In this paper we examine the status of lexical tones in Sylheti. Sylheti is generally considered to be one of the varieties of Bangla (belonging to the Indo-Aryan language family). The consonant inventory of Sylheti has undergone significant reduction and restructuring, and lost all the aspirated stops due to obstruent weakening ([bai>bai] „brother‟, [lat̪i> lat̪i] „kick‟) and spirantization of t...

This paper describes the system used by the LIPN-IIMAS team in the Task 2, Semantic Textual Similarity, at SemEval 2015, in both the English and Spanish sub-tasks. We included some features based on alignment measures and we tested different learning models, in particular Random Forests, which proved the best among those used in our participation.

Recent analyses suggest that cigarette excise taxes lower prenatal smoking. It is unclear, however, whether the association between taxes and prenatal smoking represents a decline among women of reproductive age or a particular response by pregnant women. We address this question directly with an analysis of quit and relapse behavior during and after pregnancy. We find that the price elasticity...

During production of glottal stops the glottal vibration has unequal cycles and is caused by laryngealization. While one can perceive the features of laryngealization in the speech, it is difficult to analyse the signal to detect these source features from the standard spectrum-based analysis methods. In this paper we propose methods to extract the voice source vibration characteristics, and sh...

This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, the article demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. The article concludes that crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance a...

A further study is reported from a program of research exploring the improvement of speech perception by hearing-impaired persons via enhancement of acoustic features of consonants (10,11). Enhancements were applied to certain acoustic segments of consonants, segments known to be useful in consonant perception by normal-hearing persons but often not for persons with severe/profound hearing loss...

background and objective: stop-bang questionnaire is a well-known obstructive sleep apnea (osa) screening tool. this study aimed to evaluate that patients with high probability of osa in stop-bang questionnaire meet the criteria for assessment by split-night polysomnography (psg). materials and methods: patients who were admitted to three sleep clinics and underwent full-night psg entered into ...

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN COMMUNICATION SCIENCE AND DISORDERS • Volume 28 • 20–29 • Spring 2001 © NSSLHA 1092-5171/01/2801-0020 ABSTRACT: Spoken word recognition was investigated in a group of children aged 3:0 to 7:11 (years:months) to assess the relationship between five measures of language development and spoken word recognition accuracy. Two spoken word recognition tasks, gated words and nois...

In the original ’bag of words’ model image features are seen as independent and orderless. In the real world, relative co-occurrence of image features defines the spatial order in which they appear. This means the spatial relationship between image features has potential information to be exploited in a classification task. Our model attempts to discover the usefulness of the co-occurrence info...