Partly automated creation of interlinear glossed text (IGT) has the potential to assist in linguistic documentation. We argue that LLMs can make this process more accessible to linguists because of their capacity to follow natural-language instructions. We investigate the effectiveness of a retrieval-based LLM prompting approach to glossing, applied to the seven languages from the SIGMORPHON 2023 shared task. Our system beats the BERT-based shared task baseline for every language in the morpheme-level score category, and we show that a simple 3-best oracle has higher word-level scores than the challenge winner (a tuned sequence model) in five languages. In a case study on Tsez, we ask the LLM to automatically create and follow linguistic instructions, reducing errors on a confusing grammatical feature. Our results thus demonstrate the potential contributions which LLMs can make in interactive systems for glossing, both in making suggestions to human annotators and following directions.

Recent advancements in generative models have sparked significant interest within the machine learning community. Particularly, diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing images and speech. Studies such as those by Lee et al. [19], Black et al. [4], Wang et al. [37], and Fan et al. [8] illustrate that Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can enhance diffusion models for image synthesis. However, due to architectural differences between these models and those employed in speech synthesis, it remains uncertain whether RLHF could similarly benefit speech synthesis models. In this paper, we explore the practical application of RLHF to diffusion-based text-to-speech synthesis, leveraging the mean opinion score (MOS) as predicted by UTokyo-SaruLab MOS prediction system [29] as a proxy loss. We introduce diffusion model loss-guided RL policy optimization (DLPO) and compare it against other RLHF approaches, employing the NISQA speech quality and naturalness assessment model [21] and human preference experiments for further evaluation. Our results show that RLHF can enhance diffusion-based text-to-speech synthesis models, and, moreover, DLPO can better improve diffusion models in generating natural and high quality speech audios.

This paper explores how Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) learn representations of phonological phenomena. We analyze how GANs encode contrastive and non-contrastive nasality in French and English vowels by applying the ciwGAN architecture (Begus 2021a). Begus claims that ciwGAN encodes linguistically meaningful representations with categorical variables in its latent space and manipulating the latent variables shows an almost one to one corresponding control of the phonological features in ciwGAN's generated outputs. However, our results show an interactive effect of latent variables on the features in the generated outputs, which suggests the learned representations in neural networks are different from the phonological representations proposed by linguists. On the other hand, ciwGAN is able to distinguish contrastive and noncontrastive features in English and French by encoding them differently. Comparing the performance of GANs learning from different languages results in a better understanding of what language specific features contribute to developing language specific phonological representations. We also discuss the role of training data frequencies in phonological feature learning.

Maltese is often described as having a hybrid morphological system resulting from extensive contact between Semitic and Romance language varieties. Such a designation reflects an etymological divide as much as it does a larger tradition in the literature to consider concatenative and non-concatenative morphological patterns as distinct in the language architecture. Using a combination of computational modeling and information theoretic methods, we quantify the extent to which the phonology and etymology of a Maltese singular noun may predict the morphological process (affixal vs. templatic) as well as the specific plural allomorph (affix or template) relating a singular noun to its associated plural form(s) in the lexicon. The results indicate phonological pressures shape the organization of the Maltese lexicon with predictive power that extends beyond that of a word's etymology, in line with analogical theories of language change in contact.

In many applications such as recidivism prediction, facility inspection, and benefit assignment, it's important for individuals to know the decision-relevant information for the model's prediction. In addition, the model's predictions should be fairly justified. Essentially, decision-relevant features should provide sufficient information for the predicted outcome and should be independent of the membership of individuals in protected groups such as race and gender. In this work, we focus on the problem of (un)fairness in the justification of the text-based neural models. We tie the explanatory power of the model to fairness in the outcome and propose a fairness-aware summarization mechanism to detect and counteract the bias in such models. Given a potentially biased natural language explanation for a decision, we use a multi-task neural model and an attribution mechanism based on integrated gradients to extract the high-utility and discrimination-free justifications in the form of a summary. The extracted summary is then used for training a model to make decisions for individuals. Results on several real world datasets suggests that our method: (i) assists users to understand what information is used for the model's decision and (ii) enhances the fairness in outcomes while significantly reducing the demographic leakage.