We report on a study examining the generation of noun phrases within a spoken dialog agent for a navigation domain. The task is to provide real-time instructions that direct the user to move between a series of destinations within a large interior space. A subtask within sentence planning is determining what form to choose for noun phrases. This choice is driven by both the discourse history an...

In this study, we quantified the use of uncertainty expressions, referred to as 'hedge' phrases, among a corpus of 100,000 clinical documents retrieved from our institution's electronic health record system. The frequency of each hedge phrase appearing in the corpus was characterized across document types and clinical departments. We also used a natural language processing tool to identify clin...

We examine the problem of generating definite noun phrases that are appropriate referring expressions: that is, noun phrases that (a) successfully identify the intended referent to the hearer whilst (b) not conveying to him or her any false conversational implicatures (Grice, 1975). We review several possible computational interpretotions of the conversational implicature maxims, with different...

Background: Formulaic expressions—conversational speech formulas, idioms, pause fillers, conventional phrases, proverbs, expletives, and so on—constitute on average about 25% proportionally of everyday communication. While some clinical and experimental studies have implicated a right hemisphere involvement, controversy remains surrounding cerebral processing with respect to comprehension and p...

Our work deals with calendar information as it is expressed in natural language (NL), that is to say through textual units such as prepositional phrases or noun phrases (e.g. in the 90s, at the beginning of the XVth century). We call these textual units Calendar Expressions (CE). Our work aims at showing how Information Retrieval systems can benefit from dealing with CE. In this paper we descri...

Idiomatic expressions are plentiful in everyday language, yet they remain mysterious, as it is not clear exactly how people learn and understand them. They are of special interest to linguists, psycholinguists, and lexicographers, mainly because of their syntactic and semantic idiosyncrasies as well as their unclear lexical status. Despite a great deal of research on the properties of idioms in...

This study examines the frequency and functions of code switching in informal conversations among Jordanian pilots, who have created their own jargon. It also explores most frequent English expressions that pilots switch to Arabic discourse. The eight aged between thirty fifty-five were tape-recorded three separate natural settings. data used for purpose finding out what pragmatic communicative...

The present study explores the vocal intensity of turn-initial cue phrases in a corpus of dialogues in Swedish. Cue phrases convey relatively little propositional content, but have several important pragmatic functions. The majority of these entities are frequently occurring monosyllabic words such as “eh”, “mm”, “ja”. Prosodic analysis shows that these words are produced with higher intensity ...

BACKGROUND Verbal perseveration (i.e. excessive self-repetition) is a characteristic of male individuals with fragile X syndrome; however, little is known about its occurrence among females or its underlying causes. This project examined the relationship between perseveration and (1) gender, (2) cognitive and linguistic ability, and (3) language sampling context, among youth with fragile X synd...