Related papers: Over-representation of phonological features in ba…
Throughout language history, words are borrowed from one language to another and gradually become integrated into the recipient's lexicon. Speakers can often differentiate these loanwords from native vocabulary, particularly in bilingual…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
Speaker identity plays a significant role in human communication and is being increasingly used in societal applications, many through advances in machine learning. Speaker identity perception is an essential cognitive phenomenon that can…
n this paper, we attempt to explain the emergence of the linguistic diversity that exists across the consonant inventories of some of the major language families of the world through a complex network based growth model. There is only a…
We adopt an evolutionary view on language change in which cognitive factors (in addition to social ones) affect the fitness of words and their success in the linguistic ecosystem. Specifically, we propose a variety of psycholinguistic…
Generative spoken language models pretrained on large-scale raw audio can continue a speech prompt with appropriate content while preserving attributes like speaker and emotion, serving as foundation models for spoken dialogue. In prior…
Statistical properties of the taxonomic classification of human languages are studied. It is shown that, at the highest levels of the taxonomic hierarchy, the frequency of taxon members as a function of the number of languages belonging to…
Language modelling is regularly analysed at word, subword or character units, but syllables are seldom used. Syllables provide shorter sequences than characters, they can be extracted with rules, and their segmentation typically requires…
This paper develops an improved surrogate data test to show experimental evidence, for all the simple vowels of US English, for both male and female speakers, that Gaussian linear prediction analysis, a ubiquitous technique in current…
Self-supervised speech models (S3Ms) have become an effective backbone for speech applications. Various analyses suggest that S3Ms encode linguistic properties. In this work, we seek a more fine-grained analysis of the word-level linguistic…
We present a cross-linguistic study that aims to quantify vowel harmony using data-driven computational modeling. Concretely, we define an information-theoretic measure of harmonicity based on the predictability of vowels in a natural…
In recent years, with the rapid development of the depth and breadth of large language models' capabilities, various corresponding evaluation benchmarks have been emerging in increasing numbers. As a quantitative assessment tool for model…
In cross-lingual language models, representations for many different languages live in the same space. Here, we investigate the linguistic and non-linguistic factors affecting sentence-level alignment in cross-lingual pretrained language…
This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification…
Words can be represented by composing the representations of subword units such as word segments, characters, and/or character n-grams. While such representations are effective and may capture the morphological regularities of words, they…
The success of multilingual pre-trained models is underpinned by their ability to learn representations shared by multiple languages even in absence of any explicit supervision. However, it remains unclear how these models learn to…
Large language models show strong performance on knowledge intensive tasks such as fact-checking and question answering, yet they often struggle with numerical reasoning. We present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art models for…
Tokenization is the first step in every language model (LM), yet it never takes the sounds of words into account. We investigate how tokenization influences text-only LMs' ability to represent phonological knowledge. Through a series of…
The recent availability of larger typological databases such as Haspelmath et al. (2005) has brought the linguistics community closer to having a solid, empirical foundation for making actual claims about prehistoric migrations, deep…
Similarities between language representations derived from Self-Supervised Speech Models (S3Ms) have been observed to primarily reflect geographic proximity or surface typological similarities driven by recent expansion or contact,…