Eileen Fitzpatrick

The Montclair Electronic Language Database Project

The Montclair Electronic Language Database (MELD) is an expanding collection of essays written by students of English as a second language. This paper describes the content and structure of the database and gives examples of database applications. The essays in MELD consist of the timed and untimed writing of undergraduate ESL students, dated so that progress can be tracked over time. Demographic data is also collected for each student, including age, sex, L1 background, and prior experience with English. The essays are continuously being tagged for errors in grammar and academic writing as determined by a group of annotators. The database currently consists of 44,477 words of tagged text and another 53,826 words of text ready to be tagged. The database allows various analyses of student writing, from assessment of progress over time to relation of error type and L1 background.

Building a forensic corpus to test language-based indicators of deception

Experimental laboratory results, often performed with college student subjects, have proposed several linguistic phenomena as indicative of speaker deception. We have identified a subset of these phenomena that can be formalized as a linguistic model. The model incorporates three classes of language-based deception cues: (1) linguistic devices used to avoid making a direct statement of fact, for example, hedges; (2) preference for negative expressions in word choice, syntactic structure, and semantics; (3) inconsistencies with respect to verb and noun forms, for example, verb tense changes. The question our research addresses is whether the cues we have adapted from laboratory studies will recognize deception in real-world statements by suspects and witnesses. The issue addressed here is how to test the accuracy of these linguistic cues with respect to identifying deception. To perform the test, we assembled a corpus of criminal statements, police interrogations, and civil testimony that we annotated in two distinct ways, first for language-based deception cues and second for verification of the claims made in the narrative data. The paper discusses the possible methods for building a corpus to test the deception cue hypothesis, the linguistic phenomena associated with deception, and the issues involved in assembling a forensic corpus.

Corpus Linguistics Beyond the Word

This volume will be of particular interest to readers interested in expanding the applications of corpus linguistics techniques through new tools and approaches. The text includes selected papers from the Fifth North American Symposium, hosted by the Linguistics Department at Montclair State University in Montclair New Jersey in May 2004. The symposium papers represented several areas of corpus studies including language development, syntactic analysis, pragmatics and discourse, language change, register variation, corpus creation and annotation, and practical applications of corpus work, primarily in language teaching, but also in medical training and machine translation. A common thread through most of the papers was the use of corpora to study domains longer than the word. Not surprisingly, fully half of the papers deal with the computational tools and linguistic strategies needed to search for and analyze these longer spans of language while most of the remaining papers examine particular syntactic and rhetorical properties of one or more corpora.

Implementing prosodic phrasing for an experimental text‐to‐speech system

While text‐to‐speech systems tend to perform well on word pronunciation, they fall short when it comes to providing good prosody for complete sentences. An experimental text‐to‐speech system that uses a natural language parser and prosody rules to determine prosodic phrasing for English input to text‐to‐speech synthesis will be described. Building on information from the syntax tree, the prosody rules specify the location and relative strength of prosodic phrase boundaries; these specifications are then used to dictate modulations in pitch and timing for the Olive‐Liberman synthesizer [J. P. Olive and M. Y. Liberman, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 78, S6 (1985)]. Two important assumptions motivate the prosody rules. First, constituency below the level of the sentence is the crucial determinant for boundary location; i.e., boundary location is influeneed by noun, prepositional, and adjective phrases, but not by clauses or verb phrases. Second, the relative strength of boundaries is determined by balancing pr...

Estimating the Amenability of New Domains for Deception Detection

In this paper we present an initial experiment in the estimation of the amenability of new domains to true/false classification. We choose four domains, two of which have been classified for deception, and use the out-ofrank distance measure on n-grams to aid in deciding whether the third and fourth domains are amenable to T/F classification. We then use a classifier covered in the literature to train on the verified domains and test on the new domains to determine whether the relative distance measure can be a predictor of classification accuracy.