Pauses play important roles both for the intelligibility and the naturalness of speech. Their occurrences and durations in text reading are influenced by syntactic structures of the text as well as by physiological constraints of respiration on the part of the speaker. The present paper describes some of the preliminary findings on Japanese text reading, especially on the effects of the syntact...

This paper outlines a simple and general notion of syntactic category on a metatheoretical level, independent of the notations and substantive claims of any particular grammatical framework. We define a class of formal objects called "category structures" where each such object provides a constructive definition for a space of syntactic categories. A unification operation and subsumption and id...

We implement and evaluate systems for automatically distinguishing habitual and episodic sentences. Using features such as tense, aspect, noun phrase characteristics, temporal modifiers, specific adverb modifiers, and specific verb auxiliaries on genericity we built and evaluated a supervised machine learning classifier that provides 86.3% precision in disambiguating habitual and episodic sente...

We describe a multi-step process for automatically learning reliable sub-sentential syntactic phrases that are translation equivalents of each other and syntactic translation rules between two languages. The input to the process is a corpus of parallel sentences, word-aligned and annotated with phrase-structure parse trees. We first apply a newly developed algorithm for aligning parse-tree node...

This paper presents a syntactic description of a fragment of German that has been worked out within the machine translation project Eurotra. It represents the syntactic part of the German module of this multilingual translation system. The linguistic tool for the following analyses is the so-called CATframework. In the first two sections of this paper an introduction of the formalism and a ling...

This paper describes our two contributions to WMT08 shared task: factored phrase-based model using Moses and a probabilistic treetransfer model at a deep syntactic layer.

We describe an eye-tracking experiment that tested the effect of syntactic predictability on skipping rates during reading. We found that plural noun phrases were skipped more often than singular noun phrases, in syntactic contexts which induced a high expectation for a plural. We interpret this effect as evidence that the plural noun phrase has been predicted ahead of time. The results indicat...

The paper discusses several complex transfer problems and their prospective solutions within an English-to-Swedish spoken language translation system. The emphasis in the text is on transfer problems which are not lexically triggered, concentrating mainly on the translation of differences in mood and tense. Laying the groundworks for the translation part, the treatment of verb-phrase syntax and...

In the past seven years, Language Research Institute of Inner Mongolia University has constructed a 500,000word scale Mongolian dependency treebank. The syntactic treebank provides a favorable data platform for language research and information processing. In order to effectively use the treebank, we have designed and implemented a graphical syntactic information retrieval system based on the M...

Two event-related brain potential experiments were conducted to investigate the functional interplay between discourse-level referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing of phrases. We manipulated both the syntactic/semantic coherence of a noun phrase (NP) and the referential ambiguity of the same NP. Incoherence of the NP elicited a P600 effect in both experiments. Referentia...