Linguistics
Browse by
Recent Submissions
-
Speech to Text to Semantics: A Sequence-to-Sequence System for Spoken Language Understanding
Spoken language understanding entails both the automatic transcription of a speech utterance and the identification of one or more semantic concepts being conveyed by the utterance. Traditionally these systems are domain ... -
The Acoustic Cues at Prosodic Boundaries in Mandarin
Prosodic boundary labeling is an important task not only for its direct application in speech synthesis but also for constructing speech corpora for speech synthesis. However, due to the lack of quantitive study on Mandarin ... -
Inferring Grammars from Interlinear Glossed Text: Extracting Typological and Lexical Properties for the Automatic Generation of HPSG Grammars
This dissertation presents a grammar inference system that leverages linguistic knowledge recorded in the form of annotations in interlinear glossed text (IGT) and in a meta-grammar engineering system (the LinGO Grammar ... -
Stylistic variation in African American Language: examining the social meaning of linguistic features in a Seattle community
Linguistic features associated with African American Language (AAL) may have a large set of ideological and functional meanings beyond ethnic identity. While sociolinguists know a lot, comparatively, about regional and ... -
The Language of Law: An Analysis of Gender and Turn-Taking in U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments
In this study, I present a corpus of short exchanges between speakers in U.S. Supreme Court Oral Arguments. Each exchange is labeled on a spectrum of “cooperative” to “competitive” by a human annotator with legal experience ... -
Old Stereotypes "Live Free or Die": Addressing the Evaluation Problem of non-rhoticity in New Hampshire
Recent research examining New Hampshire English has demonstrated that the traditional Eastern New England features are dissipating among New Hampshirites (Nagy, 2001; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2005; Nagy & Irwin, 2010; Stanford, ... -
On the Statistical Significance Testing for Natural Language Processing
This thesis explores and compares statistical significance tests frequently used in comparing Natural Language Processing (NLP) system performance in several aspects. We begin by establishing the fundamentals of the NLP ... -
Enriching Scientific Paper Embeddings with Citation Context
Amid profusion of scientific literature, methods to organize and search available papers are quite valuable. Embedded representations of papers have potential to be used as input to a variety of tasks related to research ... -
Braiding Language (by Computer): Lushootseed Grammar Engineering
This dissertation describes the beginnings of the t̕əbšucid project. t̕əbšucid, literally the braiding of language, is a way to refer to "grammar" in Lushootseed (also known as Puget Salish, ISO-639-3:lut). The t̕əbšucid ... -
Productivity, influence, and evolution: The complex language shift of Modern Ladino
This dissertation uses data from interviews with Seattle Ladino speakers, an online forum in Ladino, and documents from the University of Washington Sephardic Studies Collection to investigate the language shift that Modern ... -
Issues in Named Entity Recognition on Early Modern English Letters
The influx of digitized historical documents into online collections has made the study of these documents much more accessible to researchers and the general public. This data, however, is frequently raw data sometimes ... -
Verb-linking and Events in Syntax: The Case of Uyghur -(i)p Constructions
This dissertation explores the syntactic structures of Uyghur multi-verb constructions formed using the verb-linking -(i)p suffix. In such constructions, only the final verb is inflected for tense, and -(i)p attaches to ... -
Named Entity Resolution for Historical Texts
The field of digital humanities has spurred an increase in applications of computational lin- guistics to historical documents, but the field remains underdeveloped. Standard natural language processing (NLP) techniques ... -
Pronouns Raising and Emerging
This dissertation revisits the question of the syntactic and semantic status of pronouns, incorporating new syntactic, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic data to support an analysis of n-to-D head movement in the nominal domain. ... -
Multi-predicate Constructions in Nuuchahnulth
This dissertation documents and models two types of multi-predicate constructions in Nuuchahnulth: serial verb constructions, and a construction involving the suffix -(q)ḥ, which is called the predicate linker. I define a ... -
When change comes from within: The origin and diachronic development of 'positive' anymore from pre-Modern Scots to Modern North American English
The goal of this thesis is to provide a syntactic account of the diachronic development of the adverb anymore from a polarity sensitive aspectual adverb in Late Middle Scots (approximately 1550 to 1700), shown in (1); to ... -
Contextual Scripture Recommendation for Writers
Recommendation of book passages, quotes, or citations based on a given text can aid writing, research, literary analysis, and the incorporation of legal references (e.g. laws, previous cases). Each of these applications ... -
Korean Learners' Long-Term Individual Networks of Practice
This dissertation examines investment in language learning, especially how that investment looks over the entirety of a learner’s target language-related journey. It investigates investment, in terms of positive and negative ... -
Exploring Phone Recognition in Pre-verbal and Dysarthric Speech
In this study, we perform phone recognition on speech utterances made by two groups of people: adults who have speech articulation disorders and young children learning to speak language. We explore how these utterances ... -
&0: The Syntax and Semantics of 'Slash' and 'And/or'
I claim that 'slash' has become the first new coordinator in English in recent history. I use data from naturally observed spontaneous conversation and examples from corpora to demonstrate that 'slash' is an English syntactic ...
RSS 1.0