Related papers: The Self-Organization of Speech Sounds
Communication is compositional if complex signals can be represented as a combination of simpler subparts. In this paper, we theoretically show that inductive biases on both the training framework and the data are needed to develop a…
While there has been significant progress towards modelling coherence in written discourse, the work in modelling spoken discourse coherence has been quite limited. Unlike the coherence in text, coherence in spoken discourse is also…
Speech is a natural interface for humans to interact with robots. Yet, aligning a robot's voice to its appearance is challenging due to the rich vocabulary of both modalities. Previous research has explored a few labels to describe robots…
In this age of information technology, information access in a convenient manner has gained importance. Since speech is a primary mode of communication among human beings, it is natural for people to expect to be able to carry out spoken…
Current speech production systems predominantly rely on large transformer models that operate as black boxes, providing little interpretability or grounding in the physical mechanisms of human speech. We address this limitation by proposing…
Self-organization is the generation of order out of local interactions in non-equilibrium [1]. It is deeply connected to all fields of science from physics, chemistry to biology where functional living structures self-assemble[2] and…
One of the distinguishing aspects of human language is its compositionality, which allows us to describe complex environments with limited vocabulary. Previously, it has been shown that neural network agents can learn to communicate in a…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has rendered the boundary between humanity and computational machinery increasingly ambiguous. In the presence of more interwoven relationships within human-machine symbiosis, the very notion of…
Human languages provide efficient systems for expressing numerosities, but whether the sheer pressure to communicate is enough for numerical representations to arise in artificial agents, and whether the emergent codes resemble human…
Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We…
This paper introduces Linguistic Style Improvisation, a theory and set of algorithms for improvisation of spoken utterances by artificial agents, with applications to interactive story and dialogue systems. We argue that linguistic style is…
Artificial intelligence systems exhibit many useful capabilities, but they appear to lack understanding. This essay describes how we could go about constructing a machine capable of understanding. As John Locke (1689) pointed out words are…
Interaction with the world requires an organism to transform sensory signals into representations in which behaviorally meaningful properties of the environment are made explicit. These representations are derived through cascades of…
Recent progress in Spoken Language Modeling has shown that learning language directly from speech is feasible. Generating speech through a pipeline that operates at the text level typically loses nuances, intonations, and non-verbal…
Text does not fully specify the spoken form, so text-to-speech models must be able to learn from speech data that vary in ways not explained by the corresponding text. One way to reduce the amount of unexplained variation in training data…
Speech is the surface form of a finite set of phonetic units, which can be represented by discrete codes. We propose the Code BERT (CoBERT) approach for self-supervised speech representation learning. The idea is to convert an utterance to…
Establishing a communication system is hard because the intended meaning of a signal is unknown to its receiver when first produced, and the signaller also has no idea how that signal will be interpreted. Most theoretical accounts of the…
Intelligent agents such as robots are increasingly deployed in real-world, safety-critical settings. It is vital that these agents are able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions to human counterparts, however, their behavior is…