Significant research has focused on speaker recognition, determining which speaker is speaking in a segment of audio. However, few experiments have investigated speaker recognition for very low-resource or endangered languages. Furthermore, speaker recognition has the potential to support language documentation and revitalization efforts, making recordings more accessible to researchers and communities. Since endangered language datasets are too small to build competitive speaker representations from scratch, we investigate the application of large-scale pre-built speaker recognition models to bridge this gap. This paper compares four speaker recognition models on six diverse endangered language data sets. Comparisons contrast three recent neural network-based x-vector models and an earlier baseline i-vector model. Experiments demonstrate significantly stronger performance for some of the studied models. Further analysis highlights differences in effectiveness tied to the lengths of test audio segments and amount of data used for speaker modeling.

Cross-lingual emotion detection allows us to analyze global trends, public opinion, and social phenomena at scale. We participated in the Explainability of Cross-lingual Emotion Detection (EXALT) shared task, achieving an F1-score of 0.6046 on the evaluation set for the emotion detection sub-task. Our system outperformed the baseline by more than 0.16 F1-score absolute, and ranked second amongst competing systems. We conducted experiments using fine-tuning, zero-shot learning, and few-shot learning for Large Language Model (LLM)-based models as well as embedding-based BiLSTM and KNN for non-LLM-based techniques. Additionally, we introduced two novel methods: the Multi-Iteration Agentic Workflow and the Multi-Binary-Classifier Agentic Workflow. We found that LLM-based approaches provided good performance on multilingual emotion detection. Furthermore, ensembles combining all our experimented models yielded higher F1-scores than any single approach alone.

This paper introduces our submitted systems for WASSA 2024 Shared Task 2: Cross-Lingual Emotion Detection. We implemented a BERT-based classifier and an in-context learning-based system. Our best-performing model, using English Chain of Thought prompts with trigger words, reached 3rd overall with an F1 score of 0.6015. Following the motivation of the shared task, we further analyzed the scalability and transferability of the monolingual English dataset on cross-lingual tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the importance of data quality over quantity. We also found that augmented multilingual data does not necessarily perform better than English monolingual data in cross-lingual tasks. We open-sourced the augmented data and source code of our system for future research.

This paper describes our task 1 submission for the WASSA 2024 shared task on Explainability for Cross-lingual Emotion in Tweets. Our task is to predict the correct emotion label (Anger, Sadness, Fear, Joy, Love, and Neutral) for a dataset of English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Russian tweets, while training exclusively on English emotion labeled data, to reveal what kind of emotion detection information is transferable cross-language (Maladry et al., 2024). To that end, we used an ensemble of models with a GPT-4 decider. Our ensemble consisted of a few-shot GPT-4 prompt system and a TwHIN-BERT system fine-tuned on the EXALT and additional English data. We ranked 8th place under the name WU_TLAXE with an F1 Macro score of 0.573 on the test set. We also experimented with an English-only TwHIN-BERT model by translating the other languages into English for inference, which proved to be worse than the other models.

Recent advancements in multilingual models for automatic speech recognition (ASR) have been able to achieve a high accuracy for languages with extremely limited resources. This study examines ASR modeling for the Mvskoke language, an indigenous language of America. The parameter efficiency of adapter training is contrasted with training entire models, and it is demonstrated how performance varies with different amounts of data. Additionally, the models are evaluated with trigram language model decoding, and the outputs are compared across different types of speech recordings. Results show that training an adapter is both parameter efficient and gives higher accuracy for a relatively small amount of data.

We introduce a Masked Segmental Language Model (MSLM) for joint language modeling and unsupervised segmentation. While near-perfect supervised methods have been developed for segmenting human-like linguistic units in resource-rich languages such as Chinese, many of the world’s languages are both morphologically complex, and have no large dataset of “gold” segmentations for supervised training. Segmental Language Models offer a unique approach by conducting unsupervised segmentation as the byproduct of a neural language modeling objective. However, current SLMs are limited in their scalability due to their recurrent architecture. We propose a new type of SLM for use in both unsupervised and lightly supervised segmentation tasks. The MSLM is built on a span-masking transformer architecture, harnessing a masked bidirectional modeling context and attention, as well as adding the potential for model scalability. In a series of experiments, our model outperforms the segmentation quality of recurrent SLMs on Chinese, and performs similarly to the recurrent model on English.

Prosody is essential in human interaction, enabling people to show interest, establish rapport, efficiently convey nuances of attitude or intent, and so on. Some applications that exploit prosodic knowledge have recently shown superhuman performance, and in many respects our ability to effectively model prosody is rapidly advancing. This tutorial will overview the computational modeling of prosody, including recent advances and diverse actual and potential applications.

We introduce a simple method for extracting non-arbitrary form-meaning representations from a collection of semantic vectors. We treat the problem as one of feature selection for a model trained to predict word vectors from subword features. We apply this model to the problem of automatically discovering phonesthemes, which are submorphemic sound clusters that appear in words with similar meaning. Many of our model-predicted phonesthemes overlap with those proposed in the linguistics literature, and we validate our approach with human judgments.

Basic-level categories have been shown to be both psychologically significant and useful in a wide range of practical applications. We build a rule-based system to identify basic-level categories in WordNet, achieving 77% accuracy on a test set derived from prior psychological experiments. With additional annotations we found our system also has low precision, in part due to the existence of many categories that do not fit into the three classes (superordinate, basic-level, and subordinate) relied on in basic-level category research.

This paper addresses the problem of building conceptual resources for multilingual applications. We describe new techniques for large-scale construction of a Chinese-English lexicon for verbs, using thematic-role information to create links between Chinese and English conceptual information. We then present an approach to compensating for gaps in the existing resources. The resulting lexicon is used for multilingual applications such as machine translation and cross-language information retrieval.