arXiv subjects

Yu-Hsiang Tseng

Publications and source records attributed to Yu-Hsiang Tseng.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Reduplicative constructions in Mandarin: Socio-emotional profiling through distributional semantics

Mandarin Chinese has two productive reduplicative constructions that repeat either two-character base words or their constituents (e.g., `in good health', `discuss a bit'). Their varied meanings have been described as realizing plurality, valence coloring, sound symbolism and pragmatic functions. The aim of this study is twofold. A first goal is to clarify whether it is possible to come to a more precise understanding of the variegated semantics of Mandarin reduplication by using word embeddings from distributional semantics. A second goal is to explore how useful embeddings are for understanding the details of a semantically complex word-formation process. We show that the embedding space recovers the semantic and grammatical properties of reduplications previously identified in the literature, validating Tencent embeddings for morphological investigation. Semantic profiling revealed that reduplicative constructions are often strongly represented on multiple dimensions. The two patterns exhibit clear semantic and pragmatic differentiation in distributional space. Procrustes analysis clarified that the overall organization of the base-word space is largely preserved in the reduplication space, with local mismatches highlighting regions of discourse-pragmatic reorganization. Taken together, these results show that high-dimensional word embeddings can recover established linguistic generalizations, and capture the semantic versatility of Mandarin reduplication and constructional transparency.

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arXiv2026

Letters hide the truth from our eyes: English homophones have meaningfully different phonetic realizations

The distribution of spoken word duration of English homophones is known to co-vary with frequency of use. This study investigates whether other aspects of the phonetic realization of homophones also differ. A series of quantitative investigations of 14,000 homophone tokens in American television news broadcasts revealed that the tokens of homophone pairs such as \textit{weight} and \textit{wait} have different phonetic realizations, and that these can be predicted from their meanings in utterance context. These systematic differences remain even when taking duration-related variation into account. Time-normalized spectrograms emerged as an excellent tool for probing the fine details of phonetic realization, and obviate the need for phonetic transcriptions, which inevitably hide the phonetic truth from our eyes.

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arXiv2025

Word-specific tonal realizations in Mandarin

The pitch contours of Mandarin two-character words are generally understood as being shaped by the underlying tones of the constituent single-character words, in interaction with articulatory constraints imposed by factors such as speech rate, co-articulation with adjacent tones, segmental make-up, and predictability. This study shows that tonal realization is also partially determined by words' meanings. We first show, on the basis of a corpus of Taiwan Mandarin spontaneous conversations, using a generalized additive regression model, and focusing on the rise-fall tone pattern, that after controlling for effects of speaker and context, word type is a stronger predictor of tonal realization than all the previously established word-form related predictors combined. Importantly, the addition of information about meaning in context improves prediction accuracy even further. We then proceed to show, using computational modeling with context-specific word embeddings, that token-specific pitch contours predict word type with 50% accuracy on held-out data, and that context-sensitive, token-specific embeddings can predict the shape of pitch contours with 40% accuracy. These accuracies, which are an order of magnitude above chance level, suggest that the relation between words' pitch contours and their meanings are sufficiently strong to be potentially functional for language users. The theoretical implications of these empirical findings are discussed.

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arXiv2024

Resolving Regular Polysemy in Named Entities

Word sense disambiguation primarily addresses the lexical ambiguity of common words based on a predefined sense inventory. Conversely, proper names are usually considered to denote an ad-hoc real-world referent. Once the reference is decided, the ambiguity is purportedly resolved. However, proper names also exhibit ambiguities through appellativization, i.e., they act like common words and may denote different aspects of their referents. We proposed to address the ambiguities of proper names through the light of regular polysemy, which we formalized as dot objects. This paper introduces a combined word sense disambiguation (WSD) model for disambiguating common words against Chinese Wordnet (CWN) and proper names as dot objects. The model leverages the flexibility of a gloss-based model architecture, which takes advantage of the glosses and example sentences of CWN. We show that the model achieves competitive results on both common and proper nouns, even on a relatively sparse sense dataset. Aside from being a performant WSD tool, the model further facilitates the future development of the lexical resource.

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arXiv2023

Exploring Affordance and Situated Meaning in Image Captions: A Multimodal Analysis

This paper explores the grounding issue regarding multimodal semantic representation from a computational cognitive-linguistic view. We annotate images from the Flickr30k dataset with five perceptual properties: Affordance, Perceptual Salience, Object Number, Gaze Cueing, and Ecological Niche Association (ENA), and examine their association with textual elements in the image captions. Our findings reveal that images with Gibsonian affordance show a higher frequency of captions containing 'holding-verbs' and 'container-nouns' compared to images displaying telic affordance. Perceptual Salience, Object Number, and ENA are also associated with the choice of linguistic expressions. Our study demonstrates that comprehensive understanding of objects or events requires cognitive attention, semantic nuances in language, and integration across multiple modalities. We highlight the vital importance of situated meaning and affordance grounding in natural language understanding, with the potential to advance human-like interpretation in various scenarios.

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arXiv2023

Vec2Gloss: definition modeling leveraging contextualized vectors with Wordnet gloss

Contextualized embeddings are proven to be powerful tools in multiple NLP tasks. Nonetheless, challenges regarding their interpretability and capability to represent lexical semantics still remain. In this paper, we propose that the task of definition modeling, which aims to generate the human-readable definition of the word, provides a route to evaluate or understand the high dimensional semantic vectors. We propose a `Vec2Gloss' model, which produces the gloss from the target word's contextualized embeddings. The generated glosses of this study are made possible by the systematic gloss patterns provided by Chinese Wordnet. We devise two dependency indices to measure the semantic and contextual dependency, which are used to analyze the generated texts in gloss and token levels. Our results indicate that the proposed `Vec2Gloss' model opens a new perspective to the lexical-semantic applications of contextualized embeddings.

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arXiv2023

Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis in Multimodal Context

Multimodal corpora have become an essential language resource for language science and grounded natural language processing (NLP) systems due to the growing need to understand and interpret human communication across various channels. In this paper, we first present our efforts in building the first Multimodal Corpus for Languages in Taiwan (MultiMoco). Based on the corpus, we conduct a case study investigating the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis (LRH), specifically examining whether the hand gestures co-occurring with speech constants facilitate lexical retrieval or serve other discourse functions. With detailed annotations on eight parliamentary interpellations in Taiwan Mandarin, we explore the co-occurrence between speech constants and non-verbal features (i.e., head movement, face movement, hand gesture, and function of hand gesture). Our findings suggest that while hand gestures do serve as facilitators for lexical retrieval in some cases, they also serve the purpose of information emphasis. This study highlights the potential of the MultiMoco Corpus to provide an important resource for in-depth analysis and further research in multimodal communication studies.

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