In this paper, we propose an online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, positive negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations then projected into feature space. Therein, learning respectively conducted in row column space by maximizing simil...

The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as ...

UNLABELLED The neighborhood social and physical environments are considered significant factors contributing to children's inactive lifestyles, poor eating habits, and high levels of childhood obesity. Understanding of neighborhood environmental profiles is needed to facilitate community-based research and the development and implementation of community prevention and intervention programs. We ...

This article presents new evidence from English that the theory of grammar makes a distinction between the contrastive focus and discourse-new status of constituents. The evidence comes from a phonetic investigation which compares the prosody of all-new sentences with the prosody of sentences combining contrastive focus and discourse-new constituents. We have found that while the sentences of t...

A traditional approach to contrastive rhetoric has emphasized cultural difference in rhetorical patterns among various languages. Despite its laudable pedagogical intentions to raise teachers’ and students’ cultural and rhetorical awareness in second language writing, traditional contrastive rhetoric has perpetuated static binaries between English and other languages and viewed students as cult...

Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of breathy-to-creaky phonation contours in vowels from a production study of native speakers of English and White Hmong. These languages differ in the nature of the non-modal...

vibration in the air slide tables of ultra precision machines prevents gaining accuracies within nanometer level. in this work, dissimilar types of internal vibration including small vibrations and pneumatic hammers have been tested and some measures have been offered to reduce their effects. this paper has also proceeded to the vibration tests on the air slide tables built with different numbe...

This paper aims to narrow the gap between specific and general language theory by initiating contrastive acoustic-phonetic research of Slovenian and English diphthongs. Our ultimate goal is to investigate acoustic-phonetic similarities of the diphthongs across languages in the context of possible portability of resources between the languages. In general, the paper addresses the possibility of ...

This article pursues the idea of inferring aspects of phonological underlying forms directly from surface contrasts by looking at optimality theoretic linguistic systems (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004). The main result proves that linguistic systems satisfying certain conditions have the faithful contrastive feature property: Whenever 2 distinct morphemes contrast on the surface in a particular...

This paper explores the relationship between perceived syllable prominence and the acoustic properties of a speech utterance. It is aimed at establishing a link between the linguistic meaning of an utterance in terms of sentence modality and focus and its underlying prosodic features. Applications of such knowledge can be found in computerbased pronunciation training as well as general automati...