Brief Summaries of Student AML Papers
(Fall 1998 Course)

Richard Bangerter and Benjamin Smith attempt to predict the plural inflection for substantives in Romanian; preliminary results suggest that sound representation plays a more important role than gender in these predictions

La Bokeo predicts where to put word breaks in continuously written Thai text; predictions based solely upon orthographic information from Thai texts where the word breaks have been put in; high degree of success

Cary Cambell applies AML to Arabic plural formation; difficulties arise in trying to determine the how to represent tri-consonantal roots

Matthew Coulson attempts to predict gender assignment in Albanian; phonetic factors seem to play a more significant role than semantic ones

David Gunn predicts the phonetic variation of the Spanish /s/ phoneme as [s], [h], or NULL (Ø)

Stephen Hancock gives analogical predictions for the negative prefix in Italian; predictability is affected by part of speech, the initial sound of the word, and the stress pattern of the word

Frances Kan provides a first attempt to use AML to predict the selection of classifiers in Mandarin Chinese; there was some difficulty in specifying the appropriate semantic variables for the database

Lisa Kurki applies AML to predicting the past participle in English from either the present-tense form or the simple past-tense form; in general, exceptional forms are not predictable, but regular ones are (which is what we expect)

Kent Minson provides a first attempt to use AML to predict garden path sentences in English; the variables specified were insufficient and no conclusions could be drawn from the results

Camera Palmer's preliminary results suggest that gender assignment in Danish appears to be lexical; that is, speakers have to memorize the gender for each noun; phonological and semantic variables are not particularly successful in predicting gender

Anton Rytting attempts to predict in Turkish whether a final-k noun stem will drop the k or retain it when a vowel-initial suffix is added to the noun stem; there were some difficulties in deriving an appropriate database

Jennifer Sperry analogically predicts the spelling of the agentive suffix or/er; her database is based on the spelling of words alone (no pronunciation, semantic, or etymological factors are used), yet she is able to predict the spelling in nearly every case; this result indicates that the spelling of this suffix is more orthographically determined and more predictable than previously realized

Jon Stansell predicts the allophonic pronunciation of the r-hachek in Czech