Glottophilia

Re-publish your articles online!

2007-05-17T17:28:00.000+02:00

I recently ran across an interesting article by Geoffrey Sampson, distinguished British linguist, on the future of scholarly publications. As is my policy to (progressively) put online pdfs of published papers (practice net yet very common in my country) not any more easily available, I suggest this reading to all researchers interested in disseminating their work:

The death of learned journals, Geoffrey Sampson (2005)

John Sinclair (1933 – 2007)

2007-03-14T22:21:00.000+01:00

Yesterday John Sinclair, corpus linguist and lexicographer, died in Florence.

Every scholar involved in empirical linguistics must recognize his immense contribution to the field, both at a theoretical and applied level. Author of many milestone-publications in lexicography and corpus linguistics, director and founder of the Cobuild project (and Bank of English), among his many contributions are major researches in dictionary and corpus design, computational lexicography, lexical collocations, English for special purpose and on language teaching and learning. John will also be always remembered for his intellectual generosity in discussing his and other's work and in encouraging dialogue and research.

In the last years he and Elena Tognini-Bonelli have lead courses and workshops on various aspects of corpus linguistics at the Tuscan Word Centre (Italy). The picture you see is from the last TWC in late October 2006 (photo by: U. Roemer).

Isabella Chiari

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The best way to start remembering is by keeping his intellectual inheritance:

Corpus and Text: Basic Principles John Sinclair (Tuscan Word Centre)

A list of his publications (up to 2000) can be found at: http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/research/archive/1999-2000/sinclairpubs.htm

CLIPS, Corpus of Spoken Italian

2007-02-21T19:01:00.000+01:00

Today has been announced the final release of a new corpsu of spoken Italian (CLIPS), directed by Federico Albano Leoni (University La Sapienza of Rome). The key features of the corpus are: free distibution of audio and transcription, explicit Eagles compliant documentation, and above all phonetic transcription of a section of the collected material.

Here is the brief description of the corpus made by Federico Albano Leoni:

"CLIPS, a corpus of spoken Italian, is freely available at www.clips.unina.it. The corpus (audio files, annotation and documentation) are fully downloadable from the website via ftp, free for research purposes.

CLIPS consists of about 100 hours of speech, equally represented by female and male voices. A section of the corpus is transcribed orthographically, a smaller section has been phonetically labeled. Recordings were made in 15 Italian cities, selected on the basis of linguistic and socio-economic principles of representativeness: Bari, Bergamo, Bologna, Cagliari, Catanzaro, Firenze, Genova, Lecce, Milano, Napoli, Palermo, Parma, Perugia, Roma, Venezia.

For each of the 15 cities different text typologies have been included: a) radio and television broadcasts (news, interviews, talk shows); dialogue (240 dialogues collected using the map task procedure and the “spot the difference” game. In this set: 30 dialogues are phonetically labeled, 90 orthographically transcribed); c) read speech from non professional speakers (20 sentences each, covering medium-high frequency Italian words); d) speech over the telephone (conversations between 300 speakers and a simulated hotel desk service operator), e) read speech from 20 professional speakers (160 sentences, covering all phonotactic sequences and medium-high frequency Italian words) recorded in an anechoic chamber.Documentation, corpus collection and annotation follow the EAGLES guidelines.

Parlaritaliano, portal of spoken Italian resources

2007-02-15T17:31:00.000+01:00

On february the 26th 2007 Parlare italiano: osservatorio degli usi linguistici. project will be officially presented in Salerno.
Tools, resources, publications on spoken language, mainly Italian will be collected on the home page Parlaritaliano (http://www.parlaritaliano.it/).

The project joins different Universities: Università di Salerno, Università di Firenze, Università di Napoli “Federico II”, Università di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Università di Roma “La Sapienza”, Università di Roma Tre, Università per Stranieri di Siena, Università di Torino.

Measuring linguistic diversity over the net

2006-08-05T21:53:00.000+02:00

Many have wondered about languages represented on the net, on their proportions, on their readers. The exact extension of the web is itself still a huge enigma. There are many obvious implications in what can be called the "language divide".

UNESCO has published a volume collecting many different contributions on this subject. One of the contributions, that of professor Paolillo of Indiana University, reinforced the intuition that most pages are still written in English (more than 50%). Following Global Reach after English, Chinese, Japanese, and than Spanish, German, French and Italian. Chinese in particular has exploded from 2001 to 2005 becoming four times more present. Data obtained by search engine are not trustworthy. Romance languages (all) reach only 14% of the total pages.

Methodological problems have arised in trying to estimate language diversity. Namely: there is a large dependency over indexed pages (but what about the large amount of hidden non indexed pages?). How many language shoud we monitor? Daniel Prado (Unione latine) discusses political and judiciary questions, while addressing particular attention on Romance languages. An extremely interesting reading, from the methodological and political point of view.

ICh

Bibliography

Mesurer la diversité linguistique sur l’Internet Un ensemble d’articles signés par : John Paolillo, Daniel Pimienta, Daniel Prado et autres. – Révisé et accompagné d’une introduction de l’Institut de statistique de l’UNESCO Montréal (Canada). – Montréal : UNESCO, 2005 (CI.2005/WS/06) (pdf)

Voiceprints...individual identification through speech patterns

2006-07-06T17:26:00.000+02:00

Researchers from the University of Hertfordshire are working on speech pattern recognition. A mathematical modelling of voice pattern will be able to improve security by identifying individuals in the future, like fingerprints nowadays do.

"Once we receive our sentence from a speaker we select their voice prints, and then we select from that features which represent the voice prints. We use these special features to build a statistical model representing the individual speaker and we store them. Then at the time of testing – when somebody for example wants use his voice to access his bank over the telephone – we receive the speech data from the user, extract the features the same way and compare these against the reference model we have for that individual. And then we decide whether the user is genuine or an impostor." Dr Aladdin Ariyeeinia, University of Hertfordshire.

Useful links:

Biometrics White Paper
VoiceBiometrics

E-mail misunderstanding

2006-05-19T12:57:00.000+02:00

The Christian Science Monitor (May 15, 2006), published an article by Daniel Enemark on misunderstanding occurring in e-mail exchanges. A recent essay published by Nicholas Epley and Justin Kruger sheds light on some of its sources.

Enemark cites prof. Morris: "Though e-mail is a powerful and convenient medium, researchers have identified three major problems. First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict."

Misunderstanding occurs when communication means are perceived as immediate and close to spoken communication (even though they obviously are not). But clues present in spoken communication (paralinguistic features, facial expression, prosody and intonation, voice emotional features etc.) cannot be easily inferred by the written word, thus generating conflict and misperception of the writer's intentions. E-mails result often in ambiguity, as chat and instant messenging do. Irony, sarcasm, humour are only some of the most common misunderstanding sources. Furthermore in e-mail sender and recipient do not actually engage an informal dialogue (as they uncorrectly perceive) where a certain amount of potential misunderstaning can be negotiated and resolved by metalinguistic means and immediate clarification.

Textual analysis on actual e-mail exchanges is needed as well as psychological research on expectations of participants while engaging in e-mail, chat and messenging communication.

Isabella Chiari

References

"When What You Type Isn't What They Read: The Perseverance of Stereotypes and Expectancies over E-Mail." Nicholas Epley and Justin Kruger; Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2005, 41(4), pp. 414. (picture above is taken from this research).

"Effects of emotional cues transmitted in e-mail communication on the emotions experienced by senders and receivers", Computers in Human Behavior, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 24 January 2006, Yuuki Kato, Shogo Kato and Kanji Akahori

"Some consequences of e-mail vs. face-to-face communication in experiment" Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 35, Issue 3, 15 April 1998, Pages 389-403 Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer

Links

It's all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood, By Daniel Enemark, Christian Science Monitor.
E-mails and egos by By Lea Winerman, Monitor on Psychology.

Information theory and the language of the whales

2006-03-23T12:06:00.001+01:00

The Acoustic Signal Processing Laboratory, of the School of Marine Sciences and Technology of the University of Massachussets Darthmouth, directed by Assoc. Prof. John R. Buck, has recetly published a number of studies on animal communication, on whales signalling systems and on Zipf's Law applied to non-human communication systems.

Specifically the works of R. Suzuki and colleagues deal with the interpretations of the songs of the humpback whale, as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has recently reported (Warbling Whales Speak a Language All Their Own, March 21, 2006), and on complex syntactic capabilities showed in the signalling behaviour. In the last issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (119, 3, p. 1849-66) an article on "Information entropy of humpback whale songs" by Ryuji Suzuki, John R. Buck, Peter L. Tyack discusses complexity, redundancy, and predictability of the whales songs, the role of repetition. It is an extremely interesting approach, taking advantage of information theory applied to animal communication.

Some years ago an essey discussing this approach was published by the same team. In the 2003 article Suzuki et alii suggested that Zipf's law is not an appropriate tool for animal communication analysis claiming that: "Tests based on Zipf’s law are highly susceptible to false positives, both in theory and practice." (p. 9) and furthermore that "(1) the Zipf’s distribution model is not an effective way to analyse unknown information sources, even when we know that the source statistics closely follow this distribution; (2) Zipf’s law analysis cannot reliably discriminate between languages and stochastic processes devoid of semantic or communicative content. Studies that have depended on Zipf’s law as a language detector or to measure communication capacity should develop alternative techniques." (p. 16). Particularly interesting the implication on redundancy principle in the psychobiological perspective.

ICh

Suggested readings:

> R. Suzuki, J. R. Buck, and P. L. Tyack, "The use of Zipf's law in animal communication analysis," Animal Behaviour, January 2005, Vol. 69. pp. F9-F17. (Paper Download: PDF)
> R. Suzuki, J. R. Buck, and P. L. Tyack, "Information entropy of humpback whale songs", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 119, 3, p. 1849-66.
> Songs of the humpback whales, recorded in Hawaii. Listen
> I. Chiari, Ridondanza e linguaggio, Roma: Carocci.

La semaine de la langue française

2006-03-19T16:32:00.000+01:00

"La semaine de la langue française" is held from march 17th to the 26th of this month. This week will host lectures, conferences, round tables and prizes to promote French language and French policies on language issues. The 20th of march the Journée internationale de la Francophonie will be celebrated by les francophones worldwide. While the festival «Francofffonies ! » will last more than eight months.

Great interest has gained the "concours pour la défense et l'illustration de la langue française". Students are asked to compose texts and poems using a list of ten words: accent, badinage, escale, flamboyant, hôte, kaléidoscope, masque, outre-ciel, soif, tresser. A special version of this prize will be awarded to sign language users (on the web site, sign language equivalents of the ten words).

Read le Rapport au Parlement sur l'emploi de la langue française (1995) where national policies of French language are exposed, simplification of administrative language, natural language processing, the role of French in formal education and usage of French in international organizations.

Henriette Walter gives a comment on recent events regarding French language in Liberation (18 march 2006).

Speaking, counting, writing

2006-03-17T19:22:00.000+01:00

When did abstract numbers appear in written reports? How are they related to general writing skills? Did they come before or after? An article by Ivars Peterson in Science News (march 11, 2006) reports recent works by archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the University of Texas in Austin.

Around 3100 B.C. abstract symbols for numbers began to appear. Abstract numbers do not represent single specific objects (20 jars), but a conventional sign meaning a numeral that could be associated with any object-simbol. And as Schmandt-Besserat claims: "The most important evidence uncovered is that counting was not, as formerly assumed, subservient to writing; on the contrary, writing emerged from counting".

The complex relationship that involves the development of writing has been investigated in two volumes: Before Writing (1992), How Writing Came About (1996).

Read the article ACCOUNTING WITH TOKENS IN THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST (2004) by Denise Schmandt-Besserat

Ich

New Unicode IPA fonts from SIL

2006-03-17T13:11:00.000+01:00

SIL International just released updated versions of IPA fonts Charis SIL and Doulos SIL, that substitute older IPA93 etc (in 8-bit). Fonts are freely downloadable from the home page of Summer Institute of Linguistics and are compatible with technologies such as OpenType, Apple Advanced Typography, and SIL's Graphite. Fonts can be integrated in Microsoft Word for the insertion of the 2,400 charachters and diacritics included in the set.