Related papers: Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its …

Sentence similarity is considered the basis of many natural language tasks such as information retrieval, question answering and text summarization. The semantic meaning between compared text fragments is based on the words semantic…

Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we investigate the…

Recently, researchers started to pay attention to the detection of temporal shifts in the meaning of words. However, most (if not all) of these approaches restricted their efforts to uncovering change over time, thus neglecting other…

Human language, as a typical complex system, its organization and evolution is an attractive topic for both physical and cultural researchers. In this paper, we present the first exhaustive analysis of the text organization of human speech.…

Linguistic relations in oral conversations present how opinions are constructed and developed in a restricted time. The relations bond ideas, arguments, thoughts, and feelings, re-shape them during a speech, and finally build knowledge out…

Human communication often involves the use of verbal irony or sarcasm, where the speakers usually mean the opposite of what they say. To better understand how verbal irony is expressed by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer we conduct…

There are two reasons why uncertainty may not be adequately described by Probability Theory. The first one is due to unique or nearly-unique events, that either never realized or occurred too seldom for frequencies to be reliably measured.…

This paper studies the performance of a neural self-attentive parser on transcribed speech. Speech presents parsing challenges that do not appear in written text, such as the lack of punctuation and the presence of speech disfluencies…

We address the problem of inferring a speaker's level of certainty based on prosodic information in the speech signal, which has application in speech-based dialogue systems. We show that using phrase-level prosodic features centered around…

The prosody of a spoken utterance, including features like stress, intonation and rhythm, can significantly affect the underlying semantics, and as a consequence can also affect its textual translation. Nevertheless, prosody is rarely…

Semantics of a sentence is defined with much less ambiguity than semantics of a single word, and we assume that it should be better preserved by translation to another language. If multilingual sentence embeddings intend to represent…

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…

Language decoding studies have identified word representations which can be used to predict brain activity in response to novel words and sentences (Anderson et al., 2016; Pereira et al., 2018). The unspoken assumption of these studies is…

Written language is complex. A written text can be considered an attempt to convey a meaningful message which ends up being constrained by language rules, context dependence and highly redundant in its use of resources. Despite all these…

We investigate mechanisms for language change within a framework where an unconventional signal for a meaning is first innovated, and then subsequently propagated through a speech community to replace the existing convention. We appeal to…

Reasoning about unpredicted change consists in explaining observations by events; we propose here an approach for explaining time-stamped observations by surprises, which are simple events consisting in the change of the truth value of a…

Speech is a fundamental means of communication that can be seen to provide two channels for transmitting information: the lexical channel of which words are said, and the non-lexical channel of how they are spoken. Both channels shape…

There has been a considerable amount of work on uncertainty in knowledge-based systems. This work has generally been concerned with uncertainty arising from the strength of inferences and the weight of evidence. In this paper we discuss…

This paper explores contexts associated with errors in transcrip-tion of spontaneous speech, shedding light on human perceptionof disfluencies and other conversational speech phenomena. Anew version of the Switchboard corpus is provided…

People in the real world often possess vague knowledge of future payoffs, for which quantification is not feasible or desirable. We argue that language, with differing ability to convey vague information, plays an important but less-known…