Projects
Homophone intrusions in the spelling of regularly inflected Dutch verb forms are used to address a central question in psycholinguistics – and cognitive science in general: do people rely on symbolic mental rules or on a knowledge base that captures the co-occurrence probabilities in the learning domain (statistical learning)? Earlier findings in our research group indicated an effect of homophone dominance in the pattern of intrusion errors when spelling homophonic verb forms: such errors...
RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
-To what extent do Flemish teenagers integrate morpho-syntactic and phonological features of the Brabantic regiolect in their chat language?
-What is the impact of the independent variable ‘hometown’? Is there a correlation between the relative representation of Brabantic regiolect features and the region where the chatters come from? To what extent do teenagers from the provinces of West-Flanders, East-Flanders and Limburg integrate morpho-syntactic and phonological...
Voice control of the apparatus that we use in our daily lives is perceived as a luxury. Often, a remote control is even better suited for home automation because we find it easier to push a button than to speak a command. However, for persons with a physical impairment, pushing a button is not always as easy as it is for most people and voice control is a viable solution for them. What is perceived as a luxury for most people can actually mean a significant...
The AMiCA (“Automatic Monitoring for Cyberspace Applications”) project aims to mine relevant social media (blogs, chat rooms, and social networking sites) and collect, analyse, and integrate large amounts of information using text and image analysis. The ultimate goal is to trace harmful content, contact, or conduct in an automatic way.
Essentially, we take a cross-media mining approach that allows us to detect risks “on-the-fly”. When critical situations are detected (e.g. a very...
In many human language technology applications (e.g. machine translators, spelling checkers), it often happens that concatenatively written compounds (e.g. “skrywerspen”/”schrijverspen” ‘writer’s pen’) are processed incorrectly. From a technological perspective, these segmentation problems are particularly problematic, since concatenative compounding is a highly productive process in many languages, including Dutch and Afrikaans. Although a compound splitter has already been developed for...
How can we explain the apparently delayed language development of children whose parents can be said to have a low socioeconomic status (lowSES)? Why does a child with, say, a mother who is on public assistance have a poorer language proficiency than a child with a mother who has a university degree and a professional occupation?
Previous research has shown that the linguistic environment (the language the child hears, the conversations and interactions that adult and child have) of the...
In this project, we investigate a methodology for the automatic extraction and analysis of style that we want to apply to both individual authors (authorship attribution, both fiction and non-fiction) and groups of authors (extraction of stylistich characteristics associated to gender and age). This methodology covers several aspects: (1) Automatic linguistic analysis of documents by means of available text analysis tools on the level of morphological structure, part of speech, global syntactic...
In this project we on the one hand propose a methodology to (semi)-automate the manual control of peer-to-peer networks and on the other hand a methodology for the automatic extraction and analysis of linguistic features (associated to age, gender and deceptive language usage) of chat language. The aim of the DAPHNE project is to develop a software prototype that will support the law enforcement agencies' control of peer-to-peer networks with regard to the illegal distribution of child...
In this project we investigate the applicability of machine learning techniques (supervised and unsupervised methods) to various language technology problems for African languages.
The goal of the deLearyous project is the development of a 3D serious video game where players can practice their communication skills by interacting with a virtual character. The trainee talks to the virtual character by typing in sentences in Dutch. The software then has to interpret these sentences and determine the appropriate reaction for the virtual character.
The virtual character's response follows a communication model known as the Interpersonal Circumplex (AKA "Leary's Rose", after...
FLaReNet aims at developing a common vision of the area language technology and fostering a European strategy for consolidating the sector, thus enhancing competitiveness at EU level and worldwide.
By creating a consensus among major players in the field, the mission of FLaReNet is to identify priorities as well as short, medium, and long-term strategic objectives and provide consensual recommendations in the form of a plan of action for EC, national organisations and industry.
Through the...
Research in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience has shown that audition and language exhibit plasticity, i.e. the ability to modify pre-existing neural synaptic connections dedicated to particular cognitive systems, depending on the quantity and quality of the environmental stimuli during a specific developmental stage. However, there is very little consensus in the literature with respect to the precise limits of these windows of opportunity. In this project we will tackle the...
Nowadays, many profoundly deaf children are given access to auditory information by means of a cochlear implant (CI). Thanks to this device, these children are able to develop oral speech and language. However, there are still many open questions about the nature of speech and language skills of CI children. Previous research has focused mainly on perceptual achievements, while far less attention has been paid to speech and language production, i.e. to how well do CI children speak? Moreover,...
In this project we investigate whether language acquisition and language processing is best described using a rule-based model or using an exemplar-based model. More specifically, we will use priming experiments to find out whether these two models make correct predictions about the acquisition of the phonology and lexicon of a non-standardised variety (viz. the Maldegem dialect) by children who were raised in Standard Dutch.
Phonological descriptions of the Standard Dutch vowel system distinguish between tense and lax vowels. Both categories may differ in intensity, vowel quality and duration. This project focuses on the perceptual role of duration in vowel categorisation for tense vowels. We study how differences in vowel duration are perceived by listeners with different regional backgrounds. The durational measurements are made in spontaneous speech samples of native speakers in well-defined geographical regions...
This project investigates the acquisition of relative adjectives (e.g. big, old, warm) by Dutch-speaking children. Semanticists have shown that relative adjectives evoke open scales with the pivotal region – norm – in the middle. Due to the relevance of a class-specific norm, we may call a cat big and an elephant small, even though a cat is much smaller than an elephant. Open scale structure explains why relative adjectives cannot be used in combinations like helemaal làng 'completely long'....
The aim of this project is to investigate segmental, intrasyllabic and intersyllabic co-occurrence patterns in prelexical babbling, and the acquisition of phonological segments and patterns in the early lexical period. Longitudinal data of deaf children with a cochlear implant (implanted in the first/second year of life) will be compared with those of a hearing age matched cohort in order to establish if they develop language in the same sequence and according to the same patterns as hearing...
This project wants to investigate how techniques of statistical relational learning can be used for natural language processing. The focus will be on challenging natural language processing tasks, such as semantic role labeling, where syntac and semantic depedencies, structured and unstructured data, local and global models, and probabilistic and logical information must be combined with one another. For what concerns statistical relational learning, the emphasis will lie on...
The goal of this project is to implement a robust, modular system for stylometry and readability research on the basis of existing techniques for automatic text analysis and machine learning, and the development of a web service that allows researchers in the humanities and social sciences to analyze texts with this system. In this way, the project will make available to researchers recent advances in research on the computational modeling of style and readability.
More information: www.stylene...
Masked priming has become a very popular technique in psycholinguistics and other areas of cognitive psychology. In this paradigm a stimulus (the prime) is presented for a very short presentation duration and is immediately followed by the target, which causes backward masking of the prime. The combined action of the two masking stimuli and the short presentation duration of the prime result in a consciously imperceptible stimulus.
The advantage of masked priming is that it allows...
