Papers by Elizabeth Nielsen
Spelling convention sensitivity in neural language models (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Various long-distance dependencies have been investigated using neural language models. |
| Approach: | They examine whether large neural language models learn the long-distance dependency of British versus American spelling conventions . a large T5 language model does internalize consistency, but only with respect to observed lexical items . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model internalizes consistency with the training corpora, but only with respect to observed lexical items. |
Alligators All Around: Mitigating Lexical Confusion in Low-resource Machine Translation (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Current machine translation systems for low-resource languages have a particular failure mode: they tend to confuse words within a domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a recall-based metric to measure the failure mode of machine translation systems for low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a lexicon-based translator in 122 low-resource languages. |
Prosodic segmentation for parsing spoken dialogue (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing parsers struggle to parse spoken dialogue because of disfluencies and unmarked boundaries between sentence-like units (SUs). |
| Approach: | They hypothesize that prosody affects a parser that receives an entire dialogue turn as input, instead of gold standard pre-segmented SUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than the SU-based model on the English Switchboard corpus despite performing two tasks rather than one, and pitch and intensity features are the most important for this corpus. |
The role of context in neural pitch accent detection in English (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prosody is a rich information source in natural language, serving as a marker for phenomena such as contrast. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses full utterances as input and adds an LSTM layer to detect prosodic events in speech. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the American English speech in the Boston University Radio News Corpus. |