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The goal of our research is to automatically retrieve the satisfaction and the frustration in real-life call-center conversations. This study focuses an industrial application in which the customer satisfaction is continuously tracked down…
Purpose: This study evaluated whether articulatory kinematics, inferred by Articulatory Phonology speech inversion neural networks, aligned with perceptual ratings of /r/ and /s/ in the speech of children with speech sound disorders.…
Is child-directed language (CDL) optimized to support language learning, and which aspects of linguistic development does it facilitate? We investigate this question using neural language models trained on CDL versus adult-directed language…
Estimating dimensional emotions, such as activation, valence and dominance, from acoustic speech signals has been widely explored over the past few years. While accurate estimation of activation and dominance from speech seem to be…
To investigate how the auditory system processes natural speech, models have been created to relate the electroencephalography (EEG) signal of a person listening to speech to various representations of the speech. Mainly the speech envelope…
Children learning their first language face multiple problems of induction: how to learn the meanings of words, and how to build meaningful phrases from those words according to syntactic rules. We consider how children might solve these…
One of the major challenges in acoustic modelling of child speech is the rapid changes that occur in the children's articulators as they grow up, their differing growth rates and the subsequent high variability in the same age group. These…
Infants gradually learn to parse continuous speech into words and connect names with objects, yet the mechanisms behind development of early word perception skills remain unknown. We studied the extent to which early words can be acquired…
A formulation of bit-string models of language evolution, based on differential equations for the population speaking each language, is introduced and preliminarily studied. Connections with replicator dynamics and diffusion processes are…
We investigate instabilities in a stochastic mathematical model of cochlear dynamics. The cochlea is modeled as a spatio-temporal dynamical system made up of a spatially distributed array of coupled oscillators, together with the cochlear…
Recursion is the nature of human natural language. Since Chomsky proposed generative grammar, many scholars have studied recursion either theoretically or empirically. However, by observing children's acquisition of tail recursion…
Human infants acquire their verbal lexicon with minimal prior knowledge of language based on the statistical properties of phonological distributions and the co-occurrence of other sensory stimuli. This study proposes a novel fully…
Trial-and-error learning requires evaluating variable actions and reinforcing successful variants. In songbirds, vocal exploration is induced by LMAN, the output of a basal ganglia-circuit that also contributes a corrective bias to the…
Emergence is a fascinating property of large language models and neural networks more broadly: as models scale and train for longer, they sometimes develop new abilities in sudden ways. Despite initial studies, we still lack a comprehensive…
Motor babbling and goal babbling has been used for sensorimotor learning of highly redundant systems in soft robotics. Recent works in goal babbling has demonstrated successful learning of inverse kinematics (IK) on such systems, and…
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…
Neural network models for audio tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and acoustic scene classification (ASC), are susceptible to noise contamination for real-life applications. To improve audio quality, an enhancement module,…
Although stochastic optimization is central to modern machine learning, the precise mechanisms underlying its success, and in particular, the precise role of the stochasticity, still remain unclear. Modelling stochastic optimization…
We address the linguistic problem of the sequential arrangement of a head and its dependents from an information theoretic perspective. In particular, we consider the optimal placement of a head that maximizes the predictability of the…
Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the…