Related papers: Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its …
This paper describes a framework and a method with which speech communication can be analyzed. The framework consists of a set of low bit rate, short-range acoustic communication systems, such as speech, but that are quite different from…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
Disfluencies (i.e. interruptions in the regular flow of speech), are ubiquitous to spoken discourse. Fillers ("uh", "um") are disfluencies that occur the most frequently compared to other kinds of disfluencies. Yet, to the best of our…
Studying the ways in which language is gendered has long been an area of interest in sociolinguistics. Studies have explored, for example, the speech of male and female characters in film and the language used to describe male and female…
A new generation of AI models generates step-by-step reasoning text before producing an answer. This text appears to offer a human-readable window into their computation process, and is increasingly relied upon for transparency and…
If humans understood language by randomly selecting parsing actions, it might have been necessary to construct a robust symbolic system capable of being interpreted under any hierarchical structure. However, human parsing strategies do not…
The theoretical code-switching (CS) literature provides numerous pointwise investigations that aim to explain patterns in CS, i.e. why bilinguals switch language in certain positions in a sentence more often than in others. A resulting…
Simple representations of documents based on the occurrences of terms are ubiquitous in areas like Information Retrieval, and also frequent in Natural Language Processing. In this work we propose a logical-probabilistic approach to the…
Language change is a cultural evolutionary process in which variants of linguistic variables change in frequency through processes analogous to mutation, selection and genetic drift. In this work, we apply a recently-introduced method to…
In this work, we systematically investigate how well current models of coherence can capture aspects of text implicated in discourse organisation. We devise two datasets of various linguistic alterations that undermine coherence and test…
Does speaking style variation affect humans' ability to distinguish individuals from their voices? How do humans compare with automatic systems designed to discriminate between voices? In this paper, we attempt to answer these questions by…
Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g.,…
It is well-known that speakers who entrain to one another have more successful conversations than those who do not. Previous research has shown that interlocutors entrain on linguistic features in both written and spoken monolingual…
Human spoken language has long been the subject of scientific investigation, particularly with regard to the mechanisms underpinning speech production. Likewise, the study of animal communications has a substantial literature, with many…
Suspense is an affective response to narrative text that is believed to involve complex cognitive processes in humans. Several psychological models have been developed to describe this phenomenon and the circumstances under which text might…
Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…
Variation in speech is often quantified by comparing phonetic transcriptions of the same utterance. However, manually transcribing speech is time-consuming and error prone. As an alternative, therefore, we investigate the extraction of…
In this paper, we show how game-theoretic work on conversation combined with a theory of discourse structure provides a framework for studying interpretive bias. Interpretive bias is an essential feature of learning and understanding but…
Emergent communication protocols among humans and artificial neural network agents do not yet share the same properties and show some critical mismatches in results. We describe three important phenomena with respect to the emergence and…
Machine translation is a popular test bed for research in neural sequence-to-sequence models but despite much recent research, there is still a lack of understanding of these models. Practitioners report performance degradation with large…