Head (linguistics)

About: Head (linguistics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2540 publications have been published within this topic receiving 29023 citations. The topic is also known as: nucleus.

On the Distribution of -kolwiek 'ever' in Polish Free Relatives

Abstract: This paper analyzes the distribution of the particle - kolwiek 'ever' in Polish free relatives. The empirical observation it builds on concerns the obligatory presence of - kolwiek in complex free relatives. I argue against accounts that reduce this requirement to purely semantic considerations and propose a syntactic account instead. This account rests on independently motivated claims about the structure of Polish noun phrases and the positive setting of the DP Parameter for Polish. The crucial innovation lies in the structure proposed for wh -phrases in free relatives; I argue that such wh -phrases have a more complex internal structure than wh -phrases in questions, in that they require the topmost head inside the nominal projection, the Q head, to be filled by an overt element in order to support the maximality operator associated with the interpretation of free relatives.

Prosodic phrasing modeling for Vietnamese TTS using syntactic information

Abstract: This research aims at modeling prosodic phrasing for improving the naturalness of Vietnamese (a tonal language) speech synthesis. The proposed phrasing model includes hypotheses on: (i) prosodic structure based on syntactic rules (ii) final lengthening linked to syllabic structures and tone types. Audio files in the analysis corpus are manually transcribed at the syllable level and perceived pauses. Text files are parsed and represented with annotated-syntax trees. Statistical treatment brings out a correlation between syntactic element boundaries and pause duration. Major breaks may appear at the end of a clause or between predicates or head elements. Other rules between grammatical phrases/words or shorter clauses may trigger minor breaks. Break levels (including ones predicted by syntactic rules) and relative positions of syllables are used to train VTed, an HMM-based Text-To-Speech (TTS) system for Vietnamese. In the synthesis phase, break levels are explicitly inserted while lengthening is applied for last syllables of prosodic phrases. Perceptive testing shows an increase of 0.34 on a 5 point MOS scale, for the new prosodic informed system (3.95/5) compared to the previous TTS system (3.61/5). In the pairwise comparison test, about 70% of the synthetic voice with the proposed model is preferred to the previous version.

Building a Knowledge Base from Parsed Definitions

Abstract: This chapter focuses on a set of head nouns such as unit, group, member, and any, which occur frequently in dictionary definitions and which provide information other than strict IS-A relations with the headword. The semantic and syntactic behavior of these nouns has been analyzed by linguists and philosophers (Cruse 1986; Winston, Chaffin, and Herman 1987; Landman 1989; Jackendoff 1991). This study identifies the behavior of one of these nouns (unit) as it occurs in definitions by parsing the definitions with PEG, searching the resulting analysis structures with the tree-querying facility QT, and analyzing the semantic impact of the noun on the genus term or genus phrase. We demonstrate that an understanding of the underlying semantic structure of these nouns as obtained from dictionary definitions can be used in the development of an independent knowledge base. Elsewhere we have also demonstrated how to apply this information to the problem of sense mapping across dictionaries (see Klavans et al. 1990b).