用语音嵌入分析106种语言的亲缘关系,发现其能有效反映语言演化规律。
Neighbors and relatives: How do speech embeddings reflect linguistic connections across the world?
- 基于XLS-R模型提取语音嵌入,通过线性判别分析聚类语言
- 嵌入距离与谱系、词汇、地理距离高度一致,捕捉全局与局部模式
- 适合研究低资源语言,为大规模语言演化分析提供新路径
本研究利用微调后的XLS-R自监督语言识别模型voxlingua107-xls-r-300m-wav2vec生成的语音嵌入,分析106种世界语言之间的关系。通过线性判别分析(LDA)对语言嵌入进行聚类,并与谱系、词汇及地理距离进行比较。结果表明,基于嵌入的距离与传统度量高度吻合,能够有效捕捉全球及局部的语言类型学模式。可视化中出现的挑战,特别是层级聚类与网络方法的局限性,凸显了语言演变的动态性。该方法在应对语料规模和潜在空间维度等方法论问题后,展现出对低资源语言的大规模分析潜力,有助于连接宏观与微观语言变异。未来工作将拓展至代表性不足的语言,并融合社会语言变异以更全面理解语言多样性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Investigating linguistic relationships on a global scale requires analyzing diverse features such as syntax, phonology and prosody, which evolve at varying rates influenced by internal diversification, language contact, and sociolinguistic factors. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) offer complementary alternatives to traditional historical and typological approaches. Instead of relying on expert labor in analyzing specific linguistic features, these new methods enable the exploration of linguistic variation through embeddings derived directly from speech, opening new avenues for large-scale, data-driven analyses. This study employs embeddings from the fine-tuned XLS-R self-supervised language identification model voxlingua107-xls-r-300m-wav2vec, to analyze relationships between 106 world languages based on speech recordings. Using linear discriminant analysis (LDA), language embeddings are clustered and compared with genealogical, lexical, and geographical distances. The results demonstrate that embedding-based distances align closely with traditional measures, effectively capturing both global and local typological patterns. Challenges in visualizing relationships, particularly with hierarchical clustering and network-based methods, highlight the dynamic nature of language change. The findings show potential for scalable analyses of language variation based on speech embeddings, providing new perspectives on relationships among languages. By addressing methodological considerations such as corpus size and latent space dimensionality, this approach opens avenues for studying low-resource languages and bridging macro- and micro-level linguistic variation. Future work aims to extend these methods to underrepresented languages and integrate sociolinguistic variation for a more comprehensive understanding of linguistic diversity.
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