In this paper, we describe a novel spoken language understanding approach using two successive learners. The first learner is used to identify the topic of an input utterance. With the restriction of the recognized target topic, the second learner is trained to extract the corresponding slot-value pairs. The advantage of the proposed approach is that it is mainly datadriven and requires only mi...

A comparison of emerging signed languages and creole provides evidence that, when language is emerging, it prioritizes marking the novelty information; readily recursive; favors manner action (aspect) over time (tense); develops inflection only in a visual, as opposed to aural, mode; derivational opacity result drift long periods time.

We extracted the di erences between spoken language and written language from a spoken-language corpus and a writtenlanguage corpus by using the UNIX command \di " and examined the di erences to determine the construction of the grammars of the two corpora. We also transformed written-language sentences into spoken-language sentences by using rules based on the extracted di erences.

In this paper, the requirements on semantic representations in spoken dialogue systems are discussed. It is argued that spoken dialogue needs a special treatment when it comes to natural language processing, since the phenomena that occur in spoken language are not the same as those that occur in written language. These special properties of spoken language are outlined and the different aspect...

Background: The present study aims to investigate which variables affect English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ listening comprehension test performance. It examines two types of variables: (1) test formats and (2) test materials. Methods: First, three types of test formats are investigated: (1) questions are not written but given orally only once in English and in the students’ first la...