Pseudo-likelihood and contrastive divergence are two well-known examples of contrastive methods. These algorithms trade off the probability of the correct label with the probabilities of other “nearby” instantiations. In this paper we explore more general types of contrastive objectives, which trade off the probability of the correct label against an arbitrary set of other instantiations. We pr...

This paper reports on a comparative analysis of accentuation strategies within Italian and Dutch NPs. Accent-patterns were obtained in a (semi-)spontaneous way via a simple dialogue-game with 8 Dutch speakers and 4 Italian ones. In this way, target descriptions of all speakers were obtained in the following four contexts: all new, single contrast in the adjective, single contrast in the noun, a...

The present article describes the development of L1-L2map, a multi-lingual contrastive analysis tool. It uses the phoneme inventories of a large number of languages, but also contains more detailed phonetic information. An example of this is the information about the syllable positions in which the sounds can occur in a given language, which is very useful for computer-assisted pronunciation tr...

This study is aimed at (1) describing the process of word formation using al-ziyaadah and affixation in Bugis Arabic, (2) revealing meaning forming a (3) analyzing similarities differences substances produced by affixations Arabic. The research applied library linguistic approach. primary data was collected identified through textbook; then, types affixes both languages were analyzed. forms tha...

This paper discusses an experiment concerning the assignment of contrastive accents, i.e., accents used to indicate the presence of contrastive information. The experiment tested which of two existing approaches to the determination of contrastive information gives the most natural results. According to one approach the presence of ‘alternative items’ is the only condition for the assignment of...

Phonemic analysis, the process of identifying the contrastive sounds in a language, involves finding allophones; phonetic variants of those contrastive sounds. An algorithm for finding allophones (developed by Peperkamp et al.) is evaluated on consonants in the TIMIT acoustic phonetic transcripts. A novel phonetic filter based on the active articulator is introduced and has a higher recall than...

The paper discusses the methods followed to re-use a large-scale, broad-coverage English grammar for constructing similar scale grammars for Bulgarian, Czech and Russian for the fast prototyping of a multilingual generation system. We present (1) the theoretical and methodological basis for resource sharing across languages, (2) the use of a corpus-based contrastive register analysis, in partic...