My thesis concentrates on the distinction between pro tanto reasons and allthings-considered judgments, and their relation to normative justification. Negatively, it seeks to show that a prevailing kind of account of this relation should be rejected, namely that family of views which takes it that every reason has an associated weight, and the truth with respect to any issue is established by w...

The work presented in this paper proposes to identify contrast in the form of contrastive word pairs and prosodically signal it with emphatic accents in a Text-to-Speech (TTS) application using a Hidden-Markov-Model (HMM) based speech synthesis system. We first describe a novel method to automatically detect contrastive word pairs using textual features only and report its performance on a corp...

We present an eye-tracking experiment investigating the time course with which listeners derive pragmatic inferences from contextual information. We used as a test case the construction “It looks like an X” pronounced either with (a) a nuclear pitch accent on the final noun, or (b) a contrastive L+H* pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support a complex contrastive infer...

We study the effect of focus shift on prosodic features for Marathi, a major Indian language. In our analysis, we consider different focus locations and different focus widths. We report observations of fundamental frequency, intensity, and syllabic durations of constituent words of the utterance. F0 is studied via the accent commands of the Fujisaki model. We contrast statements containing nar...

This paper presents a new model for the task of contrastive opinion summarization (COS) particularly for controversial issues. Traditional COS methods, which mainly rely on sentence similarity measures are not sufficient for a complex controversial issue. We therefore propose an Expert-Guided Contrastive Opinion Summarization (ECOS) model. Compared to previous methods, our model can (1) integra...

The work presented in this paper proposes to identify contrast in the form of contrastive word pairs and prosodically signal it with emphatic accents in a Text-to-Speech (TTS) application using a Hidden-Markov-Model (HMM) based speech synthesis system. We first describe a novel method to automatically detect contrastive word pairs using textual features only and report its performance on a corp...

Previous research has shown that Germans produce contrastive topics with prenuclear accents exhibiting larger f0-excursions, later peaks, and longer durations than non-contrastive topics (Braun, 2006). Contrastive topic accents hence resemble L*+H, non-contrastive topic accents L+H*, but expert labelers experience difficulties in consistently labeling this distinction (ibid). Offline acceptabil...