Related papers: Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its …
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…
Code corpora, as observed in large software systems, are now known to be far more repetitive and predictable than natural language corpora. But why? Does the difference simply arise from the syntactic limitations of programming languages?…
Meaning is context-dependent, but many properties of language (should) remain the same even if we transform the context. For example, sentiment, entailment, or speaker properties should be the same in a translation and original of a text.…
Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…
Discourse signals are often implicit, leaving it up to the interpreter to draw the required inferences. At the same time, discourse is embedded in a social context, meaning that interpreters apply their own assumptions and beliefs when…
Acoustic context effects, where surrounding changes in pitch, rate or timbre influence the perception of a sound, are well documented in speech perception, but how they interact with language background remains unclear. Using a…
The paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations…
Colexification refers to the phenomenon of multiple meanings sharing one word in a language. Cross-linguistic lexification patterns have been shown to be largely predictable, as similar concepts are often colexified. We test a recent claim…
Scalar inferences (SI) are a signature example of how humans interpret language based on unspoken alternatives. While empirical studies have demonstrated that human SI rates are highly variable -- both within instances of a single scale,…
Recent studies on interpreting the hidden states of speech models have shown their ability to capture speaker-specific features, including gender. Does this finding also hold for speech translation (ST) models? If so, what are the…
Every encoding has priori information if the encoding represents any semantic information of the unverse or object. Encoding means mapping from the unverse to the string or strings of digits. The semantic here is used in the model-theoretic…
Although information theoretic characterizations of human communication have become increasingly popular in linguistics, to date they have largely involved grafting probabilistic constructs onto older ideas about grammar. Similarities…
Unlike text, speech conveys information about the speaker, such as gender, through acoustic cues like pitch. This gives rise to modality-specific bias concerns. For example, in speech translation (ST), when translating from languages with…
In this paper we study the variations in human brain activity when listening to real and fake audio. Our preliminary results suggest that the representations learned by a state-of-the-art deepfake audio detection algorithm, do not exhibit…
Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not…
Understanding emotion from speech requires sensitivity to both lexical and acoustic cues. However, it remains unclear whether large audio language models (LALMs) genuinely process acoustic information or rely primarily on lexical content.…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
When people interpret text, they rely on inferences that go beyond the observed language itself. Inspired by this observation, we introduce a method for the analysis of text that takes implicitly communicated content explicitly into…
Music is a structured and perceptually rich sequence of sounds in time, whose perception is shaped by the interplay of expectation and uncertainty about what comes next. Yet the uncertainty we infer from music depends on how the musical…