This article explores the language in the four plays of Samuel Beckett – Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape, and Footfalls. It considers the way in which Beckett uses language, especially through fragmentation utterances, repetitions, monologues, contradictions, and silence. It discusses the function of language in modern society, in the Theater of the Absurd, and in the plays. Parad...

Several studies have addressed the automatic classification of speakers with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and healthy controls (HC). Most of the studies are based on speech recordings of sustained vowels, isolated words, and single sentences. Only few investigations have considered read texts and/or spontaneous speech. This paper addresses two main questions still open regarding the automatic analy...

This paper presents the Dial-Your-Disc (dyd) system, an interactive system that supports browsing through a large database of musical information and generates a spoken monologue once a musical composition has been selected. The paper focuses on the generation of spoken monologues and, more speciically, on the various ways in which the generation of an utterance at a given point in the monologu...

We focus on the problem of learning semantics from multimedia data associated with broadcast video documents. In this paper we propose to learn semantic concepts from multimodal sources based on style and context detectors, in combination with statistical classifier ensembles. As a case study we present our method for detecting the concept of news subject monologues. This approach had the best ...

In this paper we present our approach to detect monologues in video shots. A monologue shot is defined as a shot containing a talking person in the video channel with the corresponding speech in the audio channel. Whilst motivated by the TREC 2002 Video Retrieval Track (VT02), the underlying approach of synchrony between audio and video signals are also applicable for voice and face-based biome...

Approved: ____________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________ Title and Department ____________________________________ Date

Hesitations are prevalent in spontaneous speech and believed to be relevant to on-line speech planning. We tested the complexity hypothesis that speakers are more likely to need to suspend speaking, the more complex the constituent, by examining ratios of filled pauses (fillers) at clause and case boundaries with following constituents of different degrees of complexity, using ì the Corpus of s...

We are feminists in our 50s who first became activists in the women’s health movement when we were in our 20s. In 2002 we performed in The Vagina Monologues and participated in the 2002 V-Day College Campaign to end violence against women. We use our experiences bthenQ in the women’s health movement and bnowQ in the College Campaign as a lens through which to introduce a bworryQ about ba cultur...