Other Linguistics Commons^™

Numerals And Other Means Of Expressing Plurality In Language And Thought: A Developmental Perspective Across Cultures., Giovanni Giuseppe G.G. Nicosia Prof.

Numeracy

Several ancient languages use linguistic structures to differentiate between singular, dual, and plural forms that are used when one, two, or many objects are referenced. (Some languages go further, adding a trial form to differentiate two from three.) In many modern languages, numerals are used to convey precise number. After reviewing a range of ways languages express number (including the interesting case of Pirahã which does not express precise number), the paper concludes with a proposed developmental path for the expression of quantity in languages.

Limitations In Speech Recognition For Young Adults With Down Syndrome, Franceli L. Cibrian, Yingying 'Yuki' Chen, Kayla Anderson, Cecilia Marie Abrahamsson, Vivian Genaro Motti

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Speech recognition has the potential to make technology more accessible to users. However, the accuracy of speech recognition remains limited for users with disabilities, including those with Down Syndrome, and the types and frequencies of recognition errors are poorly understood. This paper characterizes these problems, focusing on errors occurring when recognizing Down Syndrome speech. We analyze the transcripts from six speech recognition algorithms (Google, IBM, Otter.ai, Microsoft, AssemblyAI, OpenAI) using the audio content of 15 individuals with Down Syndrome (331 dialogues; 3428 words). Our analysis shows: (1) significant difference in speech recognition accuracy for people with Down Syndrome compared to …

Legislative Language For Success, Sanjana Gundala

Master's Theses

Legislative committee meetings are an integral part of the lawmaking process for local and state bills. The testimony presented during these meetings is a large factor in the outcome of the proposed bill. This research uses Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques to analyze testimonies from California Legislative committee meetings from 2015-2016 in order to identify what aspects of a testimony makes it successful. A testimony is considered successful if the alignment of the testimony matches the bill outcome (alignment is "For" and the bill passes or alignment is "Against" and the bill fails). The process of finding what …

Animal Communication And Sustainability Project, Reiko Kataoka, Tridha Chatterjee

Assignment Prompts

This assignment is for the Ling 123 course. This is a GE course under Area R, and it is a large course (about 10 sections, max 25 students in each section) taught by multiple instructors.

The assignment is designed as a term project. With one or two preparatory class meetings, this two-part project (three-part including the learning) could be completed in 4-5 weeks, culminating in group presentations. The assignment would be best given toward the end of the semester as a capstone project after students have gained in-depth knowledge on mechanisms and adaptive functions of animal communication systems and the …

Non-Manual Articulators In Irish Sign Language Verbs: An Analysis With Data Mining Association Rules, Robert G. Smith, Markus Hofmann

Conference Papers

The Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus (Leeson et al., 2006) deploys a complex multi-tiered temporal data structure. The process of manually analyzing such data is laborious, cannot eliminate bias and often, important patterns can go completely unnoticed. In addition to this, as a result of the complex nature of grammatical structures contained in the corpus, identifying complex linguistic associations or patterns across tiers is simply too intricate a task for a human to carry out in an acceptable timeframe. This work explores the application of data mining techniques on a set of multi-tiered temporal data from the SOI corpus. Building …

Emotional Facial Expressions In Synthesised Sign Language Avatars: A Manual Evaluation., Robert G Smith, Brian Nolan

Other Resources

This research explores and evaluates the contribution that facial expressions might have regarding improved comprehension and acceptability in sign language avatars. Focusing specifically on Irish sign language (ISL), the Deaf (the uppercase ‘‘D’’ in the word ‘‘Deaf’’ indicates Deaf as a culture as opposed to ‘‘deaf’’ as a medical condition) community’s responsiveness to sign language avatars is examined. The hypothesis of this is as follows: augmenting an existing avatar with the seven widely accepted universal emotions identified by Ekman (Basic emotions: handbook of cognition and emotion. Wiley, London, 2005) to achieve underlying facial expressions will make that avatar more human-like …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

Bailey's Hexameters, Jeremiah Farrell, Al Shapiro

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Nat. Bailey was the most important English lexicographer before Samuel Johnson. Our interest in this essay is to report on some of the 1730 dictionary's entries for the "Entertainmen of the Curious".

Cube Mentalism, Jeremiah Farrell, Ivan Moscovich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Our tour of multidimensional cubes begins with the marking of the eight comers of a 3-cube with the eight words HOT, POT, POD, HOD, HAD, HAT, PAT, and PAD. The figure below shows how these eight inherit the labels of the HOT-PAD).die where the letter H is opposite P, the letter O is opposite T and the letter T is opposite the letter D...

The First Gathering, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The following is a photocopy of a letter I sent to my good friend James P. Fink shortly after the first Gathering in 1993. It is not reqritten or edited in any way in hopes of conveying to you some sense of my awe at how very special this event really way. My son David, then a student in Boston, was also privileged to be invited by Tom Rodgers and David and I still feel overwhelmed by the experience.

There are so many memories- and so many friends. After you have read the letter, I will remark on some of …

The Stenographic Affine Plane, Oscar Thumpbindle, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This square, composed of familiar words, is semimagic because any row or column (the rook sweeps) anagrams into STENOGRAPHIC. "Semi" means the diagonals don't. However, there are four very special diagonals; those that have words with one of the four vowels of STENOGRAPHIC in common. These four bishop sweeps will be important later. Keeping with the chess piece theme, the reader will take notice of the knight 4-tours using the consonants P, H, Rand C. For example one of these is the P-tour SAP, PEG, PIN and TOP. Another set of knight tours traces the letters S, T, G and …

Peppering Knowledge Sources With Salt: Boosting Conceptual Content For Ontology Generation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Yihong Ding, David W. Embley, Alan Melby

Faculty Publications

This paper describes work done to explore the common ground between two different ongoing research projects: the standardization of lexical and terminological resources, and the use of conceptual ontologies for information extraction and data integration. Specifically, this paper explores improving the generation of extraction ontologies through use of a comprehensive terminology database that has been represented in a standardized format for easy tool-based implementation. We show how, via the successful integration of these two distinct efforts, it is possible to leverage large-scale terminological and conceptual information having relationship-rich semantic resources in order to reformulate, match, and merge retrieved information of …

Election Day Puzzle, 1996, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Jeremiah Farrell's famous 1996 Election Day Puzzle. The puzzle was released the day before the results of the election were announced and the answer to 39 across could have been either CLINTON or BOBDOLE.