Search for: All records

Among the many multilingual speakers of the world, code- switching (CSW) is a common linguistic phenomenon. Prior sociolinguistic work has shown that factors such as expressing group identity and solidarity, performing affective function, and reflecting shared experiences are related to CSW prevalence in multilingual speech. We build on prior studies by asking: is the expression of empathy a motivation for CSW in speech? To begin to answer this question, we examine several multilingual speech corpora representing diverse language families and ap- ply recent modeling advances in the study of empathetic mono- lingual speech. We find a generally stronger positive relation- ship of spoken CSW with the lexical correlates of empathy than with acoustic-prosodic ones, which holds across three language pairs. Our work is a first step toward establishing a motivation for CSW that has thus far mainly been studied qualitatively. 

It is well-known that speakers who entrain to one another have more successful conver- sations than those who do not. Previous re- search has shown that interlocutors entrain on linguistic features in both written and spoken monolingual domains. More recent work on code-switched communication has also shown preliminary evidence of entrainment on cer- tain aspects of code-switching (CSW). How- ever, such studies of entrainment in code- switched domains have been extremely few and restricted to human-machine textual inter- actions. Our work studies code-switched spon- taneous speech between humans, finding that (1) patterns of written and spoken entrainment in monolingual settings largely generalize to code-switched settings, and (2) some patterns of entrainment on code-switching in dialogue agent-generated text generalize to spontaneous code-switched speech. Our findings give rise to important implications for the potentially "uni- versal" nature of entrainment as a communica- tion phenomenon, and potential applications in inclusive and interactive speech technology. 

The linguistic notion of formality is one dimension of stylistic variation in human communication. A universal characteristic of language production, formality has surface-level realizations in written and spoken language. In this work, we explore ways of measuring the formality of such realizations in multilingual speech corpora across a wide range of domains. We compare measures of formality, contrasting textual and acoustic-prosodic metrics. We believe that a combination of these should correlate well with downstream applications. Our findings include: an indication that certain prosodic variables might play a stronger role than others; no correlation between prosodic and textual measures; limited evidence for anticipated inter-domain trends, but some evidence of consistency of measures between languages. We conclude that non-lexical indicators of formality in speech may be more subtle than our initial expectations, motivating further work on reliably encoding spoken formality. 

While large TTS corpora exist for commercial sys- tems created for high-resource languages such as Man- darin, English, and Spanish, for many languages such as Amharic, which are spoken by millions of people, this is not the case. We are working with “found” data collected for other purposes (e.g. training ASR systems) or avail- able on the web (e.g. news broadcasts, audiobooks) to produce TTS systems for low-resource languages which do not currently have expensive, commercial systems. This study describes TTS systems built for Amharic from “found” data and includes systems built from di erent acoustic-prosodic subsets of the data, systems built from combined high and lower quality data using adaptation, and systems which use prediction of Amharic gemination to improve naturalness as perceived by evaluators.