The 36th Language Lunch
Date: 2013-02-08
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
Primates and Patterns in the Evolution of Language and Music
Andrea,Ravignani; andrea.ravignani@univie.ac.at
The study of the origins of language and music is an exciting interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research area. By presenting some of my ongoing research on apes and monkeys, I will suggest how the biology of cognition can contribute to the ongoing debate and give us some insights on how we ended up being chatty, musical hominids.
Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer In DNN-Based LVCSR
Pawel,Swietojanski; Informatics; p.swietojanski@sms.ed.ac.uk
We investigate the use of cross-lingual acoustic data to initialise deep neural network (DNN) acoustic models by means of unsupervised restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) pretraining. DNNs for German are pretrained using one or all of German, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The DNNs are used in a tandem configuration, where the network outputs are used as features for a hidden Markov model (HMM) whose emission densities are modeled by Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), as well as in a hybrid configuration, where the network outputs are used as the HMM state likelihoods. The experiments show that unsupervised pretraining is more crucial for the hybrid setups, particularly with limited amounts of transcribed training data. More importantly, unsupervised pretraining is shown to be language-independent. Additionally, we show that finetuning the hidden layers of the DNNs using data from multiple languages improves the recognition accuracy compared to a monolingual DNN-HMM hybrid system.
How Speakers of Different Languages Process the Same Metaphors Differently
Christoph,Hesse; PPLS; S0975727@sms.ed.ac.uk
Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986, 1995), Graded Salience (Giora 2003), and Grice (1975, 1978) argue that the mechanisms we use to comprehend metaphors are linguistic in nature. Conceptual Metaphor Theory, on the other hand, claims they are not specialised to language. In this poster I present experimental results comparing monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ comprehension of metaphors that are either idiomatic in English or German or in both English and German. These results support that the mechanisms are linguistic rather than general.
Dialogue in Joint Activity: Coordinating on Reference and Plans
Gregory,Mills; Informatics; gmills@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
One of the most contentious debates in studies of dialogue concerns the explanatory role assigned to speakers‘ intentions. To address this issue, this poster reports a computer-mediated variant of the maze task (Pickering & Garrod, 2004), which manipulates the dialogue by inserting artificial clarification requests that appear, to participants, as if they originate from each other. Two kinds of clarification were introduced: (1) Artificial “Why?” questions that query the plan, (2) Fragment clarification requests that query the constituent elements of the referring expressions. As coordination develops, “Why?” clarification requests become progressively easier to respond to, while for fragment clarification requests the converse is the case. We argue that this differential pattern is not arrived at via explicit negotiation of intentions, but via tacit turn-by-turn feedback.
