A method for aligning a transcript to recorded speech is described, motivated by the need for alignment of audiobooks for use by SLA software. A combination of text-to-speech technology, mel-spectrum feature extraction, and dynamic time warping are employed to obtain a word-alignment for the input speech sample.
This week I have been reading up on syntax. I started with Baker's The Atoms of Language, continued with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, and have just finished the syntax chapter of the textbook Contemporary Linguistics (3rd edition). I have learned a great deal thus far, but the more I read the more questions I have. I write these notes into the margins of my books, but I now feel the need to post the more salient questions for later reference, lest they get buried when I continue my linguistic inquiry.
In a previous post I made some recommendations from among the established commercial language learning methods such as Berlitz, Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, and a few course books. Over the past year I have branched out to experiment with the methods of various on-line linguaphile gurus, the likes of Piotr Wozniak, Tim Ferris, Mike Campbell, Prof Arguelles, and Katzumoto --- all of whom are worth checking out. But just today I stumbled across the method of polyglot and simultaneous interpreter Kató Lomb, as explained in her book How I Learn Languages. I found Lomb's book absolutely captivating. She makes a number of excellent points. Although her book is by no means a one-stop-shop for polyglottery, it is definitely worth a read for those aspiring to learn one or a few L2s.
Aspiring polyglots face the huge challenge of massive vocabulary acquisition. Even in closely related languages, it is easy to miss cognates because of sound changes and different orthographies. I have found that using etymological information from dictionary look-ups has boosted my recall for learning from a single language -- but I conjecture that this boost will carry over to other languages of interest if the dictionary would provide related words in every language of interest when they exist. However, in present form, this procedure requires searching through possibly 12 different books! I believe an electronic version would be a huge boon to the modern polyglot community.
Here is a list of the 3000 most commonly used characters in written Chinese, sorted by Mandarin reading, with tones ignored.
While working through Japanese the Spoken Language (JSL), I feel the need to make Anki cards for the spoken words that I'm having trouble recalling the meanings of. Now, I haven't yet decided exactly what card format is best, but I was dreading having to type in accents on the romanized words. (See the introduction to JSL to see what these accents are.) So, I wrote a quick program to allow easy input of accented words.
The Theory of Deuxieme Vue, or second sight, is something I've been working on for a while now. I'm not sure what the general version is quite yet, but I will give some examples.
Inquisitor: "How many vowels are there in English?"
Many complex phenomena may be decomposed using a stack. For example, one might decompose contemporary scientific theory into a stack as follows: physics -- chemistry -- biology -- psychology -- sociology.
I just learned about the Knuth up-arrow notation yesterday. Basically, Knuth's up-arrow is the answer to the question "What comes next in the sequence \((+, \times, \wedge)\)?" You could call it iterated exponentiation. Later operators in the sequence are called "higher-order", and may be defined in terms of the previous order function.