We introduce the Swedish Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs, a dataset for evaluating syntactic performance in language models. It includes 2,500 minimal pairs organized into 25 syntactic phenomena, with 100 pairs per phenomenon. Each pair contrasts a well-formed and an ill-formed sentence that differ minimally. For each phenomenon, we manually constructed ten pairs from scratch. We semi-automatically generated the remaining 90 pairs and manually adjusted them. A random sample was assessed by 40 participants, who selected the well-formed sentence in 98.05% of cases. We evaluate eleven state-of-the-art models. Results generally show that models handle local agreement well but struggle with certain long-distance dependencies and word order phenomena. Model size seems to matter less than the training domain. Prompt-based evaluation generally lowers performance. We show that model performance is stable across handcrafted and generated subsets and across sample sizes, suggesting that 100 pairs per phenomenon suffice for reliable evaluation. Future work will expand the number of phenomena.

We present a pipeline for deep neural network assisted modeling and analysis of the behavior of an acoustic tube. The vocal tract is represented as a series of cylindrical tube segments, each characterized by fixed length and variable cross-sectional area. A large synthetic dataset of such tube configurations is generated, and a circuit theory–based algorithm predicts corresponding formant frequencies. To explore mapping between vocal tract shapes and formant values, the pipeline integrates both linear regression and nonlinear machine learning models - including multilayer perceptrons. Model interpretability is measured using Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP), which quantifies the contribution of each segment to predicted formant frequencies. The proposed framework enables detailed exploration of the articulatory-acoustic relationships inherent to an acoustic tube and vocal tract simulacrum. We present and describe the pipeline in the context of modeling effects of perturbations on the first three formants for a 16-cm tube, divided into 1 cm segments. Our pipeline can be applied to any method that models predictions of behavior of an acoustic tube, where the tube is conceived as a series of segmented units.

This study investigates the stability and convergence of vowel formants (F1, F2, F3) in read speech through an extensive corpus of audiobook recordings. While most formant studies rely on brief, isolated utterances recorded in laboratory settings, this analysis draws on 3,384 chapters (about 942 hours) of continuous, stylistically varied speech from publicly available audiobooks. The data was processed using an automated pipeline that comprised transcription, phoneme alignment, and formant extraction. Several statistical techniques – First Token Within (FTW), Cumulative Sum (CUSUM), Two-Sample t-Test, Confidence Interval (CI) Shrinkage, Piecewise Linear Fitting (PWLF), and Binary Segmentation (BinSeg) – were compared for their effectiveness in identifying stabilization points. Findings indicate that formant means generally stabilize within 60 to 230 vowel tokens per phoneme, dependent on vowel type and speaker gender. Of the methods that were evaluated, CUSUM yielded the most consistent and informative results. The results provide practical guidelines for determining the quantity of non-laboratory speech required to obtain reliable vowel formant averages.

We present a new set of 96 Swedish multi-word expressions annotated with degree of (non-)compositionality. In contrast to most previous compositionality datasets we also consider syntactically complex constructions and publish a formal specification of each expression. This allows evaluation of computational models beyond word bigrams, which have so far been the norm. Finally, we use the annotations to evaluate a system for automatic compositionality estimation based on distributional semantics. Our analysis of the disagreements between human annotators and the distributional model reveal interesting questions related to the perception of compositionality, and should be informative to future work in the area.