Related papers: Infant directed speech is consistent with teaching
Automatic inference of important paralinguistic information such as age from speech is an important area of research with numerous spoken language technology based applications. Speaker age estimation has applications in enabling…
Autonomous discovery and direct instruction are two distinct sources of learning in children but education sciences demonstrate that mixed approaches such as assisted discovery or guided play result in improved skill acquisition. In the…
We introduce quantitative metrics for child language acquisition to evaluate language models. Our focus is on the formal syntactic and functional discourse properties of determiners in English, which young children acquire early and…
Functional Distributional Semantics (FDS) models the meaning of words by truth-conditional functions. This provides a natural representation for hypernymy but no guarantee that it can be learnt when FDS models are trained on a corpus. In…
Digital agents are considered a general-purpose technology. They spread quickly in private and organizational contexts, including education. Yet, research lacks a conceptual framing to describe interaction with such agents in a holistic…
A deep neural network (DNN)-based model has been developed to predict non-parametric distributions of durations of phonemes in specified phonetic contexts and used to explore which factors influence durations most. Major factors in US…
When acquiring syntax, children consistently choose hierarchical rules over competing non-hierarchical possibilities. Is this preference due to a learning bias for hierarchical structure, or due to more general biases that interact with…
Recent work has shown that distributed word representations can encode abstract information from child-directed speech. In this paper, we use diachronic distributed word representations to perform temporal modeling and analysis of lexical…
In inductive inference, we investigate the learnability of classes of formal languages. We are interested in what classes of languages are learnable in certain learning settings. A class of languages is learnable, if there is a learner that…
Sex classification of children's voices allows for an investigation of the development of secondary sex characteristics which has been a key interest in the field of speech analysis. This research investigated a broad range of acoustic…
Spoken language understanding (SLU) system usually consists of various pipeline components, where each component heavily relies on the results of its upstream ones. For example, Intent detection (ID), and slot filling (SF) require its…
One of the major challenges in acoustic modelling of child speech is the rapid changes that occur in the children's articulators as they grow up, their differing growth rates and the subsequent high variability in the same age group. These…
Accessible teaching has been extensively investigated in computer science, yet its integration into other disciplines, such as data literacy, remains limited. This paper examines the potential of data storytelling, defined as the…
Autism spectrum disorder ASD is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with challenges in communication, social interaction, and repetitive behaviors. Getting a clear diagnosis for a child is necessary for starting early intervention and…
Within months of birth, children develop meaningful expectations about the world around them. How much of this early knowledge can be explained through generic learning mechanisms applied to sensory data, and how much of it requires more…
Synthetic data becomes crucial for large language model training, but its effectiveness is highly inconsistent. We provide an information-theoretic account of this inconsistency: synthetic data improves a model only when the…
The advances in language-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies applied to build educational applications can present AI for social-good opportunities with a broader positive impact. Across many disciplines, enhancing the quality…
In-Context Learning (ICL) has been extensively studied in text-only Language Models, but remains largely unexplored in the speech domain. Here, we investigate how linguistic and acoustic features affect ICL in Speech Language Models. We…
An evolutionary model for emergence of diversity in language is developed. We investigated the effects of two real life observations, namely, people prefer people that they communicate with well, and people interact with people that are…
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a lifelong condition that significantly influencing an individual's communication abilities and their social interactions. Early diagnosis and intervention are critical due to the profound impact of ASD's…