Publications

Displaying 1 - 100 of 154
  • Almeida, L., Amdal, I., Beires, N., Boualem, M., Boves, L., Den Os, E., Filoche, P., Gomes, R., Knudsen, J. E., Kvale, K., Rugelbak, J., Tallec, C., & Warakagoda, N. (2002). Implementing and evaluating a multimodal tourist guide. In J. v. Kuppevelt, L. Dybkjær, & N. Bernsen (Eds.), Proceedings of the International CLASS Workshop on Natural, Intelligent and Effective Interaction in Multimodal Dialogue System (pp. 1-7). Copenhagen: Kluwer.
  • Anastasopoulos, A., Lekakou, M., Quer, J., Zimianiti, E., DeBenedetto, J., & Chiang, D. (2018). Part-of-speech tagging on an endangered language: a parallel Griko-Italian Resource. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2018) (pp. 2529-2539).

    Abstract

    Most work on part-of-speech (POS) tagging is focused on high resource languages, or examines low-resource and active learning settings through simulated studies. We evaluate POS tagging techniques on an actual endangered language, Griko. We present a resource that contains 114 narratives in Griko, along with sentence-level translations in Italian, and provides gold annotations for the test set. Based on a previously collected small corpus, we investigate several traditional methods, as well as methods that take advantage of monolingual data or project cross-lingual POS tags. We show that the combination of a semi-supervised method with cross-lingual transfer is more appropriate for this extremely challenging setting, with the best tagger achieving an accuracy of 72.9%. With an applied active learning scheme, which we use to collect sentence-level annotations over the test set, we achieve improvements of more than 21 percentage points
  • Bentz, C., Dediu, D., Verkerk, A., & Jäger, G. (2018). Language family trees reflect geography and demography beyond neutral drift. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 38-40). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.006.
  • Berck, P., Bibiko, H.-J., Kemps-Snijders, M., Russel, A., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). Ontology-based language archive utilization. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2295-2298).
  • Bowerman, M., Brown, P., Eisenbeiss, S., Narasimhan, B., & Slobin, D. I. (2002). Putting things in places: Developmental consequences of linguistic typology. In E. V. Clark (Ed.), Proceedings of the 31st Stanford Child Language Research Forum. Space in language location, motion, path, and manner (pp. 1-29). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language & Information.

    Abstract

    This study explores how adults and children describe placement events (e.g., putting a book on a table) in a range of different languages (Finnish, English, German, Russian, Hindi, Tzeltal Maya, Spanish, and Turkish). Results show that the eight languages grammatically encode placement events in two main ways (Talmy, 1985, 1991), but further investigation reveals fine-grained crosslinguistic variation within each of the two groups. Children are sensitive to these finer-grained characteristics of the input language at an early age, but only when such features are perceptually salient. Our study demonstrates that a unitary notion of 'event' does not suffice to characterize complex but systematic patterns of event encoding crosslinguistically, and that children are sensitive to multiple influences, including the distributional properties of the target language, in constructing these patterns in their own speech.
  • Brand, J., Monaghan, P., & Walker, P. (2018). Changing Signs: Testing How Sound-Symbolism Supports Early Word Learning. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 1398-1403). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    Learning a language involves learning how to map specific forms onto their associated meanings. Such mappings can utilise arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness, yet, our understanding of how these two systems operate at different stages of vocabulary development is still not fully understood. The Sound-Symbolism Bootstrapping Hypothesis (SSBH) proposes that sound-symbolism is essential for word learning to commence, but empirical evidence of exactly how sound-symbolism influences language learning is still sparse. It may be the case that sound-symbolism supports acquisition of categories of meaning, or that it enables acquisition of individualized word meanings. In two Experiments where participants learned form-meaning mappings from either sound-symbolic or arbitrary languages, we demonstrate the changing roles of sound-symbolism and arbitrariness for different vocabulary sizes, showing that sound-symbolism provides an advantage for learning of broad categories, which may then transfer to support learning individual words, whereas an arbitrary language impedes acquisition of categories of sound to meaning.
  • Broeder, D., Offenga, F., Wittenburg, P., Van de Kamp, P., Nathan, D., & Strömqvist, S. (2006). Technologies for a federation of language resource archive. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2291-2294).
  • Broeder, D., Van Veenendaal, R., Nathan, D., & Strömqvist, S. (2006). A grid of language resource repositories. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing.
  • Broeder, D., Offenga, F., & Willems, D. (2002). Metadata tools supporting controlled vocabulary services. In M. Rodriguez González, & C. Paz SuárezR Araujo (Eds.), Third international conference on language resources and evaluation (pp. 1055-1059). Paris: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    Within the ISLE Metadata Initiative (IMDI) project a user-friendly editor to enter metadata descriptions and a browser operating on the linked metadata descriptions were developed. Both tools support the usage of Controlled Vocabulary (CV) repositories by means of the specification of an URL where the formal CV definition data is available.
  • Broeder, D., Wittenburg, P., Declerck, T., & Romary, L. (2002). LREP: A language repository exchange protocol. In M. Rodriguez González, & C. Paz Suárez Araujo (Eds.), Third international conference on language resources and evaluation (pp. 1302-1305). Paris: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    The recent increase in the number and complexity of the language resources available on the Internet is followed by a similar increase of available tools for linguistic analysis. Ideally the user does not need to be confronted with the question in how to match tools with resources. If resource repositories and tool repositories offer adequate metadata information and a suitable exchange protocol is developed this matching process could be performed (semi-) automatically.
  • Broeder, D., Claus, A., Offenga, F., Skiba, R., Trilsbeek, P., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). LAMUS: The Language Archive Management and Upload System. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2291-2294).
  • Broersma, M. (2006). Nonnative listeners rely less on phonetic information for phonetic categorization than native listeners. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 109-110).
  • Broersma, M. (2002). Comprehension of non-native speech: Inaccurate phoneme processing and activation of lexical competitors. In ICSLP-2002 (pp. 261-264). Denver: Center for Spoken Language Research, U. of Colorado Boulder.

    Abstract

    Native speakers of Dutch with English as a second language and native speakers of English participated in an English lexical decision experiment. Phonemes in real words were replaced by others from which they are hard to distinguish for Dutch listeners. Non-native listeners judged the resulting near-words more often as a word than native listeners. This not only happened when the phonemes that were exchanged did not exist as separate phonemes in the native language Dutch, but also when phoneme pairs that do exist in Dutch were used in word-final position, where they are not distinctive in Dutch. In an English bimodal priming experiment with similar groups of participants, word pairs were used which differed in one phoneme. These phonemes were hard to distinguish for the non-native listeners. Whereas in native listening both words inhibited each other, in non-native listening presentation of one word led to unresolved competition between both words. The results suggest that inaccurate phoneme processing by non-native listeners leads to the activation of spurious lexical competitors.
  • Broersma, M. (2006). Accident - execute: Increased activation in nonnative listening. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2006 (pp. 1519-1522).

    Abstract

    Dutch and English listeners’ perception of English words with partially overlapping onsets (e.g., accident- execute) was investigated. Partially overlapping words remained active longer for nonnative listeners, causing an increase of lexical competition in nonnative compared with native listening.
  • Brugman, H., Levinson, S. C., Skiba, R., & Wittenburg, P. (2002). The DOBES archive: It's purpose and implementation. In P. Austin, H. Dry, & P. Wittenburg (Eds.), Proceedings of the international LREC workshop on resources and tools in field linguistics (pp. 11-11). Paris: European Language Resources Association.
  • Brugman, H., Malaisé, V., & Gazendam, L. (2006). A web based general thesaurus browser to support indexing of television and radio programs. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 1488-1491).
  • Brugman, H., Spenke, H., Kramer, M., & Klassmann, A. (2002). Multimedia annotation with multilingual input methods and search support.
  • Brugman, H., Wittenburg, P., Levinson, S. C., & Kita, S. (2002). Multimodal annotations in gesture and sign language studies. In M. Rodriguez González, & C. Paz Suárez Araujo (Eds.), Third international conference on language resources and evaluation (pp. 176-182). Paris: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    For multimodal annotations an exhaustive encoding system for gestures was developed to facilitate research. The structural requirements of multimodal annotations were analyzed to develop an Abstract Corpus Model which is the basis for a powerful annotation and exploitation tool for multimedia recordings and the definition of the XML-based EUDICO Annotation Format. Finally, a metadata-based data management environment has been setup to facilitate resource discovery and especially corpus management. Bt means of an appropriate digitization policy and their online availability researchers have been able to build up a large corpus covering gesture and sign language data.
  • Byun, K.-S., De Vos, C., Roberts, S. G., & Levinson, S. C. (2018). Interactive sequences modulate the selection of expressive forms in cross-signing. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 67-69). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.012.
  • Cablitz, G. (2002). The acquisition of an absolute system: learning to talk about space in Marquesan (Oceanic, French Polynesia). In E. V. Clark (Ed.), Space in language location, motion, path, and manner (pp. 40-49). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language & Information (Electronic proceedings.
  • Chen, Y., & Braun, B. (2006). Prosodic realization in information structure categories in standard Chinese. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD Press.

    Abstract

    This paper investigates the prosodic realization of information
    structure categories in Standard Chinese. A number of proper
    names with different tonal combinations were elicited as a
    grammatical subject in five pragmatic contexts. Results show
    that both duration and F0 range of the tonal realizations were
    adjusted to signal the information structure categories (i.e.
    theme vs. rheme and background vs. focus). Rhemes
    consistently induced a longer duration and a more expanded F0
    range than themes. Focus, compared to background, generally
    induced lengthening and F0 range expansion (the presence and
    magnitude of which, however, are dependent on the tonal
    structure of the proper names). Within the rheme focus
    condition, corrective rheme focus induced more expanded F0
    range than normal rheme focus.
  • Chen, A. (2006). Variations in the marking of focus in child language. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 113-114).
  • Chen, A. (2006). Interface between information structure and intonation in Dutch wh-questions. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD Press.

    Abstract

    This study set out to investigate how accent placement is pragmatically governed in WH-questions. Central to this issue are questions such as whether the intonation of the WH-word depends on the information structure of the non-WH word part, whether topical constituents can be accented, and whether constituents in the non-WH word part can be non-topical and accented. Previous approaches, based either on carefully composed examples or on read speech, differ in their treatments of these questions and consequently make opposing claims on the intonation of WH-questions. We addressed these questions by examining a corpus of 90 naturally occurring WH-questions, selected from the Spoken Dutch Corpus. Results show that the intonation of the WH-word is related to the information structure of the non-WH word part. Further, topical constituents can get accented and the accents are not necessarily phonetically reduced. Additionally, certain adverbs, which have no topical relation to the presupposition of the WH-questions, also get accented. They appear to function as a device for enhancing speaker engagement.
  • Chen, A., Gussenhoven, C., & Rietveld, T. (2002). Language-specific uses of the effort code. In B. Bel, & I. Marlien (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Speech Prosody (pp. 215-218). Aix=en-Provence: Université de Provence.

    Abstract

    Two groups of listeners with Dutch and British English language backgrounds judged Dutch and British English utterances, respectively, which varied in the intonation contour on the scales EMPHATIC vs. NOT EMPHATIC and SURPRISED vs. NOT SURPRISED, two meanings derived from the Effort Code. The stimuli, which differed in sentence mode but were otherwise lexically equivalent, were varied in peak height, peak alignment, end pitch, and overall register. In both languages, there are positive correlations between peak height and degree of emphasis, between peak height and degree of surprise, between peak alignment and degree of surprise, and between pitch register and degree of surprise. However, in all these cases, Dutch stimuli lead to larger perceived meaning differences than the British English stimuli. This difference in the extent to which increased pitch height triggers increases in perceived emphasis and surprise is argued to be due to the difference in the standard pitch ranges between Dutch and British English. In addition, we found a positive correlation between pitch register and the degree of emphasis in Dutch, but a negative correlation in British English. This is an unexpected difference, which illustrates a case of ambiguity in the meaning of pitch.
  • Crasborn, O., Sloetjes, H., Auer, E., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). Combining video and numeric data in the analysis of sign languages with the ELAN annotation software. In C. Vetoori (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on the Representation and Processing of Sign languages: Lexicographic matters and didactic scenarios (pp. 82-87). Paris: ELRA.

    Abstract

    This paper describes hardware and software that can be used for the phonetic study of sign languages. The field of sign language phonetics is characterised, and the hardware that is currently in use is described. The paper focuses on the software that was developed to enable the recording of finger and hand movement data, and the additions to the ELAN annotation software that facilitate the further visualisation and analysis of the data.
  • Cristia, A., Ganesh, S., Casillas, M., & Ganapathy, S. (2018). Talker diarization in the wild: The case of child-centered daylong audio-recordings. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 2583-2587). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2078.

    Abstract

    Speaker diarization (answering 'who spoke when') is a widely researched subject within speech technology. Numerous experiments have been run on datasets built from broadcast news, meeting data, and call centers—the task sometimes appears close to being solved. Much less work has begun to tackle the hardest diarization task of all: spontaneous conversations in real-world settings. Such diarization would be particularly useful for studies of language acquisition, where researchers investigate the speech children produce and hear in their daily lives. In this paper, we study audio gathered with a recorder worn by small children as they went about their normal days. As a result, each child was exposed to different acoustic environments with a multitude of background noises and a varying number of adults and peers. The inconsistency of speech and noise within and across samples poses a challenging task for speaker diarization systems, which we tackled via retraining and data augmentation techniques. We further studied sources of structured variation across raw audio files, including the impact of speaker type distribution, proportion of speech from children, and child age on diarization performance. We discuss the extent to which these findings might generalize to other samples of speech in the wild.
  • Cutler, A., Kim, J., & Otake, T. (2006). On the limits of L1 influence on non-L1 listening: Evidence from Japanese perception of Korean. In P. Warren, & C. I. Watson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Australian International Conference on Speech Science & Technology (pp. 106-111).

    Abstract

    Language-specific procedures which are efficient for listening to the L1 may be applied to non-native spoken input, often to the detriment of successful listening. However, such misapplications of L1-based listening do not always happen. We propose, based on the results from two experiments in which Japanese listeners detected target sequences in spoken Korean, that an L1 procedure is only triggered if requisite L1 features are present in the input.
  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., Jansonius, M., & Bayerl, S. (2002). The lexical statistics of competitor activation in spoken-word recognition. In C. Bow (Ed.), Proceedings of the 9th Australian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 40-45). Canberra: Australian Speech Science and Technology Association (ASSTA).

    Abstract

    The Possible Word Constraint is a proposed mechanism whereby listeners avoid recognising words spuriously embedded in other words. It applies to words leaving a vowelless residue between their edge and the nearest known word or syllable boundary. The present study tests the usefulness of this constraint via lexical statistics of both English and Dutch. The analyses demonstrate that the constraint removes a clear majority of embedded words in speech, and thus can contribute significantly to the efficiency of human speech recognition
  • Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2018). Asymmetric efficiency of juncture perception in L1 and L2. In K. Klessa, J. Bachan, A. Wagner, M. Karpiński, & D. Śledziński (Eds.), Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2018 (pp. 289-296). Baixas, France: ISCA. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2018-59.

    Abstract

    In two experiments, Mandarin listeners resolved potential syntactic ambiguities in spoken utterances in (a) their native language (L1) and (b) English which they had learned as a second language (L2). A new disambiguation task was used, requiring speeded responses to select the correct meaning for structurally ambiguous sentences. Importantly, the ambiguities used in the study are identical in Mandarin and in English, and production data show that prosodic disambiguation of this type of ambiguity is also realised very similarly in the two languages. The perceptual results here showed however that listeners’ response patterns differed for L1 and L2, although there was a significant increase in similarity between the two response patterns with increasing exposure to the L2. Thus identical ambiguity and comparable disambiguation patterns in L1 and L2 do not lead to immediate application of the appropriate L1 listening strategy to L2; instead, it appears that such a strategy may have to be learned anew for the L2.
  • Cutler, A., & Fear, B. D. (1991). Categoricality in acceptability judgements for strong versus weak vowels. In J. Llisterri (Ed.), Proceedings of the ESCA Workshop on Phonetics and Phonology of Speaking Styles (pp. 18.1-18.5). Barcelona, Catalonia: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.

    Abstract

    A distinction between strong and weak vowels can be drawn on the basis of vowel quality, of stress, or of both factors. An experiment was conducted in which sets of contextually matched word-intial vowels ranging from clearly strong to clearly weak were cross-spliced, and the naturalness of the resulting words was rated by listeners. The ratings showed that in general cross-spliced words were only significantly less acceptable than unspliced words when schwa was not involved; this supports a categorical distinction based on vowel quality.
  • Ip, M. H. K., & Cutler, A. (2018). Cue equivalence in prosodic entrainment for focus detection. In J. Epps, J. Wolfe, J. Smith, & C. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 153-156).

    Abstract

    Using a phoneme detection task, the present series of
    experiments examines whether listeners can entrain to
    different combinations of prosodic cues to predict where focus
    will fall in an utterance. The stimuli were recorded by four
    female native speakers of Australian English who happened to
    have used different prosodic cues to produce sentences with
    prosodic focus: a combination of duration cues, mean and
    maximum F0, F0 range, and longer pre-target interval before
    the focused word onset, only mean F0 cues, only pre-target
    interval, and only duration cues. Results revealed that listeners
    can entrain in almost every condition except for where
    duration was the only reliable cue. Our findings suggest that
    listeners are flexible in the cues they use for focus processing.
  • Cutler, A., & Pasveer, D. (2006). Explaining cross-linguistic differences in effects of lexical stress on spoken-word recognition. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Speech Prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD press.

    Abstract

    Experiments have revealed differences across languages in listeners’ use of stress information in recognising spoken words. Previous comparisons of the vocabulary of Spanish and English had suggested that the explanation of this asymmetry might lie in the extent to which considering stress in spokenword recognition allows rejection of unwanted competition from words embedded in other words. This hypothesis was tested on the vocabularies of Dutch and German, for which word recognition results resemble those from Spanish more than those from English. The vocabulary statistics likewise revealed that in each language, the reduction of embeddings resulting from taking stress into account is more similar to the reduction achieved in Spanish than in English.
  • Cutler, A., Eisner, F., McQueen, J. M., & Norris, D. (2006). Coping with speaker-related variation via abstract phonemic categories. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 31-32).
  • Cutler, A., Burchfield, L. A., & Antoniou, M. (2018). Factors affecting talker adaptation in a second language. In J. Epps, J. Wolfe, J. Smith, & C. Jones (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 33-36).

    Abstract

    Listeners adapt rapidly to previously unheard talkers by
    adjusting phoneme categories using lexical knowledge, in a
    process termed lexically-guided perceptual learning. Although
    this is firmly established for listening in the native language
    (L1), perceptual flexibility in second languages (L2) is as yet
    less well understood. We report two experiments examining L1
    and L2 perceptual learning, the first in Mandarin-English late
    bilinguals, the second in Australian learners of Mandarin. Both
    studies showed stronger learning in L1; in L2, however,
    learning appeared for the English-L1 group but not for the
    Mandarin-L1 group. Phonological mapping differences from
    the L1 to the L2 are suggested as the reason for this result.
  • Cutler, A. (1991). Prosody in situations of communication: Salience and segmentation. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences: Vol. 1 (pp. 264-270). Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, Service des publications.

    Abstract

    Speakers and listeners have a shared goal: to communicate. The processes of speech perception and of speech production interact in many ways under the constraints of this communicative goal; such interaction is as characteristic of prosodic processing as of the processing of other aspects of linguistic structure. Two of the major uses of prosodic information in situations of communication are to encode salience and segmentation, and these themes unite the contributions to the symposium introduced by the present review.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1986). The perceptual integrity of initial consonant clusters. In R. Lawrence (Ed.), Speech and Hearing: Proceedings of the Institute of Acoustics (pp. 31-36). Edinburgh: Institute of Acoustics.
  • Dediu, D. (2006). Mostly out of Africa, but what did the others have to say? In A. Cangelosi, A. D. Smith, & K. Smith (Eds.), The evolution of language: proceedings of the 6th International Conference (EVOLANG6) (pp. 59-66). World Scientific.

    Abstract

    The Recent Out-of-Africa human evolutionary model seems to be generally accepted. This impression is very prevalent outside palaeoanthropological circles (including studies of language evolution), but proves to be unwarranted. This paper offers a short review of the main challenges facing ROA and concludes that alternative models based on the concept of metapopulation must be also considered. The implications of such a model for language evolution and diversity are briefly reviewed.
  • Delgado, T., Ravignani, A., Verhoef, T., Thompson, B., Grossi, T., & Kirby, S. (2018). Cultural transmission of melodic and rhythmic universals: Four experiments and a model. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 89-91). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.019.
  • Dimitriadis, A., Kemps-Snijders, M., Wittenburg, P., Everaert, M., & Levinson, S. C. (2006). Towards a linguist's workbench supporting eScience methods. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing.
  • Dimroth, C., & Lasser, I. (Eds.). (2002). Finite options: How L1 and L2 learners cope with the acquisition of finiteness [Special Issue]. Linguistics, 40(4).
  • Doherty, M., & Klein, W. (Eds.). (1991). Übersetzung [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (84).
  • Duarte, R., Uhlmann, M., Van den Broek, D., Fitz, H., Petersson, K. M., & Morrison, A. (2018). Encoding symbolic sequences with spiking neural reservoirs. In Proceedings of the 2018 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN). doi:10.1109/IJCNN.2018.8489114.

    Abstract

    Biologically inspired spiking networks are an important tool to study the nature of computation and cognition in neural systems. In this work, we investigate the representational capacity of spiking networks engaged in an identity mapping task. We compare two schemes for encoding symbolic input, one in which input is injected as a direct current and one where input is delivered as a spatio-temporal spike pattern. We test the ability of networks to discriminate their input as a function of the number of distinct input symbols. We also compare performance using either membrane potentials or filtered spike trains as state variable. Furthermore, we investigate how the circuit behavior depends on the balance between excitation and inhibition, and the degree of synchrony and regularity in its internal dynamics. Finally, we compare different linear methods of decoding population activity onto desired target labels. Overall, our results suggest that even this simple mapping task is strongly influenced by design choices on input encoding, state-variables, circuit characteristics and decoding methods, and these factors can interact in complex ways. This work highlights the importance of constraining computational network models of behavior by available neurobiological evidence.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2006). Social consequences of common ground. In N. J. Enfield, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 399-430). Oxford: Berg.
  • Enfield, N. J. (2002). Parallel innovation and 'coincidence' in linguistic areas: On a bi-clausal extent/result constructions of mainland Southeast Asia. In P. Chew (Ed.), Proceedings of the 28th meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. Special session on Tibeto-Burman and Southeast Asian linguistics (pp. 121-128). Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
  • Enfield, N. J., & Levinson, S. C. (2006). Introduction: Human sociality as a new interdisciplinary field. In N. J. Enfield, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 1-35). Oxford: Berg.
  • Ergin, R., Senghas, A., Jackendoff, R., & Gleitman, L. (2018). Structural cues for symmetry, asymmetry, and non-symmetry in Central Taurus Sign Language. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 104-106). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.025.
  • Floyd, S. (2006). The cash value of style in the Andean market. In E.-X. Lee, K. M. Markman, V. Newdick, & T. Sakuma (Eds.), SALSA 13: Texas Linguistic Forum vol. 49. Austin, TX: Texas Linguistics Forum.

    Abstract

    This paper examines code and style shifting during sales transactions based on two market case studies from highland Ecuador. Bringing together ideas of linguistic economy with work on stylistic variation and ethnohistorical research on Andean markets, I study bartering, market calls and sales pitches to show how sellers create stylistic performances distinguished by contrasts of code, register and poetic features. The interaction of the symbolic value of language with the economic values of the market presents a place to examine the relationship between discourse and the material world.
  • Furman, R., Ozyurek, A., & Allen, S. E. M. (2006). Learning to express causal events across languages: What do speech and gesture patterns reveal? In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 190-201). Somerville, Mass: Cascadilla Press.
  • Galke, L., Gerstenkorn, G., & Scherp, A. (2018). A case study of closed-domain response suggestion with limited training data. In M. Elloumi, M. Granitzer, A. Hameurlain, C. Seifert, B. Stein, A. Min Tjoa, & R. Wagner (Eds.), Database and Expert Systems Applications: DEXA 2018 International Workshops, BDMICS, BIOKDD, and TIR, Regensburg, Germany, September 3–6, 2018, Proceedings (pp. 218-229). Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

    Abstract

    We analyze the problem of response suggestion in a closed domain along a real-world scenario of a digital library. We present a text-processing pipeline to generate question-answer pairs from chat transcripts. On this limited amount of training data, we compare retrieval-based, conditioned-generation, and dedicated representation learning approaches for response suggestion. Our results show that retrieval-based methods that strive to find similar, known contexts are preferable over parametric approaches from the conditioned-generation family, when the training data is limited. We, however, identify a specific representation learning approach that is competitive to the retrieval-based approaches despite the training data limitation.
  • Galke, L., Mai, F., & Vagliano, I. (2018). Multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendations of citations and subject labels. In T. Mitrovic, J. Zhang, L. Chen, & D. Chin (Eds.), UMAP '18: Proceedings of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (pp. 197-205). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3209219.3209236.

    Abstract

    We present multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendation and evaluate them on two different tasks: citation recommendation and subject label recommendation. We analyze the effects of adversarial regularization, sparsity, and different input modalities. By conducting 408 experiments, we show that adversarial regularization consistently improves the performance of autoencoders for recommendation. We demonstrate, however, that the two tasks differ in the semantics of item co-occurrence in the sense that item co-occurrence resembles relatedness in case of citations, yet implies diversity in case of subject labels. Our results reveal that supplying the partial item set as input is only helpful, when item co-occurrence resembles relatedness. When facing a new recommendation task it is therefore crucial to consider the semantics of item co-occurrence for the choice of an appropriate model.
  • Gazendam, L., Malaisé, V., Schreiber, G., & Brugman, H. (2006). Deriving semantic annotations of an audiovisual program from contextual texts. In First International Workshop on Semantic Web Annotations for Multimedia (SWAMM 2006).

    Abstract

    The aim of this paper is to explore whether indexing terms for an audiovisual program can be derived from contextual texts automatically. For this we apply natural-language processing techniques to contextual texts of two Dutch TV-programs. We use a Dutch domain thesaurus to derive possible metadata. This possible metadata is ranked by an algorithm which uses the relations of the thesaurus. We evaluate the results by comparing them to human made descriptions.
  • Goudbeek, M., & Swingley, D. (2006). Saliency effects in distributional learning. In Proceedings of the 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 478-482). Auckland: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.

    Abstract

    Acquiring the sounds of a language involves learning to recognize distributional patterns present in the input. We show that among adult learners, this distributional learning of auditory categories (which are conceived of here as probability density functions in a multidimensional space) is constrained by the salience of the dimensions that form the axes of this perceptual space. Only with a particular ratio of variation in the perceptual dimensions was category learning driven by the distributional properties of the input.
  • Guirardello-Damian, R., & Skiba, R. (2002). Trumai Corpus: An example of presenting multi-media data in the IMDI-browser. In P. Austin, H. Dry, & P. Wittenburg (Eds.), Proceedings of the international LREC workshop on resources and tools in field linguistics (pp. 16-1-16-8). Paris: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    Trumai, a genetically isolated language spoken in Brazil (Xingu reserve), is an example of an endangered language. Although the Trumai population consists of more than 100 individuals, only 51 people speak the language. The oral traditions are progressively dying. Given the current scenario, the documentation of this language and its cultural aspects is of great importance. In the framework of the DoBeS program (Documentation of Endangered Languages), the project "Documentation of Trumai" has selected and organized a collection of Trumai texts, with a multi-media representation of the corpus. Several kinds of information and data types are being included in the archive of the language: texts with audio and video recordings; written texts from educational materials; drawings; photos; songs; annotations in different formats; lexicon; field notes; results from scientific studies of the language (sound system, sketch grammar, comparative studies with other Xinguan languages), etc. All materials are integrated into the IMDI-Browser, a specialized tool for presenting and searching for linguistic data. This paper explores the processing phases and the results of the Trumai project taking into consideration the issue of how to combine the needs and wishes of field linguistics (content and research aspects) and the needs of archiving (structure and workflow aspects) in a well-organized corpus.
  • Gullberg, M., & Indefrey, P. (Eds.). (2006). The cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition [Special Issue]. Language Learning, 56(suppl. 1).
  • Gullberg, M. (Ed.). (2006). Gestures and second language acquisition [Special Issue]. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 44(2).
  • Gulrajani, G., & Harrison, D. (2002). SHAWEL: Sharable and interactive web-lexicons. In P. Austin, H. Dry, & P. Wittenburg (Eds.), Proceedings of the international LREC workshop on resources and tools in field linguistics (pp. 9-1-9-4). Paris: European Language Resources Association.

    Abstract

    A prototypical lexicon tool was implemented which was intended to allow researchers to collaboratively create lexicons of endangered languages. Increasingly often researchers documenting or analyzing a language work at different locations. Lexicons that evolve through continuous interaction between the collaborators can only be efficiently produced when it can be accessed and manipulated via the Internet. The SHAWEL tool was developed to address these needs; it makes use of a thin Java client and a central database solution.
  • Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2006). ELLEIPO: A module that computes coordinative ellipsis for language generators that don't. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL-2006) (pp. 115-118).

    Abstract

    Many current sentence generators lack the ability to compute elliptical versions of coordinated clauses in accordance with the rules for Gapping, Forward and Backward Conjunction Reduction, and SGF (Subject Gap in clauses with Finite/ Fronted verb). We describe a module (implemented in JAVA, with German and Dutch as target languages) that takes non-elliptical coordinated clauses as input and returns all reduced versions licensed by coordinative ellipsis. It is loosely based on a new psycholinguistic theory of coordinative ellipsis proposed by Kempen. In this theory, coordinative ellipsis is not supposed to result from the application of declarative grammar rules for clause formation but from a procedural component that interacts with the sentence generator and may block the overt expression of certain constituents.
  • Harbusch, K., Kempen, G., Van Breugel, C., & Koch, U. (2006). A generation-oriented workbench for performance grammar: Capturing linear order variability in German and Dutch. In Proceedings of the 4th International Natural Language Generation Conference (pp. 9-11).

    Abstract

    We describe a generation-oriented workbench for the Performance Grammar (PG) formalism, highlighting the treatment of certain word order and movement constraints in Dutch and German. PG enables a simple and uniform treatment of a heterogeneous collection of linear order phenomena in the domain of verb constructions (variably known as Cross-serial Dependencies, Verb Raising, Clause Union, Extraposition, Third Construction, Particle Hopping, etc.). The central data structures enabling this feature are clausal “topologies”: one-dimensional arrays associated with clauses, whose cells (“slots”) provide landing sites for the constituents of the clause. Movement operations are enabled by unification of lateral slots of topologies at adjacent levels of the clause hierarchy. The PGW generator assists the grammar developer in testing whether the implemented syntactic knowledge allows all and only the well-formed permutations of constituents.
  • Harbusch, K., & Kempen, G. (2002). A quantitative model of word order and movement in English, Dutch and German complement constructions. In Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Computational linguistics. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Abstract

    We present a quantitative model of word order and movement constraints that enables a simple and uniform treatment of a seemingly heterogeneous collection of linear order phenomena in English, Dutch and German complement constructions (Wh-extraction, clause union, extraposition, verb clustering, particle movement, etc.). Underlying the scheme are central assumptions of the psycholinguistically motivated Performance Grammar (PG). Here we describe this formalism in declarative terms based on typed feature unification. PG allows a homogenous treatment of both the within- and between-language variations of the ordering phenomena under discussion, which reduce to different settings of a small number of quantitative parameters.
  • Herbst, L. E. (2006). The influence of language dominance on bilingual VOT: A case study. In Proceedings of the 4th University of Cambridge Postgraduate Conference on Language Research (CamLing 2006) (pp. 91-98). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Abstract

    Longitudinally collected VOT data from an early English-Italian bilingual who became increasingly English-dominant was analyzed. Stops in English were always produced with significantly longer VOT than in Italian. However, the speaker did not show any significant change in the VOT production in either language over time, despite the clear dominance of English in his every day language use later in his life. The results indicate that – unlike L2 learners – early bilinguals may remain unaffected by language use with respect to phonetic realization.
  • Holler, J., & Stevens, R. (2006). How speakers represent size information in referential communication for knowing and unknowing recipients. In D. Schlangen, & R. Fernandez (Eds.), Brandial '06 Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Potsdam, Germany, September 11-13.
  • Hopman, E., Thompson, B., Austerweil, J., & Lupyan, G. (2018). Predictors of L2 word learning accuracy: A big data investigation. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 513-518). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    What makes some words harder to learn than others in a second language? Although some robust factors have been identified based on small scale experimental studies, many relevant factors are difficult to study in such experiments due to the amount of data necessary to test them. Here, we investigate what factors affect the ease of learning of a word in a second language using a large data set of users learning English as a second language through the Duolingo mobile app. In a regression analysis, we test and confirm the well-studied effect of cognate status on word learning accuracy. Furthermore, we find significant effects for both cross-linguistic semantic alignment and English semantic density, two novel predictors derived from large scale distributional models of lexical semantics. Finally, we provide data on several other psycholinguistically plausible word level predictors. We conclude with a discussion of the limits, benefits and future research potential of using big data for investigating second language learning.
  • Huettig, F., Kolinsky, R., & Lachmann, T. (Eds.). (2018). The effects of literacy on cognition and brain functioning [Special Issue]. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 33(3).
  • Isbilen, E., Frost, R. L. A., Monaghan, P., & Christiansen, M. (2018). Bridging artificial and natural language learning: Comparing processing- and reflection-based measures of learning. In C. Kalish, M. Rau, J. Zhu, & T. T. Rogers (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2018) (pp. 1856-1861). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

    Abstract

    A common assumption in the cognitive sciences is that artificial and natural language learning rely on shared mechanisms. However, attempts to bridge the two have yielded ambiguous results. We suggest that an empirical disconnect between the computations employed during learning and the methods employed at test may explain these mixed results. Further, we propose statistically-based chunking as a potential computational link between artificial and natural language learning. We compare the acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies to that of natural language structure using two types of tasks: reflection-based 2AFC measures, and processing-based recall measures, the latter being more computationally analogous to the processes used during language acquisition. Our results demonstrate that task-type significantly influences the correlations observed between artificial and natural language acquisition, with reflection-based and processing-based measures correlating within – but not across – task-type. These findings have fundamental implications for artificial-to-natural language comparisons, both methodologically and theoretically.
  • Janse, E. (2002). Time-compressing natural and synthetic speech. In Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 1645-1648).
  • Janssen, R., Moisik, S. R., & Dediu, D. (2018). Agent model reveals the influence of vocal tract anatomy on speech during ontogeny and glossogeny. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 171-174). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.042.
  • Kanero, J., Franko, I., Oranç, C., Uluşahin, O., Koskulu, S., Adigüzel, Z., Küntay, A. C., & Göksun, T. (2018). Who can benefit from robots? Effects of individual differences in robot-assisted language learning. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob) (pp. 212-217). Piscataway, NJ, USA: IEEE.

    Abstract

    It has been suggested that some individuals may benefit more from social robots than do others. Using second
    language (L2) as an example, the present study examined how individual differences in attitudes toward robots and personality
    traits may be related to learning outcomes. Preliminary results with 24 Turkish-speaking adults suggest that negative attitudes
    toward robots, more specifically thoughts and anxiety about the negative social impact that robots may have on the society,
    predicted how well adults learned L2 words from a social robot. The possible implications of the findings as well as future directions are also discussed
  • Kearns, R. K., Norris, D., & Cutler, A. (2002). Syllable processing in English. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing [ICSLP 2002] (pp. 1657-1660).

    Abstract

    We describe a reaction time study in which listeners detected word or nonword syllable targets (e.g. zoo, trel) in sequences consisting of the target plus a consonant or syllable residue (trelsh, trelshek). The pattern of responses differed from an earlier word-spotting study with the same material, in which words were always harder to find if only a consonant residue remained. The earlier results should thus not be viewed in terms of syllabic parsing, but in terms of a universal role for syllables in speech perception; words which are accidentally present in spoken input (e.g. sell in self) can be rejected when they leave a residue of the input which could not itself be a word.
  • Kempen, G., & Van Breugel, C. (2002). A workbench for visual-interactive grammar instruction at the secondary education level. In Proceedings of the 10th International CALL Conference (pp. 157-158). Antwerp: University of Antwerp.
  • Kempen, G., & Hoenkamp, E. (1982). Incremental sentence generation: Implications for the structure of a syntactic processor. In J. Horecký (Ed.), COLING 82. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Prague, July 5-10, 1982 (pp. 151-156). Amsterdam: North-Holland.

    Abstract

    Human speakers often produce sentences incrementally. They can start speaking having in mind only a fragmentary idea of what they want to say, and while saying this they refine the contents underlying subsequent parts of the utterance. This capability imposes a number of constraints on the design of a syntactic processor. This paper explores these constraints and evaluates some recent computational sentence generators from the perspective of incremental production.
  • Kempen, G., & Harbusch, K. (2002). Rethinking the architecture of human syntactic processing: The relationship between grammatical encoding and decoding. In Proceedings of the 35th Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. University of Potsdam.
  • Kemps-Snijders, M., Ducret, J., Romary, L., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). An API for accessing the data category registry. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 2299-2302).
  • Kemps-Snijders, M., Nederhof, M.-J., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). LEXUS, a web-based tool for manipulating lexical resources. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 1862-1865).
  • Klassmann, A., Offenga, F., Broeder, D., Skiba, R., & Wittenburg, P. (2006). Comparison of resource discovery methods. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006) (pp. 113-116).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (2002). Sprache des Rechts II [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 128.
  • Klein, W., & Jungbluth, K. (Eds.). (2002). Deixis [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 125.
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1986). Sprachverfall [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (62).
  • Klein, W. (Ed.). (1982). Zweitspracherwerb [Special Issue]. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, (45).
  • Kuijpers, C., Van Donselaar, W., & Cutler, A. (2002). Perceptual effects of assimilation-induced violation of final devoicing in Dutch. In J. H. L. Hansen, & B. Pellum (Eds.), The 7th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (pp. 1661-1664). Denver: ICSA.

    Abstract

    Voice assimilation in Dutch is an optional phonological rule which changes the surface forms of words and in doing so may violate the otherwise obligatory phonological rule of syllablefinal devoicing. We report two experiments examining the influence of voice assimilation on phoneme processing, in lexical compound words and in noun-verb phrases. Processing was not impaired in appropriate assimilation contexts across morpheme boundaries, but was impaired when devoicing was violated (a) in an inappropriate non-assimilatory) context, or (b) across a syntactic boundary.
  • Kuntay, A., & Ozyurek, A. (2002). Joint attention and the development of the use of demonstrative pronouns in Turkish. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A. H. Do (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 336-347). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Kuzla, C., Mitterer, H., Ernestus, M., & Cutler, A. (2006). Perceptual compensation for voice assimilation of German fricatives. In P. Warren, & I. Watson (Eds.), Proceedings of the 11th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology (pp. 394-399).

    Abstract

    In German, word-initial lax fricatives may be produced with substantially reduced glottal vibration after voiceless obstruents. This assimilation occurs more frequently and to a larger extent across prosodic word boundaries than across phrase boundaries. Assimilatory devoicing makes the fricatives more similar to their tense counterparts and could thus hinder word recognition. The present study investigates how listeners cope with assimilatory devoicing. Results of a cross-modal priming experiment indicate that listeners compensate for assimilation in appropriate contexts. Prosodic structure moderates compensation for assimilation: Compensation occurs especially after phrase boundaries, where devoiced fricatives are sufficiently long to be confused with their tense counterparts.
  • Kuzla, C., Ernestus, M., & Mitterer, H. (2006). Prosodic structure affects the production and perception of voice-assimilated German fricatives. In R. Hoffmann, & H. Mixdorff (Eds.), Speech prosody 2006. Dresden: TUD Press.

    Abstract

    Prosodic structure has long been known to constrain phonological processes [1]. More recently, it has also been recognized as a source of fine-grained phonetic variation of speech sounds. In particular, segments in domain-initial position undergo prosodic strengthening [2, 3], which also implies more resistance to coarticulation in higher prosodic domains [5]. The present study investigates the combined effects of prosodic strengthening and assimilatory devoicing on word-initial fricatives in German, the functional implication of both processes for cues to the fortis-lenis contrast, and the influence of prosodic structure on listeners’ compensation for assimilation. Results indicate that 1. Prosodic structure modulates duration and the degree of assimilatory devoicing, 2. Phonological contrasts are maintained by speakers, but differ in phonetic detail across prosodic domains, and 3. Compensation for assimilation in perception is moderated by prosodic structure and lexical constraints.
  • Kuzla, C., Mitterer, H., & Ernestus, M. (2006). Compensation for assimilatory devoicing and prosodic structure in German fricative perception. In Variation, detail and representation: 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (pp. 43-44).
  • Lattenkamp, E. Z., Vernes, S. C., & Wiegrebe, L. (2018). Mammalian models for the study of vocal learning: A new paradigm in bats. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 235-237). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.056.
  • Lauscher, A., Eckert, K., Galke, L., Scherp, A., Rizvi, S. T. R., Ahmed, S., Dengel, A., Zumstein, P., & Klein, A. (2018). Linked open citation database: Enabling libraries to contribute to an open and interconnected citation graph. In J. Chen, M. A. Gonçalves, J. M. Allen, E. A. Fox, M.-Y. Kan, & V. Petras (Eds.), JCDL '18: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 109-118). New York: ACM. doi:10.1145/3197026.3197050.

    Abstract

    Citations play a crucial role in the scientific discourse, in information retrieval, and in bibliometrics. Many initiatives are currently promoting the idea of having free and open citation data. Creation of citation data, however, is not part of the cataloging workflow in libraries nowadays.
    In this paper, we present our project Linked Open Citation Database, in which we design distributed processes and a system infrastructure based on linked data technology. The goal is to show that efficiently cataloging citations in libraries using a semi-automatic approach is possible. We specifically describe the current state of the workflow and its implementation. We show that we could significantly improve the automatic reference extraction that is crucial for the subsequent data curation. We further give insights on the curation and linking process and provide evaluation results that not only direct the further development of the project, but also allow us to discuss its overall feasibility.
  • Lefever, E., Hendrickx, I., Croijmans, I., Van den Bosch, A., & Majid, A. (2018). Discovering the language of wine reviews: A text mining account. In N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, K. Hasida, H. Isahara, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, H. Mazo, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, S. Piperidis, & T. Tokunaga (Eds.), Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) (pp. 3297-3302). Paris: LREC.

    Abstract

    It is widely held that smells and flavors are impossible to put into words. In this paper we test this claim by seeking predictive patterns in wine reviews, which ostensibly aim to provide guides to perceptual content. Wine reviews have previously been critiqued as random and meaningless. We collected an English corpus of wine reviews with their structured metadata, and applied machine learning techniques to automatically predict the wine's color, grape variety, and country of origin. To train the three supervised classifiers, three different information sources were incorporated: lexical bag-of-words features, domain-specific terminology features, and semantic word embedding features. In addition, using regression analysis we investigated basic review properties, i.e., review length, average word length, and their relationship to the scalar values of price and review score. Our results show that wine experts do share a common vocabulary to describe wines and they use this in a consistent way, which makes it possible to automatically predict wine characteristics based on the review text alone. This means that odors and flavors may be more expressible in language than typically acknowledged.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1991). Lexical access in speech production: Stages versus cascading. In H. Peters, W. Hulstijn, & C. Starkweather (Eds.), Speech motor control and stuttering (pp. 3-10). Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica.
  • Levinson, S. C. (2006). On the human "interaction engine". In N. J. Enfield, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Roots of human sociality: Culture, cognition and interaction (pp. 39-69). Oxford: Berg.
  • Lopopolo, A., Frank, S. L., Van den Bosch, A., Nijhof, A., & Willems, R. M. (2018). The Narrative Brain Dataset (NBD), an fMRI dataset for the study of natural language processing in the brain. In B. Devereux, E. Shutova, & C.-R. Huang (Eds.), Proceedings of LREC 2018 Workshop "Linguistic and Neuro-Cognitive Resources (LiNCR) (pp. 8-11). Paris: LREC.

    Abstract

    We present the Narrative Brain Dataset, an fMRI dataset that was collected during spoken presentation of short excerpts of three
    stories in Dutch. Together with the brain imaging data, the dataset contains the written versions of the stimulation texts. The texts are
    accompanied with stochastic (perplexity and entropy) and semantic computational linguistic measures. The richness and unconstrained
    nature of the data allows the study of language processing in the brain in a more naturalistic setting than is common for fMRI studies.
    We hope that by making NBD available we serve the double purpose of providing useful neural data to researchers interested in natural
    language processing in the brain and to further stimulate data sharing in the field of neuroscience of language.
  • Lupyan, G., Wendorf, A., Berscia, L. M., & Paul, J. (2018). Core knowledge or language-augmented cognition? The case of geometric reasoning. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 252-254). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.062.
  • Mai, F., Galke, L., & Scherp, A. (2018). Using deep learning for title-based semantic subject indexing to reach competitive performance to full-text. In J. Chen, M. A. Gonçalves, J. M. Allen, E. A. Fox, M.-Y. Kan, & V. Petras (Eds.), JCDL '18: Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (pp. 169-178). New York: ACM.

    Abstract

    For (semi-)automated subject indexing systems in digital libraries, it is often more practical to use metadata such as the title of a publication instead of the full-text or the abstract. Therefore, it is desirable to have good text mining and text classification algorithms that operate well already on the title of a publication. So far, the classification performance on titles is not competitive with the performance on the full-texts if the same number of training samples is used for training. However, it is much easier to obtain title data in large quantities and to use it for training than full-text data. In this paper, we investigate the question how models obtained from training on increasing amounts of title training data compare to models from training on a constant number of full-texts. We evaluate this question on a large-scale dataset from the medical domain (PubMed) and from economics (EconBiz). In these datasets, the titles and annotations of millions of publications are available, and they outnumber the available full-texts by a factor of 20 and 15, respectively. To exploit these large amounts of data to their full potential, we develop three strong deep learning classifiers and evaluate their performance on the two datasets. The results are promising. On the EconBiz dataset, all three classifiers outperform their full-text counterparts by a large margin. The best title-based classifier outperforms the best full-text method by 9.4%. On the PubMed dataset, the best title-based method almost reaches the performance of the best full-text classifier, with a difference of only 2.9%.
  • Majid, A., Enfield, N. J., & Van Staden, M. (Eds.). (2006). Parts of the body: Cross-linguistic categorisation [Special Issue]. Language Sciences, 28(2-3).
  • Malaisé, V., Aroyo, L., Brugman, H., Gazendam, L., De Jong, A., Negru, C., & Schreiber, G. (2006). Evaluating a thesaurus browser for an audio-visual archive. In S. Staab, & V. Svatek (Eds.), Managing knowledge in a world of networks (pp. 272-286). Berlin: Springer.
  • Matsuo, A., & Duffield, N. (2002). Assessing the generality of knowledge about English ellipsis in SLA. In J. Costa, & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Proceedings of the GALA 2001 Conference on Language Acquisition (pp. 49-53). Lisboa: Associacao Portuguesa de Linguistica.
  • Matsuo, A., & Duffield, N. (2002). Finiteness and parallelism: Assessing the generality of knowledge about English ellipsis in SLA. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A.-H.-J. Do (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 197-207). Somerville, Massachusetts: Cascadilla Press.
  • Melinger, A., Schulte im Walde, S., & Weber, A. (2006). Characterizing response types and revealing noun ambiguity in German association norms. In Proceedings of the 11th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Trento: Association for Computational Linguistics.

    Abstract

    This paper presents an analysis of semantic association norms for German nouns. In contrast to prior studies, we not only collected associations elicited by written representations of target objects but also by their pictorial representations. In a first analysis, we identified systematic differences in the type and distribution of associate responses for the two presentation forms. In a second analysis, we applied a soft cluster analysis to the collected target-response pairs. We subsequently used the clustering to predict noun ambiguity and to discriminate senses in our target nouns.
  • Merkx, D., & Scharenborg, O. (2018). Articulatory feature classification using convolutional neural networks. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 2142-2146). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-2275.

    Abstract

    The ultimate goal of our research is to improve an existing speech-based computational model of human speech recognition on the task of simulating the role of fine-grained phonetic information in human speech processing. As part of this work we are investigating articulatory feature classifiers that are able to create reliable and accurate transcriptions of the articulatory behaviour encoded in the acoustic speech signal. Articulatory feature (AF) modelling of speech has received a considerable amount of attention in automatic speech recognition research. Different approaches have been used to build AF classifiers, most notably multi-layer perceptrons. Recently, deep neural networks have been applied to the task of AF classification. This paper aims to improve AF classification by investigating two different approaches: 1) investigating the usefulness of a deep Convolutional neural network (CNN) for AF classification; 2) integrating the Mel filtering operation into the CNN architecture. The results showed a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy of the CNNs over state-of-the-art AF classification results for Dutch, most notably in the minority classes. Integrating the Mel filtering operation into the CNN architecture did not further improve classification performance.
  • Meyer, A. S., & Wheeldon, L. (Eds.). (2006). Language production across the life span [Special Issue]. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(1-3).
  • Micklos, A., Macuch Silva, V., & Fay, N. (2018). The prevalence of repair in studies of language evolution. In C. Cuskley, M. Flaherty, H. Little, L. McCrohon, A. Ravignani, & T. Verhoef (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG XII) (pp. 316-318). Toruń, Poland: NCU Press. doi:10.12775/3991-1.075.
  • Mulder, K., Ten Bosch, L., & Boves, L. (2018). Analyzing EEG Signals in Auditory Speech Comprehension Using Temporal Response Functions and Generalized Additive Models. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2018 (pp. 1452-1456). doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2018-1676.

    Abstract

    Analyzing EEG signals recorded while participants are listening to continuous speech with the purpose of testing linguistic hypotheses is complicated by the fact that the signals simultaneously reflect exogenous acoustic excitation and endogenous linguistic processing. This makes it difficult to trace subtle differences that occur in mid-sentence position. We apply an analysis based on multivariate temporal response functions to uncover subtle mid-sentence effects. This approach is based on a per-stimulus estimate of the response of the neural system to speech input. Analyzing EEG signals predicted on the basis of the response functions might then bring to light conditionspecific differences in the filtered signals. We validate this approach by means of an analysis of EEG signals recorded with isolated word stimuli. Then, we apply the validated method to the analysis of the responses to the same words in the middle of meaningful sentences.

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