International Postdoctoral Fellows Program: The Expression of Information Structure Through Prosody and Word Order

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9424023 Hoffman The International Junior Investigator and Postdoctoral Fellows Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month postdoctoral research tisit by Dr. Beryl A. Hoffman to work with Dr. Elisabet Engdahl at the Centre for Cognitive Science in Edinburgh, Scotland. This project will involve the investigation of the use of prosody and word order variation as strategies to express the information structure of a sentence that describes how a sentence relates to its context. The PI will concentrate on modelling the data in Turkish and investigate the cross- linguistic generalizations that can be made in other relatively free word order languages such as German and in fixed word order languages such as English. She will include implementations that can be integrated into a Turkish/English machine translation system. The proper use of prosody and word order variation is of considerable importance in developing practical applications in machine translation and speech generation. Machine translation systems, especially those including spoken language generation are a very active area of research in Europe, such as the recent ESPRIT POLYGLOT project. ***