Related papers: Dialect Identification of Spoken North S\'ami Lang…
State-of-the-art spoken language identification (LID) systems, which are based on end-to-end deep neural networks, have shown remarkable success not only in discriminating between distant languages but also between closely-related languages…
Languages have long been described according to their perceived rhythmic attributes. The associated typologies are of interest in psycholinguistics as they partly predict newborns' abilities to discriminate between languages and provide…
Modern sequence to sequence neural TTS systems provide close to natural speech quality. Such systems usually comprise a network converting linguistic/phonetic features sequence to an acoustic features sequence, cascaded with a neural…
Tone is a crucial component of the prosody of Shanghainese, a Wu Chinese variety spoken primarily in urban Shanghai. Tone sandhi, which applies to all multi-syllabic words in Shanghainese, then, is key to natural-sounding speech.…
Recent advances in eXplainable AI (XAI) have provided new insights into how models for vision, language, and tabular data operate. However, few approaches exist for understanding speech models. Existing work focuses on a few spoken language…
Expressive human speech generally abounds with rich and flexible speech prosody variations. The speech prosody predictors in existing expressive speech synthesis methods mostly produce deterministic predictions, which are learned by…
Prosody contains rich information beyond the literal meaning of words, which is crucial for the intelligibility of speech. Current models still fall short in phrasing and intonation; they not only miss or misplace breaks when synthesizing…
Speaker diarization relies on the assumption that speech segments corresponding to a particular speaker are concentrated in a specific region of the speaker space; a region which represents that speaker's identity. These identities are not…
The meaning of a slang term can vary in different communities. However, slang semantic variation is not well understood and under-explored in the natural language processing of slang. One existing view argues that slang semantic variation…
Speaker identity plays a significant role in human communication and is being increasingly used in societal applications, many through advances in machine learning. Speaker identity perception is an essential cognitive phenomenon that can…
In daily communications, Arabs use local dialects which are hard to identify automatically using conventional classification methods. The dialect identification challenging task becomes more complicated when dealing with an under-resourced…
We propose a method for learning de-identified prosody representations from raw audio using a contrastive self-supervised signal. Whereas prior work has relied on conditioning models on bottlenecks, we introduce a set of inductive biases…
In this paper, we present a novel method for phoneme-level prosody control of F0 and duration using intuitive discrete labels. We propose an unsupervised prosodic clustering process which is used to discretize phoneme-level F0 and duration…
Dialects represent a significant component of human culture and are found across all regions of the world. In Germany, more than 40% of the population speaks a regional dialect (Adler and Hansen, 2022). However, despite cultural importance,…
Recently, discrete tokens derived from self-supervised learning (SSL) models via k-means clustering have been actively studied as pseudo-text in speech language models and as efficient intermediate representations for various tasks.…
Historically, researchers and consumers have noticed a decrease in quality when applying NLP tools to minority variants of languages (i.e. Puerto Rican Spanish or Swiss German), but studies exploring this have been limited to a select few…
Growing digital archives and improving algorithms for automatic analysis of text and speech create new research opportunities for fundamental research in phonetics. Such empirical approaches allow statistical evaluation of a much larger set…
Acoustic-prosodic entrainment describes the tendency of humans to align or adapt their speech acoustics to each other in conversation. This alignment of spoken behavior has important implications for conversational success. However,…
Transcribed speech and user-generated text in Arabic typically contain a mixture of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), the standardized language taught in schools, and Dialectal Arabic (DA), used in daily communications. To handle this…
Prosodic features such as pitch, timing, and intonation are central to spoken communication, conveying emotion, intent, and discourse structure. In text-based settings, where these cues are absent, emojis act as visual surrogates that add…