This paper proposes a method for identifying synonymous relations in a bilingual lexicon, which is a set of translation-equivalent term pairs. We train a classifier for identifying those synonymous relations by using spelling variations as main clues. We compared two approaches: the direct identification of bilingual synonym pairs, and the merger of two monolingual synonyms. We showed that our ...

In this paper, we present our recent work in the analysis and modeling of speech under dialect. Dialect and accent significantly influence automatic speech recognition performance, and therefore it is critical to detect and classify non-native speech. In this study, we consider three areas that include: (i) prosodic structure (normalized f0, syllable rate, and sentence duration), (ii) phoneme a...

There seems to be a general belief among Internet users that it is a particularly democratic kind of activity. How true is this, more especially in terms of electronic publishing? The problem in seeking an answer is that ‘democracy’ means different things to different people. Its meaning not only varies from country to country, but even within a single country it can have different flavours. Fo...

Previous research has suggested that children in the early grades of primary school do not have much awareness of morphemes. In this study, a priming paradigm was used to try to detect early signs of morphological representation of stems through a spelling task presented to Portuguese children (N = 805; age range 6–9 years). Primes shared the stem with the targets and contained well-articulated...

Fifty years after Damerau set up his statistics for the distribution of errors in typed texts, his findings are still used in a range of different languages. Because these statistics were derived from texts in English, the question of whether they actually apply to other languages has been raised. We address this issue through the analysis of a set of typed texts in Brazilian Portuguese, derivi...

In this talk I will investigate the popular idea that English spelling is chaotic, and consider how to teach English spelling. I will also assess the relationship between segmentation, reading and spelling. Spelling difficulties are due to the gap between orthography and pronunciation; a word represents both sound and meaning, and good spelling may improve students' overall performance.

Controversy and uncertainty have plagued the question of whether “object markers” (OMs) are object pronouns cliticized to the verb or realizations of object agreement. Using data from Amharic, we address this question from a new perspective. Specifically, we claim that Amharic OMs should be analyzed as clitics because they are unable to double nominals that are quantified, anaphoric, or contain...

We consider the problem of providing spelling corrections for misspelled queries in Email Search using user’s own mail data. A popular strategy for general query spelling correction is to generate corrections from query logs. However, this strategy is not effective in Email Search for two reasons: 1) query log of any single user is typically not rich enough to provide potential corrections for ...

We use the ratio of growth in global military expenditures to gross domestic product (GDP) to capture ex ante expectations of political instability and explore the relation between this measure and returns. In a standard global asset pricing framework with 44 countries, this measure helps to explain cross-country return differences. Furthermore, emerging countries have greater exposure to inter...

It has been shown that techniques known as grapheme-and-phoneme-to-phoneme (GP2P) conversion can be used to derive pronunciations in a poorly-resourced accent, such as South African English, using available pronunciations in better-resourced accents of the same language, such as British and American English. However if the pronunciation is not available in either accent, it must be obtained usi...