Manohar Spoken English Book Pdf Free 165
Nichele Seibel
I wrote this article for submission to a popular science writing competition by the Department of Science and Technology. Here is my research story, which did not make to grab the award. The story is based on our research on the morphological richness of Malayalam language.
How many words are there in your language? How many of them do you know? Can you find all those words in a dictionary? You never worry about these things while communicating with people around you in daily life. As speech technology researchers, we had to probe into this, while trying to make computers recognize human speech in our native language, Malayalam. Speech recognizer is basically a computer application that can convert spoken language into textual form. The problem before us was how many words we will have to teach computers, so that they can do a close to human performance to recognize speech in Malayalam.
By word, we mean a group of letters that has a meaning on its own. They are typically shown with a space on either side, when written or printed. Many languages produce words by fusing together existing words. But some languages do this so heavily that the fusion can span over many words, finally forming a single longer word.
A baby growing up listening to Malayalam conversations, catches up not just the simple words, but this technique of word fusion as well. They start to produce and recognize compound Malayalam words. Their brain gets trained to handle pronunciation changes at word boundaries. Morphological richness does not make a language better or poor in any sense. It is just a feature of the language. Human brains can very well handle any such feature. But our computers are not yet as good as human brains. Inorder to devise strategies to make our computers and smartphones recognize Malayalam, we wanted to know where Malayalam stands in terms of its morphological richness.
Our method to measure morphological richness was to count the number of unique words in a large collection of Malayalam text. If a language is morphologically rich it will have a large number of unique words which are fused from smaller words. We examined all the Malayalam Wikipedia articles. It contained more than 80 lakh words in total. Surprisingly, of these words, 12 lakh were unique! That is a really huge count. We tabulated and plotted graphs indicating the growth of unique word counts with respect to the total word count. This is a parameter known as type-token growth rate. We compared the our results with the reported values of various computational linguistic parameters including type-token growth rate, type-token ratio and moving average type token ratio from other studies on different Indian and foreign languages. Every comparison revealed Malayalam has higher degrees of morphological richness. In the following section we shall see how does morphological richness impact speech recognition systems.
We humans use our ears to hear the sounds and process it in our brain to match it with words we know in our language. To make a computer do that, we have to familiarize computers with all phonemes. Phonemes are the smallest distinguishable sound in a language. In a speech recognizer, there should be a mathematical system that relates speech signals and phonemes in a language. It is called an acoustic model.
A system that learns the words in a language and their chances of being spoken in the context of some other word sequence is called a language model. The machine also needs a list of all words that we want it to recognize. This list is a dictionary that describes how each word is to be pronounced, as a sequence of phonemes. Technically that dictionary is called a phonetic lexicon.The popular English phonetic lexicon, CMUDict, prepared by Carnegie Mellon University contains less than 1.5 lakh words. That is far less than the number of unique words we found in Malayalam Wikipedia articles. So how large would be the phonetic lexicon for Malayalam? By theory there is no limit to which Malayalam words can undergo inflections and agglutinations. This leads to a possibility of infinite vocabulary. But practically it is not easy to have an infinitely long phonetic lexicon. So what could be an alternative?
If we can we incorporate the linguistic trick of word fusion into computers, it would equip them to have a better language model. It enables them to create a phonetic lexicon as and when required. This is what we are currently working on, the morphology aware speech recognition system. This research direction is relevant for other morphologically rich Indian languages as well. It will eventually enable you to get automatic transcription while watching your favourite videos, type text using voice and even talk with your digital assistant, all in your native language. We hope to give our computers and smartphones a bit more humane touch by making them recognize our native spoken languages.
I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, starting from Fall 2012. My advisor is Prof. Sanjeev Khudanpur. I also work closely with Aren Jansen. My research interests are spoken keyword search and automatic speech recognition (ASR).
I was an undergraduate in the School of Electronic, Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Birmingham, UK from 2010 to 2012. My final year project supervisor was Prof. Martin Russell. Before that, I was an undergraduate in Electronic Information Engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology from 2008 to 2010.
Worked in the Language Understanding and Dialog Systems Group, with Puyang Xu and Ruhi Sarikaya. Developed a unified modeling framework for multi-turn multi-task spoken language understanding using recurrent convolutional neural networks.
ISBN: 978-2-9570549-0-9
e-ISBN: 978-2-9570549-1-6
Download (57.57 MB)
Malayalam Orthographic Reforms. Impact on Language and Popular Culture
Kavya Manohar & Santhosh Thottingal
Download (6.15 MB)Abstract. Malayalam is a language spoken in India, predominantly in the state of Kerala with about 38 million native speakers. The Malayalam script evolved from Brahmi through Grantha alphabet and Vattezhuthu writing systems. The script orthography has acquired its uniqueness with its complex shaped ligatures formed by the combination of consonants and vowel sign forms. The number of unique graphemes in this system exceeds 1,200. The orthographic styles were constantly evolving. In 1971 there was a Governmental intervention in the orthography, to reduce its complexity and to address the difficulties in typesetting and printing. This paper is an attempt to explore the impact of this orthographic reforms on various aspects of script usage including popular culture, media, textbooks, graffiti and handwriting. We will also analyse the impact of Unicode and the advancement in digital typography on the orthographic diversity of Malayalam script.
So I was surprised to discover that this last assignment requiring them to write in the language they had first spoken was especially difficult. Like B., many students found it nearly impossible to complete.
B. had been born in Latvia and had moved to the Netherlands with his family around the age of 10. He had already written an accomplished, rather adult story, a gothic tale involving a bit of violence and a bit of love. The translation assignment nearly did him in. He was in my office every week, unable to start the project, and then when he did, unable to make any progress. Finally, I asked him to try to pinpoint what was the root of his problem. He thought for a moment and then lit up.
But the struggles of my Latvian student show that language also communicates our deepest selves back to us, as if words were a shroud that give form to our inner world. Language is power and protest, inclusion and exclusion. It is game and braggadocio.
Today, I ask my classes to reflect on what language means to them. I ask how many now use a language different from the one they grew up speaking. I ask: What is your language of scolding? What is your sweet language?
To translate, one must really understand what is being said. The translator crawls inside a text and inhabits it in a way not even the careful reader can. This is why every writer must read as the translator does.
Cicero, Saint Matthew and Erasmus were all literate in more than one language. Rumi, the 13th-century poet who has enjoyed such popularity lately, was born to Persian speaking parents in what is now Afghanistan. He wrote in Persian, with a smattering of Turkish, Greek and Arabic. To be educated then, as now, meant being able to write in an imperial language.
Nor was the vernacular revolution confined to Western Europe. At almost exactly the same period, the Turkish poet Yunus Emre, was rejecting the literary Persian used by writers of the time to write in his own native Turkish.
In my workshops, I often give students the assignment of picking seven words in their mother tongue. These should be words they consider particularly beautiful or resonant or even hideous and frightening. Then I ask them to use them in an English-language poem. For students who are monolingual, I press them to think of all those bits and pieces of foreign words and phrases that most of us have floating about our consciousness.
I started this essay off with the idea that at its basic level, language exists in order to communicate. But the flip side is the possibility of miscommunication, misunderstanding and the sense of mute inarticulateness that many learners of a new language experience.
Our universities are woefully lacking in multilingual writing programs that can give students the encouragement and freedom to use their native languages. We should be building many more such programs, and they should not only be for multilingual writers. Monolingual writers, too, have much to learn from the multilingual experience, one that will invite them to confront, perhaps for the first time, the gulf between a lively mind and a poor tongue. A good writing program will acknowledge the limits of language while celebrating its pleasures and possibilities.
b37509886e