Predicting the structure of a discourse is challenging because relations between discourse segments are often implicit and thus hard to distinguish computationally. I extend previous work to classify implicit discourse relations by introducing a novel set of features on the level of semantic roles. My results demonstrate that such features are helpful, yielding results competitive with other fe...

This work is aimed at exploiting Second-Order Circular Suprasegmental Hidden Markov Models (CSPHMM2s) as classifiers to enhance talking condition recognition in stressful and emotional talking environments (completely two separate environments). The stressful talking environment that has been used in this work uses Speech Under Simulated and Actual Stress (SUSAS) database, while the emotional t...

This paper investigates the use of microphone arrays to acquire and recognise speech in meetings. Meetings pose several interesting problems for speech processing, as they consist of multiple competing speakers within a small space, typically around a table. Due to their ability to provide hands-free acquisition and directional discrimination, microphone arrays present a potential alternative t...

In this paper, we report on the annotation procedures we developed for annotating the Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB), an effort that extends the Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB) annotation style by using it for annotating Turkish discourse. After a brief introduction to the TDB, we describe the annotation cycle and the annotation scheme we developed, defining which parts of the scheme are an exten...

We address the subtask of generating whyquestions from texts and propose the use of causal relations annotated in the Penn Discourse TreeBank for evaluating contentselection methods for why-question generation. Our initial experiments show that 71% of an independently developed data set of whyquestions can be correlated with causal relations annotated in the PDTB.

A 16-year-old Caucasian female presented to the pulmonary clinic for a followup on her asthma. Due to the worsening of allergy-related symptoms, therapy with montelukast 10 mg daily was started and resulted in good relief of the patient's symptoms. In the nights following initiating therapy with montelukast, the patient's mother reported daily parasomnias in the form of sleeptalking and sleepwa...

This work aims at investigating and analyzing speaker identification in each unbiased and biased emotional talking environments based on a classifier called Suprasegmental Hidden Markov Models (SPHMMs). The first talking environment is unbiased towards any emotion, while the second talking environment is biased towards different emotions. Each of these talking environments is made up of six dis...

STUDY OBJECTIVES To assess language used during episodes of sleeptalking in bilingual children. DESIGN The investigation was accomplished through the parents who, after having received appropriate information, participated by filling out a survey on sleeptalking. SETTINGS The study was performed in three bilingual schools of the Basque country, a region in northern Spain in which two comple...