This paper introduces Japanese lexical simplification. Japanese lexical simplification is the task of replacing complex words in a given sentence with simple words to produce a new sentence without changing the original meaning of the sentence. We propose a method of supervised regression learning to estimate complexity ordering of words with statistical features obtained from two types of Japa...

Lexical Simplification is the task of modifying the lexical content of complex sentences in order to make them simpler. Due to the lack of reliable resources available for the task, most existing approaches have difficulties producing simplifications which are grammatical and that preserve the meaning of the original text. In order to improve on the state-of-the-art of this task, we propose use...

How does interaction affect categorization, and how might this vary between native and non-native speakers? When people use shared labels to categorize objects, they categorize more similarly to each other. We investigated whether interaction leads non-native speakers to categorize in the same way as native speakers. In six rounds, L1-English and L2-English/L1Mandarin speakers individually cate...

We introduce a general method for automatic diagnostic evaluation of the pronunciation of individual non-native speakers based on a model of the human auditory system trained with native data stimuli. For each phoneme class, the Euclidean geometry similarity between the native perceptual domain and the non-native speech power spectrum domain is measured. The problematic phonemes for a given sec...

LVCSR performance is consistently poor on low-pro ciency non-native speech. While gains from speaker adaptation can often bring recognizer performance on highpro ciency non-native speakers close to that seen for native speakers [12], recognition for lower-pro ciency speakers remains low even after individual speaker adaptation [2]. The challenge for accent adaptation is to maximize recognizer p...

This paper examines the impact that non-native speakers have had on the structure of Picard, a GalloRomance language spoken in northern France and southern Belgium. Focusing on neuter subjects, a construction that is characterized by a more complex system than the equivalent form in French (the other language spoken by all Picard speakers), we compare the systems used by native and non-native s...

The present research addressed the prosodic realization of global and local text structure and content in the spoken discourse data produced by Persian EFL learners. Two newspaper articles were analyzed using Rhetorical Structure Theory. Based on these analyses, the global structure in terms of hierarchical level, the local structure in terms of the relative importance of text segments and the ...

Relatively little is known about differences in English-administered, clinical neuropsychological test performance between native versus non-native English speakers, with prior literature yielding mixed findings. The purpose of this study was to examine the performance of native and non-native English speakers with similar age and educational backgrounds on a variety of cognitive tests. Partici...