Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Speech Interface To Genealogical Data, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

This talk presents an interface that has been developed to enable users to access genealogical information via speech. Whereas the more traditional approaches for accessing data are prevalent in today’s commercial genealogical products (e.g. windows, icons, and point-and-click methods), hands-free access to information is becoming increasingly popular. There would seem to be a potential demand for speech-based access to genealogical information, particularly among enthusiasts who might require mobile access, or those who are uncomfortable with or unable to use manual methods. Yet software to perform this function for genealogical access does not appear to be widely available yet.

An Integrated System For Processing Information From Genealogical Text, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Merrill Hutchison, Tim Richards, William Taysom

Faculty Publications

This presentation introduces an integrated software system that has been designed and implemented to allow processing of difficult text. The genealogical text subdomain often exhibits characteristics that do not occur in more general written language. The system we describe has been developed specifically to address the extraction and analysis of information from such specialized text.

Spanish Epenthesis: Formal And Preformance Perspectives, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Epenthesis of /e/ before sC- clusters in Spanish is documented word-initially (e.g., eJfera) as well as in word-internal contexts (e.g., subestimar). Cases of alternating epenthesis also exist (e.g., arteriosclerosis I arterioeclerosis). Epe nthesis is examined in the formal frameworks of lexical phonology and optimality theory. Both formal analyses are able to account for the majority of the data presented, however, each requires some arguably ad hoc manipulation in order to do so. From a performance standpoint, it is argued that epenthesis plays no role in the processing of native Spanish words. The appearance of epenthesis in loan words (e.g., stress …

A Usage-Based Simulation Of Spanish S-Weakening, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

The pronunciation of Spanish /s/ as an aspirate [h] (or its deletion) is studied in a usagebased simulation that assumes that prior linguistic experiences are stored as memory traces, and that these stored experiences, instead of generalizations abstracted from them, are the source of the knowledge speakers have of their language. This exploratory simulation was carried out using the algorithm of Analogical Modeling of Language (Skousen 1989, 1992).

Lg-Soar: Parsing For Information, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Merrill Hutchison, Tim Richards, William Taysom

Faculty Publications

Mine content from problematic text

Address complicated linguistic issues

Output information into a usable format

Integrate components within an agent architecture

A Two-Level Implementation For Lushootseed Morphology, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

This paper describes the implementatio of a computer system that processes Lushootseed word forms. Built on the two-level model and leveraging finite-state technology, the system is able both to parse surface forms to arives at the underlying morphemic decomposition, and to generate surface forms given such a representation. Components of the system are discussed including the lexicon architecture, rule formulation and specification, ans the word-structurer grammar. Issues relevant to processing Lushootseed are discussed including reduplication, allomorphic variation, inflectional and derivational affixation, and morphophonemic alternations.

An Operator-Based Account Of Semantic Processing, Deryle W. Lonsdale, C. Anton Rytting

Faculty Publications

This paper explores issues of psychological plausibility in modeling natural language understanding within Soar, a symbolic cognitive model. It focuses on constructing syntactic and semantic representations in simulated real time, with particular emphasis on word sense disambiguation (WSD). We discuss (i) what level of WSD should be modeled and (ii) how to use resources such as WordNet to inform these models. A preliminary model of coarse-grained WSD is included to show how syntactic, semantic, and other knowledge sources interact in Soar. Finally, we explore issues of interleaving, learning, and integrating other WSD approaches with Soar's native model of learning.

Surface Analogy And Spelling Rules In English Vowel Alterations, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Previous psycholinguistic research into the English vocalic system suggest that the vowel alternations [ei-re, ii-£, ai-1, ow- a, u"-A], termed SPELLING RULE ALTERNATIONS, are psychologically significant for English speakers, in that they can influence the pronunciation of unfamiliar words. In this paper, the influence of these salient alternations on nonce words and neologisms is assessed. The effect of su1face analogy on the pronunciation of novel words is also examined. Surface analogy may be defined as the influence exerted by the fu lly specified surface forms of the morphemic relatives of a word. It assumes that all allomorphs of a given …