Related papers: Stochastic phonological grammars and acceptability
Probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs), which are commonly used to generate trees randomly, have been well analyzed theoretically, leading to applications in various domains. Despite their utility, the distributions that the grammar…
The large size and complex decision mechanisms of state-of-the-art text classifiers make it difficult for humans to understand their predictions, leading to a potential lack of trust by the users. These issues have led to the adoption of…
Sampling is a common strategy for generating text from probabilistic models, yet standard ancestral sampling often results in text that is incoherent or ungrammatical. To alleviate this issue, various modifications to a model's sampling…
When primed with only a handful of training samples, very large, pretrained language models such as GPT-3 have shown competitive results when compared to fully-supervised, fine-tuned, large, pretrained language models. We demonstrate that…
Constructing artificial lexicons that are pronounceable, typologically plausible, and semantically structured remains an open challenge in computational linguistics. Existing conlang generators either lack formal phonotactic guarantees or…
Natural language is characterized by compositionality: the meaning of a complex expression is constructed from the meanings of its constituent parts. To facilitate the evaluation of the compositional abilities of language processing…
This thesis presents a broad-coverage probabilistic top-down parser, and its application to the problem of language modeling for speech recognition. The parser builds fully connected derivations incrementally, in a single pass from…
Words of estimative probability (WEP) are expressions of a statement's plausibility (probably, maybe, likely, doubt, likely, unlikely, impossible...). Multiple surveys demonstrate the agreement of human evaluators when assigning numerical…
While generative methods have progressed rapidly in recent years, generating expressive prosody for an utterance remains a challenging task in text-to-speech synthesis. This is particularly true for systems that model prosody explicitly…
This paper investigates the ability of artificial neural networks to judge the grammatical acceptability of a sentence, with the goal of testing their linguistic competence. We introduce the Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability (CoLA), a set…
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a promising approach to language generation. The latest works introducing novel GAN models for language generation use n-gram based metrics for evaluation and only report single scores of the best…
There is much interest in providing probabilistic semantics for defaults but most approaches seem to suffer from one of two problems: either they require numbers, a problem defaults were intended to avoid, or they generate peculiar side…
Estimating the parameters of probabilistic models of language such as maxent models and probabilistic neural models is computationally difficult since it involves evaluating partition functions by summing over an entire vocabulary, which…
Functional Distributional Semantics provides a computationally tractable framework for learning truth-conditional semantics from a corpus. Previous work in this framework has provided a probabilistic version of first-order logic, recasting…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
This paper examines the characterization and learning of grammars defined with enriched representational models. Model-theoretic approaches to formal language theory traditionally assume that each position in a string belongs to exactly one…
Hearing Aid (HA) algorithms need to be tuned ("fitted") to match the impairment of each specific patient. The lack of a fundamental HA fitting theory is a strong contributing factor to an unsatisfying sound experience for about 20% of…
How do learners acquire knowledge of what is unacceptable without negative evidence? Construction Grammar proposes statistical preemption: exposure to a conventional form (e.g., "donated the books to the library") preempts structurally…
Building explainable systems is a critical problem in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), since most machine learning models provide no explanations for the predictions. Existing approaches for explainable machine learning…
The speech signal conveys information on different time scales from short time scale or segmental, associated to phonological and phonetic information to long time scale or supra segmental, associated to syllabic and prosodic information.…