Extractive summarizing can be divided into several steps. Preprocessing is a first of them and it usually includes: sentence splitting, stop words removal, stemming etc. In processing step, sentence features are calculated and then weights are assigned to these features using machine learning or heuristic methods. Those features are numerical characteristics of each sentence (e.g. sentence loca...

Do lexical tones interfere with the realization of intonation types? Given that tone and intonation both use F0 as a primary cue, can a listener reliably identify statements and questions when some of the channel capacity is taken up by lexical tones? We study this issue through a perception test on a carefully designed and obtained intonation corpus on Mandarin Chinese. Our study shows the fol...

In order to construct a CALL (Computer Aided Language Learning) system that can teach learners accent and intonation of Japanese, it's necessary to automatically identify accent types and intonation types in sentence utterances. For this purpose, several acoustic (prosodic) features of speech were investigated taking their effects on human perception into account. For the accent type identifica...

During reading, monolingual readers actively predict upcoming words from sentence context. Here we investigated whether bilingual readers predict sentence final words when they read in their second language. We recorded event-related potentials while English monolinguals (L1 comprehenders) and late Spanish–English bilinguals (L2 comprehenders) read sentences ending in an expected or unexpected ...

The timing of F0 peaks in accented syllables is known to be subject to a number of segmental and prosodic constraints. The experiment reported here was carried out to investigate the additional effect of topic structure on F0 peak timing. Three specially constructed English texts were read aloud by nine subjects. In the texts, each of four accented target syllables occurred in different discour...

Verb prediction is important in human sentence processing and, practically, in simultaneous machine translation. In verb-final languages, speakers select the final verb before it is uttered, and listeners predict it before it is uttered. Simultaneous interpreters must do the same to translate in real-time. Motivated by the problem of SOV-SVO simultaneous machine translation, we provide a study ...

In this study the N400 component of the event-related potential was used to investigate spoken sentence understanding in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics. The aim of the study was to determine whether spoken sentence comprehension problems in these patients might result from a deficit in the on-line integration of lexical information. Subjects listened to sentences spoken at a normal rate. In ha...