English

Multilingual MFA: Forced Alignment on Low-Resource Related Languages

Computation and Language 2025-04-25 v2
Authors: Alessio Tosolini , Claire Bowern
View on arXiv ↗ PDF ↗

Abstract

We compare the outcomes of multilingual and crosslingual training for related and unrelated Australian languages with similar phonological inventories. We use the Montreal Forced Aligner to train acoustic models from scratch and adapt a large English model, evaluating results against seen data, unseen data (seen language), and unseen data and language. Results indicate benefits of adapting the English baseline model for previously unseen languages.

Keywords

cross-lingual transfer machine translation natural language processing

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.07315,
  title  = {Multilingual MFA: Forced Alignment on Low-Resource Related Languages},
  author = {Alessio Tosolini and Claire Bowern},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.07315},
  year   = {2025}
}

Related papers

View all related →
Computation and Language · Computer Science
OFA: A Framework of Initializing Unseen Subword Embeddings for Efficient Large-scale Multilingual Continued Pretraining
Yihong Liu, Peiqin Lin, Mingyang Wang, Hinrich Schütze
2024-03-26
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Rethinking what Matters: Effective and Robust Multilingual Realignment for Low-Resource Languages
Quang Phuoc Nguyen, David Anugraha, Felix Gaschi, Jun Bin Cheng +1
2025-11-11
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Massively Multilingual Adversarial Speech Recognition
Oliver Adams, Matthew Wiesner, Shinji Watanabe, David Yarowsky
2019-04-05
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Match the Script, Adapt if Multilingual: Analyzing the Effect of Multilingual Pretraining on Cross-lingual Transferability
Yoshinari Fujinuma, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Katharina Kann
2022-03-22
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Investigating the Impact of Cross-lingual Acoustic-Phonetic Similarities on Multilingual Speech Recognition
Muhammad Umar Farooq, Thomas Hain
2022-07-08
Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems
BFA: Real-time Multilingual Text-to-speech Forced Alignment
Abdul Rehman, Jingyao Cai, Jian-Jun Zhang, Xiaosong Yang
2025-09-30
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Monolingual or Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Which Makes a Better Alpaca
Pinzhen Chen, Shaoxiong Ji, Nikolay Bogoychev, Andrey Kutuzov +2
2024-02-01
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Pruning Multilingual Large Language Models for Multilingual Inference
Hwichan Kim, Jun Suzuki, Tosho Hirasawa, Mamoru Komachi
2024-10-03
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Extrapolating Large Language Models to Non-English by Aligning Languages
Wenhao Zhu, Yunzhe Lv, Qingxiu Dong, Fei Yuan +5
2023-10-10
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Multilingual Transfer Learning for QA Using Translation as Data Augmentation
Mihaela Bornea, Lin Pan, Sara Rosenthal, Radu Florian +1
2020-12-14
Computation and Language · Computer Science
MultiFiT: Efficient Multi-lingual Language Model Fine-tuning
Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Sebastian Ruder, Piotr Czapla, Marcin Kardas +2
2020-06-05
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Parsing with Multilingual BERT, a Small Corpus, and a Small Treebank
Ethan C. Chau, Lucy H. Lin, Noah A. Smith
2022-06-22
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Exploring Unsupervised Pretraining Objectives for Machine Translation
Christos Baziotis, Ivan Titov, Alexandra Birch, Barry Haddow
2021-06-11
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners
Shimao Zhang, Changjiang Gao, Wenhao Zhu, Jiajun Chen +5
2024-06-19
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Comparison of Multilingual Self-Supervised and Weakly-Supervised Speech Pre-Training for Adaptation to Unseen Languages
Andrew Rouditchenko, Sameer Khurana, Samuel Thomas, Rogerio Feris +5
2023-06-01
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Targeted Multilingual Adaptation for Low-resource Language Families
C. M. Downey, Terra Blevins, Dhwani Serai, Dwija Parikh +1
2024-05-22
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Stop Pre-Training: Adapt Visual-Language Models to Unseen Languages
Yasmine Karoui, Rémi Lebret, Negar Foroutan, Karl Aberer
2023-06-30
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Empowering Cross-lingual Abilities of Instruction-tuned Large Language Models by Translation-following demonstrations
Leonardo Ranaldi, Giulia Pucci, Andre Freitas
2024-10-30
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Adapting Multilingual Neural Machine Translation to Unseen Languages
Surafel M. Lakew, Alina Karakanta, Marcello Federico, Matteo Negri +1
2019-10-31
Machine Learning · Computer Science
Multilingual Factor Analysis
Francisco Vargas, Kamen Brestnichki, Alex Papadopoulos-Korfiatis, Nils Hammerla
2019-10-25
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Improving the Lexical Ability of Pretrained Language Models for Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation
Alexandra Chronopoulou, Dario Stojanovski, Alexander Fraser
2021-04-15
Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems
Multilingual and Unsupervised Subword Modeling for Zero-Resource Languages
Enno Hermann, Herman Kamper, Sharon Goldwater
2020-04-20
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Phylogeny-Inspired Adaptation of Multilingual Models to New Languages
Fahim Faisal, Antonios Anastasopoulos
2022-11-24
Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems
Accidental Learners: Spoken Language Identification in Multilingual Self-Supervised Models
Travis M. Bartley, Fei Jia, Krishna C. Puvvada, Samuel Kriman +1
2023-03-14
Computation and Language · Computer Science
Effective vocabulary expanding of multilingual language models for extremely low-resource languages
Jianyu Zheng
2026-02-11
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:52:59.459Z