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1. On Difficulties of Cross-Lingual Transfer with Order Differences: A Case Study on Dependency Parsing

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1253  

   Ahmad, Wasi; Zhang, Zhisong; Ma, Xuezhe; Hovy, Eduard; Chang, Kai-Wei; Peng, Nanyun (January 2019, Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers))

   Different languages might have different word orders. In this paper, we investigate crosslingual transfer and posit that an orderagnostic model will perform better when transferring to distant foreign languages. To test our hypothesis, we train dependency parsers on an English corpus and evaluate their transfer performance on 30 other languages. Specifically, we compare encoders and decoders based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and modified self-attentive architectures. The former relies on sequential information while the latter is more flexible at modeling word order. Rigorous experiments and detailed analysis shows that RNN-based architectures transfer well to languages that are close to English, while self-attentive models have better overall cross-lingual transferability and perform especially well on distant languages. 

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2. The timing of speech and gesture in two Niger-Congo languages: Implications for word-level prominence

   https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.17426  

   Franich, Kathryn; Keupdjio, Hermann; Nwosu, Vincent (January 2025, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics)

   Co-speech gestures are timed to occur with prosodically prominent syllables in several languages. In prior work in Indo-European languages, gestures are found to be attracted to stressed syllables, with gesture apexes preferentially aligning with syllables bearing higher and more dynamic pitch accents. Little research has examined the temporal alignment of co-speech gestures in African tonal languages, where metrical prominence is often hard to identify due to a lack of canonical stress correlates, and where a key function of pitch is in distinguishing between words, rather than marking intonational prominence. Here, we examine the alignment of co-speech gestures in two different Niger-Congo languages with very different word structures, Medʉmba (Grassfields Bantu, Cameroon) and Igbo (Igboid, Nigeria). Our findings suggest that the initial position in the stem tends to attract gestures in Medʉmba, while the final syllable in the word is the default position for gesture alignment in Igbo; phrase position also influences gesture alignment, but in language-specific ways. Though neither language showed strong evidence of elevated prominence of any individual tone value, gesture patterning in Igbo suggests that metrical structure at the level of the tonal foot is relevant to the speech-gesture relationship. Our results demonstrate how the speech-gesture relationship can be a window into patterns of word- and phrase-level prosody cross-linguistically. They also show that the relationship between gesture and tone (and the related notion of ‘tonal prominence’) is mediated by tone’s function in a language.  

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3. How to encode arbitrarily complex morphology in word embeddings, no corpus needed

   Schwartz, Lane; Haley, Coleman; Tyers, Francis (October 2022, Proceedings of the First Workshop on NLP Applications to Field Linguistics)

   Serikov, Oleg; Voloshina, Ekaterina; Postnikova, Anna; Klyachko, Elena; Neminova, Ekaterina; Vylomova, Ekaterina; Shavrina, Tatiana; Le Ferrand, Eric; Malykh, Valentin; Tyers, Francis (Ed.)

   In this paper, we present a straightforward technique for constructing interpretable word embeddings from morphologically analyzed examples (such as interlinear glosses) for all of the world’s languages. Currently, fewer than 300-400 languages out of approximately 7000 have have more than a trivial amount of digitized texts; of those, between 100-200 languages (most in the Indo-European language family) have enough text data for BERT embeddings of reasonable quality to be trained. The word embeddings in this paper are explicitly designed to be both linguistically interpretable and fully capable of handling the broad variety found in the world’s diverse set of 7000 languages, regardless of corpus size or morphological characteristics. We demonstrate the applicability of our representation through examples drawn from a typologically diverse set of languages whose morphology includes prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes, templatic morphemes, derivational morphemes, inflectional morphemes, and reduplication. 

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4. Predicting Age of Acquisition for Children's Early Vocabulary in Five Languages Using Language Model Surprisal

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13334  

   Portelance, Eva; Duan, Yuguang; Frank, Michael C.; Lupyan, Gary (September 2023, Cognitive Science)

   Abstract What makes a word easy to learn? Early‐learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word's surprisal in child‐directed speech, computed using n‐gram and long‐short‐term‐memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a better predictor than predictability derived from n‐gram models. Across five languages, average surprisal was positively correlated with the AoA of predicates and function words but not nouns. Controlling for concreteness and word frequency, more predictable predicates and function words were learned earlier. Differences in predictability between languages were associated with cross‐linguistic differences in AoA: the same word (when it was a predicate) was produced earlier in languages where the word was more predictable. 

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5. Demonstration of Atmospheric-Pressure Radiometer with Nanocardboard Vanes

   M. Azadi, Z. Lu (October 2020, Journal of microelectromechanical systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Crookes radiometers have been the subject of numerous theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies because of the complicated forces they exhibit as well as their potential applications to light sensing and actuation. The majority of these studies have focused on classical radiometers, which function under low vacuum pressures. In contrast, here we report a radiometer with microengineered vanes that rotates at atmospheric pressure. Its functionality at pressures thousands of times higher than previous light mills is due to unique attributes of the nanocardboard that forms its vanes: 1) the extremely low areal density (0.1 mg/cm 2 ) of nanocardboard reduces the vane masses by two orders of magnitude; 2) its lower thermal conductivity allows a greater cross-vane temperature difference; and 3) its microchannels dramatically increase the thermal transpiration flow that drives the rotation. Intriguingly, the experimentally observed rotation speeds are substantially higher than those theoretically expected. Our device demonstrates new possibilities for micromanipulation, propulsion of aerial vehicles, and light-powered generators. 

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