We present a new perspective on how readers integrate context during real-time language comprehension. Our proposals build on surprisal theory, which posits that the processing effort of a linguistic unit (e.g., a word) is an affine function of its in-context information content. We first observe that surprisal is only one out of many potential ways that a contextual predictor can be derived from a language model. Another one is the pointwise mutual information (PMI) between a unit and its context, which turns out to yield the same predictive power as surprisal when controlling for unigram frequency. Moreover, both PMI and surprisal are correlated with frequency. This means that neither PMI nor surprisal contains information about context alone. In response to this, we propose a technique where we project surprisal onto the orthogonal complement of frequency, yielding a new contextual predictor that is uncorrelated with frequency. Our experiments show that the proportion of variance in reading times explained by context is a lot smaller when context is represented by the orthogonalized predictor. From an interpretability standpoint, this indicates that previous studies may have overstated the role that context has in predicting reading times.

What can large language models learn? By definition, language models (LM) are distributionsover strings. Therefore, an intuitive way of addressing the above question is to formalize it as a matter of learnability of classes of distributions over strings. While prior work in this direction focused on assessing the theoretical limits, in contrast, we seek to understand the empirical learnability. Unlike prior empirical work, we evaluate neural LMs on their home turf—learning probabilistic languages—rather than as classifiers of formal languages. In particular, we investigate the learnability of regular LMs (RLMs) by RNN and Transformer LMs. We empirically test the learnability of RLMs as a function of various complexity parameters of the RLM and the hidden state size of the neural LM. We find that the RLM rank, which corresponds to the size of linear space spanned by the logits of its conditional distributions, and the expected length of sampled strings are strong and significant predictors of learnability for both RNNs and Transformers. Several other predictors also reach significance, but with differing patterns between RNNs and Transformers.

Research in speech technologies and comparative linguistics depends on access to diverse and accessible speech data. The UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive is one of the earliest multilingual speech corpora, with long-form audio recordings and phonetic transcriptions for 314 languages (Ladefoged et al., 2009). Recently, 95 of these languages were time-aligned with word-level phonetic transcriptions (Li et al., 2021). Here we present VoxAngeles, a corpus of audited phonetic transcriptions and phone-level alignments of the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive, which uses the 95-language CMU re-release as our starting point. VoxAngeles also includes word- and phone-level segmentations from the original UCLA corpus, as well as phonetic measurements of word and phone durations, vowel formants, and vowel f0. This corpus enhances the usability of the original data, particularly for quantitative phonetic typology, as demonstrated through a case study of vowel intrinsic f0. We also discuss the utility of the VoxAngeles corpus for general research and pedagogy in crosslinguistic phonetics, as well as for low-resource and multilingual speech technologies. VoxAngeles is free to download and use under a CC-BY-NC 4.0 license.

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation, and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements on several fronts that were made in the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 66 new languages, including 24 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g., missing gender and macrons information. We have amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.

In the present paper, we introduce the ManDi Corpus, a spoken corpus of regional Mandarin dialects and Standard Mandarin. The corpus currently contains 357 recordings (about 9.6 hours) of monosyllabic words, disyllabic words, short sentences, a short passage and a poem, each produced in Standard Mandarin and in one of six regional Mandarin dialects: Beijing, Chengdu, Jinan, Taiyuan, Wuhan, and Xi’an Mandarin from 36 speakers. The corpus was collected remotely using participant-controlled smartphone recording apps. Word- and phone-level alignments were generated using Praat and the Montreal Forced Aligner. The pilot study of dialect-specific tone systems showed that with practicable design and decent recording quality, remotely collected speech data can be suitable for analysis of relative patterns in acoustic-phonetic realization. The corpus is available on OSF (https://osf.io/fgv4w/) for non-commercial use under a CC BY-NC 3.0 license.

Cross-linguistic phonetic analysis has long been limited by data scarcity and insufficient computational resources. In the past few years, the availability of large-scale cross-linguistic spoken corpora has increased dramatically, but the data still require considerable computational power and processing for downstream phonetic analysis. To facilitate large-scale cross-linguistic phonetic research in the field, we release the VoxCommunis Corpus, which contains acoustic models, pronunciation lexicons, and word- and phone-level alignments, derived from the publicly available Mozilla Common Voice Corpus. The current release includes data from 36 languages. The corpus also contains acoustic-phonetic measurements, which currently consist of formant frequencies (F1–F4) from all vowel quartiles. Major advantages of this corpus for phonetic analysis include the number of available languages, the large amount of speech per language, as well as the fact that most language datasets have dozens to hundreds of contributing speakers. We demonstrate the utility of this corpus for downstream phonetic research in a descriptive analysis of language-specific vowel systems, as well as an analysis of “uniformity” in vowel realization across languages. The VoxCommunis Corpus is free to download and use under a CC0 license.

This year’s iteration of the SIGMORPHON Shared Task on morphological reinflection focuses on typological diversity and cross-lingual variation of morphosyntactic features. In terms of the task, we enrich UniMorph with new data for 32 languages from 13 language families, with most of them being under-resourced: Kunwinjku, Classical Syriac, Arabic (Modern Standard, Egyptian, Gulf), Hebrew, Amharic, Aymara, Magahi, Braj, Kurdish (Central, Northern, Southern), Polish, Karelian, Livvi, Ludic, Veps, Võro, Evenki, Xibe, Tuvan, Sakha, Turkish, Indonesian, Kodi, Seneca, Asháninka, Yanesha, Chukchi, Itelmen, Eibela. We evaluate six systems on the new data and conduct an extensive error analysis of the systems’ predictions. Transformer-based models generally demonstrate superior performance on the majority of languages, achieving >90% accuracy on 65% of them. The languages on which systems yielded low accuracy are mainly under-resourced, with a limited amount of data. Most errors made by the systems are due to allomorphy, honorificity, and form variation. In addition, we observe that systems especially struggle to inflect multiword lemmas. The systems also produce misspelled forms or end up in repetitive loops (e.g., RNN-based models). Finally, we report a large drop in systems’ performance on previously unseen lemmas.

A broad goal in natural language processing (NLP) is to develop a system that has the capacity to process any natural language. Most systems, however, are developed using data from just one language such as English. The SIGMORPHON 2020 shared task on morphological reinflection aims to investigate systems’ ability to generalize across typologically distinct languages, many of which are low resource. Systems were developed using data from 45 languages and just 5 language families, fine-tuned with data from an additional 45 languages and 10 language families (13 in total), and evaluated on all 90 languages. A total of 22 systems (19 neural) from 10 teams were submitted to the task. All four winning systems were neural (two monolingual transformers and two massively multilingual RNN-based models with gated attention). Most teams demonstrate utility of data hallucination and augmentation, ensembles, and multilingual training for low-resource languages. Non-neural learners and manually designed grammars showed competitive and even superior performance on some languages (such as Ingrian, Tajik, Tagalog, Zarma, Lingala), especially with very limited data. Some language families (Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Turkic) were relatively easy for most systems and achieved over 90% mean accuracy while others were more challenging.

A major hurdle in data-driven research on typology is having sufficient data in many languages to draw meaningful conclusions. We present VoxClamantis v1.0, the first large-scale corpus for phonetic typology, with aligned segments and estimated phoneme-level labels in 690 readings spanning 635 languages, along with acoustic-phonetic measures of vowels and sibilants. Access to such data can greatly facilitate investigation of phonetic typology at a large scale and across many languages. However, it is non-trivial and computationally intensive to obtain such alignments for hundreds of languages, many of which have few to no resources presently available. We describe the methodology to create our corpus, discuss caveats with current methods and their impact on the utility of this data, and illustrate possible research directions through a series of case studies on the 48 highest-quality readings. Our corpus and scripts are publicly available for non-commercial use at https://voxclamantisproject.github.io.

The noun lexica of many natural languages are divided into several declension classes with characteristic morphological properties. Class membership is far from deterministic, but the phonological form of a noun and/or its meaning can often provide imperfect clues. Here, we investigate the strength of those clues. More specifically, we operationalize this by measuring how much information, in bits, we can glean about declension class from knowing the form and/or meaning of nouns. We know that form and meaning are often also indicative of grammatical gender—which, as we quantitatively verify, can itself share information with declension class—so we also control for gender. We find for two Indo-European languages (Czech and German) that form and meaning respectively share significant amounts of information with class (and contribute additional information above and beyond gender). The three-way interaction between class, form, and meaning (given gender) is also significant. Our study is important for two reasons: First, we introduce a new method that provides additional quantitative support for a classic linguistic finding that form and meaning are relevant for the classification of nouns into declensions. Secondly, we show not only that individual declensions classes vary in the strength of their clues within a language, but also that these variations themselves vary across languages.

The Mixer series of speech corpora were collected over several years, principally to support annual NIST evaluations of speaker recognition (SR) technologies. These evaluations focused on conversational speech over a variety of channels and recording conditions. One of the series, Mixer-6, added a new condition, read speech, to support basic scientific research on speaker characteristics, as well as technology evaluation. With read speech it is possible to make relatively precise measurements of phonetic events and features, which can be correlated with the performance of speaker recognition algorithms, or directly used in phonetic analysis of speaker variability. The read speech, as originally recorded, was adequate for large-scale evaluations (e.g., fixed-text speaker ID algorithms) but only marginally suitable for acoustic-phonetic studies. Numerous errors due largely to speaker behavior remained in the corpus, with no record of their locations or rate of occurrence. We undertook the effort to correct this situation with automatic methods supplemented by human listening and annotation. The present paper describes the tools and methods, resulting corrections, and some examples of the kinds of research studies enabled by these enhancements.