Today’s NLG efforts should be compared against actual human performance, which is fluent and varies randomly and with context. Consequently, evaluations should not be done against a fixed ‘gold standard’ text, and shared task efforts should not assume that they can stipulate the representation of the source content and still let players generate the diversity of texts that the real world calls ...

BACKGROUND Pragmatic communication abilities may depend on intact frontal lobe systems. Independent evidence suggests that some persons with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired on measures of frontal lobe function. HYPOTHESIS We therefore hypothesized in Study 1 that pragmatic communication skills would be impaired in some persons with PD and would be linked to frontal dysfunction in these ...

The speech production system is capable of conveying an abundance of information with regards to sentence text, speaker identity, prosodics, as well as emotion and speaker stress. In an eeort to better understand the mechanism of human voice communication, researchers have attempted to determine reliable acoustic indicators of stress using such speech production features as fundamental frequenc...

The Prosodic Module of SLIM has been created in order to solve problems related to segmental and suprasegmental features of spoken English in a courseware for computerassisted foreign language learning called SLIM an acronym for Multimedia Interactive Linguistic Software, developed at the University of Venice. It is composed of two different sets of Learning Activities, the first one dealing wi...

This thesis deals with the problem of automatic language identification (LID) and automatic speaker identification (SID) given the speech signal as input. Both researches have received renewed interest due to heightened homeland security awareness, e.g. in the use of speaker’s voice print for biometric identification, language identification for the classification of speech archives and call-sc...

In this paper we examine the treatment of English rhythm from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. There are major shortcomings in the way not just rhythm but also prosodics in general is modelled; this is all too clear in various applications of the theory, particularly in computational areas such as speech synthesis (Keller and Keller 2002). Our objective is to begin characteri...

This paper is a plea for concerted effort towards preparing unified curricula in Language and Speech Technology (L&ST) education. To be maximally effective, the text courses should be translated in student’s native languages and should be accompanied by easily accessible NLP demonstrators. The software companions, demonstrating the basic concepts and allowing for simple experiments could be sel...

In recent developments in phonological theory two independent representations for prosodic prominence are needed in languages such äs Dutch and English. A nonculminative autosegmental structure with high and low tones accounts for pitch accents in focused constituents, whereas a culminative metrical structure which is phonetically coded in relative duration accounts for the lexical stress posit...

We consider the task of theorem proving in Lambek calculi and their generalisation to \multimodal residuation calculi". These form an integral part of categorial logic, a logic of signs stemming from categorial grammar, on the basis of which language processing is essentially theorem proving. The demand of this application is not just for e cient processing of some or other speci c calculus, bu...