相关论文: Um, er: How meaning varies between speech and its …

Understanding and communicating data uncertainty is crucial for making informed decisions in sectors like finance and healthcare. Previous work has explored how to express uncertainty in various modes. For example, uncertainty can be…

People convey information extremely effectively through spoken interaction using multiple channels of information transmission: the lexical channel of what is said, and the non-lexical channel of how it is said. We propose studying human…

Senders of messages prefer to communicate uncertainty verbally (e.g., something is likely to happen) rather than numerically (such as 75%), leaving receivers with imprecise information. While it is well established that receivers translate…

Human languages vary widely in how they encode information within circumscribed semantic domains (e.g., time, space, color, human body parts and activities), but little is known about the global structure of semantic information and nothing…

Isolated word meanings are inherently uncertain. This uncertainty reduces when they are combined and anchored in context. We propose that grammar compresses meaning uncertainty cross-linguistically, which is reflected in brain and…

Words shift in meaning for many reasons, including cultural factors like new technologies and regular linguistic processes like subjectification. Understanding the evolution of language and culture requires disentangling these underlying…

Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…

The differences in written text and conversational speech are substantial; previous parsers trained on treebanked text have given very poor results on spontaneous speech. For spoken language, the mismatch in style also extends to prosodic…

Classifying the information content of neural spike trains in a linguistic endeavor, an uncertainty relation emerges between the bit size of a word and its duration. This uncertainty is associated with the task of synchronizing the spike…

Speech-acts can have literal meaning as well as pragmatic meaning, but these both involve consequences typically intended by a speaker. Speech-acts can also have unintentional meaning, in which what is conveyed goes above and beyond what…

This study examines how interruptions during U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments shape both the semantic content and emotional tone of advocates' speech, with a focus on gendered dynamics in judicial discourse. Using the ConvoKit Supreme…

Understanding and communicating data uncertainty is crucial for informed decision-making across various domains, including finance, healthcare, and public policy. This study investigates the impact of gender and acoustic variables on…

Code-switching, or switching between languages, occurs for many reasons and has important linguistic, sociological, and cultural implications. Multilingual speakers code-switch for a variety of purposes, such as expressing emotions,…

The intelligibility of speech relies on the ability of interlocutors to dynamically align their expectations about the rates at which informative changes in signals occur. Exactly how this is achieved remains an open question. We propose…

Humans possess the unique ability to communicate emotions through language. Although concepts like anger or awe are abstract, there is a shared consensus about what these English emotion words mean. This consensus may give the impression…

Languages are continuously undergoing changes, and the mechanisms that underlie these changes are still a matter of debate. In this work, we approach language evolution through the lens of causality in order to model not only how various…

We introduce a method to measure uncertainty in large language models. For tasks like question answering, it is essential to know when we can trust the natural language outputs of foundation models. We show that measuring uncertainty in…

_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…

The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…

Temporary syntactic ambiguities arise when the beginning of a sentence is compatible with multiple syntactic analyses. We inspect to which extent neural language models (LMs) exhibit uncertainty over such analyses when processing…