Related papers: Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its …
Synchronization of finite spike sequences is the way two brain regions compare their content and extract the most suitable sequence. This is the core of the linguistic comparison between a word and a previous one retrieved by memory.…
Semantic feature models have become a popular tool for prediction and interpretation of fMRI data. In particular, prior work has shown that differences in the fMRI patterns in sentence reading can be explained by context-dependent changes…
In this work, we use language modeling to investigate the factors that influence insertional code-switching. Code-switching occurs when a speaker alternates between one language variety (the primary language) and another (the secondary…
Cross-lingual alignment in pretrained language models enables knowledge transfer across languages. Similar alignment has been reported in Whisper-style speech encoders, based on spoken translation retrieval using representational…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
We propose a model of the speech perception of individual words in the presence of mishearings. This phenomenological approach is based on concepts used in linguistics, and provides a formalism that is universal across languages. We put…
In the domain of unsupervised learning most work on speech has focused on discovering low-level constructs such as phoneme inventories or word-like units. In contrast, for written language, where there is a large body of work on…
When human listeners try to guess the spatial position of a speech source, they are influenced by the speaker's production level, regardless of the intensity level reaching their ears. Because the perception of distance is a very difficult…
There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a…
Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…
Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is essential for improving human-computer interaction, yet its accuracy remains constrained by the complexity of emotional nuances in speech. In this study, we distinguish between descriptive semantics,…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
This paper elaborates on the notion of uncertainty in the context of annotation in large text corpora, specifically focusing on (but not limited to) historical languages. Such uncertainty might be due to inherent properties of the language,…
Why do human languages change at some times, and not others? We address this longstanding question from a computational perspective, focusing on the case of sound change. Sound change arises from the pronunciation variability ubiquitous in…
We present a model of speech perception which takes into account effects of correlations between sounds. Words in this model correspond to the attractors of a suitably chosen descent dynamics. The resulting lexicon is rich in short words,…
The extent to which men and women use language differently has been questioned previously. Finding clear and consistent gender differences in language is not conclusive in general, and the research is heavily influenced by the context and…
Speech is a multiplexed signal displaying levels of complexity, organizational principles and perceptual units of analysis at distinct timescales. This critical acoustic signal for human communication is thus characterized at distinct…
Divergent word usages reflect differences among people. In this paper, we present a novel angle for studying word usage divergence -- word interpretations. We propose an approach that quantifies semantic differences in interpretations among…
Language style transfer is the problem of migrating the content of a source sentence to a target style. In many of its applications, parallel training data are not available and source sentences to be transferred may have arbitrary and…