# Towards Precision Characterization of Communication Disorders using Models of Perceived Pragmatic Similarity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.09170 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.09170/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Seamless: Multilingual Expressive and Streaming Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05187/) (2023)
- [Repairing the Cracked Foundation: A Survey of Obstacles in Evaluation Practices for Generated Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06935/) (2022)
- [How Can We Accelerate Progress Towards Human-like Linguistic Generalization?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00955/) (2020)
- [Beyond BLEU: Training Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06694/) (2019)
- [Words are all you need? Language as an approximation for human similarity judgments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04105/) (2022)
- [A Textless Metric for Speech-to-Speech Comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11835/) (2022)
- [A Collection of Pragmatic-Similarity Judgments over Spoken Dialog Utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14808/) (2024)
- [Which Prosodic Features Matter Most for Pragmatics?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13240/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The diagnosis and treatment of individuals with communication disorders offers many opportunities for the application of speech technology, but research so far has not adequately considered: the diversity of conditions, the role of pragmatic deficits, and the challenges of limited data. This paper explores how a general-purpose model of perceived pragmatic similarity may overcome these limitations. It explains how it might support several use cases for clinicians and clients, and presents evidence that a simple model can provide value, and in particular can capture utterance aspects that are relevant to diagnoses of autism and specific language impairment.