Browsing Linguistics by Title
Now showing items 124-143 of 143
-
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 ... -
The diachronic development of passive constructions from Archaic Chinese to Modern Mandarin
In this dissertation, I study the diachronic development of passive construction from Archaic Chinese to Modern Mandarin. I classify the passive forms into two major groups: 1) the monoclausal passive. 2) the biclausal ... -
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 ... -
The Role of Morphology in Word Recognition of Hebrew as a Templatic Language
Research on recognition of complex words has primarily focused on affixational complexity in concatenative languages. This dissertation investigates both templatic and affixational complexity in Hebrew, a templatic language, ... -
The semantic variability of the emphatic construction koso -e in Old Japanese
There is an interesting emphatic construction (called a koso –e construction) in Old Japanese, in which the focus particle koso concords with the exclamatory (-e) sentence ending form. When koso focuses on an irrealis/subjunctive ... -
The Spatiality of Perceptual Dialectology
A criticism that has been leveled against modern sociolinguistic research is that “space [has been] carefully controlled out of” studies and that "spatial variation [... is] not examined" (Britain 2010b, p. 3). This ... -
The Suitability of Generative Adversarial Training for BERT Natural Language Generation
This thesis presents a study that was designed to test the effect of generative adversarial network (GAN) training on the quality of natural language generation (NLG) using a pre-trained language model architecture: ... -
The Weighted Möbius Score: A Unified Framework for Feature Attribution
Feature attribution aims to explain the reasoning behind a black-box model's prediction by identifying the impact of each feature on the prediction. Recent work has extended feature attribution to interactions between ... -
Three Cheers For Partisanship: Lexical Framing and Applause in U.S. Presidential Primary Debates
Polarization in American politics is at its highest levels in recent history. This polarization can be observed not only in the behaviors of citizens and the politicians who represent them, but also in the rhetoric that ... -
Toward the Emergence of Quantifiers
This thesis explores factors influencing the emergence of quantifiers in a signaling game. It includes a few novel contributions. First is a new signaling game, called the Quantifier Game, designed to provide a setting ... -
Tracing and Reducing Lexical Ambiguity in Automatically Inferred Grammars
While the automated creation of machine-readable grammars is a valuable resource for linguists who wish to work with these grammars for linguistic hypothesis testing, the complexity of developing a system capable of creating ... -
Transfer Learning Using L2 Speech to Improve Automatic Speech Recognition of Dysarthric Speech
Dysarthria is a class of speech disorders associated with impairments to a person’s motor system. Dysarthric speech is diverse but is broadly characterized by reduced prosodic, phonation, and articulatory precision (Rowe ... -
Um and Uh, and the Expression of Stance in Conversational Speech
Um and uh are some of the most frequent items in spoken American and British English (Biber et al., 1999). They have been traditionally treated as disfluencies but recent research has focused on their discursive functions ... -
Understanding and Generating Multi-Sentence Texts
English is often found in units comprised of multiple sentences, but synthesizing information across sentence boundaries, whether for understanding or generation, is a difficult challenge for natural language processing ... -
Unsupervised Morphological Word Clustering
(2013-04-17)This thesis describes a system which clusters the words of a given lexicon into conflation sets (sets of morphologically related words). The word clustering is based on clustering of suffixes, which, in turn, is based on ... -
Using External Knowledge to Improve Brown Clustering
In recent years, semi-supervised learning methods that rely on using low-dimensional word representation gained interest in NLP, due to their ability take advantage of vastly available unlabeled data and reduce dependence ... -
Using Lexical and Compositional Semantics to Improve HPSG Parse Selection
(2013-07-25)Accurate parse ranking is essential for deep linguistic processing applications and is one of the classic problems for academic research in NLP. Despite significant advances, there remains a big need for improvement, ... -
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 ... -
Ways to be a Good Consultant: Answer Ranking in Medical Domain
In this study, we make a move to answer ranking task of medical community question answering (QA). The task of answer ranking has four different settings based on whether features from questions or other answers are used. ... -
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 ...