This paper presents a perceptual evaluation of a text to speech (TTS) synthesizer in Greek with respect to acoustic registration of enclitic stress and related naturalness and intelligibility. Based on acoustical measurements and observations of naturally recorded utterances, the corresponding output of a commercially available formant-based speech synthesizer was altered and the results were s...

We explore naturalness constraints on the masses of the heavy Higgs bosons H0, H±, and A0 in supersymmetric theories. We show that, in any extension of MSSM which accommodates the 125 GeV Higgs at the tree level, one can derive an upper bound on the SUSY Higgs masses from naturalness considerations. As is well-known for the MSSM, these bounds become weak at large tanβ. However, we show that mea...

The role of the mother tongue has been a major topic of second language acquisition research over the last few decades, but despite the overwhelming empirical evidence of cross-linguistic influence in learner language a number Of questions still remain to be answered: what and how much is transferred when, how and why? This study explores the extent to which a theory of linguistic naturalness —...

We argue that the study of the statistics of the landscape of string vacua provides the first potentially predictive – and also falsifiable – framework for string theory. The question of whether the theory does or does not predict low energy supersym-metry breaking may well be the most accessible to analysis. We argue that low energy – possibly very low energy – supersymmetry breaking is likely...

The observed pattern of neutrino mass splittings and mixing angles indicates that their family structure is significantly different from that of the charged fermions. We investigate the implications of these data for the fermion mass matrices in grand unified theories with a type-I seesaw mechanism. We show that, with simple assumptions, naturalness leads to a strongly hierarchical Majorana mas...

We investigate whether the patterns of phonotactic well-formedness internalized by language learners are direct reflections of the phonological patterns they encounter, or reflect in addition principles of phonological naturalness. As a research tool we employ the phonotactic learning system of Hayes and Wilson (2008), which carries out an unbiased search of the lexicon for valid phonotactic ge...

We consider the bounds imposed by naturalness on the masses of superpartners for arbitrary points in nonminimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model and for arbitrary messenger scales. We discuss appropriate measures of naturalness and the status of nonminimal supersymmetry in the light of recent experimental results.

In this paper, aiming at automatic estimation of naturalness in timing control of non-native’s speech, we have analyzed the timing characteristics of non-native’s speech to correlate with the corresponding subjective naturalness evaluation scores given by native speakers. Through statistical analyses using English speech data spoken by Japanese with temporal naturalness scores ranging one to fi...

Two objectives in the design of decision support systems (DSS) are to improve decision-malting performance and to use DSS modeling forms that are natural, that is, to adopt modeling paradigms that are congruent with decision makers’ conceptual models of decision tasks. By accomplishing the latter objective, a DSS should enjoy better conceptual ease of use and face validity. However, past resear...

Previous research has investigated ways to quantify visual information of a scene in terms of a visual processing hierarchy, i.e., making sense of visual environment by segmentation and integration of elementary sensory input. Guided by this research, studies have developed categories for low-level visual features (e.g., edges, colors), high-level visual features (scene-level entities that conv...