Related papers: Prosody Modifications for Question-Answering in Vo…
Virtual assistants, also known as intelligent conversational systems such as Google's Virtual Assistant and Apple's Siri, interact with human-like responses to users' queries and finish specific tasks. Meanwhile, existing recommendation…
The goal of voice conversion is to transform source speech into a target voice, keeping the content unchanged. In this paper, we focus on self-supervised representation learning for voice conversion. Specifically, we compare discrete and…
Voice disorders are pathologies significantly affecting patient quality of life. However, non-invasive automated diagnosis of these pathologies is still under-explored, due to both a shortage of pathological voice data, and diversity of the…
Traditional information retrieval (such as that offered by web search engines) impedes users with information overload from extensive result pages and the need to manually locate the desired information therein. Conversely,…
Spoken language applications in natural dialogue settings place serious requirements on the choice of processing architecture. Especially under adverse phonetic and acoustic conditions parsing procedures have to be developed which do not…
Asking clarifying questions in response to ambiguous or faceted queries has been recognized as a useful technique for various information retrieval systems, especially conversational search systems with limited bandwidth interfaces.…
Though significant progress has been made for the voice conversion (VC) of typical speech, VC for atypical speech, e.g., dysarthric and second-language (L2) speech, remains a challenge, since it involves correcting for atypical prosody…
Single-channel speech enhancement models face significant performance degradation in extremely noisy environments. While prior work has shown that complementary bone-conducted speech can guide enhancement, effective integration of this…
Human speech conveys prosody, linguistic content, and speaker identity. This article investigates a novel speaker anonymization approach using an end-to-end network based on a Vector-Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder (VQ-VAE) to deal with…
Visual-to-auditory sensory substitution devices can assist the blind in sensing the visual environment by translating the visual information into a sound pattern. To improve the translation quality, the task performances of the blind are…
As an indispensable ingredient of computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT), automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) plays a pivotal role in aiding self-directed language learners by providing multi-aspect and timely feedback.…
Besides the utilitarian aspects of online shopping, hedonic motivations play a significant role in shaping the shopping behavior of online users. With the increased popularity of voice-enabled devices, online shopping platforms have…
Voice assistants have recently achieved remarkable commercial success. However, the current generation of these devices is typically capable of only reactive interactions. In other words, interactions have to be initiated by the user, which…
Explanatory information helps users to evaluate the suggestions offered by AI-driven decision support systems. With large language models, adjusting explanation expressions has become much easier. However, how these expressions influence…
Modern conversational agents such as Alexa and Google Assistant represent significant progress in speech recognition, natural language processing, and speech synthesis. But as these agents have grown more realistic, concerns have been…
Pre-trained language models have shown excellent results in few-shot learning scenarios using in-context learning. Although it is impressive, the size of language models can be prohibitive to make them usable in on-device applications, such…
Speech data has rich acoustic and paralinguistic information with important cues for understanding a speaker's tone, emotion, and intent, yet traditional large language models such as BERT do not incorporate this information. There has been…
In spite of the recent success of Dialogue Act (DA) classification, the majority of prior works focus on text-based classification with oracle transcriptions, i.e. human transcriptions, instead of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)'s…
Text-to-Speech synthesis systems are generally evaluated using Mean Opinion Score (MOS) tests, where listeners score samples of synthetic speech on a Likert scale. A major drawback of MOS tests is that they only offer a general measure of…
During a conversation, individuals take turns speaking and engage in exchanges, which can occur smoothly or involve interruptions. Listeners have various ways of participating, such as displaying backchannels, signalling the aim to take a…