Related papers: Phonotactic Complexity and its Trade-offs
Although the confusion of individual phonemes and features have been studied and analyzed since (Miller and Nicely, 1955), there has been little work done on extending this to a predictive theory of word-level confusions. The PGPfone…
Intrinsic evaluation metrics for conditional language models, such as perplexity or bits-per-character, are widely used in both mono- and multilingual settings. These metrics are rather straightforward to use and compare in monolingual…
We compared entropy for texts written in natural languages (English, Spanish) and artificial languages (computer software) based on a simple expression for the entropy as a function of message length and specific word diversity. Code text…
Recent research argues that exact recursive numeral systems optimize communicative efficiency by balancing a tradeoff between the size of the numeral lexicon and the average morphosyntactic complexity (roughly length in morphemes) of…
For decades, context-dependent phonemes have been the dominant sub-word unit for conventional acoustic modeling systems. This status quo has begun to be challenged recently by end-to-end models which seek to combine acoustic, pronunciation,…
This paper presents a new approach to phoneme recognition using nonsequential sub--phoneme units. These units are called acoustic events and are phonologically meaningful as well as recognizable from speech signals. Acoustic events form a…
In this article we undertake a study of extension complexity from the perspective of formal languages. We define a natural way to associate a family of polytopes with binary languages. This allows us to define the notion of extension…
We define {\em semantic complexity} using a new concept of {\em meaning automata}. We measure the semantic complexity of understanding of prepositional phrases, of an "in depth understanding system", and of a natural language interface to…
Spoken language evolves constrained by the economy of speech, which depends on factors such as the structure of the human mouth. This gives rise to local phonetic correlations in spoken words. Here we demonstrate that these local…
We introduce a method to estimate the complexity function of symbolic dynamical systems from a finite sequence of symbols. We test such complexity estimator on several symbolic dynamical systems whose complexity functions are known exactly.…
In this paper I propose a new way of measuring linguistic productivity that objectively assesses the ability of an affix to be used to coin new complex words and, unlike other popular measures, is not directly dependent upon token…
Phonetic error detection, a core subtask of automatic pronunciation assessment, identifies pronunciation deviations at the phoneme level. Speech variability from accents and dysfluencies challenges accurate phoneme recognition, with current…
Language models provide a key framework for studying linguistic theories based on prediction, but phonological analysis using large language models (LLMs) is difficult; there are few phonological benchmarks beyond English and the standard…
We relate the computational complexity of finite strings to universal representations of their underlying symmetries. First, Boolean functions are classified using the universal covering topologies of the circuits which enumerate them. A…
Multiple studies have probed representations emerging in neural networks trained for end-to-end NLP tasks and examined what word-level linguistic information may be encoded in the representations. In classical probing, a classifier is…
Approaches to improving multilingual language understanding often struggle with significant performance gaps between high-resource and low-resource languages. While there are efforts to align the languages in a single latent space to…
Compositionality in language refers to how much the meaning of some phrase can be decomposed into the meaning of its constituents and the way these constituents are combined. Based on the premise that substitution by synonyms is…
The complexity function of an infinite word $w$ on a finite alphabet $A$ is the sequence counting, for each non-negative $n$, the number of words of length $n$ on the alphabet $A$ that are factors of the infinite word $w$. For any given…
Language can be described as a network of interacting objects with different qualitative properties and complexity. These networks include semantic, syntactic, or phonological levels and have been found to provide a new picture of language…
In this project, we demonstrate that phoneme-based models for speech processing can achieve strong crosslinguistic generalizability to unseen languages. We curated the IPAPACK, a massively multilingual speech corpora with phonemic…