Lexical Boundary Research Articles

Comparative Analysis of Word-Building Potential of English Adverbial Suffix -ly and Its Tajik Equivalents

The article dwells on the issues beset with the comparative analysis of wordbuilding potential of English adverbial suffix -ly and its Tajik equivalents. It is noted that adverb is recognized as an independent part of speech in the comparative languages. However, its classification as a special category in these languages is uncertain, their lexical boundaries are wide, and their functional types are diverse. It is underscored that the lexical fields of adverbs are very broad and their functional types are different. It is concluded that adverbs are divided into simple, derivative, compound and composite groups based on their structure in the comprative languages and depending on their meaning they are singled out into the following sub-groups, such as: place, time, direction, frequency, modal (English), cause and purpose, manner of action and quantity and degree.

Beyond Lexical Boundaries: LLM-Generated Text Detection for Romanian Digital Libraries

Machine-generated content reshapes the landscape of digital information; hence, ensuring the authenticity of texts within digital libraries has become a paramount concern. This work introduces a corpus of approximately 60 k Romanian documents, including human-written samples as well as generated texts using six distinct Large Language Models (LLMs) and three different generation methods. Our robust experimental dataset covers five domains, namely books, news, legal, medical, and scientific publications. The exploratory text analysis revealed differences between human-authored and artificially generated texts, exposing the intricacies of lexical diversity and textual complexity. Since Romanian is a less-resourced language requiring dedicated detectors on which out-of-the-box solutions do not work, this paper introduces two techniques for discerning machine-generated texts. The first method leverages a Transformer-based model to categorize texts as human or machine-generated, while the second method extracts and examines linguistic features, such as identifying the top textual complexity indices via Kruskal–Wallis mean rank and computes burstiness, which are further fed into a machine-learning model leveraging an extreme gradient-boosting decision tree. The methods show competitive performance, with the first technique’s results outperforming the second one in two out of five domains, reaching an F1 score of 0.96. Our study also includes a text similarity analysis between human-authored and artificially generated texts, coupled with a SHAP analysis to understand which linguistic features contribute more to the classifier’s decision.

Named Entity Recognition Model Based on Feature Fusion

Named entity recognition can deeply explore semantic features and enhance the ability of vector representation of text data. This paper proposes a named entity recognition method based on multi-head attention to aim at the problem of fuzzy lexical boundary in Chinese named entity recognition. Firstly, Word2vec is used to extract word vectors, HMM is used to extract boundary vectors, ALBERT is used to extract character vectors, the Feedforward-attention mechanism is used to fuse the three vectors, and then the fused vectors representation is used to remove features by BiLSTM. Then multi-head attention is used to mine the potential word information in the text features. Finally, the text label classification results are output after the conditional random field screening. Through the verification of WeiboNER, MSRA, and CLUENER2020 datasets, the results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively improve the performance of named entity recognition.

الصورة القائمة على الادعاء في شعر عمر النَّص

The image based on the allegation - the metaphorical image and the quantitative image - comes in opposition to the truth, and it is in contrast to the truth for purposes, and that is because this is the figurative loading of knowledge and art, and that is because speech, and from here, and taking the vocabulary out of the lexical boundaries to the outside, so you give it, The metaphorical image or the image, as in the general image they are the manipulation of words and their original connotations, so as to be an unusual mutation that excites the listener or the reader.

A ‘NEW NORMAL’ OF CODE-SWITCHING: COVID-19, THE INDONESIAN MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed behavioural norms and how people conceptualise everyday life. It has led to prolific use of specific terminology that is new or was previously outside the lexical boundaries of common use. Terms like ‘social distancing’, ‘lockdown’ and ‘new normal' were previously jargon limited to specialist fields. The COVID-19 pandemic which spread globally in 2020 has led to great social change and an associated lexical influence. To study this phenomenon, we examine the lexical effects of COVID-19 on the Indonesian language, through analysis of two well-known Indonesian national newspapers – Kompas and Suara Pembaruan, for the month of May 2020. This was at a time of growing awareness of COVID-19 in Indonesia, that included a partial lockdown in Jakarta. As such, there was a great deal of attention to COVID-19 in the mass media. To study this, we apply quantitative content analysis to the sample data to identify the range and frequency of words borrowed from English. We examine this use of code-switching to also undertake qualitative analysis, exploring the various socio-linguistic dimensions of those borrowed terms. Some usage was found to address lexical gaps in Indonesian language, where other usage appeared more for stylistic, emphatic purposes, drawing on the semiotic power of English in the Indonesian context. Code-switching reiteration was particularly prominent in the sample data. We argue that through code-switching reiteration, the print media can introduce new foreign vocabulary to Indonesian readers, which subsequently generates opportunities for language change. COVID-19 has expedited this process, meaning that there has been an increased likelihood of Indonesian language change during 2020.

On Lexical Phonology of Zubairi Arabic

As its name implies, Lexical Phonology (LP) is a two-sided discipline which is very much pervasive and of a priority for particular interest. It is basically a matter of the systematic correlation of both morphology and phonology as a preliminary to screening endless items and senses. Once postulated and covered with its linguistically theoretical frames, LP has proved attractive, useful and handful in that it turns up so often in such topics as lexical items with their phonological configurations and words with their stratum-based designs. The present paper is a painstaking scrutiny of how LP is thoroughly worked out to demarcate the lexical and phonological boundaries of Zubairi Arabic lexical items with a special reference to the linguistic behavior of affix attachments. It is no doubt a massive task – it is armed with such and such amount of systematization and provided with certain 'harmless looking terms and expressions that are frequently used. In attempt to focus on this point of interaction between phonology and morphology, the paper adopts the line of reasoning that is primarily based on a tabulated description and analysis of examples so as to serve the purposes of setting some comparisons, showing certain contrasts or governing particular rules of applications as far as Zubairi words and expressions are concerned. Among many results the paper has reached is evidently the one that the structure of Zubairi Arabic lexical items is the empirical "container" in which both phonological and morphological lines of representation are sometimes crossed very sharply or sometimes paralleled very endlessly whereby their blurriness may be relative and variable.

Study on Unknown Term Translation Mining from Google Snippets

Bilingual web pages are widely used to mine translations of unknown terms. This study focused on an effective solution for obtaining relevant web pages, extracting translations with correct lexical boundaries, and ranking the translation candidates. This research adopted co-occurrence information to obtain the subject terms and then expanded the source query with the translation of the subject terms to collect effective bilingual search engine snippets. Afterwards, valid candidates were extracted from small-sized, noisy bilingual corpora using an improved frequency change measurement that combines adjacent information. This research developed a method that considers surface patterns, frequency–distance, and phonetic features to elect an appropriate translation. The experimental results revealed that the proposed method performed remarkably well for mining translations of unknown terms.

»das thierfriszt,der menschiszt«

AbstractContemporary German shows a rigid lexical segregation between humans and animals (e. g.stillen/säugen›suckle/breastfeed‹,corpse/carcass›Leiche/Kadaver‹). This was not the case historically but only evolved in Early New High German and the beginning of the New High German period. This article lays out the emergence of the lexical boundary between humans and animals using the three lexical pairsessen/fressen›eat [human]/eat [animal]‹,trinken/saufen›drink [human]/drink [animal]‹ andschwanger/trächtig›pregnant [human]/pregnant [animal]‹ on the basis of extensive corpus and dictionary studies, and pursues the question why the segregation between human and animals emerged at all and why this happened in the 18th century.

Social network size can influence linguistic malleability and the propagation of linguistic change

We learn language from our social environment, but the more sources we have, the less informative each source is, and therefore, the less weight we ascribe its input. According to this principle, people with larger social networks should give less weight to new incoming information, and should therefore be less susceptible to the influence of new speakers. This paper tests this prediction, and shows that speakers with smaller social networks indeed have more malleable linguistic representations. In particular, they are more likely to adjust their lexical boundary following exposure to a new speaker. Experiment 2 uses computational simulations to test whether this greater malleability could lead people with smaller social networks to be important for the propagation of linguistic change despite the fact that they interact with fewer people. The results indicate that when innovators were connected with people with smaller rather than larger social networks, the population exhibited greater and faster diffusion. Together these experiments show that the properties of people’s social networks can influence individuals’ learning and use as well as linguistic phenomena at the community level.

Compounds, phrases and clitics in connected speech

Abstract Four language production experiments examine how English speakers plan compound words during phonological encoding. The experiments tested production latencies in both delayed and online tasks for English noun-noun compounds (e.g., daytime), adjective-noun phrases (e.g., dark time), and monomorphemic words (e.g., denim). In delayed production, speech onset latencies reflect the total number of prosodic units in the target sentence. In online production, speech latencies reflect the size of the first prosodic unit. Compounds are metrically similar to adjective-noun phrases as they contain two lexical and two prosodic words. However, in Experiments 1 and 2, native English speakers treated the compounds as single prosodic units, indistinguishable from simple words, with RT data statistically different than that of the adjective-noun phrases. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that compounds are also treated as single prosodic units in utterances containing clitics (e.g., dishcloths are clean) as they incorporate the verb into a single phonological word (i.e. dishcloths-are). Taken together, these results suggest that English compounds are planned as single recursive prosodic units. Our data require an adaptation of the classic model of phonological encoding to incorporate a distinction between lexical and postlexical prosodic processes, such that lexical boundaries have consequences for post-lexical phonological encoding.

Translating Korean Negation: Based on the Lexically Layered Model

This study explores the hierarchy of negative prefixes in English and Korean. English prefixes could be divided into class Ⅰ affixes and class Ⅱ affixes. Korean short-form negation has five limitations of prefixes, and Korean short-form negation has broader productivity, precedes negative prefixes, works in post-lexical boundary, and has word boundary. However, Korean negative prefixes have few applications and cannot transgress short-form negation, work in lexical boundary, and has syllable boundary. We could consider Korean short-form negation as a class Ⅱ affixes and Korean negative prefixes as a class Ⅰ affix. We also could apply this hierarchy to Korean-English translation&interpretation. With regards to long-form negation working in sentence boundary as class Ⅲ negation, the model matches each language’s negation to other language’s negation. If there are no appropriate expressions in one category, we move to a higher boundary. However, in spoken text, we return to class Ⅱ affixes when translating English to Korean because short-form negations are used more commonly in spoken text than long-form negations.

Turn-taking in Korean conversation

On the basis of Sacks et al.’s (1974) turn-taking model, I explore the flexibility of the Korean turn-taking system. Noting first that speakers bring a turn to a stop without projected final turn elements, I propose that the turn stop is a legitimate completion specifiable as a transition-relevance place (TRP). I view turn construction as a process of improvisation in which lexical chunks are accumulated one after another to deliver a recognizable action; a TRP is thus constituted at the completion of a lexical chunk loosely tied to a prior lexical chunk. In parallel, a turn stop occurs at a lexical boundary in which the lexical chunks thus far accumulated have conveyed a complete action. I argue that any lexical boundary can serve as a TRP on the condition of action completion, as negotiated and determined by the participants’ shared knowledge and experiences. This flexibility of TRP constitution is proposed as a specification of Sacks et al.’s (1974) generic model applied to Korean conversation.

Amplitude fluctuations in a masker influence lexical segmentation in cochlear implant users.

Normal-hearing listeners show masking release, or better speech understanding in a fluctuating-amplitude masker than in a steady-amplitude masker, but most cochlear implant (CI) users consistently show little or no masking release even in artificial conditions where masking release is highly anticipated. The current study examined the hypothesis that the reduced or absent masking release in CI users is due to disruption of linguistic segmentation cues. Eleven CI subjects completed a sentence keyword identification task in a steady masker and a fluctuating masker with dips timed to increase speech availability. Lexical boundary errors in their responses were categorized as consistent or inconsistent with the use of the metrical segmentation strategy (MSS). Subjects who demonstrated masking release showed greater adherence to the MSS in the fluctuating masker compared to subjects who showed little or no masking release, while both groups used metrical segmentation cues similarly in the steady masker. Based on the characteristics of the segmentation cues, the results are interpreted as evidence that CI listeners showing little or no masking release are not reliably segregating speech from competing sounds, further suggesting that one challenge faced by CI users listening in noisy environments is a reduction of reliable segmentation cues.

Cognitive–Perceptual Examination of Remediation Approaches to Hypokinetic Dysarthria

To determine how increased vocal loudness and reduced speech rate affect listeners' cognitive-perceptual processing of hypokinetic dysarthric speech associated with Parkinson's disease. Fifty-one healthy listener participants completed a speech perception experiment. Listeners repeated phrases produced by 5 individuals with dysarthria across habitual, loud, and slow speaking modes. Listeners were allocated to habitual ( n = 17), loud ( n = 17), or slow ( n = 17) experimental conditions. Transcripts derived from the phrase repetition task were coded for overall accuracy (i.e., intelligibility), and perceptual error analyses examined how these conditions affected listeners' phonemic mapping (i.e., syllable resemblance) and lexical segmentation (i.e., lexical boundary error analysis). Both speech conditions provided obvious perceptual benefits to listeners. Overall, transcript accuracy was highest in the slow condition. In the loud condition, however, improvement was evidenced across the experiment. An error analysis suggested that listeners in the loud condition prioritized acoustic-phonetic cues in their attempts to resolve the degraded signal, whereas those in the slow condition appeared to preferentially weight lexical stress cues. Increased loudness and reduced rate exhibited differential effects on listeners' perceptual processing of dysarthric speech. The current study highlights the insights that may be gained from a cognitive-perceptual approach.

A word to the eyes: Visual cues benefit lexical segmentation in noise

In English, most word-initial syllables are stressed. Listeners use these syllable strength cues to identify word boundaries in degraded acoustic conditions. This is evident in the types of lexical boundary errors they make when tasked with parsing a continuous stream of degraded speech: word boundaries are more often inserted before strong syllables than before weak syllables. Listeners also use visual cues from the talker's face to glean both phonemic and prosodic speech information in degraded listening conditions. While the benefits of lipreading have received much attention, the role of visual cues in lexical segmentation remains largely unexplored. The present study examined the effect of auditory-visual cues on lexical boundary decisions. Normal-hearing listeners identified target phrases degraded by multi-talker babble. Responses in auditory-only and auditory-visual conditions were analyzed for percent words correct and lexical boundary error type. Results indicate large inter-individual variability, but overall an increase in word identification accuracy and a decrease in lexical boundary errors in the auditory-visual condition. Further, some listeners made a greater proportion of lexical boundary insertions before strong syllables, suggesting that the addition of visual cues increased their use of syllable strength to identify word boundaries. Implications for clinical populations will be discussed.

Using tactile aids to provide low frequency information for cochlear implant users

Cochlear implant (CI) users have shown benefit from residual low-frequency hearing in the contra-lateral ear (Dorman and Gifford, 2010). One source of this benefit is the enhancement of cues important for identifying word boundaries (Spitzer et al., 2009). However, there are a large number of CI users who do not have residual hearing, but who could presumably benefit from cues available in low-frequency information. Because the frequency sensitivity of human haptic sensation is similar to that of human acoustic hearing in low frequencies, we examined the ability of tactile aids to convey low-frequency cues. Using experimental phrases designed to have low inter-word predictability, and balanced for syllabic stress (trochaic/iambic), 5 CI users and 10 normal hearing participants (simulation) provided transcriptions that were scored for percent words-correct and for errors in word segmentation (lexical boundary errors, LBE). A 350 Hz sinusoid carrier modulated with overall envelope of corresponding acoustic signal drove two bone-anchored hearing aids (BAHA), which participants held while listening. Results showed a small but significant improvement on percent words correct with tactile aid, and fewer word segmentation errors. These findings support the benefit of tactile information in the perceptual task of lexical segmentation.

Vocabulary influences older and younger listeners' processing of dysarthric speech

This study examined younger (n = 16) and older (n = 16) listeners' processing of dysarthric speech-a naturally occurring form of signal degradation. It aimed to determine how age, hearing acuity, memory, and vocabulary knowledge interacted in speech recognition and lexical segmentation. Listener transcripts were coded for accuracy and pattern of lexical boundary errors. For younger listeners, transcription accuracy was predicted by receptive vocabulary. For older listeners, this same effect existed but was moderated by pure-tone hearing thresholds. While both groups employed syllabic stress cues to inform lexical segmentation, older listeners were less reliant on this perceptual strategy. The results were interpreted to suggest that individuals with larger receptive vocabularies, with their presumed greater language familiarity, were better able to leverage cue redundancies within the speech signal to form lexical hypothesis-leading to an improved ability to comprehend dysarthric speech. This advantage was minimized as hearing thresholds increased. While the differing levels of reliance on stress cues across the listener groups could not be attributed to specific individual differences, it was hypothesized that some combination of larger vocabularies and reduced hearing thresholds in the older participant group led to them prioritize lexical cues as a segmentation frame.

Effects of prosodic strengthening and lexical boundary on /s/-stop sequences in English

This study examined how the effects of prosodic strengthening (from prosodic boundary and accent) and lexical boundary (e.g., “ice # can” vs. “eye # scan”) are acoustic-phonetically realized on English /s/-stop sequences in a sentence. First, the domain-initial strengthening effect was not strictly confined to the first segment, but could extend into the second consonant and, at least partially, into the following vowel in the #/sCV/ sequence (e.g., in “scan”). Second, the accent-induced strengthening effect was robust in all acoustic measures for the #/sCV/ sequence. Third, prosodic strengthening arising with boundary and accent gave rise to the “shortened” VOT for the voiceless stop in the #/sCV/ sequence, suggesting that prosodic strengthening can operate on the phonetic manifestation of a phonological rule to reinforce the language-specific phonetic feature, which is, in this case, {-spread glottis}. Fourth, domain-initial strengthening and accent-induced strengthening differ substantially in some aspects, suggesting that they may be encoded separately in speech production process. Finally, “ice # can” and “eye # scan” were indeed very differently realized, suggesting that the underlying lexical boundary is signaled by fine-phonetic details even when the sequences occurred phrase-internally where they appeared to be homophonous, at least impressionistically, and syllabified the same.

Familiarisation conditions and the mechanisms that underlie improved recognition of dysarthric speech

This investigation evaluated the familiarisation conditions required to promote subsequent and more long-term improvements in perceptual processing of dysarthric speech and examined the cognitive-perceptual processes that may underlie the experience-evoked learning response. Sixty listeners were randomly allocated to one of three experimental groups and were familiarised under the following conditions: (1) neurologically intact speech (control), (2) dysarthric speech (passive familiarisation), and (3) dysarthric speech coupled with written information (explicit familiarisation). All listeners completed an identical phrase transcription task immediately following familiarisation, and listeners familiarised with dysarthric speech also completed a follow-up phrase transcription task 7 days later. Listener transcripts were analysed for a measure of intelligibility (percent words correct), as well as error patterns at a segmental (percent syllable resemblance) and suprasegmental (lexical boundary errors) level of perceptual processing. The study found that intelligibility scores for listeners familiarised with dysarthric speech were significantly greater than those of the control group, with the greatest and most robust gains afforded by the explicit familiarisation condition. Relative perceptual gains in detecting phonetic and prosodic aspects of the signal varied dependent upon the familiarisation conditions, suggesting that passive familiarisation may recruit a different learning mechanism to that of a more explicit familiarisation experience involving supplementary written information. It appears that decisions regarding resource allocation during subsequent processing of dysarthric speech may be informed by the information afforded by the conditions of familiarisation.

A follow-up investigation into the mechanisms that underlie improved recognition of dysarthric speech

Differences in perceptual strategies for lexical segmentation of moderate hypokinetic dysarthric speech, apparently related to the conditions of the familiarization procedure, have been previously reported [Borrie et al., Language and Cognitive Processes (2012)]. The current follow-up investigation examined whether this difference was also observed when familiarization stimuli highlighted syllabic strength contrast cues. Forty listeners completed an identical transcription task following familiarization with dysarthric phrases presented under either passive or explicit learning conditions. Lexical boundary error patterns revealed that syllabic strength cues were exploited in both familiarization conditions. Comparisons with data previously reported afford further insight into perceptual learning of dysarthric speech.