Canada

End-to-end sign language understanding and generation models do not accurately represent the prosody of the languages. This lack of temporal and spatial variation in generated signs leads to poor quality and lower human perception. We seek to improve prosody in automatic models that understand sign language by modeling intensification in a data-driven manner with strategies grounded in the linguistics of sign language by enhancing the representation of intensity modifiers in gloss annotations. In this work, we identify four major categories for sign intensification across two different sign languages. Through an extensive data exploration, we compare annotated datasets for German Sign Language and British Sign Language for intensification. We analyze the effects of the domain of the dataset on the intensifier abundance and the changes of intensifier use across different sign languages.

CogSci 2022

Learning cognitive and linguistic prosodic categories for automatic cross-lingual sign language understanding

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

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Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
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The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





Each grammatical construction has its own function, and typically multiple constructions are combined to express a message. When the functions of two constructions conflict in a way that cannot be reconciled, their combination is judged ungrammatical. Here we consider one such type of case: “syntactic island violations.” Specifically, we consider combinations of wh-questions with 11 other constructions. Wh-questions request direct information about a particular constituent. Using a new Discourse task, we quantify how directly 11 constructions convey information in simple declarative sentences. Results demonstrate acceptability judgments on the wh-questions correlate with the degree to which the 11 constructions convey information directly. Thus, we argue that degrees of unacceptability of “island violations” result from the extent to which the discourse functions of the constructions involved conflict (N=240).

Islands effects without extraction: the discourse functions of constructions predicts island status

Agreement attraction (i.e. facilitatory interference manifested by sped-up reading times) observed in establishing subject-verb number agreement by comprehenders when reading ungrammatical sentences with number-matching attractor nouns, has been long-established and cross-linguistically validated. For languages with rich inflectional morphology, case syncretism has been suggested to play a role in the phenomenon. In the present self-paced reading study on Czech, we show that unlike in other languages, facilitatory interference is not observed and that not even case syncretism is sufficient for its appearance. We put forward several possible explanations for this anomaly exhibited by Czech compared to other languages. We propose that the lack of semantic agreement in the language could be one of these. Finally, we discuss the implications of these results for the models of long-distance dependency resolution in comprehension.

No agreement attraction facilitation observed in Czech: Not even syncretism helps

Research has shown that comprehenders represent alternative meanings to single focused words online, consistent with Rooth’s (1992) formal semantic account. However, focus can also take a broader scope over whole phrases ('read the manuscript'). We examined whether in these cases, alternatives are represented by testing for an interference effect of the particle only. Using probe recognition, we first tested unmentioned alternatives to the constituent parts of VPs, to object nouns (Exp 1, 'letter' for 'manuscript') and verbs (Exp 2, 'wrote' for 'read'). In Exp 3, we tested alternatives to whole phrases ('wrote the letter'). In all experiments, alternative probes were processed slower than unrelated ones. We found varying evidence of the interference effects of only with noun, verb and whole-phrase alternatives. Overall, this study does not provide support for the generalisation of the effects of only to broad focus. Additionally, we discuss the methodological implications of probing whole phrases.


The Comprehension of Broad Focus: Probing Roothian Alternatives

Syntactic harmony occurs when heads and dependents align within and across different types of phrases in a language. Harmony is a well-known (statistical) typological universal: in most languages, many if not all heads and dependents are consistently ordered (i.e., either head-dependent, or dependent-head). Despite decades of work, from every conceivable theoretical perspective, the origins of syntactic harmony remain opaque. However, recent work using artificial language learning has suggested that harmonic patterns are easier to learn than their non-harmonic counter-parts. Thus at least part of the explanation for this tendency may be linked to learning. Here, we explore whether the mechanism behind the learning bias for syntactic harmony is fundamentally domain-general by instantiating harmony in non-linguistic stimuli. Our findings support the claim that the origins of syntactic harmony lie in a domain-general bias for simplicity acting on linearized, language-specific categories.


Syntactic harmony arises from a domain-general learning bias

When a language offers multiple options for expressing the same meaning, what principles govern a speaker's choice? Two well-known principles proposed for explaining wide-ranging speaker preference are Uniform Information Density and Availability-Based Production. Here we test the predictions of these theories in a previously uninvestigated case of speaker choice.
Russian has two ways of expressing the comparative: an \textsc{explicit} option (\textit{Ona bystree chem ja}/She fast{\sc-comp} than me{\sc-nom}) and a \textsc{genitive} option (\textit{Ona bystree menya/She fast{\sc-comp} me{\sc-gen}}). We lay out several potential predictions of each theory for speaker choice in the Russian comparative construction, including effects of post-comparative word predictability, phrase length, syntactic complexity, and semantic association between the comparative adjective and subsequent noun. In a corpus study, we find that the explicit construction is used preferentially when the post-comparative noun phrase is longer, has a relative clause, and is less semantically associated with the comparative adjective. A follow-up production experiment using visual scene stimuli to elicit comparative sentences replicates the corpus finding that Russian native speakers prefer the explicit form when post-comparative phrases are longer. These findings offer no clear support for the predictions of Uniform Information Density, but are broadly supportive of Availability-Based Production, with the explicit option serving as an unreduced form that eases speakers' planning of complex or low-availability utterances. Code for this study is available at https://github.mit.edu/thclark/russian_uid


Evidence for Availability Effects on Speaker Choice in the Russian Comparative Alternation

While the grammatical use of space for referential strategies is attested across many sign languages of Western Europe, Kata Kolok, a rural sign language used in Northern Bali, has not developed anaphoric pointing in space nor agreement verbs (Engberg-Pedersen, 1993; Liddell, 2003; de Vos, 2012). To find out whether such typological differences can be explained by differences in the respective co-speech gesture systems, this preregistered study is collecting data for a cross-cultural comparison. Building on Motamedi et al. (2021), we are conducting studies in Bali and the Netherlands using an iterated learning silent gesture paradigm in which hearing people communicate transitive events using only gestures. Preliminary data indeed suggest that our Balinese participants do not employ space the same way our Dutch participants do. We will present comparative analyses and evaluate the role of co-speech gesture systems in sign language emergence in the lab or when evolving from spontaneous interaction.

Cross-cultural differences in the emergence of referential strategies in artificial sign languages

An important step in children's socio-cognitive development is learning how to engage in coordinated conversations. This requires not only becoming competent speakers but also active listeners. This paper studies children's use of backchannel signaling (e.g., "yeah!" or a head nod) when in the listener's role during conversations with their caregivers via video call. While previous work had found backchannel to be still immature in middle childhood (i.e., 6 to 11 years of age), our use of both more natural/spontaneous conversational settings and more adequate controls allowed us to reveal that school-age children are strikingly close to adult-level mastery in many measures of backchanneling. The broader impact of this paper is to highlight the crucial role of social context in evaluating children's conversational abilities.

Backchannel Behavior in Child-Caregiver Zoom-Mediated Conversations

Listeners struggle to identify talkers with a different accent than their own, a phenomenon known as the Other Accent Effect (OAE). But for reasons that are not well understood, the OAE is not consistently observed in all studies. Comprehension-related processing demands offer one explanation, such that other-accented talkers who are more easily understood are also easier to recognize. Here, we test this hypothesis using a forensic-style voice line-up. We examine native English-speaking adults’ ability to recognize talkers from four accent groups, manipulating comprehension-related processing demands by presenting listeners with predictable sentences and subtitles (low-demand condition), or variable sentences without subtitles (high-demand condition). As predicted, the OAE was only observed for talkers with non-native accents. But crucially, our comprehension manipulation had no impact on talker recognition accuracy of any accent type. We conclude that comprehension ease is likely not a key factor driving the OAE. Other possible explanations are discussed.

Do I need to repeat myself? Getting to the root of the Other Accent Effect

Listeners interpret spoken language differently, depending on the perceived identity of the speaker. Within increasingly diverse societies, it is important to understand how speaker characteristics such as accent may impact simple linguistic exchanges. In the current study, children are being tested on their ability to recall factual information provided by native and non-native accented English speakers. Preliminary results demonstrate that children tend to remember neutral facts better if they heard them from a native accented speaker. Interestingly, children understood the native and non-native accented talkers equally well, indicating that comprehension difficulties could not account for the results. To date, there have been no studies examining how a speaker’s accent affects children’s memory, and only preliminary, mixed results in adults have been found. This gap in the literature underscores the need to understand how linguistic biases might impact information transfer across diverse language communities.

Where's the Bingleduff? How speaker accent shapes children's linguistic processing

Fast and efficient correction of speech errors is essential to effective communication. Yet, despite several accounts of error detection, no computational account exists to explain how humans repair their speech errors. This paper proposes the first such model. We demonstrate that a simple automatic mechanism can form the basis of most repairs. We then demonstrate that augmenting the model with a conflict-based monitoring-control loop allows it to capture more nuanced findings in human speech error repair data.

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Islands effects without extraction: the discourse functions of constructions predicts island status

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Modeling Intensification for Sign Language Generation: A Computational Approach