Expanding the breadth languages used to study sociophonetic variation and change is an important step in the theoretical development of sociophonetics. As data archives grow, forced alignment can accelerate the study of sociophonetic variation in minority languages. This paper examines the application of English and custom-made acoustic models on the alignment of vowels in two Pacific Creoles, Tok Pisin (59 hours) and Bislama (38.5 hours). We find that English models perform acceptably well in both languages, and as well as humans in vowel environments described as ‘Highly Reliable’. Custom models performed better in Bislama than Tok Pisin. We end the paper with recommendations on the use of cross-linguistic acoustic models in the case of English-Based Creoles.

The Appraisal framework in linguistics defines the framework for fine-grained evaluations and opinions and has contributed to sentiment analysis and opinion mining. As developing appraisal-annotated resources requires tagging of several dimensions with distinct semantic taxonomies, it has been primarily conducted manually by human experts through expensive and time-consuming processes. In this paper, we study how to automatically identify and annotate text segments for appraisal. We formulate the problem as a sequence tagging problem and propose novel task and sentiment adapters based on language models for appraisal tagging. Our model, named Adaptive Appraisal (Aˆ2), achieves superior performance than baseline adapter-based models and other neural classification models, especially for cross-domain and cross-language settings. Source code for Aˆ2 is available at: https://github.com/ltian678/AA-code.git

Advancements in Natural Language Generation have raised concerns on its potential misuse for deep fake news. Grover is a model for both generation and detection of neural fake news. While its performance on automatically discriminating neural fake news surpassed GPT-2 and BERT, Grover could face a variety of adversarial attacks to deceive detection. In this work, we present an investigation of Grover’s susceptibility to adversarial attacks such as character-level and word-level perturbations. The experiment results show that even a singular character alteration can cause Grover to fail, affecting up to 97% of target articles with unlimited attack attempts, exposing a lack of robustness. We further analyse these misclassified cases to highlight affected words, identify vulnerability within Grover’s encoder, and perform a novel visualisation of cumulative classification scores to assist in interpreting model behaviour.