Related papers: Do Self-Supervised Speech Models Exhibit the Criti…
Generative Language Models (GLMs) have the potential to significantly shape our linguistic landscape due to their expansive use in various digital applications. However, this widespread adoption might inadvertently trigger a…
Language models are often used as the backbone of modern dialogue systems. These models are pre-trained on large amounts of written fluent language. Repetition is typically penalised when evaluating language model generations. However, it…
Recent speech enhancement (SE) models increasingly leverage self-supervised learning (SSL) representations for their rich semantic information. Typically, intermediate features are aggregated into a single representation via a lightweight…
Spoken language change detection (LCD) refers to identifying the language transitions in a code-switched utterance. Similarly, identifying the speaker transitions in a multispeaker utterance is known as speaker change detection (SCD). Since…
Pretrained Language Models (LMs) have been shown to possess significant linguistic, common sense, and factual knowledge. One form of knowledge that has not been studied yet in this context is information about the scalar magnitudes of…
Children learn powerful internal models of the world around them from a few years of egocentric visual experience. Can such internal models be learned from a child's visual experience with highly generic learning algorithms or do they…
Predicting the words that a child is going to learn next can be useful for boosting language acquisition, and such predictions have been shown to be possible with both neural network techniques (looking at changes in the vocabulary state…
Speech language models (LMs) are promising for high-quality speech synthesis through in-context learning. A typical speech LM takes discrete semantic units as content and a short utterance as prompt, and synthesizes speech which preserves…
Most interpretability research in NLP focuses on understanding the behavior and features of a fully trained model. However, certain insights into model behavior may only be accessible by observing the trajectory of the training process. We…
How do adults understand children's speech? Children's productions over the course of language development often bear little resemblance to typical adult pronunciations, yet caregivers nonetheless reliably recover meaning from them. Here,…
Pretraining language models on formal language can improve their acquisition of natural language. Which features of the formal language impart an inductive bias that leads to effective transfer? Drawing on insights from linguistics and…
Exposure bias has been regarded as a central problem for auto-regressive language models (LM). It claims that teacher forcing would cause the test-time generation to be incrementally distorted due to the training-generation discrepancy.…
This work presents self-supervised learning methods for developing monaural speaker-specific (i.e., personalized) speech enhancement models. While generalist models must broadly address many speakers, specialist models can adapt their…
Conversational systems relying on text-based large language models (LLMs) often overlook paralinguistic cues, essential for understanding emotions and intentions. Speech-language models (SLMs), which use speech as input, are emerging as a…
Recent advances in self-supervised modeling of text and images open new opportunities for computational models of child language acquisition, which is believed to rely heavily on cross-modal signals. However, prior studies have been limited…
Here we study polysemy as a potential learning bias in vocabulary learning in children. Words of low polysemy could be preferred as they reduce the disambiguation effort for the listener. However, such preference could be a side-effect of…
Human speech perception is multimodal. In natural speech, lip movements can precede corresponding voicing by a non-negligible gap of 100-300 ms, especially for specific consonants, affecting the time course of neural phonetic encoding in…
Self-supervised language models are very effective at predicting high-level cortical responses during language comprehension. However, the best current models of lower-level auditory processing in the human brain rely on either…
An ability that underlies human syntactic knowledge is determining which words can appear in the similar structures (i.e. grouping words by their syntactic categories). These groupings enable humans to combine structures in order to…
Human linguistic capacity is often characterized by compositionality and the generalization it enables -- human learners can produce and comprehend novel complex expressions by composing known parts. Several benchmarks exploit…