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This paper discusses an attempt to write a computer program that would properly model the phonological development of Chinese from Middle Chinese to Modern Peking Mandarin, using the rules in Chen 1976. Several problems are encountered, the most significant being that the rules cannot apply in the same order for all lexical items. The significance of this in terms of the implementation of sound change is briefly discussed.
This special issue of the ZAS Papers in Linguistics contains a collection of papers of the French-German Thematic Summerschool on "Cognitive and physical models of speech production, and speech perception and of their interaction".
Organized by Susanne Fuchs (ZAS Berlin), Jonathan Harrington (IPdS Kiel), Pascal Perrier (ICP Grenoble) and Bernd Pompino-Marschall (HUB and ZAS Berlin) and funded by the German-French University in Saarbrücken this summerschool was held from September 19th till 24th 2004 at the coast of the Baltic Sea at the Heimvolkshochschule Lubmin (Germany) with 45 participants from Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Canada. The scientific program of this summerschool that is reprinted at the end of this volume included 11 key-note presentations by invited speakers, 21 oral presentations and a poster session (8 presentations). The names and addresses of all participants are also given in the back matter of this volume.
All participants was offered the opportunity to publish an extended version of their presentation in the ZAS Papers in Linguistics. All submitted papers underwent a review and an editing procedure by external experts and the organizers of the summerschool. As it is the case in a summerschool, papers present either works in progress, or works at a more advanced stage, or tutorials. They are ordered alphabetically by their first author's name, fortunately resulting in the fact that this special issue starts out with the paper that won the award as best pre-doctoral presentation, i.e. Sophie Dupont, Jérôme Aubin and Lucie Ménard with "A study of the McGurk effect in 4 and 5-year-old French Canadian children".
The author presents MASSY, the MODULAR AUDIOVISUAL SPEECH SYNTHESIZER. The system combines two approaches of visual speech synthesis. Two control models are implemented: a (data based) di-viseme model and a (rule based) dominance model where both produce control commands in a parameterized articulation space. Analogously two visualization methods are implemented: an image based (video-realistic) face model and a 3D synthetic head. Both face models can be driven by both the data based and the rule based articulation model.
The high-level visual speech synthesis generates a sequence of control commands for the visible articulation. For every virtual articulator (articulation parameter) the 3D synthetic face model defines a set of displacement vectors for the vertices of the 3D objects of the head. The vertices of the 3D synthetic head then are moved by linear combinations of these displacement vectors to visualize articulation movements. For the image based video synthesis a single reference image is deformed to fit the facial properties derived from the control commands. Facial feature points and facial displacements have to be defined for the reference image. The algorithm can also use an image database with appropriately annotated facial properties. An example database was built automatically from video recordings. Both the 3D synthetic face and the image based face generate visual speech that is capable to increase the intelligibility of audible speech.
Other well known image based audiovisual speech synthesis systems like MIKETALK and VIDEO REWRITE concatenate pre-recorded single images or video sequences, respectively. Parametric talking heads like BALDI control a parametric face with a parametric articulation model. The presented system demonstrates the compatibility of parametric and data based visual speech synthesis approaches.
The goal of our current project is to build a system that can learn to imitate a version of a spoken utterance using an articulatory speech synthesiser. The approach is informed and inspired by knowledge of early infant speech development. Thus we expect our system to reproduce and exploit the utility of infant behaviours such as listening, vocal play, babbling and word imitation. We expect our system to develop a relationship between the sound-making capabilities of its vocal tract and the phonetic/phonological structure of imitated utterances. At the heart of our approach is the learning of an inverse model that relates acoustic and motor representations of speech. The acoustic to auditory mappings uses an auditory filter bank and a self-organizing phase of learning. The inverse model from auditory to vocal tract control parameters is estimated using a babbling phase, in which the vocal tract is essentially driven in a random manner, much like the babbling phase of speech acquisition in infants. The complete system can be used to imitate simple utterances through a direct mapping from sound to control parameters. Our initial results show that this procedure works well for sounds generated by its own voice. Further work is needed to build a phonological control level and achieve better performance with real speech.
The two papers included in this volume have developed from work with the CHILDES tools and the Media Editor in the two research projects, "Second language acquisition of German by Russian learners", sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, from 1998 to 1999 (directed by Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, and Wolfgang Klein, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) and "The age factor in the acquisition of German as a second language", sponsored by the German Science Foundation (DFG), Bonn, since 2000 (directed by Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, and Christine Dimroth, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen). The CHILDES Project has been developed and is being continuously improved at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, under the supervision of Brian MacWhinney. Having used the CHILDES tools for more than ten years for transcribing and analyzing Greek child data there it was no question that I would also use them for research into the acquisition of German as a second language and analyze the big amount of spontaneous speech gathered from two Russian girls with the help of the CLAN programs. When in the spring of 1997, Steven Gillis from the University of Antwerp (in collaboration with Gert Durieux) developed a lexicon-based automatic coding system based on the CLAN program MOR and suitable for coding languages with richer morphologies than English, such as Modern Greek. Coding huge amounts of data then became much quicker and more comfortable so that I decided to adopt this system for German as well. The paper "Working with the CHILDES Tools" is based on two earlier manuscripts which have grown out of my research on Greek child language and the many CHILDES workshops taught in Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Brazil over the years. Its contents have now been adapted to the requirements of research into the acquisition of German as a second language and for use on Windows.
In this text, we describe the development of a broad coverage grammar for Japanese that has been built for and used in different application contexts. The grammar is based on work done in the Verbmobil project (Siegel 2000) on machine translation of spoken dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The second application for JACY was the automatic email response task. Grammar development was described in Oepen et al. (2002a). Third, it was applied to the task of understanding material on mobile phones available on the internet, while embedded in the project DeepThought (Callmeier et al. 2004, Uszkoreit et al. 2004). Currently, it is being used for treebanking and ontology extraction from dictionary definition sentences by the Japanese company NTT (Bond et al. 2004).
Das Problem des Transfers in der maschinellen Übersetzung von Japanisch nach Englisch ist fehlende Information über Numerus und Definitheit im Japanischen, die für die Wahl der englischen Artikel und die Nomenmarkierung gebraucht wird. Obwohl dieses Problem signifikant ist, beschäftigt sich die Forschungsliteratur kaum damit. [...] Wir bsaieren unsere Untersuchungen auf experimentell erhobenen Daten aus einem Experiment über deutsch-japanische gedolmetschte Terminaushandlungsdialoge [...]. Auf diese Weise können Phänomene bestimmt werden, die für die Domäne von VERBMOBIL relevant sind. Wir sehen unser Vorgehen in Übereinstimmung mit dem 'Sublanguage'-Ansatz [...].
Eins der signifikanten Probleme in der maschinellen Übersetzung japanische in deutsche Sprache ist die fehlende Information und Definitheit im japanischen Analyse-Output. Eine effiziente Lösung dieses Problems ist es, die Suche nach der relevanten Information in den Transfer zu integrieren. Transferregeln werden mit Präferenzregeln und Default-Regeln kombiniert. Dadurch wird Information über lexikalische Restriktionen der Zielsprache, über die Domäne und über den Diskurs zugänglich.
Japanese is often taken to be strictly head-final in its syntax. In our work on a broad-coverage, precision implemented HPSG for Japanese, we have found that while this is generally true, there are nonetheless a few minor exceptions to the broad trend. In this paper, we describe the grammar engineering project, present the exceptions we have found, and conclude that this kind of phenomenon motivates on the one hand the HPSG type hierarchical approach which allows for the statement of both broad generalizations and exceptions to those generalizations and on the other hand the usefulness of grammar engineering as a means of testing linguistic hypotheses.
We present a broad coverage Japanese grammar written in the HPSG formalism with MRS semantics. The grammar is created for use in real world applications, such that robustness and performance issues play an important role. It is connected to a POS tagging and word segmentation tool. This grammar is being developed in a multilingual context, requiring MRS structures that are easily comparable across languages.