Related papers: A Functional Trade-off between Prosodic and Semant…
Human speech can be characterized by different components, including semantic content, speaker identity and prosodic information. Significant progress has been made in disentangling representations for semantic content and speaker identity…
We train multi-task autoencoders on linguistic tasks and analyze the learned hidden sentence representations. The representations change significantly when translation and part-of-speech decoders are added. The more decoders a model…
Targeted syntactic evaluations have demonstrated the ability of language models to perform subject-verb agreement given difficult contexts. To elucidate the mechanisms by which the models accomplish this behavior, this study applies causal…
The understanding and interpretation of speech can be affected by various external factors. The use of face masks is one such factors that can create obstruction to speech while communicating. This may lead to degradation of speech…
Sarcasm is a form of irony that requires readers or listeners to interpret its intended meaning by considering context and social cues. Machine learning classification models have long had difficulty detecting sarcasm due to its social…
State-of-the-art methods for relation extraction consider the sentential context by modeling the entire sentence. However, syntactic indicators, certain phrases or words like prepositions that are more informative than other words and may…
This paper explores the relationship between accent strength and articulatory features inferred from acoustic speech. To quantify accent strength, we compare phonetic transcriptions with transcriptions based on dictionary-based references,…
Temporary syntactic ambiguities arise when the beginning of a sentence is compatible with multiple syntactic analyses. We inspect to which extent neural language models (LMs) exhibit uncertainty over such analyses when processing…
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…
Tarski gave a general semantics for deductive reasoning: a formula a may be deduced from a set A of formulas iff a holds in all models in which each of the elements of A holds. A more liberal semantics has been considered: a formula a may…
Sarcasm detection in product reviews requires balancing domain-specific symbolic pattern recognition with deep semantic understanding. Symbolic representations capture explicit linguistic phenomena that are often decisive for sarcasm…
This work investigates whether modern speech models are sensitive to prosodic emphasis - whether they encode emphasized and neutral words in systematically different ways. Prior work typically relies on isolated acoustic correlates (e.g.,…
We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question, Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and predicts dialogue acts…
Syntactic analysis plays an important role in semantic parsing, but the nature of this role remains a topic of ongoing debate. The debate has been constrained by the scarcity of empirical comparative studies between syntactic and semantic…
Since their inception, transformer-based language models have led to impressive performance gains across multiple natural language processing tasks. For Arabic, the current state-of-the-art results on most datasets are achieved by the…
Elaborating a series of intermediate reasoning steps significantly improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems, as such steps would evoke LLMs to think sequentially. However, human sarcasm understanding is…
Semantic communication (SC) goes beyond technical communication in which a given sequence of bits or symbols, often referred to as information, is be transmitted reliably over a noisy channel, regardless of its meaning. In SC, conveying the…
Online writing lacks the non-verbal cues present in face-to-face communication, which provide additional contextual information about the utterance, such as the speaker's intention or affective state. To fill this void, a number of…
Most state-of-the-art sign language models are trained on interpreter or isolated vocabulary data, which overlooks the variability that characterizes natural dialogue. However, human communication dynamically adapts to contexts and…
We propose a generative model for a sentence that uses two latent variables, with one intended to represent the syntax of the sentence and the other to represent its semantics. We show we can achieve better disentanglement between semantic…