We are very glad to have the following invited speakers at TABU Dag 2010.
Historical reconstruction through comparison of meaning
Michael Cysouw (Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich)
To obtain insight into the prehistoric structure and development of languages, traditionally the hallmark of evidence has been the reconstruction of regular sound correspondences. To find such correspondences in form, the changes in meaning that are happening in parallel have been mostly considered to be a nuisance. However, by close inspection of the changes in meaning of related forms it turns out also to be possible to reconstruct historical changes.
The changes in meaning can be approached quantitatively by taking an extremely extensionalistic definition of meaning: the meaning of a form is simply defined by the collection of all it's occurrences. Although this is a rather impoverished notion of meaning, this notion can productively be used for language comparison. By sampling occurrences of a particular form across languages (e.g. by using parallel texts), the changes in meaning can be investigated and used for reconstruction.
This approach turns out to have direct relations to wordlist comparison (which actually also quantifies shifts in meaning, but in a very coarse fashion) and to semantic maps (which interpret recurring similarity in meaning instead of differences). Looking forward, this approach also promises a more typologically oriented kind of historical reconstruction, as meanings can be compared independent of their form. However, currently it seems to me that this generalization of the method can only be used for a limited set of characteristics.
Michael Cysouw studied mathematics and linguistics; he promoted at the RU Nijmegen in 2001; and he did his postdoc at the ZAS in Berlin. Afterwards he became 'senior researcher' at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Since 2010 he works at the LMU in Munich with an ERC starting grant.
How Do We Know When to Speak? Acoustic, Prosodic, and Lexico-Syntactic Correlates of Turn Management in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Julia Hirschberg (Columbia University)
Listeners have many options in dialogue: They may interrupt the current speaker, take the turn after the speaker has finished, remain silent and wait for the speaker to continue, or backchannel, to indicate that they are still listening, while not taking the turn. Previous studies have proposed a number of possible cues that may signal to listeners that a speaker is ready to relinquish the turn or, conversely, that a speaker intends to continue to hold the floor. I will describe results of some empirical studies testing some of these proposals and investigating other correlates of turn-taking behaviors, in the context of a larger study of human-human turn-taking behavior in the Columbia Games Corpus (CGC). Our motivation is to discover what types of human turn-taking behavior can most usefully be modeled in Spoken Dialogue Systems, both from the perspective of recognizing the import of users' behavior and of generating appropriate system behavior. As the speech technologies in these systems improve, questions of turn management become more important, allowing users a more natural interaction with machines.
Our findings confirm that particular acoustic, prosodic, and lexico-syntactic cues do seem to be reliably associated with different turn-taking behaviors. In particular, pitch slope, pitch level, intensity, duration, aspects of voice quality, and syntactic features appear to distinguish among different types of turn-taking events. Thus we hypothesize that, in general, listeners' turn-taking decisions are sensitive to these cues. We also propose that these features be employed in creating SDS to recognize user behavior more accurately and to indicate system turn-taking intentions to users more clearly. This is joint work with Agustín Gravano (University of Buenos Aires). We also thank our collaborators, Stefan Benus, Gregory Ward, Elisa Sneed, Hector Chavez, and Michael Mulley for their help in collecting and annotating the CGC and for useful discussions.
Julia Hirschberg is Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Her research focuses on prosody in speech generation and understanding, on speech summarization, emotional speech, and interaction in spoken dialogue systems. She has served as President of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), co-editor-in-chief of Speech Communication,and editor-in-chief of Computational Linguistics. She is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and an ISCA Fellow.
Event perception, event description, and verb learning: Exploring the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic representations
John C. Trueswell (University of Pennsylvania)
When we visually interrogate the world around us, we rapidly move our eyes from person to person, place to place, and object to object. Research into understanding the dynamics of perception indicates that these eye movements, although partially driven by lower-level visual factors, reflect goal-directed categorization processes: The entities, events and states of affairs are placed into task-relevant categories, designed to achieve immediate and longer-term goals (e.g., Yarbus, 1967). In this talk, I will discuss a series of eye tracking experiments on the perception of visually depicted events, which are designed to examine the relationship between the nonlinguistic and linguistic encoding of events. One set of experiments looks at the relationship between attention and the assignment of grammatical Subject in English. Another set of experiments examines how these attention patterns may inform verb learning for children. Finally, I will present eye movement studies that reveal potential cross-linguistic differences in event encoding, which reflect the optional recruitment of the linguistic system. The findings as a whole provide important information about how events are encoded linguistically and non-linguistically, and how the detailed mappings between these representations are discovered by the language learner.
References
Yarbus, A.L. (1967). Eye movements during perception of complex objects. In L.A. Riggs (Ed.), Eye Movements and Vision. New York: Plenum Press.
John C. Trueswell is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, he is the current director of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science and the director of the IGERT Language and Communication Program. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1993. Trueswell's research investigates how adults and children rapidly interpret language in real-time, as it is being perceived. Summary of research interest: The grammatical and referential aspects of sentence processing and development of these in children. Psycholinguistic models or real time language comprehension: the representational properties of early processing commitments and the revision of these commitments. Eye-movement during scene perception as it relates to spoken language processing
Finite Verb Movement and Optimality Theory
Sten Vikner (University of Aarhus)
This Optimality Theory-based account of verb movement differences between Middle English, (modern) English, and (modern) Danish is an example of how Optimality Theory offers a way out of the strait jacket of binary parameters: There are other alternatives concerning e.g. finite verbs than for a language either to have V°-to-I° movement or not to have it.
Based on an analysis of the different positions of the finite main verb in English and Danish (and some additional related languages) in terms of V°-to-I° movement, my talk will start by linking these positional differences to the presence (or absence) of inflection for person in all verbal tenses.
It is then shown that modern English is not just different from Danish but actually unique in that it has two different types of finite verbs with different syntax. It is further argued that these two verb types should be taken to be thematic and non-thematic verbs, rather than main and auxiliary verbs.
The talk will present a comprehensive analysis of the syntax of these two types of English finite verbs (also as compared to finite verbs in Danish and in Middle English) in terms of a set of violable (and potentially conflicting) constraints.
One such constraint is Check-Distinctive-Person. There is thus a reason to move a verb which is distinctively marked for person (e.g. a Middle English finite verb) to the functional head Pers°, namely to avoid violation of this checking constraint. There is no such reason to motivate movement of a verb whose person features are not distinctively marked (e.g. a modern English finite verb), because, irrespective of whether it moves to Pers° or not, it violates this constraint. This opens the door for a lower ranked constraint, e.g. Stay, to decide for or against such movement.
Sten Vikner is a professor with special responsibilites in theoretical and comparative linguistics. He is part of the English Department which is again part of the Institute of Language, Literature and Culture at the University of Aarhus. Before coming to Aarhus, he taught at the University of Stuttgart (1990-2001) and at the University of Geneva (1984-1990). He works on the position of the verb across Germanic languages, both within Principles & Parameters, Minimalism, and within Optimality Theory. He also works on the similarities and the differences between clauses and nominals, on Danish dialect syntax, and on object positions and their interpretation.
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare gettitle() (previously declared in /var/homepages/tabudag/public_html/archive/config.php:113) in /var/homepages/tabudag/config.php on line 124