Related papers: Measuring the Functional Load of Phonological Cont…
The advisability of the use of the Fresnel number as the measure (characteristic) of the ratio of diffraction and focusing properties for ultrasonic transducers and its radiated beams is proposed and demonstrated. Althought this…
The analysis of thousands of time series in different languages reveals that word usage presents oscillations with a prevalence of 16-year cycles, mounted on slowly varying trends. These components carry different information: while similar…
Recent research has shown that static word embeddings can encode word frequency information. However, little has been studied about this phenomenon and its effects on downstream tasks. In the present work, we systematically study the…
The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that…
Word frequency is a key variable in psycholinguistics, useful for modeling human familiarity with words even in the era of large language models (LLMs). Frequency in film subtitles has proved to be a particularly good approximation of…
We analyse preference inference, through consistency, for general preference languages based on lexicographic models. We identify a property, which we call strong compositionality, that applies for many natural kinds of preference…
Voice disorders affect patients profoundly, and acoustic tools can potentially measure voice function objectively. Nonetheless, existing tools are limited to analysing voices displaying near periodicity, and do not account for inherent…
Speech representations from self-supervised speech models (S3Ms) are known to be sensitive to phonemic contrasts, but their sensitivity to prosodic contrasts has not been directly measured. The ABX discrimination task has been used to…
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on huge amounts of textual data, and concerns have been raised that the limits of such data may soon be reached. A potential solution is to train on synthetic data sampled from LLMs. In this work, we…
While large pretrained language models (PLMs) demonstrate incredible fluency and performance on many natural language tasks, recent work has shown that well-performing PLMs are very sensitive to what prompts are feed into them. Even when…
Cosine similarity of contextual embeddings is used in many NLP tasks (e.g., QA, IR, MT) and metrics (e.g., BERTScore). Here, we uncover systematic ways in which word similarities estimated by cosine over BERT embeddings are understated and…
Although Perplexity is a widely used performance metric for language models, the values are highly dependent upon the number of words in the corpus and is useful to compare performance of the same corpus only. In this paper, we propose a…
The diversity across outputs generated by LLMs shapes perception of their quality and utility. High lexical diversity is often desirable, but there is no standard method to measure this property. Templated answer structures and ``canned''…
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…
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…
A transversal study of the pitch variability of parkinsonian voices in read speech is presented. 30 patients suffering from Parkinson's disease (PD) and 32 healthy speakers were recorded while reading a text without voiceless phonemes. The…
Tone is a prosodic feature used to distinguish words in many languages, some of which are endangered and scarcely documented. In this work, we use unsupervised representation learning to identify probable clusters of syllables that share…
The World Wide Web has grown so big, in such an anarchic fashion, that it is difficult to describe. One of the evident intrinsic characteristics of the World Wide Web is its multilinguality. Here, we present a technique for estimating the…
The concept of inflection classes is an abstraction used by linguists, and provides a means to describe patterns in languages that give an analogical base for deducing previously unencountered forms. This ability is an important part of…
Human spoken language has long been the subject of scientific investigation, particularly with regard to the mechanisms underpinning speech production. Likewise, the study of animal communications has a substantial literature, with many…