This paper unearths the contribution of lexical cohesion to the textuality and overall meaning of Malcolm X’s speech 'The Ballot or the Bullet'. Drawing on Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Hoey’s (1991) theory of cohesion, specifically lexical   cohesion, whose main thrust is the role of lexical items in not only contributing to meaning but also serving as cohesive ties, the paper discusses how ...

The contributions of social processes and computational processes to early lexical development were evaluated. A re-analysis and review of previous research cast doubt on the sufficiency of social approaches to word learning. An empirical investigation of the relation of social-pragmatic and data-providing features of input to the productive vocabulary of sixty-three 2-year-old children reveale...

Between simple electronic dictionaries such as the TLFi (computerized French Language Treasure) and lexical networks like WordNet (Diller et al., 1990; Vossen, 1998), the lexical databases are growing at high speed. Our work is about the addition of rich links to lexical databases, in the context of the parallel development of lexical networks. Current research on management tools for lexical d...

Previous experimental research has found that adults and infants are sensitive to the likelihood of occurrence of sequences of segments, or probabilistic phonotactics, in the ambient language. One hypothesis that emerges from this finding is that probabilistic phonotactics, a sublexical factor, may influence rate of lexical acquisition. Preliminary results are reported from a study involving 21...

Learning to name objects is no sinecure. Children’s initial word use often will not correspond to the adult use of the same word. We suggest that semantic development may continue well past the early years of language acquisition, even for names for concrete objects. We studied evolution of the use of common nouns taking place during later lexical development. Children aged 5, 8, 10, 12 and 14 ...

Human communication is a multimodal activity, involving not only speech and written expressions, but intonation, images, gestures, visual clues, and the interpretation of actions through perception. In this paper, we describe the design of a multimodal lexicon that is able to accommodate the diverse modalities that present themselves in NLP applications. We have been developing a multimodal sem...

Most words are associated with multiple senses. A DVD can be round (when describing a disc), and a DVD can be an hour long (when describing a movie), and in each case DVD means something different. The possible senses of a word are often predictable, and also constrained, as words cannot take just any meaning: for example, although a movie can be an hour long, it cannot sensibly be described as...

In a collocation, the choice of one lexical item depends on the choice made for another. This poses a problem for simple approaches to lexicalisation in natural language generation systems. In the Meaning-Text framework, recurrent patterns of collocations have been characterised by lexical functions, which offer an elegant way of describing these relationships. Previous work has shown that usin...

One of the key challenges involved in building statistical automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems is modeling the relationship between subword units or “lexical units” and acoustic feature observations. To model this relationship two types of resources are needed, namely, acoustic resources i.e., speech data with word level transcriptions and lexical resources where each word is transcribed...