Quantifying vowel category distinctness using Bayesian modelling
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phonetic and sociolinguistic studies of vowel merger require a measure of acoustic distinctness between vowel categories. Three desiderata for such a metric are that it be multivariate, in the sense that it account for correlations between dimensions (e.g., F1 and F2), control for other factors affecting vowel formants (e.g. surrounding consonants), and work for unbalanced data (common in naturalistic data). Previous work (Nycz and Hall-Lew, 2013; Kelley & Tucker, 2020) has considered a variety of measures, including variants of Euclidean distance, Pillai score, and Bhattacharyya affinity, but none meet all three criteria. We present a new method for quantifying vowel merger that meets all desiderata and can be applied to different metrics: we fit a Bayesian mixed-effects linear model to jointly predict F1 and F2, then compute any desired metric—here, Euclidean distance, Pillai score, and Bhattacharyya affinity—from the posterior. We evaluate each metric, and the overall method, to describe PIN-PEN across a range of English dialect corpora. We find that controlling for covariates and unbalanced data adds substantial signal, but that multivariate modelling does not perform substantially better than univariate modelling. Additionally, we argue that Bhattacharyya affinity has particularly desirable properties (e.g., allowing for heteroskedastic data: Johnson, 2015).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".