In many language learning scenarios, it is important to anticipate spelling errors. We model the spelling difficulty of words with new features that capture phonetic phenomena and are based on psycholinguistic findings. To train our model, we extract more than 140,000 spelling errors from three learner corpora covering English, German and Italian essays. The evaluation shows that our model pred...

Speech communication is a highly interactive process in which speakers actively seek to align themselves with their interlocutors [9]. This study investigates phonetic alignment in spontaneous speech in speakers from two different regional accent backgrounds; Standard Southern British English (SSBE), the prestige accent of British English, and North-East English (NE), a nonstandard accent. Six ...

This paper investigates several linguistic changes which are ongoing in north-western Catalan using a contemporary corpus. We take advantage of a range of dialectometric methods that allow us to calculate and analyze the linguistic distance between varieties in apparent time from an aggregate perspective. Specifically, we pay attention to the process of structural dialect loss due to linguistic...

Communication between student and learning source represents the main media for the teaching / learning process. For Deaf and Dumb (D&D) such communication could be processed via speech visualization media. All the oral/audio instructional material could be translated into the corresponding material via visual mode. Three main modes of communication for the D&D are commonly used. They are alpha...

F or a century and a half, from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II, the British Empire was the greatest power in the world. At the core of that power was the Royal Navy, the greatest and most advanced naval force in the world. For decades, the distinctive nature, the power and the glory, of the empire and the Royal Navy shaped the character and provided the identity of the British nation. Toda...

There is substantial within-industry variation in the prices that plants pay for their material inputs. Using plant-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I explore the consequences and sources of this variation in materials prices. For a sample of industries with relatively homogeneous products, the standard deviation of plant-level productivity would be 7% smaller if all plants faced the sam...

Market-based theories predict that differences in CEO skills lead to potentially large differences in pay, but it is challenging to quantify the CEO skill premium in pay. In a first step toward overcoming this empirical challenge, we code detailed biographical information on a large sample of CEOs for a panel of S&P 1,500 firms between 1993 and 2005 to identify specific reputational, career, an...

Proper names, whether English or non-English, have several different spellings when transliterated from a non-English source language into English. Knowing the different variations can significantly improve the results of name-searches on various source texts, especially when recall is important. In this paper we propose two novel phonetic models to generate numerous candidate variant spellings...

Hand gestures are examples of fast and complex motions. Computers fail to track these in fast video, but sleight of hand fools humans as well: what happens too quickly we just cannot see. We show a 3D tracker for these types of motions that relies on the recognition of familiar configurations in 2D images (classification), and fills the gaps in-between (interpolation). We illustrate this idea w...

Current mobile devices do not support Bangla (or Bengali) Input method. Due to this many Bangla language speakers have to write Bangla in mobile phone using English alphabets. During this time they used to write English foreign words using English spelling. This tendency also exists when writing in computer using phonetically input methods, which cause many typing mistakes. In this scenario, co...