Aaricia Herygers

Kevin Glocker, Aaricia Herygers, Munir Georges

This paper proposes Allophant, a multilingual phoneme recognizer. It requires only a phoneme inventory for cross-lingual transfer to a target language, allowing for low-resource recognition. The architecture combines a compositional phone embedding approach with individually supervised phonetic attribute classifiers in a multi-task architecture. We also introduce Allophoible, an extension of the PHOIBLE database. When combined with a distance based mapping approach for grapheme-to-phoneme outputs, it allows us to train on PHOIBLE inventories directly. By training and evaluating on 34 languages, we found that the addition of multi-task learning improves the model's capability of being applied to unseen phonemes and phoneme inventories. On supervised languages we achieve phoneme error rate improvements of 11 percentage points (pp.) compared to a baseline without multi-task learning. Evaluation of zero-shot transfer on 84 languages yielded a decrease in PER of 2.63 pp. over the baseline.

Kai Hartung, Aaricia Herygers, Shubham Kurlekar et al.

Biases induced to text by generative models have become an increasingly large topic in recent years. In this paper we explore how machine translation might introduce a bias in sentiments as classified by sentiment analysis models. For this, we compare three open access machine translation models for five different languages on two parallel corpora to test if the translation process causes a shift in sentiment classes recognized in the texts. Though our statistic test indicate shifts in the label probability distributions, we find none that appears consistent enough to assume a bias induced by the translation process.

Jonas Mayer Martins, Zhuojing Huang, Aaricia Herygers et al.

What makes a word difficult to learn, and how does the difficulty depend on the learner's native language? We computationally model vocabulary difficulty for English learners whose first language is Spanish, German, or Chinese with gradient-boosted models trained on features related to a word's familiarity (e.g., frequency), meaning, surface form, and cross-linguistic transfer. Using Shapley values, we determine the importance of each feature group. Word familiarity is the dominant feature group shared by all three languages. However, predictions for Spanish- and German-speaking learners rely additionally on orthographic transfer. This transfer mechanism is unavailable to Chinese learners, whose difficulty is shaped by a combination of familiarity and surface features alone. Our models provide interpretable, L1-tailored difficulty estimates that can be used to design vocabulary curricula.