arXiv Computation and Language

Opinionated, Hesitant and Stressed: Three Studies of How Politicians Speak in Four Slavic Parliaments

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Speaker-Specific and Language-Dependent Temporal Organization in Bilingual Political Speech

The study investigates how bilingual politicians structure the timing of their speeches in Luxembourgish and French, analyzing 400 sentences from ten speakers. Rhythm metrics were computed for consonants and vowels, revealing that consonant patterns are largely speaker-specific while vowel patterns are strongly influenced by language choice. French tokens exhibited longer, more variable vowels and vocalic intervals, whereas consonant timing differences were smaller, with no significant language-by-gender interactions.

By Nina Hosseini-Kivanani, Nafiseh Taghva, Peter Gilles, Oliver Niebuhr
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Evolution of US Oral Political Language

The study analyzes oral political language in U.S. presidential debates from 1960 to 2024, focusing on 19 candidates. It finds a clear trend toward simplification: sentence length and complex terms have decreased, while emotional tone has risen and logical, rational content has diminished. The research also explores whether specific presidents exhibit unique stylistic traits and whether language patterns correlate with electoral success.

By Jacques Savoy
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Speaker or Language? Explaining Variance in Charismatic Prosody Across Luxembourgish and French

The study examined 400 utterances from 10 politicians speaking in both Luxembourgish and French to determine how much of charismatic prosody is due to speaker identity versus language. Mixed‑effects modeling revealed that speaker identity explained most of the variance, while language contributed less but still produced systematic differences: French speech had higher shimmer and phrase‑final F0, suggesting a polite, respectful tone, whereas Luxembourgish speech showed stronger mid‑frequency spectral energy, indicating a more vocally present profile. These acoustic patterns reflect the sociolinguistic roles of Luxembourgish as an informal identity language and French as a high‑prestige institutional variety.

By Nina Hosseini-Kivanani, Nafiseh Taghva, Peter Gilles, Oliver Niebuhr
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

arXiv:2608.30260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While it is well-established that prosody carries crucial cues for syntactic structure, the degree and nature of correspondence between these two dom...

By Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regev, Tiago Pimentel, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

The Public Discourse Corpus (PDC): A Speaker-Attributed Dataset for Valence and Epistemic Modality with Target Speaker Participation

The Public Discourse Corpus (PDC) is the first dataset of public‑figure interview speech annotated for affective valence and epistemic modality. It contains 998 videos from 100 speakers across seven professional domains, yielding 186,642 sentences (3.1 million words). A key methodological contribution is Target Speaker Participation (TSP), a five‑category annotation taxonomy with documented inter‑annotator reliability (κ = 0.616), and an audio‑first diarization pipeline that separates target‑speaker turns from interviewer and third‑party speech. The corpus, annotation tools, validation sample, and processing pipeline are released as open source.

By Bo Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Political Ideology Shifts in Large Language Models

arXiv:2508.16013v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in politically sensitive contexts, raising concerns about their susceptibility to ideologica...

By Pietro Bernardelle, Stefano Civelli, Leon Fr\"ohling, Riccardo Lunardi, Kevin Roitero, Gianluca Demartini
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 20

Hear2Act: Benchmarking When Prosody Should Change What an Assistant Does

Prosodic cues can convey task-relevant information that alters the trajectory and outcome of a task-oriented dialogue, even when the words themselves remain unchanged. Yet existing benchmarks typically evaluate prosodic perception, response appropriateness, and task-oriented dialogue in isolation, making it difficult to test whether prosodic evidence changes downstream decisions.