Related papers: Universal versus system-specific features of punct…
The ever-growing size of the foundation language model has brought significant performance gains in various types of downstream tasks. With the existence of side-effects brought about by the large size of the foundation language model such…
The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose…
As speakers turn their thoughts into sentences, they maintain a balance between the complexity of words and syntax. However, it is unclear whether this syntax-lexicon tradeoff is unique to the spoken language production that is under the…
For real-life applications, it is crucial that end-to-end spoken language translation models perform well on continuous audio, without relying on human-supplied segmentation. For online spoken language translation, where models need to…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) still exhibit large performance gaps between English and other languages, yet much current work assumes these gaps can be closed simply by making reasoning in every language resemble English reasoning. This…
In combinatorics on words, a word w of length n over an alphabet of size q is said to be privileged if n <= 1 or if n >= 2 and w has a privileged border that occurs exactly twice in w. Forsyth, Jayakumar and Shallit proved that there exist…
A crucial part of an accurate and reliable spoken language assessment system is the underlying ASR model. Recently, large-scale pre-trained ASR foundation models such as Whisper have been made available. As the output of these models is…
Explainability is a topic of growing importance in NLP. In this work, we provide a unified perspective of explainability as a communication problem between an explainer and a layperson about a classifier's decision. We use this framework to…
The regular languages with a neutral letter expressible in first-order logic with one alternation are characterized. Specifically, it is shown that if an arbitrary $\Sigma_2$ formula defines a regular language with a neutral letter, then…
In this short communication, we describe the recent debate on whether the hazard function should be used for causal inference in time-to-event studies and consider three different potential outcomes frameworks (by Rubin, Robins, and Pearl,…
We show that across architecture (Transformer vs. Mamba vs. RWKV), training dataset (OpenWebText vs. The Pile), and scale (14 million parameters to 12 billion parameters), autoregressive language models exhibit highly consistent patterns of…
The temporal statistics exhibited by written correspondence appear to be media dependent, with features which have so far proven difficult to characterize. We explain the origin of these difficulties by disentangling the role of spontaneous…
Discourse segmentation is a crucial step in building end-to-end discourse parsers. However, discourse segmenters only exist for a few languages and domains. Typically they only detect intra-sentential segment boundaries, assuming gold…
Consider a person trying to spread an important message on a social network. He/she can spend hours trying to craft the message. Does it actually matter? While there has been extensive prior work looking into predicting popularity of…
A non-empty word $w$ is a border of the word $u$ if $\vert w\vert<\vert u\vert$ and $w$ is both a prefix and a suffix of $u$. A word $u$ with the border $w$ is closed if $u$ has exactly two occurrences of $w$. A word $u$ is privileged if…
The use of linguistic typological resources in natural language processing has been steadily gaining more popularity. It has been observed that the use of typological information, often combined with distributed language representations,…
A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] \dots w[i_{k}]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq \lvert w\rvert$. A word $w$ is $k$-subsequence universal over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if every…
The present study uses a computational approach to examine the role of semantic constraints in normal reading. This methodology avoids confounds inherent in conventional measures of predictability, allowing for theoretically deeper accounts…
We describe an implemented system for robust domain-independent syntactic parsing of English, using a unification-based grammar of part-of-speech and punctuation labels coupled with a probabilistic LR parser. We present evaluations of the…
There have been several efforts to extend distributional semantics beyond individual words, to measure the similarity of word pairs, phrases, and sentences (briefly, tuples; ordered sets of words, contiguous or noncontiguous). One way to…