Publications

Abstract

Finding regularities in large data sets requires implementations of systems that are efficient in both time and space requirements. Here, we describe a newly developed system that exploits the internal structure of the enhanced suffixarray to find significant patterns in a large collection of sequences. The system searches exhaustively for all significantly compressing patterns where patterns may consist of symbols and skips or wildcards. We demonstrate a possible application of the system by detecting interesting patterns in a Dutch and an English corpus.

Abstract

In this article, we propose the use of suffix arrays to implement n-gram language models with practically unlimited size n. These unbounded n-grams are called 1-grams. This approach allows us to use large contexts efficiently to distinguish between different alternative sequences while applying synchronous back-off. From a practical point of view, the approach has been applied within the context of spelling confusibles, verb and noun agreement and prenominal adjective ordering. These initial experiments show promising results and we relate the performance to the size of the n-grams used for disambiguation.

Abstract

This paper presents a quantitative analysis of the
turn-taking mechanism evidenced in 93 telephone
dialogues that were taken from the 9-million-word
Spoken Dutch Corpus. While the first part of the paper
focuses on the temporal phenomena of turn taking, such
as durations of pauses and overlaps of turns in the
dialogues, the second part explores the discoursefunctional
aspects of utterances in a subset of 8
dialogues that were annotated especially for this
purpose. The results show that speakers adapt their turntaking
behaviour to the interlocutor’s behaviour.
Furthermore, the results indicate that male-male dialogs
show a higher proportion of overlapping turns than
female-female dialogues.

Abstract

This paper combines two different approaches to modeling reaction time data from lexical decision experiments, viz. a dataoriented statistical analysis by means of a linear mixed effects model, and a process-oriented computational model of human speech comprehension. The linear mixed effect model is implemented by lmer in R. As computational model we apply DIANA, an end-to-end computational model which aims at modeling the cognitive processes underlying speech comprehension. DIANA takes as input the speech signal, and provides as output the orthographic transcription of the stimulus, a word/non-word judgment and the associated reaction time. Previous studies have shown that DIANA shows good results for large-scale lexical decision experiments in Dutch and North-American English. We investigate whether predictors that appear significant in an lmer analysis and processes implemented in DIANA can be related and inform both approaches. Predictors such as ‘previous reaction time’ can be related to a process description; other predictors, such as ‘lexical neighborhood’ are hard-coded in lmer and emergent in DIANA. The analysis focuses on the interaction between subject variables and task variables in lmer, and the ways in which these interactions can be implemented in DIANA.

Abstract

On the basis of two-speaker spontaneous conversations, it is shown that the distributions of both pauses and speech-overlaps of telephone and faceto-face dialogues have different statistical properties. Pauses in a face-to-face
dialogue last up to 4 times longer than pauses in telephone conversations in functionally comparable conditions. There is a high correlation (0.88 or larger) between the average pause duration for the two speakers across face-to-face
dialogues and telephone dialogues. The data provided form a first quantitative analysis of the complex turn-taking mechanism evidenced in the dialogues available in the 9-million-word Spoken Dutch Corpus.

Abstract

In spontaneous conversations, words are often produced in reduced form compared to formal careful speech. In English, for instance, ’probably’ may be pronounced as ’poly’ and ’police’ as ’plice’. Reduced forms are very common, and native listeners usually do not have any problems with interpreting these reduced forms in context. Non-native listeners, however, have great difficulties in comprehending reduced forms. In order to investigate the problems in comprehension that non-native listeners experience, a dictation experiment was conducted in which sentences were presented auditorily to non-natives either in full (unreduced) or reduced form. The types of errors made by the L2 listeners reveal aspects of the cognitive processes underlying this dictation task. In addition, we compare the errors made by these human participants with the type of word errors made by DIANA, a recently developed computational model of word comprehension.

Abstract

This study investigates phrase-medial vowel devoicing in European French (e.g. /ty po/ [typo] 'you can'). Our spontaneous speech data confirm that French phrase-medial devoicing is a frequent phenomenon affecting high vowels preceded by voiceless consonants. We also found that devoicing is more frequent in temporally reduced and coarticulated vowels. Complete and partial devoicing were conditioned by the same variables (speech rate, consonant type and distance from the end of the AP). Given these results, we propose that phrase-medial vowel devoicing in French arises mainly from the temporal compression of vocalic gestures and the aerodynamic conditions imposed by high vowels.

Abstract

This article describes the preparation, recording and orthographic transcription of a new speech corpus, the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish (NCCSp). The corpus contains around 30 hours of recordings of 52 Madrid Spanish speakers engaged in conversations with friends. Casual speech was elicited during three different parts, which together provided around ninety minutes of speech from every group of speakers. While Parts 1 and 2 did not require participants to perform any specific task, in Part 3 participants negotiated a common answer to general questions about society. Information about how to obtain a copy of the corpus can be found online at http://mirjamernestus.ruhosting.nl/Ernestus/NCCSp

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a CLARIN-compatible repository solution that fulfils
both the long-term preservation requirements as well as the current day discoverability and usability
needs of an online data repository of language resources. The widely used Fedora Commons
open source repository framework, combined with the Islandora discovery layer, forms
the basis of the solution. On top of this existing solution, additional modules and tools are developed
to make it suitable for the types of data and metadata that are used by the participating
partners.

Abstract

Every language manifests casual speech processes, and hence every second language too. This study examined how listeners deal with second-language casual speech processes, as a function of the processes in their native language. We compared a match case, where a second-language process t/-reduction) is also operative in native speech, with a mismatch case, where a second-language process (/r/-insertion) is absent from native speech. In each case native and non-native listeners judged stimuli in which a given phoneme (in sentence context) varied along a continuum from absent to present. Second-language listeners in general mimicked native performance in the match case, but deviated significantly from native performance in the mismatch case. Together these results make it clear that the mapping from first to second language is as important in the interpretation of casual speech processes as in other dimensions of speech perception. Unfamiliar casual speech processes are difficult to adapt to in a second language. Casual speech processes that are already familiar from native speech, however, are easy to adapt to; indeed, our results even suggest that it is possible for subtle difference in their occurrence patterns across the two languages to be detected,and to be accommodated to in second-language listening.

Abstract

Controlled vocabularies of various kinds (e.g., thesauri, classification schemes) play an integral part in making Cultural Heritage collections accessible. The various institutions participating in the Dutch CATCH programme maintain and make use of a rich and diverse set of vocabularies. This makes it hard to provide a uniform point of access to all collections at once. Our SKOS-based vocabulary and alignment repository aims at providing technology for managing the various vocabularies, and for exploiting semantic alignments across any two of them. The repository system exposes web services that effectively support the construction of tools for searching and browsing across vocabularies and collections or for collection curation (indexing), as we demonstrate.

Abstract

Multivariate analysis allows decoding of single trial data in individual subjects. Since different models are obtained for each subject it becomes hard to perform an analysis on the group level. We introduce a new algorithm for Bayesian multi-task learning which imposes a coupling between single-subject models. Using
the CMU fMRI dataset it is shown that the algorithm can be used for concept classification
based on the average activation of regions in the AAL atlas. Concepts which were most easily classified correspond to the categories shelter,manipulation and eating, which is in accordance with the literature. The multi-task learning algorithm is shown to find regions of interest that are common to all subjects which
therefore facilitates interpretation of the obtained
models.

Abstract

Previous research suggests that bilinguals presented with low and high predictability sentences benefit from semantics in clear but not in conversational speech [1]. In everyday speech, however, many words are not highly predictable. Previous research has shown that native listeners can use also more subtle semantic contextual information [2]. The present study reports two auditory lexical decision experiments investigating to what extent late Asian-English bilinguals benefit from subtle semantic cues in their processing of English unreduced and reduced speech. Our results indicate that these bilinguals are less sensitive to semantic cues than native listeners for both speech registers.

Abstract

Over the years, the field of Language Resources and Technology (LRT) hasdeveloped a tremendous amount of resources and tools. However, there is noready-to-use map that researchers could use to gain a good overview andsteadfast orientation when searching for, say corpora or software tools tosupport their studies. It is rather the case that information is scatteredacross project- or organisation-specific sites, which makes it hard if notimpossible for less-experienced researchers to gather all relevant material.Clearly, the provision of metadata is central to resource and softwareexploration. However, in the LRT field, metadata comes in many forms, tastesand qualities, and therefore substantial harmonization and curation efforts arerequired to provide researchers with metadata-based guidance. To address thisissue a broad alliance of LRT providers (CLARIN, the Linguist List, DOBES,DELAMAN, DFKI, ELRA) have initiated the Virtual Language Observatory portal toprovide a low-barrier, easy-to-follow entry point to language resources andtools; it can be accessed via http://www.clarin.eu/vlo

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of phoneme durations of emotional speech in two languages: Dutch and Korean. The analyzed corpus of emotional speech has been specifically developed for the purpose of cross-linguistic comparison, and is more balanced than any similar corpus available so far: a) it contains expressions by both Dutch and Korean actors and is based on judgments by both Dutch and Korean listeners; b) the same elicitation technique and recording procedure were used for recordings of both languages; and c) the phonetics of the carrier phrase were constructed to be permissible in both languages. The carefully controlled phonetic content of the carrier phrase allows for analysis of the role of specific phonetic features, such as phoneme duration, in emotional expression in Dutch and Korean. In this study the mutual effect of language and emotion on phoneme duration is presented.

Abstract

In this paper we investigate a computational model of word learning, that is embedded in a cognitively and ecologically plausible framework. Multi-modal stimuli from four different speakers form a varied source of experience. The model incorporates active learning, attention to a communicative setting and clarity of the visual scene. The model's ability to learn associations between speech utterances and visual concepts is evaluated during training to investigate the influence of active learning under conditions of uncertain input. The results show the importance of shared attention in word learning and the model's robustness against noise.

Abstract

This paper investigates the production and perception of epenthetic stops at syllable boundaries in Dutch and compares the experimental data with lexical statistics for Dutch and English. This extends past work on epenthesis in coda position [1]. The current work is particularly informative regarding the question of phonotactic constraints’ influence on parsing of speech variability.

Abstract

This paper presents articulatory data on the production of /l/ in various environments in Dutch, and shows that the direction of movement of the tongue dorsum varies across environments. This makes it impossible to measure tongue position at the peak of the dorsal gesture. We argue for an alternative method in such cases: measurement of position of one articulator at a time point defined by the gesture of another. We present new data measured this way which confirms a previous finding on the articulation of Dutch /l/.

Abstract

Recent studies using phoneme detection tasks have shown that spoken-language processing is neither facilitated nor interfered with by optional assimilation, but is inhibited by violation of obligatory assimilation. Interpretation of these results depends on an assessment of their generality, specifically, whether they also obtain when listeners are processing nonnative language. Two separate experiments are presented in which native listeners of German and native listeners of Dutch had to detect a target fricative in legal monosyllabic Dutch nonwords. All of the nonwords were correct realisations in standard Dutch. For German listeners, however, half of the nonwords contained phoneme strings which violate the German fricative assimilation rule. Whereas the Dutch listeners showed no significant effects, German listeners detected the target fricative faster when the German fricative assimilation was violated than when no violation occurred. The results might suggest that violation of assimilation rules does not have to make processing more difficult per se.

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments examined linguistic gender effects in non-native spoken-word recognition. French participants, who knew German well, followed spoken instructions in German to click on pictures on a computer screen (e.g., Wo befindet sich die Perle, “where is the pearl”) while their eye movements were monitored. The name of the target picture was preceded by a gender-marked article in the instructions. When a target and a competitor picture (with phonologically similar names) were of the same gender in both German and French, French participants fixated competitor pictures more than unrelated pictures. However, when target and competitor were of the same gender in German but of different gender in French, early fixations to the competitor picture were reduced. Competitor activation in the non-native language was seemingly constrained by native gender information. German listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The results speak against a form-based account of the linguistic gender effect. They rather support the notion that the effect originates from the grammatical level of language processing.

Abstract

In this paper, we present empirical data from a corpus study on the linear order of subjects and objects in German main clauses. The aim was to establish the validity of three well-known ordering constraints: given complements tend to occur before new complements, definite before indefinite, and pronoun before full noun phrase complements. Frequencies of occurrences were derived for subject-first and object-first sentences from the German Negra corpus. While all three constraints held on subject-first sentences, results for object-first sentences varied. Our findings suggest an influence of grammatical functions on the ordering of verb complements.

Abstract

Language resources are valuable assets, both for institutions and researchers. To safeguard these resources requirements for repository systems and data management have been specified by various branch organizations, e.g., CLARIN and the Data Seal of Approval. This paper describes these and some additional ones posed by the authors’ home institutions. And it shows how they are met by FLAT, to provide a new home for language resources. The basis of FLAT is formed by the Fedora Commons repository system. This repository system can meet many of the requirements out-of-the box, but still additional configuration and some development work is needed to meet the remaining ones, e.g., to add support for Handles and Component Metadata. This paper describes design decisions taken in the construction of FLAT’s system architecture via a mix-and-match strategy, with a preference for the reuse of existing solutions. FLAT is developed and used by the a Institute and The Language Archive, but is also freely available for anyone in need of a CLARIN-compliant repository for their language resources.

Abstract

In foreign-accented speech, listeners have to handle noticeable deviations from the standard pronunciation of a target language. Three cross-modal priming experiments investigated how short- and long-term experiences with a foreign accent influence word recognition by native listeners. In experiment 1, German-accented words were presented to Dutch listeners who had either extensive or limited prior experience with German-accented Dutch. Accented words either contained a diphthong substitution that deviated acoustically quite largely from the canonical form (huis [hys], "house", pronounced as [hoys]), or that deviated acoustically to a lesser extent (lijst [lst], "list", pronounced as [lst]). The mispronunciations never created lexical ambiguity in Dutch. While long-term experience facilitated word recognition for both types of substitutions, limited experience facilitated recognition only of words with acoustically smaller deviations. In experiment 2, Dutch listeners with limited experience listened to the German speaker for 4 min before participating in the cross-modal priming experiment. The results showed that speaker-specific learning effects for acoustically large deviations can be obtained already after a brief exposure, as long as the exposure contains evidence of the deviations. Experiment 3 investigates whether these short-term adaptation effects for foreign-accented speech are speaker-independent.

Abstract

In the emerging e-Science scenario users should be able to easily combine data resources and tools/services; and machines should automatically be able to trace paths and carry out interpretations. Users who want to participate need to move from a down-load first to a cyberinfrastructure paradigm, thus increasing their dependency on the seamless operation of all components in the Internet. Such a scenario is inherently complex and requires compliance to guidelines and standards to keep it working smoothly. Only a change in our culture of dealing with research data and awareness about the way we do data lifecycle management will lead to success. Since we have so many legacy resources that are not compliant with the required guidelines, since we need to admit obvious problems in particular with standardization in the area of semantics and since it will take much time to establish trust at the side of researchers, the e-Science scenario can only be achieved stepwise which will take much time.

Abstract

Lexica play an important role in every linguistic discipline. We are confronted with many types of lexica. Depending on the type of lexicon and the language we are currently faced with a large variety of structures from very simple tables to complex graphs, as was indicated by a recent overview of structures found in dictionaries from field linguistics and language engineering. It is important to assess these differences and aim at the integration of lexical resources in order to improve lexicon creation, exchange and reuse. This paper describes the first step towards the integration of existing structures and standards into a flexible abstract model.

Abstract

The increasing quantity and complexity of language resources leads to new management problems for those that collect and those that need to preserve them. At the same time the desire to make these resources available on the Internet demands an efficient way characterizing their properties to allow discovery and re-use. The use of metadata is seen as a solution for both these problems. However, the question is what specific requirements there are for the specific domain and if these are met by existing frameworks. Any possible solution should be evaluated with respect to its merit for solving the domain specific problems but also with respect to its future embedding in “global” metadata frameworks as part of the Semantic Web activities.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the core pillars of a large archive oflanguage material recorded worldwide partly about languages that are highly endangered. The bases for the documentation of these languages are audio/video recordings which are then annotated at several linguistic layers. The digital age completely changed the requirements of long-term preservation and it is discussed how the archive met these new challenges. An extensive solution for data replication has been worked out to guarantee bit-stream preservation. Due to an immediate conversion of the incoming data to standards -based formats and checks at upload time lifecycle management of all 50 Terabyte of data is widely simplified. A suitable metadata framework not only allowing users to describe and discover resources, but also allowing them to organize their resources is enabling the management of this amount of resources very efficiently. Finally, it is the Language Archiving Technology software suite which allows users to create, manipulate, access and enrich all archived resources given that they have access permissions.

Abstract

Currently, research infrastructures are being designed and established in manydisciplines since they all suffer from an enormous fragmentation of theirresources and tools. In the domain of language resources and tools the CLARINinitiative has been funded since 2008 to overcome many of the integration andinteroperability hurdles. CLARIN can build on knowledge and work from manyprojects that were carried out during the last years and wants to build stableand robust services that can be used by researchers. Here service centres willplay an important role that have the potential of being persistent and thatadhere to criteria as they have been established by CLARIN. In the last year ofthe so-called preparatory phase these centres are currently developing four usecases that can demonstrate how the various pillars CLARIN has been working oncan be integrated. All four use cases fulfil the criteria of beingcross-national.

Abstract

Previous research on basic-level object categories shows there is cross-cultural variation in basic-level concepts, arguing against the idea that the basic level reflects an objective reality. In this paper, I extend the investigation to the domain of events. More specifically, I present a case study of verbs of ingestion in Maniq illustrating a highly specific categorization of ingestion events at the basic level. A detailed analysis of these verbs reveals they tap into culturally salient notions. Yet, cultural salience alone cannot explain specificity of basic-level verbs, since ingestion is a domain of universal human experience. Further analysis reveals, however, that another key factor is the language itself. Maniq’s preference for encoding specific meaning in basic-level verbs is not a peculiarity of one domain, but a recurrent characteristic of its verb lexicon, pointing to the significant role of the language system in the structure of event concepts

Abstract

Young Infants are prolific word learners even though they are facing the challenge of referential uncertainty (Quine, 1960). Many laboratory studies have shown that infants are skilled at inferring correct referents of words from ambiguous contexts (Swingley, 2009). However, little is known regarding how they visually attend to and select the target object among many other objects in view when parents name it during everyday interactions. By investigating the looking pattern of 12-month-old infants using naturalistic first-person images with varying degrees of referential ambiguity, we found that infants’ attention is selective and they only select a small subset of objects to attend to at each learning instance despite the complexity of the data in the real world. This work allows us to better understand how perceptual properties of objects in infants’ view influence their visual attention, which is also related to how they select candidate objects to build word-object mappings.

Abstract

The amount of research data in the Humanities is increasing at fastspeed. Metadata helps describing and making accessible this data tointerested researchers within and across institutions. While metadatainteroperability is an issue that is being recognised and addressed,the systematic and user-driven provision of annotations and thelinking together of resources into new organisational layers havereceived much less attention. This paper gives an overview of ourevolving technological eScience environment to support suchfunctionality. It describes two tools, ADDIT and ViCoS, which enableresearchers, rather than archive managers, to organise and reorganiseresearch data to fit their particular needs. The two tools, which areembedded into our institute's existing software landscape, are aninitial step towards an eScience environment that gives our scientistseasy access to (multimodal) research data of their interest, andempowers them to structure, enrich, link together, and share such dataas they wish.

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that components in a set of simple signs in Nederlandse Gebarentaal (also called Sign Language of the Netherlands; henceforth: NGT), i.e. hand configuration (including orientation), movement and place of articulation, can also have morphological status. Evidence for this is provided by: firstly, the fact that handshape, orientation, movement and place of articulation show regular meaningful patterns in signs, which patterns also occur in newly formed signs, and secondly, the gradual change of formerly noninflecting predicates into inflectional predicates. The morphological complexity of signs can best be accounted for in autosegmental morphological templates.