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Novel or unexpected sounds that deviate from an otherwise repetitive sequence of the same sound cause behavioural distraction. Recent work has suggested that distraction also occurs during reading as fixation durations increased when a…

The conventional paradigm in speech translation starts with a speech recognition step to generate transcripts, followed by a translation step with the automatic transcripts as input. To address various shortcomings of this paradigm, recent…

Spoken language is often, if not always, understood in a context formed by the identity of the speaker. For example, we can easily make sense of an utterance such as "I'm going to have a manicure this weekend" or "The first time I got…

Communication of information in complex systems can be considered as major driver of systems evolution. What matters is not the communicated information by itself but rather the meaning that is supplied to the information. However…

We introduce sub-sentence encoder, a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. In contrast to the standard practice with sentence embeddings, where the meaning of an entire sequence…

The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…

Dependency syntax represents the structure of a sentence as a tree composed of dependencies, i.e., directed relations between lexical units. While in its more general form any such tree is allowed, in practice many are not plausible or are…

How does word frequency in pre-training data affect the behavior of similarity metrics in contextualized BERT embeddings? Are there systematic ways in which some word relationships are exaggerated or understated? In this work, we explore…

LLMs often adopt an assertive language style also when making false claims. Such ``overconfident hallucinations'' mislead users and erode trust. Achieving the ability to express in language the actual degree of uncertainty around a claim is…

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis posits that speakers tend to distribute information evenly across linguistic units to achieve efficient communication. Of course, information rate in texts and discourses is not perfectly…

We suggest an information-theoretic approach for measuring stylistic coordination in dialogues. The proposed measure has a simple predictive interpretation and can account for various confounding factors through proper conditioning. We…

Vocal feedback (e.g., `mhm', `yeah', `okay') is an important component of spoken dialogue and is crucial to ensuring common ground in conversational systems. The exact meaning of such feedback is conveyed through both lexical and prosodic…

Parallel texts (bitexts) have properties that distinguish them from other kinds of parallel data. First, most words translate to only one other word. Second, bitext correspondence is noisy. This article presents methods for biasing…

Attention maps in neural models for NLP are appealing to explain the decision made by a model, hopefully emphasizing words that justify the decision. While many empirical studies hint that attention maps can provide such justification from…

Semantic communication is a new paradigm for information transmission that integrates the essential meaning (semantics) of the message into the communication process. However, like in classic wireless communications, the open nature of…

One of the central aspects of contextualised language models is that they should be able to distinguish the meaning of lexically ambiguous words by their contexts. In this paper we investigate the extent to which the contextualised…

When humans judge the affective content of texts, they also implicitly assess the correctness of such judgment, that is, their confidence. We hypothesize that people's (in)confidence that they performed well in an annotation task leads to…

Cognitive distraction and measurement noise are two distinct factors that significantly impact the performance of humans and engineering systems. Cognitive distraction occurs when an individual's attention is diverted from a task, while…

This position paper looks into the formation of language and shows ties between structural properties of the words in the English language and their polysemy. Using Ollivier-Ricci curvature over a large graph of synonyms to estimate…

We provide an analytical argument for understanding the likely nature of parameter shifts between those coming from an analysis of a dataset and from a subset of that dataset, assuming differences are down to noise and any intrinsic…