Rearranging Phrasal Verbs

This paper starts from the fact that everyone who has studied English as a second languagehas noticed that the study of phrasal verbs poses a challenge for both teachers andstudents. Students are offered a list of phrasal verbs without any other explanation; theyjust have to learn them by heart. Those lists differ from one another due to the fact thateach author/teacher chooses the phrasal verbs that they consider the most common. Sincethis approach to phrasal verbs is not the most effective, it is going to be the center of thisstudy. After describing what a phrasal verb is –a compound verb formed by a main verband a particle–, although the particle placement will also be treated, the work will befocused on analyzing the particle in terms of meaning. Moreover, a comparison among itstreatment in different dictionaries will be carried out, and, since the particle is the keycomponent, we aim to reorganize the lists provided to students according to the particle inorder to make its study easier.

Statistical modeling of bowing control applied to violin sound synthesis

Excitation-continuous music instrument control patterns are often not explicitly represented in current sound synthesis techniques when applied to automatic performance. Both physical model-based and sample-based synthesis paradigmswould benefit from a flexible and accurate instrument control model, enabling the improvement of naturalness and realism. Wepresent a framework for modeling bowing control parameters inviolin performance. Nearly non-intrusive sensing techniques allow for accurate acquisition of relevant timbre-related bowing control parameter signals.We model the temporal contour of bow velocity, bow pressing force, and bow-bridge distance as sequences of short Bézier cubic curve segments. Considering different articulations, dynamics, and performance contexts, a number of note classes are defined. Contours of bowing parameters in a performance database are analyzed at note-level by following a predefined grammar that dictates characteristics of curve segment sequences for each of the classes in consideration. As a result, contour analysis of bowing parameters of each note yields an optimal representation vector that is sufficient for reconstructing original contours with significant fidelity. From the resulting representation vectors, we construct a statistical model based on Gaussian mixtures suitable for both the analysis and synthesis of bowing parameter contours. By using the estimated models, synthetic contours can be generated through a bow planning algorithm able to reproduce possible constraints caused by the finite length of the bow. Rendered contours are successfully used in two preliminary synthesis frameworks: digital waveguide-based bowed stringphysical modeling and sample-based spectral-domain synthesis.

Quasi-Nonparametric Blind Inversion of Wiener Systems

An e cient procedure for the blind inversion of a nonlinear Wiener system is proposed. We proved that the problem can be expressed as a problem of blind source separation in nonlinear mixtures, for which a solution has been recently proposed. Based on a quasi-nonparametric relative gradient descent, the proposed algorithm can perform e ciently even in the presence of hard distortions.