Related papers: Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability
Native speakers can judge whether a sentence is an acceptable instance of their language. Acceptability provides a means of evaluating whether computational language models are processing language in a human-like manner. We test the ability…
After presenting a novel O(n^3) parsing algorithm for dependency grammar, we develop three contrasting ways to stochasticize it. We propose (a) a lexical affinity model where words struggle to modify each other, (b) a sense tagging model…
Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…
When generating natural language from neural probabilistic models, high probability does not always coincide with high quality: It has often been observed that mode-seeking decoding methods, i.e., those that produce high-probability text…
Grammaticality and likelihood are distinct notions in human language. Pretrained language models (LMs), which are probabilistic models of language fitted to maximize corpus likelihood, generate grammatically well-formed text and…
The grammatical knowledge of language models (LMs) is often measured using a benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs, where the LMs are presented with a pair of acceptable and unacceptable sentences and required to judge which is more…
There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three…
Several interesting generative learning algorithms involve a complex probability distribution over many random variables, involving intractable normalization constants or latent variable normalization. Some of them may even not have an…
A controversial test for Large Language Models concerns the ability to discern possible from impossible language. While some evidence attests to the models' sensitivity to what crosses the limits of grammatically impossible language, this…
Nous pr\'esentons dans cette contribution une approche \`a la fois symbolique et probabiliste permettant d'extraire l'information sur la segmentation du signal de parole \`a partir d'information prosodique. Nous utilisons pour ce faire des…
The paper describes a parser of sequences of (English) part-of-speech labels which utilises a probabilistic grammar trained using the inside-outside algorithm. The initial (meta)grammar is defined by a linguist and further rules compatible…
We describe a generative probabilistic model of natural language, which we call HBG, that takes advantage of detailed linguistic information to resolve ambiguity. HBG incorporates lexical, syntactic, semantic, and structural information…
Spoken communication occurs in a "noisy channel" characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input,…
The goal of generative phonology, as formulated by Chomsky and Halle (1968), is to specify a formal system that explains the set of attested phonological strings in a language. Traditionally, a collection of rules (or constraints, in the…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
The relationship between written and spoken words is convoluted in languages with a deep orthography such as English and therefore it is difficult to devise explicit rules for generating the pronunciations for unseen words. Pronunciation by…
Non-native speakers show difficulties with spoken word processing. Many studies attribute these difficulties to imprecise phonological encoding of words in the lexical memory. We test an alternative hypothesis: that some of these…
In this paper we first propose a new statistical parsing model, which is a generative model of lexicalised context-free grammar. We then extend the model to include a probabilistic treatment of both subcategorisation and wh-movement.…
How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs).When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities…
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…