Sean Fulop's research page

 

Following is an overview of my projects, divided into Phonetics and Learning Theory.

Phonetics and Speech Processing

I am currently interested in experimental phonetics for linguistics, the phonetics-phonology interface, digital signal processing of speech, speaker identification, and aeroacoustic modeling of speech.

 

Recent publications:


(2012) "Phonetics and Speech Processing," in Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning published by Springer.

Speech Spectrum Analysis, (2011) published by Springer in the Signals and Communication Technology series.

Matlab code for the book

(2010) "Accuracy of formant measurement for synthesized vowels using the reassigned spectrogram and comparison with linear prediction." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 127(4).

Fulop and Sandra Ferrari Disner (2009) "Advanced time-frequency displays applied to forensic speaker identification." Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (open access).


Fulop and Chris Golston (2008) "Breathy and whispery voicing in White Hmong." Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics (open access).

(2007) "Phonetic applications of the time-corrected instantaneous frequency spectrogram." Phonetica 64.

Fulop and Sandra Ferrari Disner (2007) "The reassigned spectrogram as a tool for voice identification." Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences XVI.

Fulop and Kelly Fitz (2007) "Separation of components from impulses in reassigned spectrograms." Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 121(3).

Fulop and Kelly Fitz (2006) "A spectrogram for the twenty-first century." Acoustics Today, July.

Fulop and Kelly Fitz (2006) “Algorithms computing the time-corrected instantaneous frequency (reassigned) spectrogram, with applications.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. January.

Fulop, P. Ladefoged, F. Liu, and R. Vossen (2003) "Yeyi clicks: Acoustic description and analysis," Phonetica 60(4).

Fulop and M. Dobrovolsky (1999) "An instrumental analysis of Sharchhop obstruents." Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 22.1.

 
Fulop, E. Kari, and P. Ladefoged (1998) "An acoustic study of the tongue root contrast in Degema vowels." Phonetica 55(1-2).

 

In the interest of making all my work easily available, a couple of years ago I compiled all the speech-related publications that I deemed worthy into a single PDF volume of "collected works."  To download: Collected works on speech and signal processing

Current projects:

 
I'm now serving as Associate Editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.  I handle manuscripts related to signal processing, and I also put together the Reviews of Acoustical Patents each month.

The Time-Corrected Instantaneous Frequency "Reassigned" Spectrogram.  

This project is chiefly about a new technique for measuring frequency that does away with frequency --- or rather, its strict mathematical definition in Fourier's terms.  

You could visit the web page of my collaborator on this work, Kelly Fitz of Starkey Hearing, to find public domain computer code for various of these new signal processing functions.

I have also created a repository of code for these routines, downloadable as a zipfile including documentation. The code for my book is more recent, however.

The reassigned spectrogram is now being applied to an exciting new development in speaker recognition for which I just obtained a U.S. Patent, a first for Fresno State.

I'm working with Darin Flynn of the University of Calgary on a new theory of phonetic features and distinctive features.

I'm working with Chris Golston on the status of the segment in modern phonology.

I'm working with John Lewis and Ginette Hupé of the University of Ottawa on the analysis of communicative signalling in weakly electric fish.  We are completing a paper on a new method for detecting abrupt phase shifting in individual components of the signals emitted.


Learning theory and mathematical linguistics:


I started a blog on Mathematical Linguistics Etc.  Check it out, to see my take on latest finds in the literature, and some of my thoughts on things related to mathematics of language.

 Recent publications:

 

(2012) "Mathematical Linguistics and Learning Theory," in Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning published by Springer.


(2011) "Erratum to: Grammar induction by unification of type-logical lexicons," Journal of Logic, Language, and Information.

(2010) "Grammar induction by unification of type-logical lexicons," Journal of Logic, Language, and Information.

"Learnability of type-logical grammars," in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 53.  A newly corrected version appeared in the journal Research on Language and Computation in 2007.

(2005) "Semantic bootstrapping of type-logical grammar," Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 14(1):49-86.


"Mathematical results on syntactic learnability," invited presentation at the Chicago Linguistic Society 2003.  This was mangled when published in the proceedings volume, so I invite readers to look at the proof in the "collected works" file posted here.

 

PhD dissertation On the Logic and Learning of Language (1999).

 A complete rewrite and expansion of my dissertation is published by Trafford (2004).


I collaborated with a U. of Chicago Linguistics student Sylvain Neuvel.  A paper for our project entitled "Unsupervised Learning of Morphology Without Morphemes" was presented at the Workshop on Morphological and Phonological Learning, held on July 11, 2002, in conjunction with the ACL meeting in PhiladelphiaProceedings online

Fulop and E. Keenan (2002) "Compositionality: A global perspective." In Semantics, Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 10, published by Helmut Buske Verlag, edited by Fritz Hamm and Ede Zimmerman.

Thanks to the above paper, my Erdȍs Number is 4!

In the interest of making all my work easily available, I have compiled all the mathematics of language, computational linguistics, and learning theory publications that I deemed worthy into a single PDF volume of "collected works."  To download: Collected works on mathematics of language and learning theory

Current projects:


I'm currently guest editing the topic "Formal Learning Theory Relevant to Cognitive Science," which will be coming out in future issues of Topics in Cognitive Science. I'm also serving on the editorial board there for a while.
I'm co-editing this topic with Nick Chater; he and I are also collaborating on a review article on "Learnability theory," which is forthcoming in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science.
 

I wrote a paper on proof nets for substructural propositional logics, including grammatical logics.  I haven't found a good place to publish this yet, but it is posted on arXiv.org.
 

I'm also interested in the computational complexity and computability of analog computations, such as the harmonic analyzers.  The objective is to explore complexity of analog computation in the brain.

 


 


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