Over the last decade technological advances have been made which enable us to envision real-world applications of speech technologies. It is possible to foresee applications where the spoken query is to be recognized without even prior knowledge of the language being spoken, for example, information centers in public places such as train stations and airports. Other applications may require acc...

This paper presents a Non-Uniform Units selection-based TextTo-Speech synthesizer. Nowadays, systems use prosodic models that do not allow the prosody to vary as far as we should hope, involving a listening comfort degradation. Our system has the advantage to avoid the using of prosodic model. Speech units selection builds its features set exclusively from the linguistic information generated b...

We present an automated method for estimating the difficulty of spoken texts for use in generating items that assess non-native learners’ listening proficiency. We collected information on the perceived difficulty of listening to various English monologue speech samples using a Likert-scale questionnaire distributed to 15 non-native English learners. We averaged the overall rating provided by t...

In the last decades, a wide range of automatic metrics that use linguistic knowledge has been developed. Some of them are based on lexical information, such as METEOR; others rely on the use of syntax, either using constituent or dependency analysis; and others use semantic information, such as Named Entities and semantic roles. All these metrics work at a specific linguistic level, but some re...

Linguistic labels affect inductive generalization; however, the mechanism underlying these effects remains unclear. According to one similarity-based model, SINC (similarity, induction, naming, and categorization), early in development labels are features of objects contributing to the overall similarity of compared entities, with early induction being similarity based. If this is the case, the...

Preliminary surveys show that the lan­ guage of blogs is not restricted to the more informal levels of expression. In­ stead blogs may include many kinds of written language: from simple personal notes to literary prose or poetry. The pa­ per presents a sample of Italian blogs and comments on the results of the search of literary forms in two Web corpora using search engine queries.

Resolving named entities is important for a number of natural language processing applications. However, a named entity has multiple name variations while different entities could share the same surface. State-of-the-art systems are based on a global resolution method and mostly adopt link-based features that leverage relationships of co-occurring entities in the knowledge. We found that lingui...

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall Humor component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also scored for overall writing quality by human raters, which correl...

This paper presents a novel approach to automated sentence completion based on pointwise mutual information (PMI). Feature sets are created by fusing the various types of input provided to other classes of language models, ultimately allowing multiple sources of both local and distant information to be considered. Furthermore, it is shown that additional precision gains may be achieved by incor...

The prosodic structure of speech is based on complex interaction within and between several different levels of linguistic, and paralinguistic organization, and is expressed in the modulation of F0, intensity, duration, and voice quality, as well as the occurrence of pauses. Even though leading theories of prosody maintain that prosody is shaped through the interaction of grammatical factors fr...