In this paper, we propose a new approach which can automatically acquire translation templates from the unannotated bilingual spoken language corpora in the domain of travel information accessing. In the approach, two basic algorithms named grammar induction algorithm and dynamic programming algorithm are adopted. Our approach is an unsupervised, statistical, data-driven method which avoids the...

Accurate identification of phrasal translation equivalents is critical to both phrase-based and syntax-basedmachine translation systems. We show that the extraction of many phrasal translation equivalents is made impossible by word alignments done without taking syntactic structures into consideration. To address the problem, we propose a new annotation scheme where word alignment and the align...

In this paper, we present an efficient semiautomatic method for annotating English phrasal verbs on the OntoNotes corpus. Our method first constructs a phrasal verb dictionary based on Wiktionary, then annotates each candidate example on the corpus as an either a phrasal verb usage or a literal one. For efficient annotation, we use the dependency structure of a sentence to filter out highly pla...

Evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) are arguments that appeal to the evolutionary origins of evaluative beliefs to undermine their justification. This paper aims to clarify the premises and presuppositions of EDAs-a form of argument that is increasingly put to use in normative ethics. I argue that such arguments face serious obstacles. It is often overlooked, for example, that they presuppo...

Voice fundamental frequency (F0) determines the tonal quality of vowels, and its rise and fall comprise part of prosody in speech. This seemingly simple linear function results from highly complex physiological factors and thus lacks definitive explanations of the causal mechanisms. This report reviews previous studies and recent discoveries regarding the causal factors of F0 patterns and discu...

In his account of the mirror principle, Baker (1988) relies crucially on head (X) movement, to which he (compellingly) argues that the GF changing processes can be reduced. This move, along with the head movement constraint (Travis, 1984), allow Baker to account for the mirror principle. Head movement however, seems to have very different properties from phrasal (XP) movement. For example, head...

Past studies have shown that a native Spanish speaker’s use of phrasal prominence is a good indicator of her level of English prosody acquisition. Because of the cross-linguistic differences in the organization of phrasal prominence and durational contrasts, we hypothesize that those speakers with English-like prominence in their L2 speech are also expected to have acquired English-like rhythm....

In Optimality Theory (OT), recent work has been exploring the idea that the order of constituents in syntax is determined by alignment constraints, developed within the theory of Generalized Alignment (see McCarthy and Prince (1993)). Costa (1998) and Samek-Lodovici (1998) present general overviews, and both have specifically argued that OT analyses are superior to proposals expressed in terms ...

This paper describes the procedure of semantic role labeling and the development of the first manually annotated Persian Proposition Bank (PerPB) which added a layer of predicate-argument information to the syntactic structures of Persian Dependency Treebank (known as PerDT). Through the process of annotating, the annotators could see the syntactic information of all the sentences and so they a...

This paper presents a descriptive overview and formal analysis of the use of pronominal clitics for realizing various types of arguments in Persian, with particular emphasis on object clitics in the verbal domain. We argue that pronominal clitics behave more like suffixes than independent syntactic elements; in cases where they take syntactic scope over an NP or a PP, they must be phrasal affix...