On the Linguistic Data Consortium’s (LDC) 20th anniversary, this paper describes the changes to the language resource landscape over the past two decades, how LDC has adjusted its practice to adapt to them and how the business model continues to grow. Specifically, we will discuss LDC’s evolving roles and changes in the sizes and types of LDC language resources (LR) as well as the data they inc...

This paper describes the Unisys MUC-3 text understanding system, a system based upon a three tiered approach to text processing in which a powerful knowledge-based form of information retrieval plays a central role . This knowledge-based form of information retrieval makes it possible to define a n effective level of text analysis that falls somewhere between what is possible with standard keyw...

With maturing speech technology, spoken dialogue systems are increasingly moving from research prototypes to fielded systems. The fielded systems however generally employ much simpler linguistic and dialogue processing strategies than the research prototypes. We describe an implemented spoken-language dialogue system for a travel planning domain which supports a mixed initiative dialogue strate...

The present study examined whether surface acted empathy led to decreased burnout among providers of emotional support without adversely affecting recipients. Measures were tested via an in-lab simulated conversation between strangers and through an online survey asking participants about real-life conversations. Study 1 (95 pairs of female participants) had manipulation failure, but still part...

Pragmatic ambivalence refers to a linguistic phenomenon in which the communicator uses vague or ambiguous words convey illocutionary force other party in specific context. It is an indispensable communicative strategy for successful communication daily activities. Relevance theory can explain pragmatic ambivalence from three aspects: intentional relevance, contextual relevance and reasoni...

This study examines the linguistic features of freewrites and how those features relate to human scores of freewrite quality. Freewriting is a common prewriting strategy that has received little attention by researchers, particularly in terms of the linguistic features of good and poor freewrites. To address this issue, we developed a scoring rubric to assess the qualities of freewrites and how...

Over the last few decades, language identification systems based on different kinds of linguistic knowledge had been studied by many researchers. Most of systems utilize one kind of linguistic knowledge only, i.e. phonotactic, phonetic repertoire, or prosody. It is possible to get the improvement by combining several linguistic knowledge. However, the combination of two systems based on differe...

Language engineers often point to tight connections between their systems’ linguistic representations and accumulated sensor data as a sign that their systems really mean what they say. While we believe such connections are an important piece in the puzzle of meaning, we argue that perceptual grounding alone does not suffice to explain the specific, stable meanings human speakers attribute to e...