State-of-the-art speech recognition systems handle continuous speech and are speaker-independent. However, the lingustic information conveyed in the intonational contour is neglected. To be able to fully recognize speech, this information must be interpreted. To this end, explicit knowledge of dialectal and individual variation is required. In this paper some acoustic correlates of wh-focus in ...

We describe in this paper the implementation and use of custom specializers in two current dialects of Lisp: Skill and Common Lisp. We motivate the need for such specializers by appealing to clarity of expression, referring to experience in existing industrial applications. We discuss the implementation details of such user-defined specializers in both dialects of Lisp, detailing open problems ...

There are various ways in which religious affiliation can present itself as a sociolinguistic variable in Arabic dialects. The best-documented case is probably that of Baghdadi Arabic, in which Blanc (1964) reports that three “communal dialects” exist (or existed, until virtually all Jewish Iraqis emigrated westward) – the mainstream Muslim koiné, and a Christian and Jewish variety, which share...

for the western iranian languages the transition from the old iranian to the middle-iranian period is characterised by – among other things – the loss of word-final syllables. this loss had a far-reaching impact on the nominal and verbal systems since it caused the loss of categories which had been expressed by suffixes. the consequences include the emergence of the so-called ergative system. ...

This study aims at exploring demonstratives in two dialects: Hodeidi Yemeni Arabic and Taizi Arabic, comparing them to Modern Standard Arabic. The description of the dialects along with focused on tracing syntactic semantic evidence they are like exhibit. model used undertake analysis follows Diessel (1999). Although attracted considerable scholarly attention, literature reflects a scarcity res...

This paper reports the results of a phonetic experiment investigating Korean 'denasalization', specifically, on the amount of nasality as a function of different prosodic contexts. The variation in nasal energy of onset nasal consonants of 5 subjects, from regions where the tendency of ‘denasalization’ is reported to be strong (Kyunggi-do: 3 subjects) and weak (Kyungsang-do: 2 subjects) were ex...

The daily spoken variety of Arabic is often termed the colloquial or dialect form of Arabic. There are many Arabic dialects across the Arab World and within other Arabic speaking communities. These dialects vary widely from region to region and to a lesser extent from city to city in each region. The dialects are not standardized, they are not taught, and they do not have official status. Howev...

The Arabic language is a collection of spoken dialects with important phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic differences, along with a standard written language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Since the spoken dialects are not officially written, it is very costly to obtain adequate corpora to use for training dialect NLP tools such as parsers. In this paper, we address the problem ...

It is well known that canonical Spanish, the dialectal variant ‘central’ of Spain, so called Castilian, can be transcribed by rules. This paper deals with the automatic grapheme to phoneme transcription rules in several Spanish dialects from Latin America. Spanish is a language spoken by more than 300 million people, has an important geographical dispersion compared among other languages and ha...