Related papers: The statistical analysis of acoustic phonetic data…
The statistical properties of letters frequencies in European literature texts are investigated. The determination of logarithmic dependence of letters sequence for one-language and two-language texts are examined. The pare of languages is…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
Human history leaves fingerprints in human languages. Little is known over language evolution and its study is of great importance. Here, we construct a simple stochastic model and compare its results to statistical data of real languages.…
Meaning is the foundation stone of intercultural communication. Languages are continuously changing, and words shift their meanings for various reasons. Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. In…
We aim to explain whether a stress memory task has a significant impact on tonal coarticulation. We contribute a novel approach to analyse tonal coarticulation in phonetics, where several f0 contours are compared with respect to their…
Understanding how words change their meanings over time is key to models of language and cultural evolution, but historical data on meaning is scarce, making theories hard to develop and test. Word embeddings show promise as a diachronic…
Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in…
Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…
This article develops a general detection theory for speech analysis based on time-varying autoregressive models, which themselves generalize the classical linear predictive speech analysis framework. This theory leads to a computationally…
The sound of our speech is influenced by the places we come from. Great Britain contains a wide variety of distinctive accents which are of interest to linguistics. In particular, the "a" vowel in words like "class" is pronounced…
To transcribe speech, automatic speech recognition systems use statistical methods, particularly hidden Markov model and N-gram models. Although these techniques perform well and lead to efficient systems, they approach their maximum…
Computational and human perception are often considered separate approaches for studying sound changes over time; few works have touched on the intersection of both. To fill this research gap, we provide a pioneering review contrasting…
In this article we propose a novel method to estimate the frequency distribution of linguistic variables while controlling for statistical non-independence due to shared ancestry. Unlike previous approaches, our technique uses all available…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
It is argued that the present log-normal distribution of language sizes is, to a large extent, a consequence of demographic dynamics within the population of speakers of each language. A two-parameter stochastic multiplicative process is…
Spoken language datasets are vital for advancing linguistic research, Natural Language Processing, and speech technology. However, resources dedicated to Italian, a linguistically rich and diverse Romance language, remain underexplored…
Semantics, morphology and syntax are strongly interdependent. However, the majority of computational methods for semantic change detection use distributional word representations which encode mostly semantics. We investigate an alternative…
This paper provides a computational analysis of poetry reading audio signals at a large scale to unveil the musicality within professionally-read poems. Although the acoustic characteristics of other types of spoken language have been…
We present a new computational technique to detect and analyze statistically significant geographic variation in language. Our meta-analysis approach captures statistical properties of word usage across geographical regions and uses…
Given a random text over a finite alphabet, we study the frequencies at which fixed-length words occur as subsequences. As the data size grows, the joint distribution of word counts exhibits a rich asymptotic structure. We investigate all…