Related papers: Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs
Language models are typically trained on large corpora of text in their default orthographic form. However, this is not the only option; representing data as streams of phonemes can offer unique advantages, from deeper insights into…
We investigate what linguistic factors affect the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models. We hypothesize that orthographic and phonological complexities both degrade accuracy. To examine this, we fine-tune the multilingual…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
A longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade?…
We evaluated the impact of changing the observation scale over the entropy measures for text descriptions. MIDI coded Music, computer code and two human natural languages were studied at the scale of characters, words, and at the…
Current state of the art acoustic models can easily comprise more than 100 million parameters. This growing complexity demands larger training datasets to maintain a decent generalization of the final decision function. An ideal dataset is…
Numeral systems across the world's languages vary in fascinating ways, both regarding their synchronic structure and the diachronic processes that determined how they evolved in their current shape. For a proper comparison of numeral…
Of all components of Prosody, Rhythm has been regarded as the hardest to address, as it is utterly linked to Pitch and Intensity. Nevertheless, Rhythm is a very good indicator of a speaker's fluency in a foreign language or even of some…
Language is, as commonly theorized, largely arbitrary. Yet, systematic relationships between phonetics and semantics have been observed in many specific cases. To what degree could those systematic relationships manifest themselves in large…
Phonetic ambiguity and confusibility are bugbears for any form of bottom-up or data-driven approach to language processing. The question of when an input is ``close enough'' to a target word pervades the entire problem spaces of speech…
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…
When it comes to authentication in speaker verification systems, not all utterances are created equal. It is essential to estimate the quality of test utterances in order to account for varying acoustic conditions. In addition to the…
Human speech perception involves transforming a countinous acoustic signal into discrete linguistically meaningful units, such as phonemes, while simultaneously causing a listener to activate words that are similar to the spoken utterance…
This paper addresses the problem of deriving distance measures between parent and daughter languages with specific relevance to historical Chinese phonology. The diachronic relationship between the languages is modelled as a Probabilistic…
The problem addressed concerns the determination of the average number of successive attempts of guessing a word of a certain length consisting of letters with given probabilities of occurrence. Both first- and second-order approximations…
We survey recent results concerning the complexity of regular languages represented by their minimal deterministic finite automata. In addition to the quotient complexity of the language -- which is the number of its (left) quotients, and…
A foundational assumption in linguistics holds that the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary. Accumulating evidence from sound symbolism challenges this view, yet no study has systematically mapped the…
Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…
The Chapter starts with introductory information about quantitative linguistics notions, like rank--frequency dependence, Zipf's law, frequency spectra, etc. Similarities in distributions of words in texts with level occupation in quantum…
We present an analysis of eight measures used for quantifying morphological complexity of natural languages. The measures we study are corpus-based measures of morphological complexity with varying requirements for corpus annotation. We…