This study investigated how Mandarin listeners process tone and intonation when the F0 encodings of the lexical tone and intonation are in conflict or in congruency and the role context plays during these processes. Tone and intonation identification experiments were conducted within neutral vs. constraining semantic contexts. Tone identification was much easier than intonation identification i...

This is a detailed technical presentation of performance rules resulting from a project in which music performance has been analyzed by means of an analysis-by-synthesis procedure (Sundberg et al. 1983). The rules have been developed in cooperation with Johan Sundberg and Lars Fryd6n. Lars Fryd6n is the musical expert, Johan Sundberg has contributed mostly to the cognitive aspects and, in an ea...

Two transcribers have labeled prosodic events independently on a subset of Switchboard corpus using adapted ToBI (TOnes and Break Indices) system. Transcriptions of two types of pitch accents (H* and L*), phrasal accents (Hand L-) and boundary tones (H% and L%) encoded independently by two transcribers are compared for intertranscriber reliability. Two commonly used methods of reliability measu...

Ibibio is a Nigerian tone language, spoken in the south-east coastal region of Nigeria. Like most African languages, it is resource-limited. This presents a major challenge to conventional approaches to speech synthesis, which typically require the training of numerous predictive models of linguistic features such as the phoneme sequence (i.e., a pronunciation dictionary plus a letterto-sound m...

We present a statistical phrase-based translation model that uses hierarchical phrases— phrases that contain subphrases. The model is formally a synchronous context-free grammar but is learned from a bitext without any syntactic information. Thus it can be seen as a shift to the formal machinery of syntaxbased translation systems without any linguistic commitment. In our experiments using BLEU ...

Finding the correct attachment site for prepositional phrases (PPs) is one of the hardest problems when parsing natural languages. An English sentence consisting of a subject, a verb, and a nominal object followed by a prepositional phrase is a priori ambiguous. The PP in sentence 1 is a noun attribute and needs to be attached to the noun, but the PP in 2 is an adverbial and thus part of the ve...

Dependency structures do not have the information of phrase categories in phrase structure grammar. Thus, dependency parsing relies heavily on the lexical information of words. This paper discusses our investigation into the effectiveness of lexicalization in dependency parsing. Specifically, by restricting the degree of lexicalization in the training phase of a parser, we examine the change in...

In this paper, annotated disjunct (ADJ) technique is discussed to develop phrase-based transfer rules. We developed an English to Indonesian Machine Translation (MT) system using those transfer rules and compared with three available MT software and our earlier prototype, which uses sentence-based ADJ technique. It was found that the developed system outperforms other systems. In addition, the ...

This paper presents a tunable index compression scheme for supporting time-travel phrase queries over large versioned corpora such as web archives. Support for phrase queries makes maintenance of word positions necessary, thus increasing the index size significantly. We propose to fuse the word positions in many neighboring versions of a document, and thus exploit the typically high level of re...