This paper presents some aspects of the first Portuguese frequency lexicon extracted from a corpus of large dimensions. The Multifunctional Computational Lexicon of Contemporary Portuguese (henceforth MCL) rised from the necessity of filling a gap existent in the studies of the contemporary Portuguese. Until recently, the frequency lexicons of Portuguese were of very small dimensions, such as P...

Numerous studies have been carried out to find the relation between neighborhood effect and retention of lexical items. This study was an attempt to find such a relationship among Iranian EFL learners. Participants, advanced second English learners, were chosen based on the Oxford Placement Test. Participants completed a lexical decision task that was designed and performed by a computer softwa...

This paper investigates conceptually and empirically the novel sense matching task, which requires to recognize whether the senses of two synonymous words match in context. We suggest direct approaches to the problem, which avoid the intermediate step of explicit word sense disambiguation, and demonstrate their appealing advantages and stimulating potential for future research.

Current breakthroughs in natural language processing have benefited dramatically from neural models, through which distributional semantics can leverage data representations to facilitate downstream applications. Since embeddings use context prediction on word co-occurrences yield dense vectors, they are inevitably prone capture more semantic association than similarity. To improve vector space...

We explore the relation between word sense subjectivity and cross-lingual lexical substitution, following the intuition that good substitutions will transfer a word’s (contextual) sentiment from the source language into the target language. Experiments on English-Chinese lexical substitution show that taking a word’s subjectivity into account can indeed improve performance. We also show that ju...

Sequencing errors in natural and elicited speech have long been used to inform models of phonological encoding and to understand the process by which serial ordering is achieved in speech. The present study focused on the distribution of sequential speech errors within multi-word prosodic units to determine whether such units are relevant to speech planning, and, if so, how. Forty native Englis...

This paper analyzes the use of hybrid language models for automatic speech transcription. The goal is to later use such an approach as a support for helping communication with deaf people, and to run it on an embedded decoder on a portable device, which introduces constraints on the model size. The main linguistic units considered for this task are the words and the syllables. Various lexicon s...

Toshiba English Text-to-Speech Synthesizer utilizes several new techniques to produce synthesized speech that is more natural-sounding and intelligible than that created by conventional synthesizers. The closed-loop training method creates synthesis units that most closely resemble the training data and are the least susceptible to prosodic distortion noise by analytically solving an equation t...