Neutral vowels are vowels that may intervene between the trigger and target of a harmony pattern even when they bear the opposite value for the harmonizing feature. Despite the significant body of work on and the crucial role of vowel harmony in phonological theory, surprisingly little attention has been devoted to the low-level phonetic properties of neutral vowels. We examine a prototypical e...

Cases of ATR harmony are numerous and widely documented in the literature, whereas languages in which RTR is harmonically active (e.g. Wolof) have received a good deal less attention. A description based on the bivalent feature [±ATR] is capable of representing both harmony types, but fails to encode naturally the clear difference in typological markedness separating the two. On the other hand,...

The paper describes software combining parametric geometric modeling with a version of the harmony search method, modified to support multimodal structural optimization. Researchers have recognized the potential of population-based optimization methods, such as genetic algorithms, to support multimodal optimization: that is, generating a diverse range of good alternative solutions, rather than ...

One of the main challenges for any university administrations is building a timetable for course sessions. Such a challenge not only relates to how to build a usable timetable but also how to build an optimal timetable at the same time. The university course timetable is classified as an NP-Complete problem. In general, it means assigning predefined courses to certain rooms and timeslots under ...