This paper aims to provide a unified explanation for Contrastive Topic (CT) and Rise-Fall-Rise (RFR) construction by establishing a theory of ‘Semantic Contrast’. This will require us to depart from the conventional idea of putting Contrastive Topic under the category of Topic in the information structure and to have a new idea that the meaning of CT is derived from the interaction of Contrast ...

This pilot study investigates the effects of focus (broad, narrow and contrastive) on tonal patterns, f0 scaling and duration of accented syllables and rhythmic feet for a controlled dataset in Donegal Irish. Results show differences in pre-focal tonal patterns between broad focus and the other focus types. Narrow and contrastive focus renditions are implemented by largely the same phonetic mea...

Many studies on developmental speech perception (e.g. Werker & Tees 1984, Kuhl et al. 1992) have documented changes in speech perception that occur during an infant’s first year of life. These changes are generally understood to reflect the phonemic structure of the native language (Best et al. 1988, Liberman et al. 1957). There is little research, however, on the phonological abstractness of t...

due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the iranian and english contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (dms) between the two cultures. to this end, three s...

Contrastive loss has significantly improved performance in supervised classification tasks by using a multi-viewed framework that leverages augmentation and label information. The enables contrast with another view of single image but enlarges training time memory usage. To exploit the strength multi-views while avoiding high computation cost, we introduce multi-exit architecture outputs multip...

This article is a preliminary overview contrasting Chinese (CN) and Swedish (SE) stops. It begins with a general description of the stop systems of these two languages. The contrastive findings suggest that teachers of Chinese as Foreign Language should pay more attention to training VOT perception instead of the usual intense listening exercises of the tones. Finally, future research on contra...

Replicated Softmax model, a well-known undirected topic model, is powerful in extracting semantic representations of documents. Traditional learning strategies such as Contrastive Divergence are very inefficient. This paper provides a novel estimator to speed up the learning based on Noise Contrastive Estimate, extended for documents of variant lengths and weighted inputs. Experiments on two be...

We look at the average frequency of contrastive connectives in the SPaRKy Restaurant Corpus with respect to realization ratings by human judges. We implement a discriminative n-gram ranker to model these ratings and analyze the resulting n-gram weights to determine if our ranker learns this distribution. Surprisingly, our ranker learns to avoid contrastive connectives. We look at possible expla...

Taxonomy plays an important role in many applications by organizing domain knowledge into a hierarchy of is-a relations between terms. Previous works on the taxonomic relation identification from text corpora lack in two aspects: 1) They do not consider the trustiness of individual source texts, which is important to filter out incorrect relations from unreliable sources. 2) They also do not co...