We introduce a generic Language Independent Framework for Linguistic Code Switch Point Detection. The system uses the word length, character level (1, 2, 3, 4, and 5)-grams and word level unigram language models to train a conditional random fields (CRF) model for classifying input words into various languages. We test our proposed framework and compare it to the state-of-theart published syste...

The nearly universal requirement of English study in colleges has afforded the language an unprecedented institutional status and given rise to an increasingly large English-literate public in the Expanding Circle countries. Adopting the lens of domestic diaspora, the present study explores Chinese white-collar workers’ multilingual creativity when they seek to represent themselves as a distinc...

Standard or prestige accents (e.g., southern British RP, General American) are highly intelligible to a range of native speakers, which may be caused by listener experience (e.g., the accents are frequently heard in the media). The present study investigated the role of experience by testing Mandarin speakers with intermediate English proficiency in terms of their speech-in-noise recognition fo...

This investigation examined the Spanish and English receptive vocabulary and language comprehension abilities of bilingual preschoolers who attended Head Start over a two-year period. It was hypothesised that bilingual children's development would follow linear trajectories and that the development of children who were only exposed to Spanish in the home prior to school entry would differ from ...

The present study has been conducted with the purpose of exploring the relationship between EDBI staff's General English proficiency and their technical English Writing as well as the way each ESBP and GE courses affect their writing skill. The kind of the study is quasi-experimental with pre-test and post-test, being conducted among EDBI staff in Tehran Branches and Headquarters. In data colle...

Culturally valid speech and language testing measures for use with African-American children who are speakers of Black English (BE) are limited. An alternative to developing new tests for use with this population is to adapt currently available tests designed for use with standard English speakers. The purpose of this study was to compare the responses of 28 low-income, urban African-American p...

DIRA is a query expansion tool that generates search terms in Standard Arabic and/or its dialects when provided with queries in English or Standard Arabic. The retrieval of dialectal Arabic text has recently become necessary due to the increase of dialectal content on social media. DIRA addresses the challenges of retrieving information in Arabic dialects, which have significant linguistic diff...

This paper presents the BUCC 2017 shared task on parallel sentence extraction from comparable corpora. It recalls the design of the datasets, presents their final construction and statistics and the methods used to evaluate system results. 13 runs were submitted to the shared task by 4 teams, covering three of the four proposed language pairs: French-English (7 runs), German-English (3 runs), a...

We describe the University of Maryland machine translation systems submitted to the IWSLT 2015 French-English and Vietnamese-English tasks. We built standard hierarchical phrase-based models, extended in two ways: (1) we applied novel data selection techniques to select relevant information from the large French-English training corpora, and (2) we experimented with neural language models. Our ...