Sequence Of Phrases Research Articles

Authorship attribution as a case of anomaly detection: A neural network model

Writings by the same author usually share specific traits, the so-called stylome, which is defined as an abstraction of the constraints and specific sequences of words and phrases used in the texts. Although identifying a stylome has been elusive, so

Phrasing and relative clauses in Chimwiini

We focus in this paper on two prosodic phenomena in Chimwiini: vowel length and accent (or High tone). Vowel length is determined in part by a lexical distinction between long and short vowels, and also by various morphophonemic processes that derive long vowels. Accent is penult in the default case, but final under certain morphosyntactic conditions. In order to account for the distribution of vowel length and the location of accents in a Chimwiini sentence, it is necessary to segment sentences into a sequence of phonological phrases. This paper examines the phonological phrasing of both canonical relative clauses and what we refer to as "pseudo-relative" clauses. An account of relative clause phrasing is of critical importance in Chimwiini due to the extensive use of pseudo-relatives in the language. Close examination of the pseudo-relatives reveals that their phrasing is not exactly the same as the phrasing of canonical relative clauses.

Lipreading With Local Spatiotemporal Descriptors

Visual speech information plays an important role in lipreading under noisy conditions or for listeners with a hearing impairment. In this paper, we present local spatiotemporal descriptors to represent and recognize spoken isolated phrases based solely on visual input. Spatiotemporal local binary patterns extracted from mouth regions are used for describing isolated phrase sequences. In our experiments with 817 sequences from ten phrases and 20 speakers, promising accuracies of 62% and 70% were obtained in speaker-independent and speaker-dependent recognition, respectively. In comparison with other methods on AVLetters database, the accuracy, 62.8%, of our method clearly outperforms the others. Analysis of the confusion matrix for 26 English letters shows the good clustering characteristics of visemes for the proposed descriptors. The advantages of our approach include local processing and robustness to monotonic gray-scale changes. Moreover, no error prone segmentation of moving lips is needed.

Word integration and regression programming during reading: A test of the E-Z reader 10 model.

Participants read sentences with two types of target nouns, one that did and one that did not require a determiner to form a legal verb-noun phrase sequence. Sentences were presented with and without the critical determiner to create a local noun integration difficulty when a required determiner was missing. The absence of a required determiner did not influence 1st-pass reading of the verb, the noun, and the posttarget word. It did, however, have a profound effect on 2nd-pass reading. All three words were a likely target of a regression when a required determiner was missing, and the noun and the posttarget word were likely sources of a regression. These results are consistent with novel E-Z reader model assumptions, according to which identification of the noun should be followed by its integration, and integration difficulties can lead to the initiation of a regression to the noun. However, integration difficulties influenced eye movements earlier and later than predicted by the new model.

Tutor model syntax influences the syntactical and phonological structure of crystallized songs of white-crowned sparrows

Songbirds undergo a sensitive period in which exposure to adult song is necessary for normal vocal development. During this period, a template is formed and later used as a model for comparison via auditory feedback. In montane white-crowned sparrows, Zonotrichia leucophrys oriantha, whose song typically consists of four to five distinct segments (phrases), exposure to syntactically overlapping phrase pairs during the sensitive period provides the minimum sufficient information for song assembly; exposure to isolated phrases is insufficient. This suggests that a template representing phrase-pair information is sufficient for guiding normal song production. However, birds may also store and use the additional information they receive when tutored with full song. In the present study, we tutored white-crowned sparrows with a range of phrase sequence information. We found that sparrows tutored with varying levels of syntax information differed in the syntactical (phrase sequence) and phonological (phrase structure) characteristics of their final songs. Sparrows tutored with isolated phrases produced songs that were syntactically and, surprisingly, phonologically deficient. The crystallized songs of birds tutored with full song generally consisted of five phrase types, whereas those of birds tutored with phrase pairs generally had four phrase types. In addition, birds tutored with phrase pairs combined phrases from different tutors in their final songs, while birds tutored with full song did not. These results suggest that the additional syntactical information present in full song is stored and later used. Also, the ability to accurately reproduce phrase structure is linked to the availability of syntax information during the sensitive period.

Pre-editing and Recursive-Phrase Composites for a Better English-to-Arabic Machine Translation

This research presents an approach for an English-to-Arabic Machine Translation System based on Building correct grammar and phrase structures first and then automatically deriving Translation Rules for phrase translation. For every English phrase, the grammar is first analysed and then a corresponding Arabic translation is given which would be used by the machine learning system to produce a translation rule with the help of a dictionary and the user. These same derived rules can partially be used for other phrase sequences especially in the case of a phrase consisting of a number of smaller phrases and thus implemeting the idea of recusive phrase strucutres. The approach was implemented and tested on simple cases and the results are given which indicate that this approach is successful for small to medium phrases. Our approach is an enhancement on existing phrase translation techniques because it analyses the source language grammar first, then builds a syntactic structure before proceeding with the machine learning process of learning the translation rules. Our approach is enhancement on existing phrase based translations in two directions: the grammar editing before the translation rules and the derived translation rules can be complete for complete phrases or are rules for translatioing smaller phrases which are subsets or larger phrases. The approach has improved the spped and correctness of phrase translations.

Constraint-based Ontology Induction from Online Customer Reviews

We present an unsupervised, domain-independent technique for inducing a product-specific ontology of product features based upon online customer reviews. We frame ontology induction as a logical assignment problem and solve it with a bounds consistency constrained logic program. Using shallow natural language processing techniques, reviews are parsed into phrase sequences where each phrase refers to a single concept. Traditional document clustering techniques are adapted to collect phrases into initial concepts. We generate a token graph for each initial concept cluster and find a maximal clique to define the corresponding logical set of concept sub-elements. The logic program assigns tokens to clique sub-elements. We apply the technique to several thousand digital camera customer reviews and evaluate the results by comparing them to the ontologies represented by several prominent online buying guides. Because our results are drawn directly from customer comments, differences between our automatically induced product features and those in extant guides may reflect opportunities for better managing customer-producer relationships rather than errors in the process.

Tiger of the Snows: Tenzing Norgay: The Boy Whose Dream Was Everest (review)

Reviewed by: Tiger of the Snows: Tenzing Norgay: The Boy Whose Dream Was Everest Deborah Stevenson Burleigh, Robert Tiger of the Snows: Tenzing Norgay: The Boy Whose Dream Was Everest; illus. by Ed Young. Atheneum, 200640p ISBN 0-689-83042-4$16.95 R Gr. 3-6 In Black Whiteness (BCCB 2/98), Burleigh drew on explorer Robert Byrd's diaries to tell of his winter alone in Antarctica; here he treats a different explorer, Tenzing Norgay, who guided Edmund Hillary to the top of Everest, making them the first two people to stand on the mountain's pinnacle. The lyrical, impressionistic text, with a sequence of short ragged-right phrases delimited by commas, suggests free verse as it briefly describes Tenzing's youthful dreams of Chomolungma (the Sherpa name for Everest) and his education in climbing and then focuses on the grueling last day of the Everest climb from the last camp to the summit. The imagistic text is an unusual choice for such a concrete experience, but the style is appropriate to Burleigh's emphasis on the spiritual side of the climb (though details make clear that Burleigh is familiar with the facts of the expedition); Tenzing's relationship with the mountain is underscored by his periodic direct address to the peak ("Chomolungma, I am with you. I am with you always"). Young's panoramic oil pastels, most in three-quarter spreads, serve the snowy landscape well, conveying its grandeur and harshness (one stunning image shows the expedition as a tiny little ant-trail dwarfed by the forbidding peaks looming above); Tenzing himself comes into closer focus toward the end, especially in his evocative close-up portrait at his moment of triumph. It's refreshing to see an Everest book that focuses entirely on Tenzing rather than the more usually limned Hillary, and this is a compelling chronicle that encourages young audiences to think not only about the physical feat but its meaning for the person performing it; it would therefore pair particularly well with Steve Jenkins' On Top of the World (BCCB 4/99). Burleigh's afterword gives a little more explanation of the climb and Tenzing Norgay's towering stature among Asians; an appreciative and affectionate note from Tenzing's son, who also summited Everest, appears on the back cover. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Mechanics of Duetting in a New Zealand Endemic, the Kokako (Callaeas cinerea wilsoni): Song at a Snail's Pace

AbstractNew Zealand's endemic, duetting kokako (Callaeas cinerea wilsoni) produce one of the longest known bird songs (ca 30 s) and duets that differ strikingly from those of most duetters in their unusual length and non‐repetitive structure, long pauses between component phrases, and the great flexibility in sex roles. Here we present a structural analysis of the vocalizations of 17 kokako pairs collected during natural song bouts and in response to conspecific playback, to gain insight into the functional role of this extraordinary vocal behavior. Males tend to sing a greater proportion of the duet than females. Like many duetting species, kokako have a moderately sized repertoire of phrases (mean repertoire size =18) and pair members tend to sing antiphonally rather than in unison. Sharing of phrase types is high among neighboring kokako ( = 86%) and repertoires are not sex specific, as is typical of some but not all duetting species. Timing characteristics, broad sharing of phrase types, and countersinging behavior strongly suggest that kokako duets play an important role in territory defense. Additionally, differences in pairs’ sex role and phrase sequence flexibility suggest that these aspects of duet performance may reflect pair‐bond length or commitment, and require a time investment by pair members.

Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical models make a contrasting prediction: partial parses which are syntactically compatible with only a proper subpart of the input are sometimes constructed, at least temporarily. Three self-paced reading experiments probed for interference from such locally coherent structures. The first tested for a distracting effect of irrelevant Subject–Predicate interpretations of Noun Phrase–Verb Phrase sequences (e.g., The coach smiled at the player tossed a frisbee ) on reading times. The second addressed the question of whether the interference effects can be treated as lexical interference, instead of involving the formation of locally coherent syntactic structures. The third replicated the reading time effects of the first two experiments with grammaticality judgments. We evaluate the dynamical account, comparing it to other approaches that also predict effects of local coherence, and arguing against accounts which rule out the formation of merely locally coherent structures.

Neural responses to the production and comprehension of syntax in identical utterances

Following up on an earlier positron emission tomography (PET) experiment ( Indefrey et al., 2001), we used a scene description paradigm to investigate whether a posterior inferior frontal region subserving syntactic encoding for speaking is also involved in syntactic parsing during listening. In the language production part of the experiment, subjects described visually presented scenes using either sentences, sequences of noun phrases, or sequences of syntactically unrelated words. In the language comprehension part of the experiment, subjects were auditorily presented with the same kinds of utterances and judged whether they matched the visual scenes. We were able to replicate the previous finding of a region in caudal Broca’s area that is sensitive to the complexity of syntactic encoding in language production. In language comprehension, no hemodynamic activation differences due to syntactic complexity were found. Given that correct performance in the judgment task did not require syntactic processing of the auditory stimuli, the results suggest that the degree to which listeners recruit syntactic processing resources in language comprehension may be a function of the syntactic demands of the task or the stimulus material.

The Shaping of Gary Snyder's Ecological Consciousness

The Shaping of Gary Snyder's Ecological Consciousness Ayako Takahashi Lay down these wordsBefore your mind like rocks. (Riprap 32) Gary Snyder has been a cultural bridge between East and West since the late 1950's.1 Together with Allen Ginsberg—who was widely known as a "Beat" poet, read "Howl" at Six Gallery in 1955, and who was deeply affected by Eastern philosophy and the Buddhist poet Phillip Wheren—Snyder turned to Eastern Philosophy for his poetic inspiration. His poetry and essays examine various critical concerns, and recently many studies have been done, from critical and anthropological angles, as well as from the view of "an ecological consciousness." Consequently, Gary Snyder is being placed in the tradition of Robert Bly and Ezra Pound, and he has attracted the attention of comparatists in China, who are interested in the influences of Zen, Taoism, Hua-yen Buddhism and Cathay's upon his work. Snyder's poetic identification of the mind with things, as we read in the poem "Riprap" and others, may derive from his interest in Hua-yen Buddhism. According to this philosophy, the metaphor for the interconnectedness of nature is "the jeweled net of Indra" and is mirrored in ecological images. Robert Kern has shown Hua-yen Buddhism, especially Avatamsaka and "the jeweled net," has a prominent place in Snyder's ecological consciousness.2 Avatamsaka, as Snyder uses it, means "Flower Wreath"—a flower crown or flower earrings. It is the original name of Hua-yen Buddhism, according to "Hua-yen" a Tibetan translation of Hua-yen Buddhism, and it is symbolized literally by Hua-yen (). Likewise, the "jeweled net of Indra" that Snyder sometimes uses comes from the Hua-yen idea, , and its represents infinitely crossing relationships and the interconnectedness of all things. There is also a similarity between Snyder's principle and the Hua-yen Buddhist view, "." In [End Page 314] the Hua-yen Buddhist view, the realm of truth is called "." "" means things and truth; "" teaches us the relationships between things and truth. Among "," in "" is the world of affairs, in "" is the world of reason, in "" is the relationship between things and mind, in "" is the relationships between things and things. This interrelatedness is the essence of Snyder's ecological consciousness. In Snyder's worldview, this ecological consciousness leads to a new definition of humanism and of democracy. Wai-lim Yip argues that, for Snyder, the underlying principle is the complete awareness of all beings in nature as "self-so-complete" or tzu-jan (), as the Taoists and the Ch'an Buddhists would say.3 According to Snyder's philosophy, the identification of things with the mind does not amount to humanism, rather it is the result of "human-centeredness," a radical form of "de-humanism." This view represents the complete transition from a human-centered to an all-creature-centered—including non-human—nature. I: Capturing Things and the Mind In 1912, Ezra Pound listed as the principles of the aesthetic, direct treatment of the "things," whether subjective or objective, the use of absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation, and composition in the sequence of musical phrases.4 John Gould Fletcher tells in the preface to Goblins and Pagodas (1916) of the "doctrine of the interdependence of man and inanimate nature" which he hoped to make use of in his poetry. He felt that if he could "link up" his personality with the essence of the objective world, he might "evoke a soul" out of inanimate nature and thereby produce a rich and new kind of poetry.5 Needless to say, the haiku form had influences upon the Imagists, and Fletcher emphasizes that this influence explains the short, concise form of Imagist poetry, which nonetheless demonstrates an intense experience of nature. This is significantly different from Romanticism, which searched for the ideal of God in nature, because it could find different relationships between nature and humanity. In his first volume of poems, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, Snyder wrote some Imagistic poems. However, Snyder is clearly different from his predecessors; he doesn't use nature as a means of expression, but instead as a personal experience. For example, Snyder...

Average Profile of the Lempel-Ziv Parsing Scheme for a Markovian Source

For a Markovian source, we analyze the Lempel—Ziv parsing scheme that partitions sequences into phrases such that a new phrase is the shortest phrase not seen in the past. We consider three models: In the Markov Independent model, several sequences are generated independently by Markovian sources, and the ith phrase is the shortest prefix of the ith sequence that was not seen before as a phrase (i.e., a prefix of previous (i-1) sequences). In the other two models, only a single sequence is generated by a Markovian source. In the second model, called the Gilbert—Kadota model, a fixed number of phrases is generated according to the Lempel—Ziv algorithm, thus producing a sequence of a variable (random) length. In the last model, known also as the Lempel—Ziv model, a string of fixed length is partitioned into a variable (random) number of phrases. These three models can be efficiently represented and analyzed by digital search trees that are of interest to other algorithms such as sorting, searching, and pattern matching. In this paper we concentrate on analyzing the average profile (i.e., the average number of phrases of a given length), the typical phrase length, and the length of the last phrase. We obtain asymptotic expansions for the mean and the variance of the phrase length, and we prove that appropriately normalized phrase length in all three models tends to the standard normal distribution, which leads to bounds on the average redundancy of the Lempel—Ziv code. For the Markov Independent model, this finding is established by analytic methods (i.e., generating functions, Mellin transform, and depoissonization), while for the other two models we use a combination of analytic and probabilistic analyses.

Structural priming as implicit learning: a comparison of models of sentence production.

Structural priming reflects a tendency to generalize recently spoken or heard syntactic structures to different utterances. We propose that it is a form of implicit learning. To explore this hypothesis, we developed and tested a connectionist model of language production that incorporated mechanisms previously used to simulate implicit learning. In the model, the mechanism that learned to produce structured sequences of phrases from messages also exhibited structural priming. The ability of the model to account for structural priming depended on representational assumptions about the nature of messages and the relationship between comprehension and production. Modeling experiments showed that comprehension-based representations were important for the model's generalizations in production and that nonatomic message representations allowed a better fit to existing data on structural priming than traditional thematic-role representations.

Contribution of different cortical areas in the temporal lobes to music processing.

Music processing ability was studied in 65 right-handed patients who had undergone unilateral temporal cortectomy for the relief of intractable epilepsy, and 24 matched normal controls. The ability to recognize changes in note intervals and to distinguish between different rhythms and metres was tested by presentation of sequences of simple musical phrases with variations in either pitch or temporal dimensions. The responses (right or wrong) enabled us to determine in which component of the music processing mechanism the patients had deficits and hence, knowing the positions of the surgical lesions, to identify their separate cerebral locations. The results showed that a right temporal cortectomy impaired the use of both contour and interval information in the discrimination of melodies and a left temporal cortectomy impaired only the use of interval information. Moreover, they underlined the importance of the superior temporal gyrus in melody processing. The excision of a part of the auditory areas (posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus) was found to be most detrimental for pitch and temporal variation processing. In the temporal dimension, we observed a dissociation between metre and rhythm and the critical involvement of the anterior part of the superior temporal gyrus in metric processing. This study highlights the relevance of dissociating musical abilities into their most significant cognitive components in order to identify their separate cerebral locations.

Parsing of Sentences in a Language with Varying Word Order: Word-by-Word Variations of Processing Demands Are Revealed by Event-Related Brain Potentials

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while native speakers read German sentences in which the order of the sentence elements subject, indirect object, and direct object was systematically varied. All sentences were legal grammatical constructions. Sentences were presented word by word and a question on the role assignments had to be answered 5 s after the presentation of the final word of each sentence. Behavioral data confirmed previous findings showing that sentences whose word order deviates from the canonical sequence of subject, indirect and direct object are more difficult to process. ERPs revealed several effects which differed in their antecedent conditions, topography, and timing: (1) Anticipating a question which taxes episodic verbal knowledge was accompanied by a pronounced tonic negative shift having a left anterior maximum. (2) Articles which function as case markers in German evoked a transient, left anterior negativity whenever they indicated that a noun phrase sequence would not continue in its canonical order. (3) Nouns which follow case markers at noncanonical positions were accompanied by an enlarged transient posterior positivity. (4) Processing of words at terminal positions in sentences with a noncanonical word order was accompanied by a sequence of effects: a slow posterior positivity, a transient anterior negativity, and a transient posterior negativity, respectively. These effects are discussed in relation to functionally distinct parsing mechanisms. They show that ERPs may help to disentangle functionally distinct processes during language comprehension even when no behavioral output is generated by the participant.

Song Repertoire of the Bobolink: a Reassessment

AbstractPrevious studies have reported that male bobolinks, Dolichonyx oryzivorus, sing only two stereotyped song types. Here we reassess this description of the bobolink repertoire, using methods of sampling and classifying songs better suited to describing song diversity. Recording the songs of 51 males from five prairies in Iowa, we examined within‐ and between‐individual variation for each of three levels of bobolink singing organization: phrases, phrase sequences and repertoires. A single song was composed of 1–15 phrases selected from about 10 locally used phrase types. Shared phrases were used with similar frequencies among different males at a locality. Two‐, three‐ and four‐phrase sequences were used repeatedly in the song variants produced by individual males. Unlike other investigators, we considered each song unit composed of a unique sequence of phrases to be a different song variant. Some individuals had two basic song patterns which were varied to create an assortment of song variants. Other individuals had repertoires too complex to be described by two basic patterns. Eighteen males for which we obtained samples of 20 or more songs sang between 8 and 43 different song variants. Computing an index of singing versatility derived from information theory, we found that these individuals varied considerably in the versatility with which they delivered their song variants. Males with high versatility used a greater variety of phrase transitions and repeated song variants less often than males with low versatility. This method of describing song repertoires and singing versatility provides the potential to test hypotheses regarding the role of the bobolink song repertoire in communication and mate choice.

Acoustic Behavior of Amblycorypha parvipennis (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae)

The sounds made by Amblycorypha parvipennis Stal (Tettigoniidae: Phaneropterinae) consist of sequences of phrases produced at rates of 7-9/min with phrases 4-5 s long consisting of an average of 24 phonatomes (20-25°C). Phonatomes consisting of three or four pulse trains generated during a single wingstroke were produced at average rates of 4.5-5.5/s. Adjacent singing males alternate and overlap phrases and, where phrases overlap, phonatomes are synchronized. Although males of several phaneropterine species alternate production of phrases, and one species has been reported occasionally synchronizing lisps, no other orthopteran is known to alternate overlapped phrases and to synchronize phonatomes. Male song phrase intervals are longer during paired chorusing than when males sing alone; this suggests that phrase alternation is the result of one male being inhibited during most of the phrase of another singing katydid. Phaneropterine females typically produce single, short sounds (“ticks”) at species-identifying intervals of 17-1,130 ms following male phrases. Females of A. parvipennis are unique in producing an average of 3.2 ticks/male phrase (range, 1-17; mode, 1) and ticks falling between the phonatomes of male phrases. The only or last female tick usually falls just before (49%) or after (46%) the last phonatome of a male phrase. Sequences of female ticks fall between male phonatomes, and ticks are initiated an average of 120 ms following initiation of the previous male phonatomes. Male phonatome synchrony may have evolved so that females could time their responses and males could perceive female responses.

Association‐based parser for speech understanding systems—details of knowledge and performance evaluation

AbstractIn language processing aiming at speech understanding, not only knowledge about the syntax and the semantics, but also knowledge about the context and the control play important roles in dissolving the ambiguity due to the uncertainty in the phoneme recognition. This paper discusses the association‐based parser ASP. Discussions are made especially on the details of the employed knowledges and the result of evaluation experiment, which was performed to verify the usefulness of the association mechanism. In ASP, based on the semantic memory, episode memory, syntactic knowledge and control knowledge, the vocabulary associated with a topic in the sentence is processed with priority, and the control of the search in the intelligent backtrack is performed. In the evaluation experiment, the control knowledge to determine the object of processing from the contending partial solutions, as well as the effect of the order of solution candidates in the phrase, are particularly examined. It was verified as the result that ASP exhibits a performance independent of the order of the solution candidates under a pertinent control strategy, and the correct phrase sequence is identified, based largely on the syntactic and semantic informations, even if there does not exist an appropriate topic.

Association‐based parser for speech understanding systems—framework design on cognitive exploration

AbstractIt is well known that the use of the high‐level information data such as language information is indispensable in the speech understanding system. Because the human speech understanding process is executed unconsciously, sufficient knowledge is not yet available concerning what kind of high‐level information data are utilized and in what ways. We made two kinds of studies from the viewpoint of cognitive science to acquire knowledge about the use of high‐level information. Based on the result of study, an association based parser ASP was realized for the speech understanding system. ASP receives a large number of phrase candidate sequences as the input, and identifies the correct phrase sequence by examining successively the available syntactic, semantic and associative information. Especially, the topic is extracted first from the input candidates as a whole, and an association mechanism is employed where the vocabulary associated from the topic is processed with priority, being considered as an active word. The study in this paper is described from the viewpoint of cognitive science, and the framework of the language processing system obtained from the study is presented.