How can we learn the mapping between written words and their spoken counterparts in the absence of explicit textual supervision? We present a visually grounded method for building a vocabulary of spoken words using only images and their spoken descriptions. First, image captioning systems are used to build a vocabulary of written words representing salient visual concepts in the images. For each word, we then find utterances whose image captions contain that word. Then we use an unsupervised word discovery technique to align these utterances to locate instances of the target word. The result is spoken word segments that are linked to written words -- all accomplished without any text supervision. In spoken word retrieval and keyword spotting experiments, the proposed approach outperforms a strong neural baseline while being more interpretable. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in English and motivate future work on low-resource languages without transcripts.
We propose online unsupervised domain adaptation (DA), which is performed incrementally as data comes in and is applicable when batch DA is not possible. In a part-of-speech (POS) tagging evaluation, we find that online unsupervised DA performs as well as batch DA.
Phoneme recognition is a largely unsolved problem in NLP, especially for low-resource languages like Urdu. The systems that try to extract the phonemes from audio speech require hand-labeled phonetic transcriptions. This requires expert linguists to annotate speech data with its relevant phonetic representation which is both an expensive and a tedious task. In this paper, we propose STRATA, a framework for supervised phoneme recognition that overcomes the data scarcity issue for low resource languages using a seq2seq neural architecture integrated with transfer learning, attention mechanism, a…
In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture, Speech2Vec, for learning fixed-length vector representations of audio segments excised from a speech corpus, where the vectors contain semantic information pertaining to the underlying spoken words, and are close to other vectors in the embedding space if their corresponding underlying spoken words are semantically similar. The proposed model can be viewed as a speech version of Word2Vec. Its design is based on a RNN Encoder-Decoder framework, and borrows the methodology of skipgrams or continuous bag-of-words for training. Le…
We propose a variation to the commonly used Word Error Rate (WER) metric for speech recognition evaluation which incorporates the alignment of phonemes, in the absence of time boundary information. After computing the Levenshtein alignment on words in the reference and hypothesis transcripts, spans of adjacent errors are converted into phonemes with word and syllable boundaries and a phonetic Levenshtein alignment is performed. The aligned phonemes are recombined into aligned words that adjust the word alignment labels in each error region. We demonstrate that our Phonetically-Oriented Word Er…
Most end-to-end speech recognition systems model text directly as a sequence of characters or sub-words. Current approaches to sub-word extraction only consider character sequence frequencies, which at times produce inferior sub-word segmentation that might lead to erroneous speech recognition output. We propose pronunciation-assisted sub-word modeling (PASM), a sub-word extraction method that leverages the pronunciation information of a word. Experiments show that the proposed method can greatly improve upon the character-based baseline, and also outperform commonly used byte-pair encoding me…
Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）
We investigated word recognition in a Visually Grounded Speech model. The model has been trained on pairs of images and spoken captions to create visually grounded embeddings which can be used for speech to image retrieval and vice versa. We investigate whether such a model can be used to recognise words by embedding isolated words and using them to retrieve images of their visual referents. We investigate the time-course of word recognition using a gating paradigm and perform a statistical analysis to see whether well known word competition effects in human speech processing influence word re…
King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）；University of Tabuk（塔布克大学）
The enormous amount of data being generated on the web and social media has increased the demand for detecting online hate speech. Detecting hate speech will reduce their negative impact and influence on others. A lot of effort in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain aimed to detect hate speech in general or detect specific hate speech such as religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation. Hate communities tend to use abbreviations, intentional spelling mistakes, and coded words in their communication to evade detection, adding more challenges to hate speech detection tasks. Thus, word…
Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
Background: Computational models of speech recognition often assume that the set of target words is already given. This implies that these models do not learn to recognise speech from scratch without prior knowledge and explicit supervision. Visually grounded speech models learn to recognise speech without prior knowledge by exploiting statistical dependencies between spoken and visual input. While it has previously been shown that visually grounded speech models learn to recognise the presence of words in the input, we explicitly investigate such a model as a model of human speech recognition…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；Alibaba Inc.（阿里巴巴公司）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
We propose to learn acoustic word embeddings with temporal context for query-by-example (QbE) speech search. The temporal context includes the leading and trailing word sequences of a word. We assume that there exist spoken word pairs in the training database. We pad the word pairs with their original temporal context to form fixed-length speech segment pairs. We obtain the acoustic word embeddings through a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) which is trained on the speech segment pairs with a triplet loss. Shifting a fixed-length analysis window through the search content, we obtain a ru…
A statistical model for segmentation and word discovery in continuous speech is presented. An incremental unsupervised learning algorithm to infer word boundaries based on this model is described. Results of empirical tests showing that the algorithm is competitive with other models that have been used for similar tasks are also presented.
Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；New York, USA（纽约（此处按要求不提取城市信息，但根据原文结构，该条可能仅为地址补充，主要机构为Facebook AI Research））；Menlo Park, USA（门洛帕克（此处按要求不提取城市信息，但根据原文结构，该条可能仅为地址补充，主要机构为Facebook AI Research））
Lexicon-free speech recognition naturally deals with the problem of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we show that character-based language models (LM) can perform as well as word-based LMs for speech recognition, in word error rates (WER), even without restricting the decoding to a lexicon. We study character-based LMs and show that convolutional LMs can effectively leverage large (character) contexts, which is key for good speech recognition performance downstream. We specifically show that the lexicon-free decoding performance (WER) on utterances with OOV words using character-b…
Social media platforms have recently seen an increase in the occurrence of hate speech discourse which has led to calls for improved detection methods. Most of these rely on annotated data, keywords, and a classification technique. While this approach provides good coverage, it can fall short when dealing with new terms produced by online extremist communities which act as original sources of words which have alternate hate speech meanings. These code words (which can be both created and adopted words) are designed to evade automatic detection and often have benign meanings in regular discours…
Conventional statistics-based methods for joint Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging (S&T) have generalization ability to recognize new words that do not appear in the training data. An undesirable side effect is that a number of meaningless words will be incorrectly created. We propose an effective and efficient framework for S&T that introduces features to significantly reduce meaningless words generation. A general lexicon, Wikepedia and a large-scale raw corpus of 200 billion characters are used to generate word-based features for the wordhood. The word-lattice based framew…
Meta AI Research（Meta人工智能研究院）；ENS/PSL Paris（巴黎高等师范学院/巴黎文理研究大学）；EHESS Paris（巴黎高等社会科学研究院）；Inria Paris（巴黎法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
Finding word boundaries in continuous speech is challenging as there is little or no equivalent of a 'space' delimiter between words. Popular Bayesian non-parametric models for text segmentation use a Dirichlet process to jointly segment sentences and build a lexicon of word types. We introduce DP-Parse, which uses similar principles but only relies on an instance lexicon of word tokens, avoiding the clustering errors that arise with a lexicon of word types. On the Zero Resource Speech Benchmark 2017, our model sets a new speech segmentation state-of-the-art in 5 languages. The algorithm monot…
National Engineering Laboratory for Speech and Language Information Processing（语音及语言信息处理国家工程实验室）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；York University（约克大学）；iFLYTEK Research（科大讯飞研究院）
This paper proposes a model to learn word embeddings with weighted contexts based on part-of-speech (POS) relevance weights. POS is a fundamental element in natural language. However, state-of-the-art word embedding models fail to consider it. This paper proposes to use position-dependent POS relevance weighting matrices to model the inherent syntactic relationship among words within a context window. We utilize the POS relevance weights to model each word-context pairs during the word embedding training process. The model proposed in this paper paper jointly optimizes word vectors and the POS…
Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）；Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI)-KNAW/University of Groningen（荷兰跨学科人口研究所（NIDI）-KNAW/格罗宁根大学）
In this paper, we explore the application of language and speech technology to open-ended questions in a Dutch panel survey. In an experimental wave respondents could choose to answer open questions via speech or keyboard. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) was used to process spoken responses. We evaluated answers from these input modalities to investigate differences between spoken and typed answers.We report the errors the ASR system produces and investigate the impact of these errors on downstream analyses. Open-ended questions give more freedom to answer for respondents, but entail a non-…
This work describes an interactive decoding method to improve the performance of visual speech recognition systems using user input to compensate for the inherent ambiguity of the task. Unlike most phoneme-to-word decoding pipelines, which produce phonemes and feed these through a finite state transducer, our method instead expands words in lockstep, facilitating the insertion of interaction points at each word position. Interaction points enable us to solicit input during decoding, allowing users to interactively direct the decoding process. We simulate the behavior of user input using an ora…
TTI-Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究院）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院人工智能部门）
Direct acoustics-to-word (A2W) systems for end-to-end automatic speech recognition are simpler to train, and more efficient to decode with, than sub-word systems. However, A2W systems can have difficulties at training time when data is limited, and at decoding time when recognizing words outside the training vocabulary. To address these shortcomings, we investigate the use of recently proposed acoustic and acoustically grounded word embedding techniques in A2W systems. The idea is based on treating the final pre-softmax weight matrix of an AWE recognizer as a matrix of word embedding vectors, …
Multimedia Communications Laboratory, University of Information Technology（信息技术大学多媒体通信实验室）；University of Information Technology（信息技术大学）；Vietnam National University（越南国立大学）
Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging are necessary tasks in terms of computational linguistics and application of natural language processing. Many re-searchers still debate the demand for Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging in the deep learning era. Nevertheless, resolving ambiguities and detecting unknown words are challenging problems in this field. Previous studies on joint Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging mainly follow the character-based tagging model focusing on modeling n-gram features. Unlike previous works, we propose a neural mode…
In this paper, we present a novel multi-modal deep neural network architecture that uses speech and text entanglement for learning phonetically sound spoken-word representations. STEPs-RL is trained in a supervised manner to predict the phonetic sequence of a target spoken-word using its contextual spoken word's speech and text, such that the model encodes its meaningful latent representations. Unlike existing work, we have used text along with speech for auditory representation learning to capture semantical and syntactical information along with the acoustic and temporal information. The lat…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
The impressive ability of children to acquire language is a widely studied phenomenon, and the factors influencing the pace and patterns of word learning remains a subject of active research. Although many models predicting the age of acquisition of words have been proposed, little emphasis has been directed to the raw input children achieve. In this work we present a comparatively large-scale multi-modal corpus of prosody-text aligned child directed speech. Our corpus contains automatically extracted word-level prosodic features, and we investigate the utility of this information as predictor…
In a hybrid automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, a pronunciation lexicon (PL) and a language model (LM) are essential to correctly retrieve spoken word sequences. Being a morphologically complex language, the vocabulary of Malayalam is so huge and it is impossible to build a PL and an LM that cover all diverse word forms. Usage of subword tokens to build PL and LM, and combining them to form words after decoding, enables the recovery of many out of vocabulary words. In this work we investigate the impact of using syllables as subword tokens instead of words in Malayalam ASR, and evaluate…
National Taiwan University（台湾大学）；University of California San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）
Speech translation (ST) aims to learn transformations from speech in the source language to the text in the target language. Previous works show that multitask learning improves the ST performance, in which the recognition decoder generates the text of the source language, and the translation decoder obtains the final translations based on the output of the recognition decoder. Because whether the output of the recognition decoder has the correct semantics is more critical than its accuracy, we propose to improve the multitask ST model by utilizing word embedding as the intermediate.
College of Engineering and Management, Kolaghat（科拉加特工程与管理学院）；Jadavpur University（贾达普大学）
In this paper, we are going to focus on speed up of the Word Sense Disambiguation procedure by filtering the relevant senses of an ambiguous word through Part-of-Speech Tagging. First, this proposed approach performs the Part-of-Speech Tagging operation before the disambiguation procedure using Bigram approximation. As a result, the exact Part-of-Speech of the ambiguous word at a particular text instance is derived. In the next stage, only those dictionary definitions (glosses) are retrieved from an online dictionary, which are associated with that particular Part-of-Speech to disambiguate the…
Word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging are two critical preliminary steps for downstream tasks in Vietnamese natural language processing. In reality, people tend to consider also the phrase boundary when performing word segmentation and part of speech tagging rather than solely process word by word from left to right. In this paper, we implement this idea to improve word segmentation and part of speech tagging the Vietnamese language by employing a simplified constituency parser. Our neural model for joint word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging has the architecture of the syllable-…
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique ENS/EHESS/CNRS/PSL（认知科学与心理语言学实验室（巴黎高等师范学院/社会科学高等研究院/法国国家科学研究中心/巴黎文理大学））；Department of English Literature and Language Faculty of Letters Konan University（甲南大学文学院英语文学与语言系）；Laboratory for Language Development RIKEN Brain Science Institute（理化学研究所脑科学中心语言发展实验室）；Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Duke University（杜克大学心理学与神经科学系）
We investigate whether infant-directed speech (IDS) could facilitate word form learning when compared to adult-directed speech (ADS). To study this, we examine the distribution of word forms at two levels, acoustic and phonological, using a large database of spontaneous speech in Japanese. At the acoustic level we show that, as has been documented before for phonemes, the realizations of words are more variable and less discriminable in IDS than in ADS. At the phonological level, we find an effect in the opposite direction: the IDS lexicon contains more distinctive words (such as onomatopoeias…
Probabilistic approaches to part-of-speech tagging rely primarily on whole-word statistics about word/tag combinations as well as contextual information. But experience shows about 4 per cent of tokens encountered in test sets are unknown even when the training set is as large as a million words. Unseen words are tagged using secondary strategies that exploit word features such as endings, capitalizations and punctuation marks. In this work, word-ending statistics are primary and whole-word statistics are secondary. First, a tagger was trained and tested on word endings only. Subsequent experi…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）
In settings where only unlabelled speech data is available, speech technology needs to be developed without transcriptions, pronunciation dictionaries, or language modelling text. A similar problem is faced when modelling infant language acquisition. In these cases, categorical linguistic structure needs to be discovered directly from speech audio. We present a novel unsupervised Bayesian model that segments unlabelled speech and clusters the segments into hypothesized word groupings. The result is a complete unsupervised tokenization of the input speech in terms of discovered word types. In o…
Recently, neural network models for natural language processing tasks have been increasingly focused on for their ability of alleviating the burden of manual feature engineering. However, the previous neural models cannot extract the complicated feature compositions as the traditional methods with discrete features. In this work, we propose a feature-enriched neural model for joint Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging task. Specifically, to simulate the feature templates of traditional discrete feature based models, we use different filters to model the complex compositional fe…
We describe a new framework for distilling information from word lattices to improve the accuracy of speech recognition and obtain a more perspicuous representation of a set of alternative hypotheses. In the standard MAP decoding approach the recognizer outputs the string of words corresponding to the path with the highest posterior probability given the acoustics and a language model. However, even given optimal models, the MAP decoder does not necessarily minimize the commonly used performance metric, word error rate (WER). We describe a method for explicitly minimizing WER by extracting wor…
This paper is motivated by the automation of neuropsychological tests involving discourse analysis in the retellings of narratives by patients with potential cognitive impairment. In this scenario the task of sentence boundary detection in speech transcripts is important as discourse analysis involves the application of Natural Language Processing tools, such as taggers and parsers, which depend on the sentence as a processing unit. Our aim in this paper is to verify which embedding induction method works best for the sentence boundary detection task, specifically whether it be those which wer…
National Institute of Technology, Karnataka（卡纳塔克邦国立理工学院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；National University of Ireland Galway（爱尔兰国立大学戈尔韦分校）
Hope Speech Detection, a task of recognizing positive expressions, has made significant strides recently. However, much of the current works focus on model development without considering the issue of inherent imbalance in the data. Our work revisits this issue in hope-speech detection by introducing focal loss, data augmentation, and pre-processing strategies. Accordingly, we find that introducing focal loss as part of Multilingual-BERT's (M-BERT) training process mitigates the effect of class imbalance and improves overall F1-Macro by 0.11. At the same time, contextual and back-translation-b…
A statistical model for segmentation and word discovery in child directed speech is presented. An incremental unsupervised learning algorithm to infer word boundaries based on this model is described and results of empirical tests showing that the algorithm is competitive with other models that have been used for similar tasks are also presented.
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）
Ancient Chinese word segmentation (WSG) and part-of-speech tagging (POS) are important to study ancient Chinese, but the amount of ancient Chinese WSG and POS tagging data is still rare. In this paper, we propose a novel augmentation method of ancient Chinese WSG and POS tagging data using distant supervision over parallel corpus. However, there are still mislabeled and unlabeled ancient Chinese words inevitably in distant supervision. To address this problem, we take advantage of the memorization effects of deep neural networks and a small amount of annotated data to get a model with much kno…
A tagger is a mandatory segment of most text scrutiny systems, as it consigned a s yntax class (e.g., noun, verb, adjective, and adverb) to every word in a sentence. In this paper, we present a simple part of speech tagger for homoeopathy clinical language. This paper reports about the anticipated part of speech tagger for homoeopathy clinical language. It exploit standard pattern for evaluating sentences, untagged clinical corpus of 20085 words is used, from which we had selected 125 sentences (2322 tokens). The problem of tagging in natural language processing is to find a way to tag every w…
This paper presents our latest investigations on different features for factored language models for Code-Switching speech and their effect on automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. We focus on syntactic and semantic features which can be extracted from Code-Switching text data and integrate them into factored language models. Different possible factors, such as words, part-of-speech tags, Brown word clusters, open class words and clusters of open class word embeddings are explored. The experimental results reveal that Brown word clusters, part-of-speech tags and open-class words are …
It has been argued that, when learning a first language, babies use a series of small clues to aid recognition and comprehension, and that one of these clues is word length. In this paper we present a statistical part of speech tagger which trains itself solely on the number of letters in each word in a sentence.
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network architecture, Sequence-to-Sequence Audio2Vec, for unsupervised learning of fixed-length vector representations of audio segments excised from a speech corpus, where the vectors contain semantic information pertaining to the segments, and are close to other vectors in the embedding space if their corresponding segments are semantically similar. The design of the proposed model is based on the RNN Encoder-Decoder framework, and borrows the methodology of continuous skip-grams for training. The learned vector representations are evaluated on 1…
This paper studies how word embeddings trained on the British National Corpus interact with part of speech boundaries. Our work targets the Universal PoS tag set, which is currently actively being used for annotation of a range of languages. We experiment with training classifiers for predicting PoS tags for words based on their embeddings. The results show that the information about PoS affiliation contained in the distributional vectors allows us to discover groups of words with distributional patterns that differ from other words of the same part of speech. This data often reveals hidden in…
While the use of cluster features became ubiquitous in core NLP tasks, most cluster features in NLP are based on distributional similarity. We propose a new type of clustering criteria, specific to the task of part-of-speech tagging. Instead of distributional similarity, these clusters are based on the beha vior of a baseline tagger when applied to a large corpus. These cluster features provide similar gains in accuracy to those achieved by distributional-similarity derived clusters. Using both types of cluster features together further improve tagging accuracies. We show that the method is ef…
This paper presents our novel method to encode word confusion networks, which can represent a rich hypothesis space of automatic speech recognition systems, via recurrent neural networks. We demonstrate the utility of our approach for the task of dialog state tracking in spoken dialog systems that relies on automatic speech recognition output. Encoding confusion networks outperforms encoding the best hypothesis of the automatic speech recognition in a neural system for dialog state tracking on the well-known second Dialog State Tracking Challenge dataset.
Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；University of Avignon（阿维尼翁大学）
Many Proper Names (PNs) are Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) words for speech recognition systems used to process diachronic audio data. To help recovery of the PNs missed by the system, relevant OOV PNs can be retrieved out of the many OOVs by exploiting semantic context of the spoken content. In this paper, we propose two neural network models targeted to retrieve OOV PNs relevant to an audio document: (a) Document level Continuous Bag of Words (D-CBOW), (b) Document level Continuous Bag of Weighted Words (D-CBOW2). Both these models take document words as input and learn with an objective to maximis…
A crucial step in processing speech audio data for information extraction, topic detection, or browsing/playback is to segment the input into sentence and topic units. Speech segmentation is challenging, since the cues typically present for segmenting text (headers, paragraphs, punctuation) are absent in spoken language. We investigate the use of prosody (information gleaned from the timing and melody of speech) for these tasks. Using decision tree and hidden Markov modeling techniques, we combine prosodic cues with word-based approaches, and evaluate performance on two speech corpora, Broadca…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Telstra Research Laboratories（Telstra研究实验室）
The Lexical Access Problem consists of determining the intended sequence of words corresponding to an input sequence of phonemes (basic speech sounds) that come from a low-level phoneme recognizer. In this paper we present an information-theoretic approach based on the Minimum Message Length Criterion for solving the Lexical Access Problem. We model sentences using phoneme realizations seen in training, and word and part-of-speech information obtained from text corpora. We show results on multiple-speaker, continuous, read speech and discuss a heuristic using equivalence classes of similar sou…
Fondazione Bruno Kessler（布鲁诺·凯塞勒基金会）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
Having recognized gender bias as a major issue affecting current translation technologies, researchers have primarily attempted to mitigate it by working on the data front. However, whether algorithmic aspects concur to exacerbate unwanted outputs remains so far under-investigated. In this work, we bring the analysis on gender bias in automatic translation onto a seemingly neutral yet critical component: word segmentation. Can segmenting methods influence the ability to translate gender? Do certain segmentation approaches penalize the representation of feminine linguistic markings? We address …
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田技术研究所）
Recent studies have been revisiting whole words as the basic modelling unit in speech recognition and query applications, instead of phonetic units. Such whole-word segmental systems rely on a function that maps a variable-length speech segment to a vector in a fixed-dimensional space; the resulting acoustic word embeddings need to allow for accurate discrimination between different word types, directly in the embedding space. We compare several old and new approaches in a word discrimination task. Our best approach uses side information in the form of known word pairs to train a Siamese convo…
We present results that show it is possible to build a competitive, greatly simplified, large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system with whole words as acoustic units. We model the output vocabulary of about 100,000 words directly using deep bi-directional LSTM RNNs with CTC loss. The model is trained on 125,000 hours of semi-supervised acoustic training data, which enables us to alleviate the data sparsity problem for word models. We show that the CTC word models work very well as an end-to-end all-neural speech recognition model without the use of traditional context-dependent sub-…
While recent retrieval techniques do not limit the number of index terms, out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words are crucial in speech recognition. Aiming at retrieving information with spoken queries, we fill the gap between speech recognition and text retrieval in terms of the vocabulary size. Given a spoken query, we generate a transcription and detect OOV words through speech recognition. We then correspond detected OOV words to terms indexed in a target collection to complete the transcription, and search the collection for documents relevant to the completed transcription. We show the effectivene…
Nanjing University（南京大学）；Boston University（波士顿大学）；Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center（贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心）；Harvard Medical School（哈佛医学院）；Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications（南京邮电大学）
Human language, as a typical complex system, its organization and evolution is an attractive topic for both physical and cultural researchers. In this paper, we present the first exhaustive analysis of the text organization of human speech. Two important results are that: (i) the construction and organization of spoken language can be characterized as Zipf's law and Heaps' law, as observed in written texts; (ii) word frequency vs. rank distribution and the growth of distinct words with the increase of text length shows significant differences between book and speech. In speech word frequency d…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence（Vector人工智能研究所）
Classical Chinese is a language notable for its word class flexibility: the same word may often be used as a noun or a verb. Bisang (2008) claimed that Classical Chinese is a precategorical language, where the syntactic position of a word determines its part-of-speech category. In this paper, we apply entropy-based metrics to evaluate these claims on historical corpora. We further explore differences between nouns and verbs in Classical Chinese: using psycholinguistic norms, we find a positive correlation between concreteness and noun usage. Finally, we align character embeddings from Classica…
This paper presents an algorithm for tagging words whose part-of-speech properties are unknown. Unlike previous work, the algorithm categorizes word tokens in context instead of word types. The algorithm is evaluated on the Brown Corpus.
