Related papers: Quantifying Phonosemantic Iconicity Distributional…
The idea of using phonological features instead of phonemes as input to sequence-to-sequence TTS has been recently proposed for zero-shot multilingual speech synthesis. This approach is useful for code-switching, as it facilitates the…
Many of the world's languages employ grammatical gender on the lexeme. For example, in Spanish, the word for 'house' (casa) is feminine, whereas the word for 'paper' (papel) is masculine. To a speaker of a genderless language, this…
One of the challenges with finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) is that their tokenizer is optimized for the language(s) it was pretrained on, but brittle when it comes to previously unseen variations in the data. This can for…
Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…
Cross-lingual alignment in pretrained language models enables knowledge transfer across languages. Similar alignment has been reported in Whisper-style speech encoders, based on spoken translation retrieval using representational…
Language is far more than a communication tool. A wealth of information - including but not limited to the identities, psychological states, and social contexts of its users - can be gleaned through linguistic markers, and such insights are…
Speech-based clinical tools are increasingly deployed in multilingual settings, yet whether pathological speech markers remain geometrically separable from accent variation remains unclear. Systems may misclassify healthy non-native…
Matching place names across writing systems is a persistent obstacle to the integration of multilingual geographic sources, whether modern gazetteers, medieval itineraries, or colonial-era surveys. Existing approaches depend on…
For general modeling methods applied to diverse languages, a natural question is: how well should we expect our models to work on languages with differing typological profiles? In this work, we develop an evaluation framework for fair…
In multilingual speech recognition systems, a situation can often arise when the language is not known in advance, but the signal has already been received and is being processed. For such cases, some generalized model is needed that will…
Computational approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly applied during the past decade and many new methods that implement parts of the traditional comparative method have been proposed. Despite these increased efforts,…
Like speech, signs are composed of discrete, recombinable features called phonemes. Prior work shows that models which can recognize phonemes are better at sign recognition, motivating deeper exploration into strategies for modeling sign…
Synonymy is a widespread yet puzzling linguistic phenomenon. Absolute synonyms theoretically should not exist, as they do not expand language's expressive potential. However, it was suggested that even if synonyms denote the same concept,…
Computer vision often treats human perception as homogeneous: an implicit assumption that visual stimuli are perceived similarly by everyone. This assumption is reflected in the way researchers collect datasets and train vision models. By…
We introduce a novel analysis that leverages linguistic minimal pairs to probe the internal linguistic representations of Large Language Models (LLMs). By measuring the similarity between LLM activation differences across minimal pairs, we…
This work addresses the problem of measuring how many languages a person "effectively" speaks given that some of the languages are close to each other. In other words, to assign a meaningful number to her language portfolio. Intuition says…
Conjuring up our thoughts, language reflects statistical patterns of word co-occurrences which in turn come to describe how we perceive the world. Whether counting how frequently nouns and verbs combine in Google search queries, or…
This paper provides a comparative analysis of the performance of four state-of-the-art distributional semantic models (DSMs) over 11 languages, contrasting the native language-specific models with the use of machine translation over…
Machine translation from polysynthetic to fusional languages is a challenging task, which gets further complicated by the limited amount of parallel text available. Thus, translation performance is far from the state of the art for…
We demonstrate the effectiveness of multilingual learning for unsupervised part-of-speech tagging. The central assumption of our work is that by combining cues from multiple languages, the structure of each becomes more apparent. We…