Human-like Linguistic Biases in Neural Speech Models: Phonetic Categorization and Phonotactic Constraints in Wav2Vec2.0

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Kloots, Marianne de Heer, Zuidema, Willem
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866909240898093056
author Kloots, Marianne de Heer
Zuidema, Willem
author_facet Kloots, Marianne de Heer
Zuidema, Willem
contents What do deep neural speech models know about phonology? Existing work has examined the encoding of individual linguistic units such as phonemes in these models. Here we investigate interactions between units. Inspired by classic experiments on human speech perception, we study how Wav2Vec2 resolves phonotactic constraints. We synthesize sounds on an acoustic continuum between /l/ and /r/ and embed them in controlled contexts where only /l/, only /r/, or neither occur in English. Like humans, Wav2Vec2 models show a bias towards the phonotactically admissable category in processing such ambiguous sounds. Using simple measures to analyze model internals on the level of individual stimuli, we find that this bias emerges in early layers of the model's Transformer module. This effect is amplified by ASR finetuning but also present in fully self-supervised models. Our approach demonstrates how controlled stimulus designs can help localize specific linguistic knowledge in neural speech models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03005
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Human-like Linguistic Biases in Neural Speech Models: Phonetic Categorization and Phonotactic Constraints in Wav2Vec2.0
Kloots, Marianne de Heer
Zuidema, Willem
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
What do deep neural speech models know about phonology? Existing work has examined the encoding of individual linguistic units such as phonemes in these models. Here we investigate interactions between units. Inspired by classic experiments on human speech perception, we study how Wav2Vec2 resolves phonotactic constraints. We synthesize sounds on an acoustic continuum between /l/ and /r/ and embed them in controlled contexts where only /l/, only /r/, or neither occur in English. Like humans, Wav2Vec2 models show a bias towards the phonotactically admissable category in processing such ambiguous sounds. Using simple measures to analyze model internals on the level of individual stimuli, we find that this bias emerges in early layers of the model's Transformer module. This effect is amplified by ASR finetuning but also present in fully self-supervised models. Our approach demonstrates how controlled stimulus designs can help localize specific linguistic knowledge in neural speech models.
title Human-like Linguistic Biases in Neural Speech Models: Phonetic Categorization and Phonotactic Constraints in Wav2Vec2.0
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03005