Abstract The increasing importance of the Common European Framework Reference (CEFR) has led to research on linguistic characteristics its levels, as this would help application CEFR in design teaching materials, courses, and assessments. This study investigated whether levels can be distinguished with reference syntactic complexity (SC). 14- 17-year-old Finnish learners English (N=397) wrote t...

Speech input is a natural text entry method for handheld devices that are used in different contexts. We conducted an experiment to understand effects of input (speaking) style (phrasal vs. sentence input) on Chinese text entry rates and user satisfaction with other two variables: recognition rate (50%, 70% and 90%) and message length (10 vs. 20 characters). Wizard of Oz was applied in the expe...

This study looks into interaction between the quasi-phonemic vowel length contrast in Scottish English and its word-prosodic system. We show that under the same phrasal accent the phonetically short vowels of the morphologically conditioned quasi-phonological contrast are produced with significantly more laryngeal effort (spectral balance) than the long ones, while the vowels do not differ in q...

We present larger-scale evidence overturning previous results, showing that among the many alternative phrasal lexical similarity measures based on word vectors, the Jaccard coefficient most increases the robustness of MEANT, the recently introduced, fully-automatic, state-of-the-art semantic MT evaluation metric. MEANT critically depends on phrasal lexical similarity scores in order to automat...

Given a length function L on the R-modules of a unital ring R, for any sofic group Γ, we define a mean length for every locally L-finite RΓ-module relative to a bigger RΓ-module. We establish an addition formula for the mean length. We give two applications. The first one shows that for any unital left Noetherian ring R, RΓ is stably direct finite. The second one shows that for any ZΓ-module M,...

This paper addresses the recognition of elderly callers based on short and narrow-band utterances, which are typical for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. Our study is based on 2308 short utterances from a deployed IVR application. We show that features such as speaking rate, jitter and shimmer that are considered as most meaningful ones for determining elderly users underperform when u...