Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) relies on the availability of rich parallel corpora. However, in the case of under-resourced languages or some specific domains, parallel corpora are not readily available. This leads to under-performing machine translation systems in those sparse data settings. To overcome the low availability of parallel resources the machine translation community has rec...

Previous studies have shown that some English vowel contrasts remain difficult for English learners to perceive. This study investigated three potential factors affecting vowel perception: cross-language vowel systems, spectral distance, and language proficiency, for the discrimination and identification of English /ɪ/-/ε/, /ε/-/æ/, /ʊ/-/ʌ/, and /ʌ/-/ɒ/ contrasts in four groups of listeners: L1...

This paper is an attempt to exclusively focus on investigating the pivot language technique in which a bridging language is utilized to increase the quality of the Persian–Spanish low-resource Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). In this case, English is used as the bridging language, and the Persian–English SMT is combined with the English–Spanish one, where the relatively large corpora of e...

In this paper the syllable timing of Taiwan English is compared to that of American English. A variability index reflecting vowel length over utterances is computed based on acoustic measurements of Taiwan and American English speech. The results show that successive vowel durations are more equal in Taiwan English than in American English. Further, vowel durations are generally larger in Taiwa...

Difficulties with second-language vowel perception may be related to the significant challenges in using acoustic-phonetic cues. This study investigated the effects of perception training with duration-equalized vowels on native Chinese listeners' English vowel perception and their use of acoustic-phonetic cues. Seventeen native Chinese listeners were perceptually trained with duration-equalize...

A group of Spanish- and English-speaking listeners participated in a multidimensional scaling (MDS) study examining perceptual responses to three Spanish and seven English vowels. The vowel stimuli represented tokens of Spanish /i/, /e/, and /a/ and English /i/, /I/, /eI/, /epsilon/, /ae/, /lambda/, and /a/. Each vowel had been spoken by three monolingual talkers of Spanish or English and all p...

In this paper we describe and evaluate the corpora submitted to the PAN 2015 shared task on plagiarism detection for text alignment. We received monoand cross-language corpora in the following languages (pairs): English, Persian, Chinese, and Urdu-English, English-Persian. We present an independent section for each submitted corpus including statistics, discussion of the obfuscation techniques ...

In this paper we describe and evaluate the corpora submitted to the PAN 2015 shared task on plagiarism detection for text alignment. We received monoand cross-language corpora in the following languages (pairs): English, Persian, Chinese, and Urdu-English, English-Persian. We present an independent section for each submitted corpus including statistics, discussion of the obfuscation techniques ...