Due to the lack of paralinguistic information, politeness gains a considerable significance in telephone conversations (TCs). The use of politeness strategies can help interlocutors promote and/or maintain social harmony in telephone interactions. Using the Rapport Management Model proposed by Spencer-Oatey (2008), this study intended to primarily investigate the fundamental closing structures ...

We present a dataset of telephone conversations in English and Czech, developed to train acoustic models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in spoken dialogue systems (SDSs). The data comprise 45 hours of speech in English and over 18 hours in Czech. All audio data and a large part of transcriptions was collected using crowdsourcing; the rest was transcribed by hired transcribers. We releas...

This paper investigates the impact of word frequency and pronunciation talent on proficient speakers’ second language (L2) production variability/similarity. The data analysed stem from a corpus of quasi-spontaneous conversations between native speakers of German and English. Within-speaker production similarity was established through a comparison of amplitude envelope signals for word tokens ...

Colloquial English (CE) as found in television programs or typical conversations is different than text found in technical manuals, newspapers and books. Phrases tend to be shorter and less sophisticated. In this paper, we look at some of the theoretical and implementational issues involved in translating CE. We present a fully automatic large-scale multilingual natural language processing syst...

This paper introduces a large-scale phonetically-balanced English speech corpus developed at ATR for corpus-based speech synthesis. This corpus includes a 16-hour American English speech data spoken by a professional male narrator in “reading style.” The contents of prompt sentences concern basically news articles, travel conversations, and novels. The prompt sentences were selected from huge c...

MCGEE VICTORIA: Ethnic identity, language, and /o/ fronting among Latinos at UNC Chapel Hill (Under the direction of David Mora Marín) This study focuses on the variety of English used by college students at UNC Chapel Hill who self-identify as Latino and the relationship between the social and linguistic categories governing the speech of this particular group. The study will reveal, through c...

The DARPA BOLT Program develops systems capable of allowing English speakers to retrieve and understand information from informal foreign language sources. Phase 2 of the program required large volumes of naturally occurring informal text (SMS) and chat messages from individual users in multiple languages to support evaluation of machine translation systems. We describe the design and implement...

This article presents a study of EssayCritic, a computer-based writing aid for English as a foreign language (EFL) that provides feedback on the content of English essays. We compared two feedback conditions: automated feedback from EssayCritic (target class) and feedback from collaborating peers (comparison class). We used a mixed methods approach to collect and analyze the data, combining int...