This paper is an attempt to clarify the status of discourse markers. These lexical expressions have been studied under various labels, including discourse markers, discourse connectives, discourse operators, pragmatic connectives, sentence connectives, and cue phrases. Although most researchers agree that they are expressions which relate discourse segments, there is no agreement on how they ar...

Speech-to-speech (S2S) translation has been of increased interest in the last few years with the research focused mainly on lexical aspects. It has however been widely acknowledged that incorporating other rich information such as expressive prosody contained in speech can enhance the cross-lingual communication experience. Motivated by recent empirical findings showing a positive relation betw...

In depth cue-conflict conditions, various depth cues could represent different extents of depth. Previous studies have investigated the perceived size of negative afterimage in depth cue-correlated conditions in which different cues introduce almost the same amounts of depth to the visual system. This study examined the perceived size of the afterimage in the human observers in a condition that...

We outline how utterances in dialogs can be interpreted using a partial rst order logic. We exploit the capability of this logic to talk about the truth status of formulae to deene a notion of coherence between utterances and explain how this coherence relation can serve for the construction of AND/OR trees that represent the segmentation of the dialog. In a BDI model we formalize basic assumpt...

We sought to better understand how normal speakers signal the yes-no question-statement contrast and whether speakers with severe speech impairment could signal the contrast and how they would do so. We asked a group of eight speakers with severe dysarthria to produce ten, three-syllable phrases in an interrogative tone and in a declarative tone. We asked a group of gender matched normal speake...

The phrase length information is an important cue for assigning prosodic phrase breaks. However, it has not been fully utilized in the present TTS systems. Based on the study of the phrase length distribution and the interaction between prosodic words and prosodic phrases, this paper proposes a new stochastic model named phrase-length model for using the phrase length information. And it is pro...

This paper proposes that spontaneous speech, segmented into perceptually coherent prosodic constituents, is able to provide plentiful linguistic information in which clear patterns can be observed. We present pioneering studies with empirical and quantitative evidence, supporting the notion that prosodic units can be useful for the automatic processing of spontaneous speech. High inter-labelers...

Polarity classification of opinionated sentences with both positive and negative sentiments1 is a key challenge in sentiment analysis. This paper presents a novel unsupervised method for discovering intra-sentence level discourse relations for eliminating polarity ambiguities. Firstly, a discourse scheme with discourse constraints on polarity was defined empirically based on Rhetorical Structur...

The underlying units of attention are often discrete visual objects. Perhaps the clearest form of evidence for this is the same-object advantage: Following a spatial cue, responses are faster to probes occurring on the same object than they are to probes occurring on other objects, while equating brute distance. Is this a fundamentally spatial effect, or can same-object advantages also occur in...

In depth cue-conflict conditions, various depth cues could represent different extents of depth. Previous studies have investigated the perceived size of negative afterimage in depth cue-correlated conditions in which different cues introduce almost the same amounts of depth to the visual system. This study examined the perceived size of the afterimage in the human observers in a condition that...