Frederic Mailhot

Also published as: Frédéric Mailhot, Fred Mailhot


2026

Encoder–decoder neural networks with high-dimensional (e.g. d=300-–500) embeddings and hidden layers can be used to model a variety of morphophonological phenomena as sequence-to-sequence mappings, achieving high accuracy across languages and patterns. We show here that these high-capacity models are overparameterized, at least for the task of morphological inflection, and that simpler and smaller networks can perform near ceiling on the task of inflecting Turkish stems. Moreover these reduced-capacity models encode linguistically relevant information even when they are too small to succeed at the inflectional task.

2025

2024

We present a solution to the problem of exemplar-based language production from variable-duration tokens, leveraging algorithms from the domain of time-series clustering and classification. Our model stores and outputs tokens of phonetically rich and temporally variable representations of recorded speech. We show qualitatively and quantitatively that model outputs retain essential acoustic/phonetic characteristics despite the noise introduced by averaging, and also demonstrate the effects of similarity and indexical information as constraints on exemplar cloud selection.
Large language models in public-facing industrial applications must accurately process data for the domain in which they are deployed, but they must not leak sensitive or confidential information when used. We present a process for anonymizing training data, a framework for quantitatively and qualitatively assessing the effectiveness of this process, and an assessment of the effectiveness of models fine-tuned on anonymized data in comparison with commercially available LLM APIs.

2023

2021

We describe three baseline beating systems for the high-resource English-only sub-task of the SIGMORPHON 2021 Shared Task 1: a small ensemble that Dialpad’s speech recognition team uses internally, a well-known off-the-shelf model, and a larger ensemble model comprising these and others. We additionally discuss the challenges related to the provided data, along with the processing steps we took.

2019

We use sequence-to-sequence networks trained on sequential phonetic encoding tasks to construct compositional phonological representations of words. We show that the output of an encoder network can predict the phonetic durations of American English words better than a number of alternative forms. We also show that the model’s learned representations map onto existing measures of words’ phonological structure (phonological neighborhood density and phonotactic probability).

2010