The originality of this work leads in tackling text compression using an unsupervised method, based on a deep linguistic analysis, and without resorting on a learning corpus. This work presents a system for dependent tree pruning, while preserving the syntactic coherence and the main informational contents, and led to an operational software, named COLIN. Experiment results show that our compre...

Our study aims at gaining a better understanding of how speech-gesture synchronization is affected by the factors (1) mutual visibility and (2) linguistic information structure. To this end, we analyzed spontaneous dyadic interactions where interlocutors are engaged in a verbalized version of the game TicTacToe, both with and without mutual visibility. The setting allows for a straightforward d...

In Mexico City Spanish, plural morphology is always overtly realized but in Chilean Spanish, due to a lenition process that targets syllable-final [s], plural morphology is not always realized, and the conditions of overt realization of plural morphology are subject to both linguistic and extra-linguistic factors. In this paper we show that variability in the input for grammatical morphology ca...

In this paper we describe the voices we submitted to the 2010 Blizzard Challenge, a yearly challenge to evaluate auditory speech synthesis on common data. One of the goals of a datadriven synthesizer, such as ours, is to generalize the speech database in such a way that it allows a realistic rendition of unseen input text. The two main changes to our system, compared to previous submissions, ar...

This paper presents a cross-linguistic data elicitation study on fully realised referring expressions (REs) in a dialogue context. A webbased experiment was set up in which participants were asked to choose REs to be uttered by one of two agents for identifying five targets in a scripted dialogue. Participants were told that the agent would point at the referents while uttering their chosen lin...

Previous studies have shown a significant association between reading skills and the performance on visuo-motor tasks. In order to clarify whether reading and writing skills modulate non-linguistic domains, we investigated the performance of two literacy groups on a visuo-motor integration task with non-linguistic stimuli. Twenty-one illiterate participants and twenty matched literate controls ...

This chapter provides readers a systematic and panoramic view of LDC formulation and various LDC designs under different criteria. 1. LDC 1.

Binding theory is the component of grammar that regulates the interpretation of noun phrases. Certain syntactic configurations involving picture noun phrases (PNPs) are problematic for the standard formulation of binding theory, which has prompted competing proposals for revisions of the theory. Some authors have proposed an account based on structural constraints, while others have argued that...

This article pursues the idea of inferring aspects of phonological underlying forms directly from surface contrasts by looking at optimality theoretic linguistic systems (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). The main result proves that linguistic systems satisfying certain conditions have the faithful contrastive feature property: Whenever 2 distinct morphemes contrast on the surface in a particular...

2. However, it is with deep disappointment that, at the conclusion of this process, it is clear our voices have not been heard and reflected in the conference outcomes. The negotiations started with analyses of the failings of the Brussels Programme of Action, also reflected in UNCTAD’s LDC report 2010. These showed that development partners failed to deliver their commitments to provide adequa...