In this paper we present IDEAL+, a parsing architecture for Italian, which pursues the goal of pairing robustness with deep linguistic analysis by extending a shallow processing kernel with a pool of hybrid constraints for the incremental identification of grammatical relations. The parsing output takes the form of dependency structures representing the full range of instantiated functional rel...

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of an Italian broadcast news corpus at ITC-irst, under a contract with the European Language resources Distribution Agency (ELDA). The corpus consists of 30 hours of recordings transcribed and annotated with conventions similar to those adopted by the Linguistic Data Consortium for the DARPA HUB-4 corpora. The corpus will be completed and rel...

This presentation reports on recent progress the Linguistic Data Consortium has made in addressing the needs of multiple research communities by collecting, annotating and distributing, simplifying access and developing standards and tools. Specifically, it describes new trends in publication, a sample of recent projects and significant improvements to LDC Online that improve access to LDC data...

This paper describes the collection of the H1 Corpus of children’s weekly writing over the course of 3 months in 2nd and 3rd grades, aged 7-11. The texts were collected within the normal classroom setting by the teacher. Texts of children whose parents signed the permission to donate the texts to science were collected and transcribed. The corpus consists of the elicitation techniques, an overv...

It is claimed that bilingual children have two separate linguistic systems from early ages. Over the past decades, linguists carried out a number of studies to test the validity of the claim. They explored bilingual children’s code-mixing in correlation with a variety of linguistic elements, such as lexicon, syntax, phonology in different contexts, concluding that bilingual children had separat...

On the Linguistic Data Consortium’s (LDC) 20th anniversary, this paper describes the changes to the language resource landscape over the past two decades, how LDC has adjusted its practice to adapt to them and how the business model continues to grow. Specifically, we will discuss LDC’s evolving roles and changes in the sizes and types of LDC language resources (LR) as well as the data they inc...

This paper describes the Unisys MUC-3 text understanding system, a system based upon a three tiered approach to text processing in which a powerful knowledge-based form of information retrieval plays a central role . This knowledge-based form of information retrieval makes it possible to define a n effective level of text analysis that falls somewhere between what is possible with standard keyw...

This paper presents a consensus model in group decision making under linguistic assessments. It is based on the use of linguistic preferences to provide individuals' opinions, and on the use of fuzzy majority of consensus, represented by means of a linguistic quantifier. Several linguistic consensus degrees and linguistic distances are defined, acting on three levels. The consensus degrees indi...

Both infants and adults are sensitive to the non-linguistic features of speech, and this sensitivity impacts speech sound categorization, but with somewhat different effects. While both infants and adults sometimes confuse the non-linguistic for the linguistic and are susceptible to categorization problems when the two covary, adults, on the other hand, are often able to exploit non-linguistic ...

Human languages contain very little unconditioned variation. In contexts where language learners are exposed to input that contains inconsistencies, they tend to regularise it, either by eliminating competing variants, or conditioning variant use on the context. In the present study we compare regularisation behaviour across linguistic levels, looking at how adult learners respond to variabilit...