Orientador: Maria Filomena Spatti Sandalo / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-12T09:39:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Roessler_Eva-Maria_M.pdf: 84135419 bytes, checksum: 0dfdaa306092baf9a06759531f7755fb (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: Este trabalho é um estudo piloto de alguns aspectos fonológicos e morfológicos da língua achê, uma língua indígena falada por aproximadamente 300 falantes fluentes na região oriental do Paraguai. O trabalho apresenta um estudo fonológico, que inclui a descrição dos segmentos vocálicos e consoantais, como também de aspectos suprassegmentais como o espraiamento de nasalidade. Além disso, discute-se a estrutura silábica, o acento lexical e a estrutura da palavra mínima do achê. A segunda parte apresenta uma descrição da marcacão de pessoa/número, de tempo-aspecto-modo, da construção passiva e também das categorias lexicais da língua achê. É importante destacar que o trabalho tem um segundo objetivo: contextualizar estas descrições gramaticais em um debate sociolingüístico. Durante os últimos dois séculos, e até hoje, a literatura histórica, antropológica e lingüística apontam para a hipotése de o achê ser uma língua de contato baseada no léxico da língua guarani. Como o meu trabalho aborda a questão do contato lingüístico a partir de uma visão interdisciplinar, informações etnográficas e históricas relevantes para o entendimento da possível gênese da língua achê são incluídas. Apresento dados lingüísticos, resultados da minha pesquisa de campo, que podem contribuir para esta discussão. Observo que. há mudanças, essencialmente no subsistema morfossintático, que podem ser consideradas abruptas, e, portanto, podem indicar uma transmissão lingüística nãolinear. O subsistema morfossintático conta com recursos morfológicos reduzidos quando comparado com a possível língua base - o guarani do Paraguai. Estes recursos, além disso, passaram por mudanças, tanto na sua forma fonológica, quanto na sua função. As alterações na função, que em muitos casos são caracterizadas por uma ampliação de funções morfossintáticas e semânticas, podem ser entendidas como resultado de processos de analogia e reinterpretação. / Abstract: This work Is a pilot study of some aspects of phonology and morphology of Aché, an indigenous language spoken by approximately 300 fluent speakers in the oriental region of Paraguay. It presents a phonological study of the phonemic inventory as well as a study of suprasegmental phenomena such as nasalization, stress, syllable structure, and some considerations about minimal word constraints. In the second section of the descriptive part, I outline aspects of person and number agreement, tense-aspect-mood marking, followed by a description of passive constructions and a discussion on lexical categories of the Achá language. The preceding grammatical description is particularly relevant for a wider sociolinguistic discussion of language genesis and evolution. The historical, anthropological and linguistic literature of the past two centuries suggests the hypothesis that the Aché language might be a contact language based on the lexicon of Paraguayan Guarani. My work approaches this hypothesis from an interdisciplinary standpoint, and includes some ethnographic and historic information crucial for the understanding of a possible genesis of the Aché language. In the final section I review linguistic data - the results of my field research - that can contribute to that discussion. Specifically, inside the morphosyntactic subsystem of the Aché grammar, I observe changes that can be considered abrubt and therefore the result of possible non-linear transmission. The morphosyntactic subsystem contains reduced flexional morphemes if compared to the hypothesized lexifier language - Paraguayan Guarani. The remaining flexional morphemes changed both their phonological structure and their grammatical functions. In grammatical terms, the changes can be characterized as amplifications of morphosyntactic and semantic function and might be possibly understood as outcome of processes such as analogy and reinterpretation. / Mestrado / Mestre em Linguística

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Since the use of social media has evolved, the ability of its users to bully others has increased. One of the prevalent forms of bullying is Cyberbullying, which occurs on the social media sites such as Facebook©, WhatsApp©, and Twitter©. The past decade has witnessed a growth in cyberbullying – is a form of bullying that occurs virtually by the use of electronic devices, such as messaging, e-mail, online gaming, social media, or through images or mails sent to a mobile. This bullying is not only limited to English language and occurs in other languages. Hence, it is of the utmost importance to detect cyberbullying in multiple languages. Since current approaches to identify cyberbullying are mostly focused on English language texts, this thesis proposes a new approach (called Multilingual Cyberbullying Detection System) for the detection of cyberbullying in multiple languages (English, Hindi, and Marathi). It uses two techniques, namely, Machine Learning-based and Lexicon-based, to classify the input data as bullying or non-bullying. The aim of this research is to not only detect cyberbullying but also provide a distributed infrastructure to detect bullying. We have developed multiple prototypes (standalone, collaborative, and cloud-based) and carried out experiments with them to detect cyberbullying on different datasets from multiple languages. The outcomes of our experiments show that the machine-learning model outperforms the lexicon-based model in all the languages. In addition, the results of our experiments show that collaboration techniques can help to improve the accuracy of a poor-performing node in the system. Finally, we show that the cloud-based configurations performed better than the local configurations.

Orientador: Angel humberto Corbera Mori / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-06T17:05:12Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Santos_ManoelGomesdos_D.pdf: 2336557 bytes, checksum: d334c11c77ad8b655de97dde11f69171 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Resumo: Esta tese objetiva propor uma análise da língua Wapixana (Aruák), falada pelos Wapixana hoje estimados entre 10 e 11 mil pessoas que vivem na extensão que vai do vale do rio Uraricoera, no Brasil, ao vale do rio Rupununi, na República Cooperativa da Guiana. O estudo envolve aspectos da fonologia, da morfologia e da sintaxe dessa língua e encontra-se estruturado em quatro capítulos. O capítulo 1. Introdução - apresenta aspectos sócio-culturais do povo Wapixana, informações gerais sobre sua língua e explicita o conjunto de procedimentos de pesquisa. O capítulo 2. Fonologia - apresenta o quadro de fonemas, processos fonológicos, a estrutura da sílaba e o padrão acentual do Wapixana no domínio da palavra fonológica. O capítulo 3. Morfologia - aborda classes de palavras (partes do discurso), visando, especialmente, identificar e caracterizar suas categorias constituintes, do ponto de vista de suas propriedades estruturais e funcionais. Finalmente, o capítulo 4. Sintaxe - destina-se ao estudo da sentença wapixana, com destaque especial para a análise da sentença simples / Abstract: The present thesis proposes at analysing the Wapixana language (Aruák), spoken by the Wapixana, whose population is believed to be between 10,000 (ten thousand) and 11,000 (eleven thousand) people living in the extension ofland that goes ftom the valley of the Uraricoera river, in Brazil, to the valley of the Rupununi river, in the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. The study involves aspects of the phonology, the morphology and the syntax of the Wapixana language and is divided in four chapters. Chapter 1. Introduction presents social and cultural aspects of the Wapixana people, general information on its language and explanation about research procedures. Chapter 2. Phonology - presents the grid of phonemes, phonological processes, the structure of the syllable and the stress pattern of the Wapixana language in the domain of the phonological word. Chapter 3. Morphology - deals with classes of words (parts of the speech), especially aiming at identifying and pointing the characteristics of its constituent categories, ftom the point oí view of its structural and functional properties. Finally, chapter 4. Syntax - aims at the study of the Wapixana sentence, with emphasis on the analysis of the simple sentence / Doutorado / Doutor em Linguística

<p dir="ltr">Use of serious games and gamified applications for language learning have increased substantially over the past decade. They are an effective way to supplement language learning. These applications utilize a range of language learning methods such as grammar-translation, audio-lingual and task-based learning in combination. Task-based language learning particularly suits the typical gameplay elements of narratives and quests. Thus, this study aims to develop a serious game for learning Bengali, world’s 7th most spoken language. The literature in this area indicates that hubshaped quest landscape design is found to be most effective for game-based learning environments. So, the study implements a branching, hubshaped narrative for learning Bengali language.</p><p dir="ltr">This application also implemented a hidden object mechanism for vocabulary acquisition instead of traditional grammar-translation methods used in other language learning software. The prototype was assessed from user feedback in a qualitative manner across four broad heuristic categories comprising of learning, tutorials, engagement and cultural elements. In the process, the study sought to understand whether cultural context-based interventions in the narrative improve learner motivation.</p><p dir="ltr">The results show a positive impact of cultural elements on the learners’ motivation to progress. Further, the hidden object mechanism was received as a satisfactory method to learn foreign vocabulary. This form of interactive, narrative based educational application has the potential to supplement traditional lessons for foreign language acquisition.</p>

La tesi si concentra sugli influssi lessicali che le lingue indiane hanno esercitato sulla lingua inglese sia in prospettiva diacronica sia sincronica. La prima parte dell'elaborato indaga, tramite l'impiego di uno strumento lessicografico, l'Oxford English Dictionary edizione on-line, la presenza in inglese di prestiti veri e propri, ma anche di derivati e composti, sorti in seguito al contatto tra l'inglese le lingue indiane a partire dal Sedicesimo secolo e fino ai nostri giorni, arrivando a individuare 1791 forme lessicali. La seconda parte intende verificare l'effettiva presenza, la frequenza d'uso e il significato di tali prestiti, composti e derivati nel British English contemporaneo, avvalendosi degli strumenti offerti dalla linguistica dei corpora. Il corpus di riferimento impiegato in questa seconda fase della ricerca è Bank of English. L'elaborato, oltre a delineare lo scenario storico culturale di riferimento, mette in evidenza le procedure metodologiche impiegate, e ricostruisce l'impianto teorico sulle questioni di interferenze tra codici linguistici, lingue in contatto e prestiti lessicali, riferendosi ai maggiori e più recenti studi in materia. / The research focuses on lexical influences exerted by Indian languages on British English as a result of linguistic contacts between Great Britain and India. Both diachronic and synchronic perspectives are taken into consideration in evaluating the extent of such lexical influences. The first part of the research analyses the presence of words of East Indian origin in English by means of the Oxford English Dictionary, on-line edition, be these words authentic lexical borrowings, or derivatives or compounds arisen as a consequence of such linguistic contacts. The historical period taken into consideration goes from the 16th century till nowadays. The second part of the research aims to verify the actual presence, frequency of usage and meaning of such words in contemporary British English by means of a linguistic corpora tool, namely the Bank of English by Harper Collins. The historical and cultural background of the relationships between Great Britain and India, as well as the theoretical background about linguistic interferences as a whole are also illustrated, with reference to the most authoritative and recent studies.

Speech segmentation is the process of identifying the boundaries between words, syllables or phones in the recorded waveforms of spoken natural languages. The lowest level of speech segmentation is the breakup and classification of the sound signal into a string of phones. The difficulty of this problem is compounded by the phenomenon of co-articulation of speech sounds. The classical solution to this problem is to manually label and segment spectrograms. In the first step of this two step process, a trained person listens to a speech signal, recognizes the word and phone sequence, and roughly determines the position of each phonetic boundary. The second step involves examining several features of the speech signal to place a boundary mark at the point where these features best satisfy a certain set of conditions specific for that kind of phonetic boundary. Manual segmentation of speech into phones is a highly time-consuming and painstaking process. Required for a variety of applications, such as acoustic analysis, or building speech synthesis databases for high-quality speech output systems, the time required to carry out this process for even relatively small speech databases can rapidly accumulate to prohibitive levels. This calls for automating the segmentation process. The state-of-art segmentation techniques use Hidden Markov Models (HMM) for phone states. They give an average accuracy of over 95% within 20 ms of manually obtained boundaries. However, HMM based methods require large training data for good performance. Another major disadvantage of such speech recognition based segmentation techniques is that they cannot handle very long utterances, Which are necessary for prosody modeling in speech synthesis applications. Development of Text to Speech (TTS) systems in Indian languages has been difficult till date owing to the non-availability of sizeable segmented speech databases of good quality. Further, no prosody models exist for most of the Indian languages. Therefore, long utterances (at the paragraph level and monologues) have been recorded, as part of this work, for creating the databases. This thesis aims at automating segmentation of very long speech sentences recorded for the application of corpus-based TTS synthesis for multiple Indian languages. In this explicit segmentation problem, we need to force align boundaries in any utterance from its known phonetic transcription. The major disadvantage of forcing boundary alignments on the entire speech waveform of a long utterance is the accumulation of boundary errors. To overcome this, we force boundaries between 2 known phones (here, 2 successive stop consonants are chosen) at a time. Here, the approach used is silence detection as a marker for stop consonants. This method gives around 89% (for Hindi database) accuracy and is language independent and training free. These stop consonants act as anchor points for the next stage. Two methods for explicit segmentation have been proposed. Both the methods rely on the accuracy of the above stop consonant detection stage. Another common stage is the recently proposed implicit method which uses Bach scale filter bank to obtain the feature vectors. The Euclidean Distance of the Mean of the Logarithm (EDML) of these feature vectors shows peaks at the point where the spectrum changes. The method performs with an accuracy of 87% within 20 ms of manually obtained boundaries and also achieves a low deletion and insertion rate of 3.2% and 21.4% respectively, for 100 sentences of Hindi database. The first method is a three stage approach. The first is the stop consonant detection stage followed by the next, which uses Quatieri’s sinusoidal model to classify sounds as voiced/unvoiced within 2 successive stop consonants. The final stage uses the EDML function of Bach scale feature vectors to further obtain boundaries within the voiced and unvoiced regions. It gives a Frame Error Rate (FER) of 26.1% for Hindi database. The second method proposed uses duration statistics of the phones of the language. It again uses the EDML function of Bach scale filter bank to obtain the peaks at the phone transitions and uses the duration statistics to assign probability to each peak being a boundary. In this method, the FER performance improves to 22.8% for the Hindi database. Both the methods are equally promising for the fact that they give low frame error rates. Results show that the second method outperforms the first, because it incorporates the knowledge of durations. For the proposed approaches to be useful, manual interventions are required at the output of each stage. However, this intervention is less tedious and reduces the time taken to segment each sentence by around 60% as compared to the time taken for manual segmentation. The approaches have been successfully tested on 3 different languages, 100 sentences each -Kannada, Tamil and English (we have used TIMIT database for validating the algorithms). In conclusion, a practical solution to the segmentation problem is proposed. Also, the algorithm being training free, language independent (ES-SABSF method) and speaker independent makes it useful in developing TTS systems for multiple languages reducing the segmentation overhead. This method is currently being used in the lab for segmenting long Kannada utterances, spoken by reading a set of 1115 phonetically rich sentences.