Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2207.01947

Making sense of spoken plurals

Elnaz Shafaei-Bajestan·Peter Uhrig·R. Harald Baayen
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Distributional semantics offers new ways to study the semantics of morphology. This study focuses on the semantics of noun singulars and their plural inflectional variants in English. Our goal is to compare two models for the conceptualization of plurality. One model (FRACSS) proposes that all singular-plural pairs should be taken into account when predicting plural semantics from singular semantics. The other model (CCA) argues that conceptualization for plurality depends primarily on the semantic class of the base word. We compare the two models on the basis of how well the speech signal of plural tokens in a large corpus of spoken American English aligns with the semantic vectors predicted by the two models. Two measures are employed: the performance of a form-to-meaning mapping and the correlations between form distances and meaning distances. Results converge on a superior alignment for CCA. Our results suggest that usage-based approaches to pluralization in which a given word's own semantic neighborhood is given priority outperform theories according to which pluralization is conceptualized as a process building on high-level abstraction. We see that what has often been conceived of as a highly abstract concept, [+plural], is better captured via a family of mid-level partial generalizations.

Explore related subjects

cs.CL

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Elnaz Shafaei-Bajestan, Peter Uhrig, R. Harald Baayen. 2023-01-30. Making sense of spoken plurals. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.01947

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Hierarchical attention interpretation: an interpretable speech-level transformer for bi-modal depression detection

Depression is a common mental disorder. Automatic depression detection tools using speech, enabled by machine learning, help early screening of depression. This paper addresses two limitations that may hinder the clinical implementations of such tools: noise resulting from segment-level labelling and a lack of model interpretability. We propose a bi-modal speech-level transformer to avoid segment-level labelling and introduce a hierarchical interpretation approach to provide both speech-level and sentence-level interpretations, based on gradient-weighted attention maps derived from all attention layers to track interactions between input features. We show that the proposed model outperforms a model that learns at a segment level ($p$=0.854, $r$=0.947, $F1$=0.897 compared to $p$=0.732, $r$=0.808, $F1$=0.768). For model interpretation, using one true positive sample, we show which sentences within a given speech are most relevant to depression detection; and which text tokens and Mel-spectrogram regions within these sentences are most relevant to depression detection. These interpretations allow clinicians to verify the validity of predictions made by depression detection tools, promoting their clinical implementations.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models Using Soft Prompt Tuning

Large Language Model (LLM) alignment is commonly achieved through supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, both of which require labeled or preference data and update model weights. Without targeted cultural adaptation, however, deployed LLMs often exhibit culturally homogeneous behavior that fails to reflect diverse local values. Aligning models to cultural value frameworks such as Hofstede's Value Survey Module (VSM13) presents a distinct challenge: alignment signals are available only as aggregated survey-level scores computed after generating responses to an entire survey, providing no per-token gradient and requiring no preference data by construction. This makes standard gradient-based alignment methods ill-suited to the task. We propose a deployment-friendly approach that encodes cultural behavior in short, tunable soft prompts optimized with Differential Evolution (DE), while keeping model weights frozen and requiring no preference data. At inference, the system inserts the appropriate cultural-specific prompt to adapt model responses for different cultures. Experiments across four countries and four instruction-tuned models show that DE-optimized prompts generally reduce discrepancy with VSM13 reference profiles, improve rank agreement with the World Values Survey (WVS), an independent framework not seen during optimization, and are preferred in blinded pairwise evaluations using majority voting across three LLM judges.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

VQ-Logits: Compressing the Output Bottleneck of Large Language Models via Vector Quantized Logits

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success but face significant computational and memory challenges, particularly due to their extensive output vocabularies. The final linear projection layer, mapping hidden states to vocabulary-sized logits, often constitutes a substantial portion of the model's parameters and computational cost during inference. Existing methods like adaptive softmax or hierarchical softmax introduce structural complexities. In this paper, we propose VQ-Logits, a novel approach that leverages Vector Quantization (VQ) to drastically reduce the parameter count and computational load of the LLM output layer. VQ-Logits replaces the large V * dmodel output embedding matrix with a small, shared codebook of K embedding vectors (K << V ). Each token in the vocabulary is mapped to one of these K codebook vectors. The LLM predicts logits over this compact codebook, which are then efficiently "scattered" to the full vocabulary space using the learned or preassigned mapping. We demonstrate through extensive experiments on standard language modeling benchmarks (e.g., WikiText-103, C4) that VQ-Logits can achieve up to 99% parameter reduction in the output layer and 6x speedup in logit computation, with only a marginal 4% increase in perplexity compared to full softmax baselines. We further provide detailed ablation studies on codebook size, initialization, and learning strategies, showcasing the robustness and effectiveness of our approach.

cs.CL↗