arXiv Computation and Language

When the Persona Contradicts the Line: Diagnosing Plan-to-Synthesis Failures in Chain-of-Thought TTS

arXiv AI
Jul 9

DiaLLM: An Investigation into the Robustness-Generation Gap in English Dialect Adaptation

arXiv:2607. 07669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly \emph{understand} dialectal English, yet still \emph{produce} only standard, US-leaning English, leaving dialectal generation, the harder half of the problem, largely unaddressed.

By Jordan Painter, Dipankar Srirag, Adarsh Kappiyath, Diptesh Kanojia, Aditya Joshi, Lu Yin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

When Models Hear What They Expect: Diagnosing Prosodic Heuristics in Multimodal Sarcasm Detection

The study investigates how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) use prosodic cues in sarcasm detection. By testing Qwen2.5‑Omni and Qwen3‑Omni on Mandarin Chinese and English across five modality conditions, the authors find that adding audio increases false positives without improving true positives. Acoustic error analysis shows that models rely on a stereotypical prosodic pattern—elevated pitch and irregular pausing—that does not align with genuine sarcasm cues, and manipulating these dimensions alone can raise false positive rates up to 60%. The same effect appears in Gemini 3 Flash Preview, indicating the heuristic is not limited to a single architecture.

By Yongjian Chen, Pengfei Wei, Yiqun Sun, Zhu Li, Lawrence B. Hsieh
arXiv AI
Oct 19

SpeechCritic: Learning a Diagnostic Speech Judge from Limited Human Preferences

SpeechCritic learns a diagnostic speech judge from only about 300 human-labeled comparisons, calibrating a frontier audio-language model with non-binding hints that select acoustic measurements agreeing with human judgments. The approach improves dimension-level agreement by 6.3 points and reduces mismatch in Tie rates by 10.4 points, and training a 7B judge with SFT, OPD, and RL yields distinct behaviors, with RL producing more specific rationales. The method works across language pairs, demonstrating a path from limited human preferences to a diagnostic speech judge.

By Mingyue Huo, Shivam Mehta, Bhavin Jawade, Yinghong Lan, Haoqi Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

COT-TTS: Audio Context-Aware Text-to-Speech with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

arXiv:2609.22697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, text-to-speech systems have made significant progress in speech expressiveness and controllability. However, the speaking style of generated...

By Weizhen Bian, Sitong Cheng, Rongxiu Zhong, Jiahao Pan, Liumeng Xue, Boyi Kang, Shilei Zhang, Jinglei Liu, Yue Wang, Junlan Feng, Bei Liu, Wei Xue
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Diverging Transformer Predictions for Human Sentence Processing: A Comprehensive Analysis of Agreement Attraction Effects

The study evaluates eleven autoregressive transformer models on English agreement attraction scenarios using a surprisal-based approach. Results show that while transformers match human reading times for prepositional phrase configurations, they perform poorly on object‑extracted relative clauses, with predictions diverging across models and failing to capture human interference patterns. The authors argue that current transformers cannot adequately model human morphosyntactic processing and call for more rigorous, comprehensive testing to avoid misleading conclusions from limited syntactic setups.

By Titus von der Malsburg, Sebastian Pad\'o
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

How Human-Like Are Large Language Models? A Register-Aware Linguistic Evaluation Framework

The paper introduces a register-aware framework to evaluate how human-like large language models (LLMs) are, focusing on linguistic feature distributions rather than factual correctness. It uses Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and 67 Biber lexico‑grammatical features to compare LLM‑generated texts with human reference corpora across different registers. Experiments on seven instruction‑tuned, open‑source models across five English datasets show that all LLMs deviate from human baselines, with closeness to human language varying by register and not by model size.

By Bj\"orn Nieth, Marianna Gracheva, Michaela Mahlberg, Bjoern Eskofier, Emmanuelle Salin