Related papers: Phoneme Level Language Models for Sequence Based L…

To scale neural speech synthesis to various real-world languages, we present a multilingual end-to-end framework that maps byte inputs to spectrograms, thus allowing arbitrary input scripts. Besides strong results on 40+ languages, the…

Character-based Neural Network Language Models (NNLM) have the advantage of smaller vocabulary and thus faster training times in comparison to NNLMs based on multi-character units. However, in low-resource scenarios, both the character and…

We present a joint Speech and Language Model (SLM), a multitask, multilingual, and dual-modal model that takes advantage of pretrained foundational speech and language models. SLM freezes the pretrained foundation models to maximally…

Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) models are popular for their balance between speed and performance for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, these CTC models still struggle in other areas, such as personalization towards…

We study training a single acoustic model for multiple languages with the aim of improving automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance on low-resource languages, and over-all simplifying deployment of ASR systems that support diverse…

Cross-language pre-trained models such as multilingual BERT (mBERT) have achieved significant performance in various cross-lingual downstream NLP tasks. This paper proposes a multi-level contrastive learning (ML-CTL) framework to further…

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) models are a key component in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, such as the ASR system in Alexa, as they are used to generate pronunciations for out-of-vocabulary words that do not exist in the…

Researchers working on low-resource languages face persistent challenges due to limited data availability and restricted access to computational resources. Although most large language models (LLMs) are predominantly trained in…

There exist three approaches for multilingual and crosslingual automatic speech recognition (MCL-ASR) - supervised pretraining with phonetic or graphemic transcription, and self-supervised pretraining. We find that pretraining with phonetic…

Despite recent advancements in speech processing, zero-resource speech translation (ST) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) remain challenging problems. In this work, we propose to leverage a multilingual Large Language Model (LLM) to…

Previous work on end-to-end translation from speech has primarily used frame-level features as speech representations, which creates longer, sparser sequences than text. We show that a naive method to create compressed phoneme-like speech…

Transfer learning or multilingual model is essential for low-resource neural machine translation (NMT), but the applicability is limited to cognate languages by sharing their vocabularies. This paper shows effective techniques to transfer a…

We show that unsupervised sequence-segmentation performance can be transferred to extremely low-resource languages by pre-training a Masked Segmental Language Model (Downey et al., 2021) multilingually. Further, we show that this transfer…

Multilingual Machine Translation promises to improve translation quality between non-English languages. This is advantageous for several reasons, namely lower latency (no need to translate twice), and reduced error cascades (e.g., avoiding…

Acoustic word embedding models map variable duration speech segments to fixed dimensional vectors, enabling efficient speech search and discovery. Previous work explored how embeddings can be obtained in zero-resource settings where no…

Integrating audio encoders with LLMs through connectors has enabled these models to process and comprehend audio modalities, significantly enhancing speech-to-text tasks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and automatic speech…

Transfer learning from high-resource languages is known to be an efficient way to improve end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages. Pre-trained or jointly trained encoder-decoder models, however, do not share…

We propose a practical scheme to train a single multilingual sequence labeling model that yields state of the art results and is small and fast enough to run on a single CPU. Starting from a public multilingual BERT checkpoint, our final…

This paper presents XLSR which learns cross-lingual speech representations by pretraining a single model from the raw waveform of speech in multiple languages. We build on wav2vec 2.0 which is trained by solving a contrastive task over…

We present XPhoneBERT, the first multilingual model pre-trained to learn phoneme representations for the downstream text-to-speech (TTS) task. Our XPhoneBERT has the same model architecture as BERT-base, trained using the RoBERTa…