Computational Linguistics Commons^™

Data-Driven Synthesis And Evaluation Of Syntactic Facial Expressions In American Sign Language Animation, Hernisa Kacorri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology to automatically synthesize linguistically accurate and natural-looking animations of American Sign Language (ASL) would make it easier to add ASL content to websites and media, thereby increasing information accessibility for many people who are deaf and have low English literacy skills. State-of-art sign language animation tools focus mostly on accuracy of manual signs rather than on the facial expressions. We are investigating the synthesis of syntactic ASL facial expressions, which are grammatically required and essential to the meaning of sentences. In this thesis, we propose to: (1) explore the methodological aspects of evaluating sign language animations with facial expressions, …

Argumentation Mining In Parliamentary Discourse, Nona Naderi

OSSA Conference Archive

In parliamentary discourse, politicians expound their beliefs and goals through argumentation, and, to persuade the audience, they communicate their values by highlighting some aspect of an issue, an action which is commonly known as framing. The choices of frames are typically dependent upon the speaker’s ideology.

In this proposed doctoral work, we will computationally analyze framing strategies and present a model for discovering the latent structure of framing of real-world issues in Canadian parliamentary discourse.

Hpcnmf: A High-Performance Toolbox For Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Karthik Devarajan, Guoli Wang

COBRA Preprint Series

Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a widely used machine learning algorithm for dimension reduction of large-scale data. It has found successful applications in a variety of fields such as computational biology, neuroscience, natural language processing, information retrieval, image processing and speech recognition. In bioinformatics, for example, it has been used to extract patterns and profiles from genomic and text-mining data as well as in protein sequence and structure analysis. While the scientific performance of NMF is very promising in dealing with high dimensional data sets and complex data structures, its computational cost is high and sometimes could be critical for …

Radical Recognition In Off-Line Handwritten Chinese Characters Using Non-Negative Matrix Factorization, Xiangying Shuai

Senior Projects Spring 2016

In the past decade, handwritten Chinese character recognition has received renewed interest with the emergence of touch screen devices. Other popular applications include on-line Chinese character dictionary look-up and visual translation in mobile phone applications. Due to the complex structure of Chinese characters, this classification task is not exactly an easy one, as it involves knowledge from mathematics, computer science, and linguistics.

Given a large image database of handwritten character data, the goal of my senior project is to use Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF), a recent method for finding a suitable representation (parts-based representation) of image data, to detect specific …