Related papers: Exemplar Dynamics Models of the Stability of Phono…
We develop a model of phonological contrast in natural language. Specifically, the model describes the maintenance of contrast between different words in a language, and the elimination of such contrast when sounds in the words merge. An…
In spoken languages, speakers divide up the space of phonetic possibilities into different regions, corresponding to different phonemes. We consider a simple exemplar model of how this division of phonetic space varies over time among a…
Exemplar models are a popular class of models used to describe language change. Here we study how limiting the memory capacity of an individual in these models affects the system's behaviour. In particular we demonstrate the effect this…
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the…
Diphthong vowels exhibit a degree of inherent dynamic change, the extent of which can vary synchronically and diachronically, such that diphthong vowels can become monophthongs and vice versa. Modelling this type of change requires defining…
What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…
Recognition of speech, and in particular the ability to generalize and learn from small sets of labelled examples like humans do, depends on an appropriate representation of the acoustic input. We formulate the problem of finding robust…
This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification…
Recent research has extensively studied how large language models manipulate integers in specific arithmetic tasks, and on a more fundamental level, how they represent numeric values. These previous works have found that language model…
Autonomous morphology, such as inflection class systems and paradigmatic distribution patterns, is widespread and diachronically resilient in natural language. Why this should be so has remained unclear given that autonomous morphology…
Linguistic typology studies the range of structures present in human language. The main goal of the field is to discover which sets of possible phenomena are universal, and which are merely frequent. For example, all languages have vowels,…
The notions of noise sensitivity and stability were recently extended for the voter model. In this model, the vertices of a graph have opinions that are updated by uniformly selecting edges. We further extend stability results to different…
The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…
We attach to each weak model category $\mathcal{M}$ a class of first order formulas about the fibrant objects of $\mathcal{M}$ whose validity is invariant under homotopies and weak equivalences. This is a generalization of the classical…
Given the fast development of analysis techniques for NLP and speech processing systems, few systematic studies have been conducted to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each method. As a step in this direction we study the case of…
A persistence module is a functor $f: \mathbf{I} \to \mathsf{E}$, where $\mathbf{I}$ is the poset category of a totally ordered set. This work introduces saecular decomposition: a categorically natural method to decompose $f$ into simple…
We propose spoken sentence embeddings which capture both acoustic and linguistic content. While existing works operate at the character, phoneme, or word level, our method learns long-term dependencies by modeling speech at the sentence…
Word embedding models offer continuous vector representations that can capture rich contextual semantics based on their word co-occurrence patterns. While these word vectors can provide very effective features used in many NLP tasks such as…
Speech and language biomarkers have the potential to be regular, objective assessments of symptom severity in several health conditions, both in-clinic and remotely using mobile devices. However, the complex nature of speech and often…
Although many previous studies have carried out multimodal learning with real-time MRI data that captures the audio-visual kinematics of the vocal tract during speech, these studies have been limited by their reliance on multi-speaker…