar of a particular language or as a unitary phenomenon that cuts across these particular _ grammars. Since the language output of Broca's aphasics is remarkably uniform a...

This paper considers the problem of automatically inducing role-semantic annotations in the FrameNet paradigm for new languages. We introduce a general framework for semantic projection which exploits parallel texts, is relatively inexpensive and can potentially reduce the amount of effort involved in creating semantic resources. We propose projection models that exploit lexical and syntactic i...

Speakers of English and Tamil differ widely in which relational roles they overtly express with a verb. This study provides new information about how speakers of these languages differ in their descriptions of the same scenes and how explicit mention of roles and other scene elements vary with the properties of the scenes themselves. Specifically, we find that English speakers, who in normal sp...

It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect and mood are inflectional categories of verbal classes only.1 However, there are a number of languages around the world in which nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for tense, aspect and mood (henceforth TAM). That nominals may be inflected for TAM has been noted in the grammatical description...