There is a growing body of work on the effects of hormonal factors on speech and language behavior. The present research explores the links between speakers’ testosterone levels and suprasegmental aspects of speech, namely speaking rate and pitch measures for intonational phrases. Saliva samples were collected from 40 men aged between 20 and 27 years in order to assess testosterone levels. Subj...

All systems for automatic sign language translation and recognition, in particular statistical systems, rely on adequately sized corpora. For this purpose, we created the Phoenix corpus that is based on German television weather reports translated into German Sign Language. It comes with a rich annotation of the video data, a bilingual text-based sentence corpus and a monolingual German corpus.

INTRODUCTION THIS REVIEW explores a poorly-defined area of borderline abnormal blood pressures. Different definitions as to what is normal and abnormal blood pressure traditionally apply sharp cutting lines, but they differ from study to study. No one would question that consistent readings below 130/80 represent normal blood pressure, and those always above 160/100 at any age require medical a...

Due to the explosive growth of the world-wide web, automatictext summarization has become an essential tool for web users. In this paperwe present a novel approach for creating text summaries. Using fuzzy logicand word-net, our model extracts the most relevant sentences from an originaldocument. The approach utilizes fuzzy measures and inference on theextracted textual information from the docu...

Normalized F0 values measured from a specific prosodic domain (the Accentual Phrase, AP) are used in order to compare readings from four female speakers of two varieties of French: two Canadians (Quebec City area) and two French (Vendée area). Comparisons are based on APs with similar internal organization (contour, number of syllables, contourto-text timing) and identical position within an ut...

Introduction: Contrast sensitivity is a visual element used in optometric examinations to help assess visual capacity. This study compared two formats of contrast sensitivity tests, ETDRS Letters and Continuous Text. Methods: Contrast sensitivity was measured in 75 subjects, who met inclusion criteria, using the Adult Near Contrast Test. Patients’ verbal readings provided data for the formats a...

The text-critical practice of grouping witnesses into families or texttypes often faces two obstacles: Contamination in the manuscript tradition, and co-dependence in identifying characteristic readings and manuscripts. We introduce non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) as a simple, unsupervised, and efficient way to cluster large numbers of manuscripts and readings simultaneously while summa...