arXiv Computation and Language

Self-Supervised Lexical Representation Learning for Fast, Large-Scale Phylogenetic Inference

The paper presents a fully self‑supervised contrastive learning framework that learns lexical representations from raw IPA‑transcribed wordlists without any cognacy annotations or expert input. Using a dual contrastive objective—word‑level and language‑level losses—the model produces word representations that enable fast computation of pairwise language distances and the inference of a global phylogenetic tree for 3,399 language varieties. The resulting tree achieves a generalized quartet distance competitive with baselines while requiring only minutes of computation on a standard notebook GPU, and the representations also capture diachronic concept stability.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Phoneme- and Word-Level Metrics Using Self-Supervised Speech Representations for Forced Alignment Evaluation

The paper introduces two new corpus‑level, reference‑free metrics—Phoneme‑Cluster Mutual Information (PCMI) and Word Acoustic Consistency Score (WACS)—that use self‑supervised speech representations to evaluate forced alignment quality. PCMI quantifies how well aligned phoneme labels agree with clusters derived from SSL representations, while WACS assesses consistency across repeated word realizations via dynamic time warping of word representation sequences. Experiments on 85 languages from FLEURS and 45 languages in DoReCo show that both metrics degrade predictably under alignment perturbations, effectively distinguish high‑ from low‑quality alignments, and correlate strongly with traditional timestamp‑based measures, enabling scalable, multilingual alignment evaluation without manual annotations.

By V. S. D. S. Mahesh Akavarapu, Michael Daniel, Gerhard J\"ager
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

CWoMP: Morpheme Representation Learning for Interlinear Glossing

CWoMP (Contrastive Word‑Morpheme Pretraining) is a new approach for generating interlinear glossed text that treats morphemes as atomic form‑meaning units with learned representations. It uses a contrastively trained encoder to align words in context with their constituent morphemes in a shared embedding space, and an autoregressive decoder that retrieves morpheme sequences from a mutable lexicon of these embeddings. The method yields interpretable predictions grounded in lexicon entries and allows users to improve results at inference time by expanding the lexicon without retraining, achieving superior performance and efficiency on diverse low‑resource languages, especially in extremely low‑resource settings.

By Morris Alper, Enora Rice, Bhargav Shandilya, Alexis Palmer, Lori Levin
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

KinyaEmbed: Contrastive Sentence Embeddings for Kinyarwanda via Multi-Stage Curriculum Training

KinyaEmbed is the first sentence‑embedding model specifically designed for Kinyarwanda, built on KinyaBERT‑large and trained through a four‑stage curriculum that incorporates paraphrase pairs, translated MNLI triplets, OPUS‑100 translation pairs, and high‑quality KinyaCOMET pairs. It outperforms existing multilingual embeddings on the SemRel2024‑rw benchmark, achieving a Spearman ψ of 0.7298, and introduces the Wiki‑RW‑STS benchmark of 300 contamination‑free Kinyarwanda sentence pairs. All model checkpoints, filtered pairs, and the new benchmark are publicly released.

By Ireddi Rakshitha, Devavarapu Yashwanth, Ntakirutimana Pierre
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Spectral Signatures of Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 03377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapidly growing repository of publicly available large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges for systematic management and quantification at scale, such as model lineage tracing, licensing, and evaluation.

By Zhuoying Zhang, Ishan V. Prasad, Yuanzhe Hu, Zihang Liu, Hengrui Luo, Pu Ren, Yaoqing Yang
arXiv AI
Jun 18

Morpheus: A Morphology-Aware Neural Tokenizer and Word Embedder for Turkish

arXiv:2606. 18717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turkish is agglutinative: meaning is carried by morphemes, yet the subword tokenizers that drive modern language models split words by corpus statistics, fragmenting semantically loaded suffixes and -- in the case of WordPiece and rule-based analyzers -- failing to decode their output back to the original text.

By Tolga \c{S}akar