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1500 questions
11
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4 answers
What is the difference between coreference resolution and anaphora resolution?
Is there any difference between coreference resolution and anaphora resolution? More generally, what is the difference between coreferences and anaphoras?
user48665
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Is a diphthong one phoneme or two, or does it depend?
In Mitch's answer to "What is the difference between a diphthong and a glide?" and its comments it seems more than one of us is at least a bit confused as to how many phonemes a single diphthong represents:
The two vowel sounds in a diphthong…
hippietrail
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11
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5 answers
What are the main accents of modern Russian among native speakers?
Before I had heard any spoken, Russian was one of my favorite languages. I used to have fun just reading Russian dictionaries, and I thought I'd soon learn to speak it. But when I tried to find some recordings, I felt that what seemed to be the…
magnetar
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11
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3 answers
General mathematical frameworks of language acquisition since Gold
Gold's theorem on the unlearnability of certain sets of languages (among them context-free ones) made several assumptions in its modeling of learning a language:
At each time step the learner receives one sentence from our language, and for each…
Artem Kaznatcheev
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10
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4 answers
What is the difference between complements and adjuncts?
What is the difference between complements and adjuncts? I always have a problem drawing a tree diagram for the syntax structure of a sentence with placing complements with word level category and adjuncts with different nodes; I don't actually know…
Stas Itsenko
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10
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2 answers
Why do languages with such different alphabets use the same common punctuation marks?
From my experience, many languages with absolutely different alphabets colloquially use the same common punctuation marks, such as:
the question mark (?), for inquiring/interrogatives
exclamation mark (!), for excitement or emphasis
period (.), for…
galois
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10
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4 answers
Is this natural: gender concord of direct objects with the past participle in French?
Phrases in French like la photo que j'ai prise (instead of que j'ai pris) have always struck me as unnatural. I've heard a lot of French people who fail to follow this rule when speaking spontaneously, and I've also heard a lot of hypercorrections…
user6849
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3 answers
Textbooks in Formal Semantics / Montague semantics
I'm looking for a cheap, thorough but reasonably accessible introduction to formal semantics. There appear to be lots of options on the market. I assume there are plenty of experts in formal semantics / computational linguistics /AI / applied…
لويس العرب
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10
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2 answers
Before being borrowed by Europeans, was "hurricane" ever pronounced with an initial "f"?
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, Spanish works about the New World in the 1500s wrote the word we spell in modern English as "hurricane" alternatively as "huracan" or "furacan". A spelling with an initial "f" has been preserved in many…
Dan Getz
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Does sample text exist that includes most English sounds represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet?
My understanding of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is that it aims to provide a set of letter-based values that represent and map to fundamental sounds present in human languages.
My question refers to the English language:
Are there any…
chris50
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Is there serious scientific evidence/vindication for the "linguistic fingerprint" concept?
I was reading a BBC article about "linguistic fingerprints". In my opinion a quite interesting idea, but there seems to exist a dispute in linguistic scientific community according to Wikipedia, how valid and objective such a concept is.…
Hauser
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10
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1 answer
Why has Paris French mostly lost the distinction between /e/ and /ɛ/?
Why has Paris French mostly lost the distinction between /e/ and /ɛ/? As in, the difference between 'Je le ferai' and 'Je le ferais', 'poignée' and 'poignet', or more simply between the é sound and the è sound. According to Wikipédia…
pantoute
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10
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2 answers
How is it that such varied sounds (in major European Languages) came to be represented by the same letter "j"?
The letter "j" is pronounced differently in the following major European languages:
English: just /d͡ʒʌst/
Spanish: justo /ˈxus.to/
German: junge /ˈjʊŋə/
French: juste /ʒyst/
How is the sound so varied in these languages?
PS: Originally posted…
Curious
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10
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Is it obvious that the difference between French/German is much larger than between Mandarin/Cantonese?
In another Linguistics.SE question, an answer makes this claim:
The difference between French and German is so much larger than between Mandarin/Cantonese that one would be hard pressed to say they are of similar distance.
This however contradicts…
user3222
10
votes
1 answer
Automatic/Computational Language Detection in Speech
Are there any packages that do much the same thing for audio/speech that the langid component/corpus of NLTK does for written text? The langid corpus/tool makes surprisingly accurate guesses about a language after training on popular trigram counts…
chbrown
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