This paper tests the usefulness of the category ‘intonation phrase’ for the analysis of natural conversation. It asks whether the intonation phrase is a relevant unit for participants, and if so, whether it is a prosodic, or indeed an interactional category. The data show that while participants do divide their speech into intonation phrase-like chunks, these chunks are not defined by intonatio...

An example-based machine translation (EBMT) system based on analogies requires numerous analogies between linguistic units to work properly. Consequently, long sentences cannot be handled directly in such a framework. In this paper, we inspect the quality of translation of chunks obtained by marker-based chunking in English and French in both directions. Our results show that more than three qu...

Deduplication is a special case of data compression in which repeated chunks of data are stored only once. For very large chunks, this process may be applied even if the chunks are similar and not necessarily identical, and then the encoding of duplicate data consists of a sequence of pointers to matching parts. However, not all the pointers are worth being kept, as they incur some storage over...

Metasearch and data-fusion techniques combine the rank lists of multiple document retrieval systems with the aim of improving search coverage and precision. We propose a new fusion method that partitions the rank lists of document retrieval systems into chunks. The size of chunks grows exponentially in the rank list. Using a small number of training queries, the probabilities of relevance of do...

We propose an efficient text summarization technique that involves two basic operations. The first operation involves finding coherent chunks in the document and the second operation involves ranking the text in the individual coherent chunks and picking the sentences that rank above a given threshold. The coherent chunks are formed by exploiting the lexical relationship between adjacent senten...

Analogy has been proposed as a possible principle for example-based machine translation. For such a framework to work properly, the training data should contain a large number of analogies between sentences. Consequently, such a framework can only work properly with short and repetitive sentences. To handle longer and more varied sentences, cutting the sentences into chunks could be a solution ...

The psychological relevance of large-scale musical structures has been a matter of debate in the music community. This issue was investigated with a method that allows assessing listeners' detection of musical incoherencies in normal and scrambled versions of popular and contemporary music pieces. Musical excerpts were segmented into 28 or 29 chunks. In the scrambled version, the temporal order...

We examined how 61 young zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) males copied song from 5 adult tutors. Zebra finch song consists of a string of 5-15 distinct syllables, and these syllables were copied as chunks, or strings of consecutive syllables (modal length = 3). The silent interval between 2 syllables was copied as part of the syllable after the silence. Copied chunks had boundaries that fell a...

The work presented in this paper is related to the area of situational method engineering (SME). In this domain, approaches are developed accordingly to specific project specifications. We propose to adapt an existing method construction process, namely the assembly-based one. One of the particular features of assembly-based SME approach is the selection of method chunks. Our proposal is to off...