@inproceedings{choi-etal-2026-b,
    title = "[b] = [d] - [t] + [p]: Self-supervised Speech Models Discover Phonological Vector Arithmetic",
    author = "Choi, Kwanghee  and
      Yeo, Eunjung  and
      Cho, Cheol Jun  and
      Harwath, David  and
      Mortensen, David R.",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.537/",
    pages = "11048--11069",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Self-supervised speech models (S3Ms) are known to encode rich phonetic information, yet how this information is structured remains underexplored. We conduct a comprehensive study across 96 languages to analyze the underlying structure of S3M representations, with particular attention to phonological vectors.We first show that there exist linear directions within the model{'}s representation space that correspond to phonological features. We further demonstrate that the scale of these phonological vectors correlate to the degree of acoustic realization of their corresponding phonological features in a continuous manner. For example, the difference between [d] and [t] yields a voicing vector: adding this vector to [p] produces [b], while scaling it results in a continuum of voicing. Together, these findings indicate that S3Ms encode speech using phonologically interpretable and compositional vectors, demonstrating phonological vector arithmetic.All code and interactive demos are available at https://github.com/juice500ml/phonetic-arithmetic."
}