相关论文: Quantifying Phonosemantic Iconicity Distributional…
A foundational assumption in linguistics holds that the relationship between a word's sound and its meaning is arbitrary. Accumulating evidence from sound symbolism challenges this view, yet no study has systematically mapped the…
Sound symbolism is a linguistic concept that refers to non-arbitrary associations between phonetic forms and their meanings. We suggest that this can be a compelling probe into how Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) interpret auditory…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
While tokenization is a key step in language modeling, with effects on model training and performance, it remains unclear how to effectively evaluate tokenizer quality. One proposed dimension of tokenizer quality is the extent to which…
A longstanding debate in semiotics centers on the relationship between linguistic signs and their corresponding semantics: is there an arbitrary relationship between a word form and its meaning, or does some systematic phenomenon pervade?…
We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a…
This work presents a novel methodology for calculating the phonetic similarity between words taking motivation from the human perception of sounds. This metric is employed to learn a continuous vector embedding space that groups similar…
We show that short-range phoneme dependencies encode large-scale patterns of linguistic relatedness, with direct implications for quantitative typology and evolutionary linguistics. Specifically, using an information-theoretic framework, we…
We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity---bits per phoneme---that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the…
A core part of linguistic typology is the classification of languages according to linguistic properties, such as those detailed in the World Atlas of Language Structure (WALS). Doing this manually is prohibitively time-consuming, which is…
Language similarities can be caused by genetic relatedness, areal contact, universality, or chance. Colexification, i.e. a type of similarity where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings, is underexplored. In our work, we…
Meaning is the foundation stone of intercultural communication. Languages are continuously changing, and words shift their meanings for various reasons. Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. In…
Recent years have brought great advances into solving morphological tasks, mostly due to powerful neural models applied to various tasks as (re)inflection and analysis. Yet, such morphological tasks cannot be considered solved, especially…
Figurative language permeates human communication, but at the same time is relatively understudied in NLP. Datasets have been created in English to accelerate progress towards measuring and improving figurative language processing in…
Contemporary deep learning models effectively handle languages with diverse morphology despite not being directly integrated into them. Morphology and word order are closely linked, with the latter incorporated into transformer-based models…
Lexical iconicity, a direct relation between a word's meaning and its form, is an important aspect of every natural language, most commonly manifesting through sound-meaning associations. Since Large language models' (LLMs') access to both…
This paper analyzes dysarthric speech datasets from three languages with different prosodic systems: English, Korean, and Tamil. We inspect 39 acoustic measurements which reflect three speech dimensions including voice quality,…
Colexification refers to the linguistic phenomenon where a single lexical form is used to convey multiple meanings. By studying cross-lingual colexifications, researchers have gained valuable insights into fields such as psycholinguistics…
Received wisdom in linguistic typology holds that if the structure of a language becomes more complex in one dimension, it will simplify in another, building on the assumption that all languages are equally complex (Joseph and Newmeyer,…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…