Related papers: Quantifying the redundancy between prosody and tex…

Large language models (LLMs) generate outputs by utilizing extensive context, which often includes redundant information from prompts, retrieved passages, and interaction history. In critical applications, it is vital to identify which…

Some recent models for Text-to-Speech synthesis aim to transfer the prosody of a reference utterance to the generated target synthetic speech. This is done by using a learned embedding of the reference utterance, which is used to condition…

Prosodic cues in conversational speech aid listeners in discerning a message. We investigate whether acoustic cues in spoken dialogue can be used to identify the importance of individual words to the meaning of a conversation turn.…

Human processing of idioms relies on understanding the contextual sentences in which idioms occur, as well as language-intrinsic features such as frequency and speaker-intrinsic factors like familiarity. While LLMs have shown high…

Recent advances in deep learning methods have elevated synthetic speech quality to human level, and the field is now moving towards addressing prosodic variation in synthetic speech.Despite successes in this effort, the state-of-the-art…

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,…

Vocal feedback (e.g., `mhm', `yeah', `okay') is an important component of spoken dialogue and is crucial to ensuring common ground in conversational systems. The exact meaning of such feedback is conveyed through both lexical and prosodic…

This work explores the application of various supervised classification approaches using prosodic information for the identification of spoken North S\'ami language varieties. Dialects are language varieties that enclose characteristics…

The speech signal conveys information on different time scales from short time scale or segmental, associated to phonological and phonetic information to long time scale or supra segmental, associated to syllabic and prosodic information.…

Contextualized word embeddings in language models have given much advance to NLP. Intuitively, sentential information is integrated into the representation of words, which can help model polysemy. However, context sensitivity also leads to…

Backchannels (e.g., `yeah', `mhm', and `right') are short, non-interruptive feedback signals whose lexical form and prosody jointly convey pragmatic meaning. While prior computational research has largely focused on predicting backchannel…

Speech large language models (SLMs) are typically built from text large language model (TLM) checkpoints, yet they still suffer from a substantial modality gap. Prior work has mainly attempted to reduce this gap from the output side by…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can be adapted to extend their text capabilities to speech inputs. However, these speech-adapted LLMs consistently underperform their text-based counterparts--and even cascaded pipelines--on language…

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…

Low-resource languages pose a challenge for machine translation with large language models (LLMs), which require large amounts of training data. One potential way to circumvent this data dependence is to rely on LLMs' ability to use…

To simplify the generation process, several text-to-speech (TTS) systems implicitly learn intermediate latent representations instead of relying on predefined features (e.g., mel-spectrogram). However, their generation quality is…

The recent advancement of large language models has spurred a growing trend of integrating pre-trained language model (PLM) embeddings into topic models, fundamentally reshaping how topics capture semantic structure. Classical models such…

We present ProsAudit, a benchmark in English to assess structural prosodic knowledge in self-supervised learning (SSL) speech models. It consists of two subtasks, their corresponding metrics, and an evaluation dataset. In the protosyntax…

Prosodic boundary plays an important role in text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) in terms of naturalness and readability. However, the acquisition of prosodic boundary labels relies on manual annotation, which is costly and time-consuming. In…