A hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to describe daily rainfall occurrence at ten gauge stations in the state of Ceará in northeast Brazil during the February–April wet season 1975–2002. The model assumes that rainfall occurrence is governed by a few discrete states, with Markovian daily transitions between them. Four “hidden” rainfall states are identified. One pair of the states represents wet...

Chinese spell checking is different from its counterparts for Western languages because Chinese words in texts are not separated by spaces. Chinese spell checking in this article refers to how to identify the misuse of characters in text composition. In other words, it is error correction at the word level rather than at the character level. Before Chinese sentences are spell checked, the text ...

A hidden Markov model (HMM) is used to describe daily rainfall occurrence at ten gauge stations in the state of Ceará in northeast Brazil during the February–April wet season 1975–2002. The model assumes that rainfall occurrence is governed by a few discrete states, with Markovian daily transitions between them. Four “hidden” rainfall states are identified. One pair of the states represents wet...

In this paper, we describe our experiments for the Rich Speech Retrieval Task at the MediaEval Benchmark Initiative 2011. We start with a brief overview on the used framework and its structure. Our experiments indicate that a two-step retrieval approach and applying a spell checker can improve the quality of retrieval results in the given scenario. Finally, we discuss other techniques that may ...

This paper introduces the SIGHAN 2015 Bake-off for Chinese Spelling Check, including task description, data preparation, performance metrics, and evaluation results. The competition reveals current state-of-the-art NLP techniques in dealing with Chinese spelling checking. All data sets with gold standards and evaluation tool used in this bake-off are publicly available for future research.

This paper describes a CALL approach which integrates software for speaker independent continuous speech recognition with embodied virtual agents and virtual worlds to create an immersive environment in which learners can converse in the target language in contextualised scenarios. The result is a self-access learning package: SPELL (Spoken Electronic Language Learning). The SPELL system has be...

In this thesis, I investigate the question of how the units of a linguistic expression are linearly ordered in syntax. In particular, I examine interactions between locality conditions on movement and the mapping between syntax and phonology. I show that Cyclic Linearization of syntactic structure and constraints on domain-internal movement of multiple specifiers predict unique ordering restric...

A spell-checker and thesaurus for the Bambara language (Bamanankan), based on an electronic version of a dictionary of Bambara, Bamadaba, ported to a standard spell-check engine, Hunspell, and made available (through their respective web sites) for Libre Office, Open Office, Neo Office, Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, as well as Adobe Indesign and other software using the Hunspell engine. The ...

This paper reports work carried out to develop a speller for Spanish at Microsoft Corporation, discusses the technique for isolatedword error correction used by the speller, provides general descriptions of the error data collection and error typology, and surveys a variety of linguistic considerations relevant when dealing with a world language spread over several countries and exposed to diff...

Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF) is the most common cyanotic congenital heart disease [1], with only a few patients reaching adulthood without surgical correction; ten percent may survive to their 30s but only 3% reach their 40s or older [2] and survival beyond the seventh decade of life is even rarer [3]. TOF comprises obstruction to right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT; pulmonary stenosis [PS]), ve...