Related papers: Which Prosodic Features Matter Most for Pragmatics…

The ability to accurately interpret implied meanings plays a crucial role in human communication and language use, and language models are also expected to possess this capability. This study demonstrates that providing language models with…

Prosody plays a crucial role in speech perception, influencing both human understanding and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Despite its importance, prosodic stress remains under-studied due to the challenge of efficiently…

Prominences and boundaries are the essential constituents of prosodic structure in speech. They provide for means to chunk the speech stream into linguistically relevant units by providing them with relative saliences and demarcating them…

The latest generation of LLMs can be prompted to achieve impressive zero-shot or few-shot performance in many NLP tasks. However, since performance is highly sensitive to the choice of prompts, considerable effort has been devoted to…

Prosody describes both form and function of a sentence using the suprasegmental features of speech. Prosody phenomena are explored in the domain of higher phonological constituents such as word, phonological phrase and intonational phrase.…

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 explores the impact of variable pragmatic competence on communicative success through simulating language learning and conversing between speakers and listeners with different levels of reasoning abilities. Through studying this…

Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of…

The rapid advancement and widespread adoption of machine learning-driven technologies have underscored the practical and ethical need for creating interpretable artificial intelligence systems. Feature importance, a method that assigns…

Much of the success of modern language models depends on finding a suitable prompt to instruct the model. Until now, it has been largely unknown how variations in the linguistic expression of prompts affect these models. This study…

Grammatical features such as number and gender serve two central functions in human languages. While they encode salient semantic attributes like numerosity and animacy, they also offload sentence processing cost by predictably linking…

Prosody conveys rich emotional and semantic information of the speech signal as well as individual idiosyncrasies. We propose a stand-alone model that maps text-to-prosodic features such as F0 and energy and can be used in downstream tasks…

Speech-to-speech translation systems today do not adequately support use for dialog purposes. In particular, nuances of speaker intent and stance can be lost due to improper prosody transfer. We present an exploration of what needs to be…

The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic…

While generative methods have progressed rapidly in recent years, generating expressive prosody for an utterance remains a challenging task in text-to-speech synthesis. This is particularly true for systems that model prosody explicitly…

Parsing spoken dialogue poses unique difficulties, including disfluencies and unmarked boundaries between sentence-like units. Previous work has shown that prosody can help with parsing disfluent speech (Tran et al. 2018), but has assumed…

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…

Phonology typically describes speech in terms of discrete signs like features. The field of intonational phonology uses discrete accents to describe intonation and prosody. But, are such representations useful? The results of mimicry…

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…

Given the critical role of non-intrusive speech intelligibility assessment in hearing aids (HA), this paper enhances its performance by introducing Feature Importance across Domains (FiDo). We estimate feature importance on spectral and…