Abstract Substance-free phonology (SFP) is based on the hypothesis that phonological computation makes no reference to phonetic substance, and features are treated as arbitrary symbols for purposes of computation. However, phonologists within SFP tradition disagree about whether content innate or learned (“emergent”), if learned, acquisition process patterning alone refers substance. In present...

The goal in this paper is to show how the classiication of patterns of phonetic features (=phones) to phonemes can be acquired. This classi-cational process is modelled by a supervised feature selection method, based on a weighted Hamming distance, augmented by Boolean functions describing exceptions. An important aspect is the diierentiation of rules and exceptions during learning. 1 Phonetic ...

The process of human segmentation and labelling of speech can be seen as a two-step process. In the first step humans listen to a speech signal, recognize the word and phoneme sequence, and roughly determine the position of each phonetic boundary. In the second step humans examine several speech signal features (waveform, energy, spectrogram, etc.) to place a phonetic boundary time mark where t...

Most concatenative speech synthesizers employ both acoustic measures and phonetic features to predict the perceptual damage caused by concatenating two waveform segments because no reliable acoustic measure has been found so far. This paper compares the predicting ability of the two kinds of predictor variables. We first conduct a perceptual experiment to measure the naturalness degradation due...

Scholarly peer review is a complex collaborative activity that is increasingly supported by web-based systems. Yet little is known about how reviewers and authors interact in such environments, how criticisms are conveyed, or how the systems may affect the interactions and use of language of reviewers and authors. We looked at one aspect of the interactions between reviewers and authors, the us...

Automatic assessment of subjective characteristics of customers like politeness, satisfaction or competence could provide services companies with information needful for improving service quality. In this work, we construct a regression model for politeness estimation of customers, which uses a) set of linguistic indicators and b) manual estimations of expert(s). We apply the suggested methodol...

In our study „Polite responses to polite requests‟, 1 we reported four experiments. In Experiment 1, people rated the politeness of 18 types of indirect requests, such as Could you tell me where Jordan Hall is? In Experiments 2, 3, and 4, other people rated the politeness of various responses to these requests, such as Yes, I can—it's down the street and Down the street. From the findings, we a...