arXiv subjects

Harald Baayen

Publications and source records attributed to Harald Baayen.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

An experimental and computational study of an Estonian single-person word naming

This study investigates lexical processing in Estonian. A large-scale single-subject experiment is reported that combines the word naming task with eye-tracking. Five response variables (first fixation duration, total fixation duration, number of fixations, word naming latency, and spoken word duration) are analyzed with the generalized additive model. Of central interest is the question of whether measures for lexical processing generated by a computational model of the mental lexicon (the Discriminative Lexicon Model, DLM) are predictive for these response variables, and how they compare to classical predictors such as word frequency, neighborhood size, and inflectional paradigm size. Computational models were implemented both with linear and deep mappings. Central findings are, first, that DLM-based measures are powerful predictors for lexical processing, second, that DLM-measures using deep learning are not necessarily more precise predictors of lexical processing than DLM-measures using linear mappings, third, that classical predictors tend to provide somewhat more precise fits compared to DLM-based predictors (except for total fixation duration, where the two provide equivalent goodness of fit), and fourth, that in the naming task lexical variables are not predictive for first fixation duration and the total number of fixations. As the DLM works with mappings from form to meaning, the predictivity of DLM-based measures for total fixation duration, naming latencies, and spoken word duration indicates that meaning is heavily involved in the present word naming task.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Historical and psycholinguistic perspectives on morphological productivity: A sketch of an integrative approach

In this study, we approach morphological productivity from two perspectives: a cognitive-computational perspective, and a diachronic perspective zooming in on an actual speaker, Thomas Mann. For developing the first perspective, we make use of a cognitive computational model of the mental lexicon, the discriminative lexicon model. For computational mappings between form and meaning to be productive, in the sense that novel, previously unencountered words, can be understood and produced, there must be systematicities between the form space and the semantic space. If the relation between form and meaning would be truly arbitrary, a model could memorize form and meaning pairings, but there is no way in which the model would be able to generalize to novel test data. For Finnish nominal inflection, Malay derivation, and English compounding, we explore, using the Discriminative Lexicon Model as a computational tool, to trace differences in the degree to which inflectional and word formation patterns are productive. We show that the DLM tends to associate affix-like sublexical units with the centroids of the embeddings of the words with a given affix. For developing the second perspective, we study how the intake and output of one prolific writer, Thomas Mann, changes over time. We show by means of an examination of what Thomas Mann is likely to have read, and what he wrote, that the rate at which Mann produces novel derived words is extremely low. There are far more novel words in his input than in his output. We show that Thomas Mann is less likely to produce a novel derived word with a given suffix the greater the average distance is of the embeddings of all derived words to the corresponding centroid, and discuss the challenges of using speaker-specific embeddings for low-frequency and novel words.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Language with Vision: a Study on Grounded Word and Sentence Embeddings

Grounding language in vision is an active field of research seeking to construct cognitively plausible word and sentence representations by incorporating perceptual knowledge from vision into text-based representations. Despite many attempts at language grounding, achieving an optimal equilibrium between textual representations of the language and our embodied experiences remains an open field. Some common concerns are the following. Is visual grounding advantageous for abstract words, or is its effectiveness restricted to concrete words? What is the optimal way of bridging the gap between text and vision? To what extent is perceptual knowledge from images advantageous for acquiring high-quality embeddings? Leveraging the current advances in machine learning and natural language processing, the present study addresses these questions by proposing a simple yet very effective computational grounding model for pre-trained word embeddings. Our model effectively balances the interplay between language and vision by aligning textual embeddings with visual information while simultaneously preserving the distributional statistics that characterize word usage in text corpora. By applying a learned alignment, we are able to indirectly ground unseen words including abstract words. A series of evaluations on a range of behavioural datasets shows that visual grounding is beneficial not only for concrete words but also for abstract words, lending support to the indirect theory of abstract concepts. Moreover, our approach offers advantages for contextualized embeddings, such as those generated by BERT, but only when trained on corpora of modest, cognitively plausible sizes. Code and grounded embeddings for English are available at https://github.com/Hazel1994/Visually_Grounded_Word_Embeddings_2.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

How direct is the link between words and images?

Current word embedding models despite their success, still suffer from their lack of grounding in the real world. In this line of research, Gunther et al. 2022 proposed a behavioral experiment to investigate the relationship between words and images. In their setup, participants were presented with a target noun and a pair of images, one chosen by their model and another chosen randomly. Participants were asked to select the image that best matched the target noun. In most cases, participants preferred the image selected by the model. Gunther et al., therefore, concluded the possibility of a direct link between words and embodied experience. We took their experiment as a point of departure and addressed the following questions. 1. Apart from utilizing visually embodied simulation of given images, what other strategies might subjects have used to solve this task? To what extent does this setup rely on visual information from images? Can it be solved using purely textual representations? 2. Do current visually grounded embeddings explain subjects' selection behavior better than textual embeddings? 3. Does visual grounding improve the semantic representations of both concrete and abstract words? To address these questions, we designed novel experiments by using pre-trained textual and visually grounded word embeddings. Our experiments reveal that subjects' selection behavior is explained to a large extent based on purely text-based embeddings and word-based similarities, suggesting a minor involvement of active embodied experiences. Visually grounded embeddings offered modest advantages over textual embeddings only in certain cases. These findings indicate that the experiment by Gunther et al. may not be well suited for tapping into the perceptual experience of participants, and therefore the extent to which it measures visually grounded knowledge is unclear.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Parsimonious Mixed Models

The analysis of experimental data with mixed-effects models requires decisions about the specification of the appropriate random-effects structure. Recently, Barr, Levy, Scheepers, and Tily, 2013 recommended fitting `maximal' models with all possible random effect components included. Estimation of maximal models, however, may not converge. We show that failure to converge typically is not due to a suboptimal estimation algorithm, but is a consequence of attempting to fit a model that is too complex to be properly supported by the data, irrespective of whether estimation is based on maximum likelihood or on Bayesian hierarchical modeling with uninformative or weakly informative priors. Importantly, even under convergence, overparameterization may lead to uninterpretable models. We provide diagnostic tools for detecting overparameterization and guiding model simplification.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Balancing Type I Error and Power in Linear Mixed Models

Linear mixed-effects models have increasingly replaced mixed-model analyses of variance for statistical inference in factorial psycholinguistic experiments. Although LMMs have many advantages over ANOVA, like ANOVAs, setting them up for data analysis also requires some care. One simple option, when numerically possible, is to fit the full variance-covariance structure of random effects (the maximal model; Barr et al. 2013), presumably to keep Type I error down to the nominal alpha in the presence of random effects. Although it is true that fitting a model with only random intercepts may lead to higher Type I error, fitting a maximal model also has a cost: it can lead to a significant loss of power. We demonstrate this with simulations and suggest that for typical psychological and psycholinguistic data, higher power is achieved without inflating Type I error rate if a model selection criterion is used to select a random effect structure that is supported by the data.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2016

The cave of Shadows. Addressing the human factor with generalized additive mixed models

Generalized additive mixed models are introduced as an extension of the generalized linear mixed model which makes it possible to deal with temporal autocorrelational structure in experimental data. This autocorrelational structure is likely to be a consequence of learning, fatigue, or the ebb and flow of attention within an experiment (the `human factor'). Unlike molecules or plots of barley, subjects in psycholinguistic experiments are intelligent beings that depend for their survival on constant adaptation to their environment, including the environment of an experiment. Three data sets illustrate that the human factor may interact with predictors of interest, both factorial and metric. We also show that, especially within the framework of the generalized additive model, in the nonlinear world, fitting maximally complex models that take every possible contingency into account is ill-advised as a modeling strategy. Alternative modeling strategies are discussed for both confirmatory and exploratory data analysis.

stat.AP↗

arXiv1995

Estimating Lexical Priors for Low-Frequency Syncretic Forms

Given a previously unseen form that is morphologically n-ways ambiguous, what is the best estimator for the lexical prior probabilities for the various functions of the form? We argue that the best estimator is provided by computing the relative frequencies of the various functions among the hapax legomena --- the forms that occur exactly once in a corpus. This result has important implications for the development of stochastic morphological taggers, especially when some initial hand-tagging of a corpus is required: For predicting lexical priors for very low-frequency morphologically ambiguous types (most of which would not occur in any given corpus) one should concentrate on tagging a good representative sample of the hapax legomena, rather than extensively tagging words of all frequency ranges.

cmp-lg↗