Related papers: Cross-lingual transfer learning for spoken languag…

The capacity and effectiveness of pre-trained multilingual models (MLMs) for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is well established. However, phenomena of positive or negative transfer, and the effect of language choice still need to be fully…

Training neural text-to-speech (TTS) models for a new speaker typically requires several hours of high quality speech data. Prior works on voice cloning attempt to address this challenge by adapting pre-trained multi-speaker TTS models for…

Most Transformer language models are primarily pretrained on English text, limiting their use for other languages. As the model sizes grow, the performance gap between English and other languages with fewer compute and data resources…

Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning multilingual pretrained models shows promise for low-resource languages, but often suffers from misalignment of internal representations between languages. We hypothesize that even when the…

When we transfer a pretrained language model to a new language, there are many axes of variation that change at once. To disentangle the impact of different factors like syntactic similarity and vocabulary similarity, we propose a set of…

Concept definition is important in language understanding (LU) adaptation since literal definition difference can easily lead to data sparsity even if different data sets are actually semantically correlated. To address this issue, in this…

This work investigates spoken language understanding (SLU) systems in the scenario when the semantic information is extracted directly from the speech signal by means of a single end-to-end neural network model. Two SLU tasks are…

Transfer tasks in text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis - where one or more aspects of the speech of one set of speakers is transferred to another set of speakers that do not feature these aspects originally - remains a challenging task. One of…

Despite the great success of spoken language understanding (SLU) in high-resource languages, it remains challenging in low-resource languages mainly due to the lack of labeled training data. The recent multilingual code-switching approach…

Bootstrapping speech recognition on limited data resources has been an area of active research for long. The recent transition to all-neural models and end-to-end (E2E) training brought along particular challenges as these models are known…

Spoken Language Models (SLMs) aim to learn linguistic competence directly from speech using discrete units, widening access to Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies for languages with limited written resources. However, progress…

Current researches on spoken language understanding (SLU) heavily are limited to a simple setting: the plain text-based SLU that takes the user utterance as input and generates its corresponding semantic frames (e.g., intent and slots).…

While achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple tasks and languages, translation-based cross-lingual transfer is often overlooked in favour of massively multilingual pre-trained encoders. Arguably, this is due to its main limitations:…

We describe an LSTM-based model which we call Byte-to-Span (BTS) that reads text as bytes and outputs span annotations of the form [start, length, label] where start positions, lengths, and labels are separate entries in our vocabulary.…

Cross-lingual transfer, where a high-resource transfer language is used to improve the accuracy of a low-resource task language, is now an invaluable tool for improving performance of natural language processing (NLP) on low-resource…

Scaling laws research has focused overwhelmingly on English -- yet the most prominent AI models explicitly serve billions of international users. In this work, we undertake the largest multilingual scaling laws study to date, totaling 774…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems parse speech into semantic structures like dialog acts and slots. This involves the use of an Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) to transcribe speech into multiple text alternatives (hypotheses).…

This paper explores cost-efficient methods to adapt pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) to new lower-resource languages, with a specific focus on Estonian. Leveraging the Llama 2 model, we investigate the impact of combining…

An effective method for cross-lingual transfer is to fine-tune a bilingual or multilingual model on a supervised dataset in one language and evaluating it on another language in a zero-shot manner. Translating examples at training time or…

Machine Translation (MT) has been widely used for cross-lingual classification, either by translating the test set into English and running inference with a monolingual model (translate-test), or translating the training set into the target…