SymmetricalVoice

Linguistics and language conservation. Special attention to the Pacific. run by @peterschuelke

[SymmetricalVoice @Symmetricalvoic]

A taro patch cultivated by some Roviana community members in the Solomon Islands. Blust (ACD) reconstructs *talos as the Proto Oceanic word for taro. There are many modern Oceanic languages which reflect some form of *talos, as taro is an important part of Pacific culture.1/

[Bodhi @BodhiCogSci]

Linguistics/ ComSci/ CogSci twitter? Where and when did syntax tree originate in the history? I'm asking about the pictorial representation, not the concept, like which paper did it use first? Is it in computer science literature or linguistics literature?

[Gašper Beguš @begusgasper]

Can we model syntax from speech?

Most models of syntax are text-based.

Here we propose that basic syntax can be modeled from raw speech.

GANs trained on individual words start to concatenate them into multiple-word outputs.

Sometimes the model even concatenates three words:

[irina ijbolina @bkmacaulay]

theta roles are just a 'gotcha' for syntacticians, like it's always "what do you mean 'subject'? this verb only assigns a SCORPIO"

[Gašper Beguš @begusgasper]

Interpretability is one of the main frontiers in AI

Doing interpretability work on speech is easier than in vision. Among others, sound is 1D (huge advantage)

Here's a presentation of our IEEE/ACM TASLP paper that introduces a technique to interpret layers in audio CNNs

[Endangered Languages Project @_ELProject]

We're hiring! Applications for ELP's summer 2023 internships are now open - if you are passionate about supporting #languagerevitalization, we'd love to hear from you!⁠
⁠
Learn more about the positions and apply by May 10 at: https://t.co/fv6Zjw54f2

[Gašper Beguš @begusgasper]

GPT4 unlike ChatGPT does not hallucinate papers and actually gives useful recommendations.

Prompt:
“Give me references to papers that measure vowel duration before stops with various laryngeal features”

[Field Matters @field_matters]

The link is in document!

Join us at "Climbing the WALS: Typological Case Studies in LLMs Probing Using Syntactic Probing Framework"online talk now!

[@langoinstitute.bsky.social @langoinstitute]

Join us as we learn #Ghanongga #Ganoqa https://t.co/uJAjmBNbPt

[Field Matters @field_matters]

1/7
Discussing low-resource languages we highlighted that the amount of the language data doesn’t correlate with the number of their speakers. The number of speakers isn’t the main factor that affects language vitality, the other factors also play a part.
Which ones? The 🧵

[Gašper Beguš @begusgasper]

Uncovering the unknowns in sperm whale communication🐳 using deep learning

We introduce a novel interpretability technique (CDEV) that combines generative deep models and causal inference methods.

Our model discovers meaningful properties, both novel and previously hypothesized

[IZ Europäische Sprachen @izeus_berlin]

#OTD 146 years ago, Wilhelm Doegen (1877-1967) was born 🥳 Expert on phonetics, phonology, and the inventor of a speech recording device known as Doegen-Lautapparat (1909). During WW1, he recorded speech samples and songs of PoWs in diverse languages.
#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx

[Greg Dickson @GregDicksonNT]

Animals in Kriol where the etymology is the English plural:

hosis = horse (from 'horses')
ens = ant (from 'ants')

I reckon there are a couple more examples that will come to me...

[Gašper Beguš @begusgasper]

"John is too stubborn to talk to" is the new "colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

Prompt: Draw a minimalist syntactic analysis of the sentence "John is too stubborn to talk to"

GPT4:

[Gašper Beguš @begusgasper]

GPT4 Prompt: draw an OT Tableau for the process /anta/ > [anda]

https://t.co/unpK9XWFst

[Ryan @Ryncor2]

Not a huge Chomsky fan myself, but can we please stop with the LLMs disprove Chomsky thing?

Humans are not computers. We don't know that computers learn grammar in the same way, we don't know that humans can learn like computers, and LLMs require significantly more data.

[Gašper Beguš @begusgasper]

GPT4 draws a syntactic tree for the sentence:

"I saw an elephant with glasses" 🐘😎

Interesting timing given a recent opinion piece in @nytimes

[Ansley Potter @ansdpotter]

Here's a look at our poster from #HSP2023! Adults who spend many hours reading may read object relative clauses faster, BUT this effect is modulated by the syntactic complexity of the text (websites) they frequently read

[Gašper Beguš @begusgasper]

One advantage of speech-based models trained on smaller datasets is that we can observe how the network learns as it is being trained (unlike in text-based GPT) and compare “machine acquisition” to language acquisition stages

They can be are very similar

https://t.co/AJdclsbVf0