Prefactory Note. Acknowledgments. 1. Preliminaries:. Background and Overview. Optimality. Overall Structure of the Argument. Overview of Part I. 2. Optimality in Grammar: Core Syllabification in Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber:. The Heart of Dell & Elmedlaoui. Optimality Theory. Summary of discussion to date. 3. Generalization--Forms in Domination Hierarchies IBlocking and Triggering: Profuseness and Economy:. Epenthetic Structure. Do Something Only When: The Failure of Bottom--up Constructionism. 4. Generalization--Forms in Domination Hierarchies IIDo Something Except When: Blocking, or The Theory of Profuseness:. Edge--Oriented Infixation. Interaction of Weight Effects with Extrametricality. Background: Prominence--Driven Stress Systems. The Interaction of Weight and Extrametricality: Kelkar's Hindi/Urdu. Nonfinality and Nonexhaustiveness. Nonfinality and the Laws of Foot Form: Raw Minimality. Nonfinality and the Laws of Foot Form:Extended Minimality Effects. Summary of Discussion of the Except When Effect. Except meets Only: Triggering and Blocking in a Single Grammar. 5. The Construction of Grammar in Optimality Theory:. Construction of Harmonic Orderings from Phonetic and Structural Scales. The Theory of Constraint Interaction. Comparison of Entire Candidates by a Single Constraint. Ons: Binary constraints. Hnuc: Non--binary constraints. Comparison of Entire Candidates by an Entire Constraint Hierarchy. Discussion. Non--locality of interaction. Strictness of domination. Serial vs. Parallel Harmony Evaluation and Gen. Binary vs. Non--binary constraints. Paoini's Theorem on Constraint Ranking. Overview of Part II. 6. Syllable Structure Typology I: the CV Theory:. The Jakobson Typology. The Faithfulness Interactions. Groundwork. Basic CV Syllable Theory. Onsets. Codas. The Theory of Epenthesis Sites. 7. Constraint Interaction in Lardil Phonology:. The Constraints. The Ranking. Some Ranking Logic. Ranking the Constraints. Verification of Forms. Consonant--Final Stems. Vowel Final Stems. Discussion. 8. Universal Syllable Theory II: Ordinal Construction of C/V and Onset/Coda Licensing Asymmetry:. Associational Harmony. Deconstructing Hnuc: Berber, Take 1. Restricting to Binary Marks. Reconstructing the C and V Classes: Emergent Parameter Setting via Constraint Ranking. Harmonic Completeness of Possible Onsets and Peaks. Peak-- and Margin--Affinity. Interactions with Parse. Restricting Deletion and Epenthesis. Further Necessary Conditions on Possible Onsets and Nuclei. Sufficient Conditions on Possible Onsets and Nuclei. The Typology of Onset, Nucleus, and Coda Inventories. The Typology of Onset and Nucleus Inventories. Onset/Coda Licensing Asymmetries. An Example: Berber, Take 2. Simplifying the Theory by Encapsulating Constraint Packages. Encapsulating the Association Hierarchies. An Example: Berber, Take 3. Sufficiency and Richness of the Encapsulated Theory. 9. Inventory Theory and the Lexicon:. Language--Particular Inventories. Harmonic Bounding and Nucleus, Syllable, and Word Inventories. Segmental Inventories. Universal Inventories. Segmental Inventories. Syllabic Inventories. Optimality in the Lexicon. 10. Foundational Issues and Theory--Comparisons:. Thinking about Optimality. Fear of Optimization. The Reassurance. The Connectionism Connection, and other Computation--based Comparisons. Why Optimality Theory has nothing to do with connectionism. Why Optimality Theory is deeply connected to connectionism. Harmony Maximization and Symbolic Cognition. Analysis of 'Phonotactics+Repair' Theories. CV Syllable Structure and Repair. General Structure of the Comparisons: Repair Analysis. Persistent Rule Theory. English Closed Syllable Shortening. Shona Tone Spreading. Summary. The Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies. Appendix. A.1 The Cancellation and Cancellation/Domination Lemmas. A.2 CV Syllable Structure. A.3 Paoinia s Theorem on Constraint--ranking. References. Index of Constraints. Index of Languages. General Index

http://www.roozbehhormozi.persiangig.com/document/%5bAlan_Prince,_Paul_Smolensky%5d_Optimality_Theory_C(BookFi.org).pdf

Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar

Handwriting has continued to persist as a means of communication and recording information in day-to-day life even with the introduction of new technologies. Given its ubiquity in human transactions, machine recognition of handwriting has practical significance, as in reading handwritten notes in a PDA, in postal addresses on envelopes, in amounts in bank checks, in handwritten fields in forms, etc. This overview describes the nature of handwritten language, how it is transduced into electronic data, and the basic concepts behind written language recognition algorithms. Both the online case (which pertains to the availability of trajectory data during writing) and the off-line case (which pertains to scanned images) are considered. Algorithms for preprocessing, character and word recognition, and performance with practical systems are indicated. Other fields of application, like signature verification, writer authentification, handwriting learning tools are also considered.

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Online and off-line handwriting recognition: a comprehensive survey

The FERET database and evaluation procedure for face-recognition algorithms

A fundamentally new approach to the theory of phonology and its relation to syntax is developed in this book, which is the first to address the question of the relation between syntax and phonology in a systematic way.This general theory differs from its predecessors in the generative tradition in several respects. By arguing that the intonational structure of a sentence determines certain aspects of its stress pattern or rhythmic structure, and not vice versa, it provides a novel view of the intonation-stress relation. It also offers a new theory of the focus-prosody relation that solves a variety of classic puzzles and involves an appeal to the place of a focused constituent in the predicate-argument structure of the sentence. The book also includes other novel features, among them a development of the metrical grid theory of stress (including a complete treatment of English word stress in this framework), the representation of juncture in terms of "silent" positions in the metrical grid (with a treatment of sandhi in terms of this rhythmic juncture), and a "rhythmic" nonsyntactic approach to the basic phonology of function words in EnglishElisabeth 0. Selkirk is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. This book is tenth in the series, Current Studies in Linguistics.

Phonology and Syntax: The Relation between Sound and Structure

This article describes three statistical models for natural language parsing. The models extend methods from probabilistic context-free grammars to lexicalized grammars, leading to approaches in which a parse tree is represented as the sequence of decisions corresponding to a head-centered, top-down derivation of the tree. Independence assumptions then lead to parameters that encode the X-bar schema, subcategorization, ordering of complements, placement of adjuncts, bigram lexical dependencies, wh-movement, and preferences for close attachment. All of these preferences are expressed by probabilities conditioned on lexical heads. The models are evaluated on the Penn Wall Street Journal Treebank, showing that their accuracy is competitive with other models in the literature. To gain a better understanding of the models, we also give results on different constituent types, as well as a breakdown of precision/recall results in recovering various types of dependencies. We analyze various characteristics of the models through experiments on parsing accuracy, by collecting frequencies of various structures in the treebank, and through linguistically motivated examples. Finally, we compare the models to others that have been applied to parsing the treebank, aiming to give some explanation of the difference in performance of the various models.

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Head-Driven Statistical Models for Natural Language Parsing

This paper reports the results of our experiments on speaker identification in the SCOTUS corpus, which includes oral arguments from the Supreme Court of the United States. Our main findings are as follows: 1) a combination of Gaussian mixture models and monophone HMM models attains near‐100% text‐independent identification accuracy on utterances that are longer than one second; (2) the sampling rate of 11025 Hz achieves the best performance (higher sampling rates are harmful); and a sampling rate as low as 2000 Hz still achieves more than 90% accuracy; (3) a distance score based on likelihood numbers was used to measure the variability of phones among speakers; we found that the most variable phone is the phone UH (as in good), and the velar nasal NG is more variable than the other two nasal sounds M and N; 4.) our models achieved “perfect” forced alignment on very long speech segments (one hour). These findings and their significance are discussed.

/pdf/speaker-identification-on-the-scotus-corpus-327ao57ndt.pdf

Speaker identification on the SCOTUS corpus

Thesis. 1975. Ph.D.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics.

The intonational system of English

`Linguistic annotation' covers any descriptive or analytic notations applied to raw language data. The basic data may be in the form of time functions -- audio, video and/or physiological recordings -- or it may be textual. The added notations may include transcriptions of all sorts (from phonetic features to discourse structures), part-of-speech and sense tagging, syntactic analysis, `named entity' identification, co-reference annotation, and so on. While there are several ongoing efforts to provide formats and tools for such annotations and to publish annotated linguistic databases, the lack of widely accepted standards is becoming a critical problem. Proposed standards, to the extent they exist, have focussed on file formats. This paper focuses instead on the logical structure of linguistic annotations. We survey a wide variety of existing annotation formats and demonstrate a common conceptual core, the annotation graph. This provides a formal framework for constructing, maintaining and searching linguistic annotations, while remaining consistent with many alternative data structures and file formats.

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation

We report the status of the UNIPEN project of data exchange and recognizer benchmarks started two years ago at the initiative of the International Association of Pattern Recognition (Technical Committee 11). The purpose of the project is to propose and implement solutions to the growing need of handwriting samples for online handwriting recognizers used by pen-based computers. Researchers from several companies and universities have agreed on a data format, a platform of data exchange and a protocol for recognizer benchmarks. The online handwriting data of concern may include handprint and cursive from various alphabets (including Latin and Chinese), signatures and pen gestures. These data will be compiled and distributed by the Linguistic Data Consortium. The benchmarks will be arbitrated the US National Institute of Standards and Technologies. We give a brief introduction to the UNIPEN format. We explain the protocol of data exchange and benchmarks.

/pdf/unipen-project-of-on-line-data-exchange-and-recognizer-3b2p04asvf.pdf

UNIPEN project of on-line data exchange and recognizer benchmarks

The problem of quantitatively comparing the performance of different broad-coverage grammars of English has to date resisted solution. Prima facie, known English grammars appear to disagree strongly with each other as to the elements of even the simplest sentences. For instance, the grammars of Steve Abney (Bellcore), Ezra Black (IBM), Dan Flickinger (Hewlett Packard), Claudia Gdaniec (Logos), Ralph Grishman and Tomek Strzalkowski (NYU), Phil Harrison (Boeing), Don Hindle (AT&T), Bob Ingria (BBN), and Mitch Marcus (U. of Pennsylvania) recognize in common only the following constituents, when each grammarian provides the single parse which he/she would ideally want his/her grammar to specify for three sample Brown Corpus sentences:The famed Yankee Clipper, now retired, has been assisting (as (a batting coach)).One of those capital-gains ventures, in fact, has saddled him (with Gore Court).He said this constituted a (very serious) misuse (of the (Criminal court) processes).

Mark Liberman

Papers

Speaker identification on the SCOTUS corpus

The intonational system of English

A Formal Framework for Linguistic Annotation

UNIPEN project of on-line data exchange and recognizer benchmarks

Procedure for quantitatively comparing the syntactic coverage of English grammars