Questions about the relationship between language and thought have long fascinated psychologists, philosophers, and the general public. One specific question is the extent to which verbal labels causally impact cognitive processes—how does calling an object by a particular name influence the way people categorize it; how does knowing words for mental states influence our reasoning about the min...

Nowadays read speech recognition already works pretty well, but the recognition of spontaneous speech is much more problematic. There are plenty of reasons for this, and we hypothesize that one of them is the regular occurrence of disfluencies in spontaneous speech. Disfluencies disrupt the normal course of the sentence and when for instance word interruptions are concerned, they also give rise...

This paper describes the system developed by the UBham team for the SemEval2014 Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis task (Task 4). We present an approach based on deep linguistic processing techniques and resources, and explore the parameter space of these techniques applied to the different stages in this task and examine possibilities to exploit interdependencies between them.

This study investigates the Voice Onset Time (VOT) of stop consonant production in six bilingual English-Arabic children in order to examine whether bilingual children possess one unitary or two separate linguistic systems. A total of six English-Arabic bilingual children participated ages 5 to 10. English and Arabic stop consonants followed by a vowel /a/ made by bilingual children were measur...

In this study we elaborate a road map for the conversion of a traditional lexical syntactico-semantic resource for French into a linguistic linked open data (LLOD) model. Our approach uses current best-practices and the analyses of earlier similar undertakings (lemonUBY and PDEV-lemon) to tease out the most appropriate representation for our resource.

This paper investigates the potential use of dialog-based ALICEbots in disseminating terrorism information to the general public. In particular, we study the acceptance and response satisfaction of ALICEbot responses in both the general conversation and terrorism domains. From our analysis of three different knowledge sets: general conversation, terrorism, and combined, we found that users were...

This paper describes a process of building a bilingual syntactically annotated corpus, the PCEDT (Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank). The corpus is being created at Charles University, Prague, and the release of this corpus as Linguistic Data Consortium data collection is scheduled for the spring of 2004. The paper discusses important decisions made prior to the start of the project and ...

To relax the Term Independence Assumption, Term Dependency is introduced and it has improved retrieval precision dramatically. There are two kinds of term dependencies, one is defined by term proximity, and the other is defined by linguistic dependencies. In this paper, we take a comparative study to re-examine these two kinds of term dependencies in dependence language model framework. Syntact...

Absolute linguistic universals are often justified by cross-linguistic analysis: If all observed languages exhibit a property, the property is taken to be a likely universal, perhaps specified in the cognitive or linguistic systems of language learners and users. In many cases, these patterns are then taken to motivate linguistic theory. Here, we show that cross-linguistic analysis will very ra...