Related papers: Prosody leaks into the memories of words

In spoken communication, information is transmitted not only via words, but also through a rich array of non-verbal signals, including prosody--the non-segmental auditory features of speech. Do these different communication channels carry…

Prosody -- the suprasegmental component of speech, including pitch, loudness, and tempo -- carries critical aspects of meaning. However, the relationship between the information conveyed by prosody vs. by the words themselves remains poorly…

Prosody -- the melody of speech -- conveys critical information often not captured by the words or text of a message. In this paper, we propose an information-theoretic approach to quantify how much information is expressed by prosody alone…

The relation of syntax and prosody (the syntax--prosody interface) has been an active area of research, mostly in linguistics and typically studied under controlled conditions. More recently, prosody has also been successfully used in the…

Based on data from a large-scale experiment with human subjects, we conclude that the logarithm of probability to guess a word in context (unpredictability) depends linearly on the word length. This result holds both for poetry and prose,…

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across linguistic units to achieve efficient communication. Of course, information rate in texts and discourses is not perfectly…

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…

This paper argues that the relationship between lexical identity and prosody -- one well-studied parameter of linguistic variation -- can be characterized using information theory. We predict that languages that use prosody to make lexical…

The prosody of a spoken word is determined by its surrounding context. In incremental text-to-speech synthesis, where the synthesizer produces an output before it has access to the complete input, the full context is often unknown which can…

When human listeners try to guess the spatial position of a speech source, they are influenced by the speaker's production level, regardless of the intensity level reaching their ears. Because the perception of distance is a very difficult…

In emotion recognition from speech, a key challenge lies in identifying speech signal segments that carry the most relevant acoustic variations for discerning specific emotions. Traditional approaches compute functionals for features such…

We suggest an information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper conditioning. We…

Prediction in language has traditionally been studied using simple designs in which neural responses to expected and unexpected words are compared in a categorical fashion. However, these designs have been contested as being `prediction…

Spoken language understanding research to date has generally carried a heavy text perspective. Most datasets are derived from text, which is then subsequently synthesized into speech, and most models typically rely on automatic…

This paper investigates the use of word surprisal, a measure of the predictability of a word in a given context, as a feature to aid speech synthesis prosody. We explore how word surprisal extracted from large language models (LLMs)…

While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a…

This study is a preliminary exploration of the concept of informativeness -how much information a sentence gives about a word it contains- and its potential benefits to building quality word representations from scarce data. We propose…

Speakers repeat constructions frequently in dialogue. Due to their peculiar information-theoretic properties, repetitions can be thought of as a strategy for cost-effective communication. In this study, we focus on the repetition of…

This paper links prosody to the information in a text and how it is processed by the speaker. It describes the operation and output of LOQ, a text-to-speech implementation that includes a model of limited attention and working memory.…

The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of…