Articles

AbstractThis paper describes methods used for generating a morphological lexicon of organization entity names in Croatian. This resource is intended for two primary tasks: template-based natural language generation and named entity identification. The main problems concerning the lexicon generation are high level of inflection in Croatian and low linguistic quality …...

AbstractThe development of natural language processing (NLP) components is resource-intensive and therefore justifies exploring ways of reducing development time and effort when building NLP components. This paper addresses the experimental fast-tracking of the development of finite-state morphological analysers for Xhosa, Swati and (Southern) Ndebele by using an existing morphological analyser …...

AbstractMorphologically rich languages pose a challenge to the annotators of treebanks with respect to the status of orthographic (space-delimited) words in the syntactic parse trees. In such languages an orthographic word may carry various, distinct, sorts of information and the question arises whether we should represent such words as a …...

AbstractThis paper deals with the treatment of constructed neologisms in a machine translation system. It focuses on a particular issue in Romance languages: relational adjectives and the role they play in prefixation. Relational adjectives are formally adjectives but are semantically linked to their base-noun. In prefixation processes, the prefix is …...

AbstractIn this paper, we define the task of Number Identification in natural context. We present and validate a language-independent semi-automatic approach to quickly building a gold standard for evaluating number identification systems by exploiting hand-aligned parallel data. We also present and extensively evaluate a robust rule-based system for number identification …...

AbstractQuestion Answering systems are systems that enable the user to ask questions in natural language and to also receive an answer in natural language. Most existing systems, however, are constructed for the English language, and it is not clear in how far these approaches are also applicable to other languages. …...

AbstractSpock is an open source tool for the easy deployment of time-aligned corpora. It is fully web-based, and has very limited server-side requirements. It allows the end-user to search the corpus in a text-driven manner, obtaining both the transcription and the corresponding sound fragment in the result page. Spock has …...

AbstractThe output of a speech recognition system is not always ideal for subsequent downstream processing, in part because speakers themselves often make mistakes. A system would accomplish speech reconstruction of its spontaneous speech input if its output were to represent, in flawless, fluent, and content-preserving English, the message that the …...

AbstractCorpus based methods are increasingly used for speech technology applications and for the development of theoretical or computer models of spoken languages. These usages range from unit selection speech synthesis to statistical modeling of speech phenomena like prosody or expressivity. In all cases, these usages require a wide range of …...

AbstractIn this paper, we discuss lemma identification in Japanese morphological analysis, which is crucial for a proper formulation of morphological analysis that benefits not only NLP researchers but also corpus linguists. Since Japanese words often have variation in orthography and the vocabulary of Japanese consists of words of several different …...

AbstractSpeech synthesis by unit selection requires the segmentation of a large single speaker high quality recording. Automatic speech recognition techniques, e.g. Hidden Markov Models (HMM), can be optimised for maximum segmentation accuracy. This paper presents the results of tuning such a phoneme segmentation system. Firstly, using no text transcription, the …...

AbstractThis article is interested in the problem of the linguistic content of a speech corpus. Depending on the target task, the phonological and linguistic content of the corpus is controlled by collecting a set of sentences which covers a preset description of phonological attributes under the constraint of an overall …...

AbstractThe metadata management system for speech corpora “memasysco” has been developed at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) and is applied for the first time to document the speech corpus “German Today”. memasysco is based on a data model for the documentation of speech corpora and contains two generic XML …...

AbstractThe paper describes a method of word phonosemantics estimation. We treat phonosemantics as a subconscious emotional perception of word sounding independent on the word meaning. The method is based on the data about emotional perception of sounds obtained from a number of respondents. A program estimates word’s emotional characteristics using …...

AbstractIn this paper we present our recent work to develop phonemic and syllabic inventories for Castilian Spanish based on the C-ORAL-ROM corpus, a spontaneous spoken resource with varying degrees of naturalness and in different communicative contexts. These inventories have been developed by means of a phonemic and syllabic automatic transcriptor …...

AbstractThere are conflicting views in the literature as to the role of listener-adaptive processes in language production in general and articulatory reduction in particular. We present two novel pieces of corpus evidence that corroborate the hypothesis that non-lexical variation of durations is related to the speed of retrieval of stored …...

AbstractThis paper describes the use of the CasSys platform in order to achieve the chunking of conversational speech transcripts by means of cascades of Unitex transducers. Our system is involved in the EPAC project of the French National agency of Research (ANR). The aim of this project is to develop …...

AbstractSome big languages like English are spoken by a lot of people whose mother tongues are different from. Their second languages often have not only distinct accent but also different lexical and syntactic characteristics. Speech recognition performance is severely affected when the lexical, syntactic, or semantic characteristics in the training …...

AbstractThe present contribution aims at increasing our understanding of automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors involving frequent homophone or almost homophone words by confronting them to perceptual results. The long-term aim is to improve acoustic modelling of these items to reduce automatic transcription errors. A first question of interest addressed in …...

AbstractIn the present contribution we start with an overview of the linguistic situation of Luxembourg. We then describe specificities of spoken and written Lëtzebuergesch, with respect to automatic speech processing. Multilingual code-switching and code-mixing, poor writing standardization as compared to languages such as English or French, a large diversity of …...