Related papers: AlloVera: A Multilingual Allophone Database

Deep acoustic models represent linguistic information based on massive amounts of data. Unfortunately, for regional languages and dialects such resources are mostly not available. However, deep acoustic models might have learned linguistic…

In this paper, we present several adaptation methods for non-native speech recognition. We have tested pronunciation modelling, MLLR and MAP non-native pronunciation adaptation and HMM models retraining on the HIWIRE foreign accented…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has benefited from advances in pretrained speech and language models, yet most systems remain constrained to monolingual settings and short, isolated utterances. While recent efforts in context-aware ASR…

This paper introduces Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS) dataset, a large multilingual corpus suitable for speech research. The dataset is derived from read audiobooks from LibriVox and consists of 8 languages, including about 44.5K hours of…

Preserving a speaker's voice identity while generating speech in a different language remains a fundamental challenge in spoken language technology, particularly in specialized domains such as scientific communication. In this paper, we…

This paper measures similarity both within and between 84 language varieties across nine languages. These corpora are drawn from digital sources (the web and tweets), allowing us to evaluate whether such geo-referenced corpora are reliable…

The pursuit of novel alloys tailored to specific requirements poses significant challenges for researchers in the field. This underscores the importance of developing predictive techniques for essential physical properties of alloys based…

Pronunciation dictionaries are an important component in the process of speech forced alignment. The accuracy of these dictionaries has a strong effect on the aligned speech data since they help the mapping between orthographic…

Tone is a prosodic feature used to distinguish words in many languages, some of which are endangered and scarcely documented. In this work, we use unsupervised representation learning to identify probable clusters of syllables that share…

For many low-resource languages, the only available language models are large multilingual models trained on many languages simultaneously. Despite state-of-the-art performance on reasoning tasks, we find that these models still struggle…

Speech foundation models have achieved state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance across various tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) in hundreds of languages. However, multi-speaker ASR remains a challenging task for these models due…

This paper presents XLS-R, a large-scale model for cross-lingual speech representation learning based on wav2vec 2.0. We train models with up to 2B parameters on nearly half a million hours of publicly available speech audio in 128…

Multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) acquire valuable, generalizable linguistic information during pretraining and have advanced the state of the art on task-specific finetuning. To date, only ~31 out of ~2,000 African languages…

This paper proposes a multilingual speech synthesis method which combines unsupervised phonetic representations (UPR) and supervised phonetic representations (SPR) to avoid reliance on the pronunciation dictionaries of target languages. In…

Grapheme-to-phoneme conversion (g2p) is necessary for text-to-speech and automatic speech recognition systems. Most g2p systems are monolingual: they require language-specific data or handcrafting of rules. Such systems are difficult to…

Various audio-LLMs (ALLMs) have been explored recently for tackling different audio tasks simultaneously using a single, unified model. While existing evaluations of ALLMs primarily focus on single-audio tasks, real-world applications often…

Word-piece models (WPMs) are commonly used subword units in state-of-the-art end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. For multilingual ASR, due to the differences in written scripts across languages, multilingual WPMs bring…

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…

Existing large-scale sign language resources typically provide supervision only at the level of raw video-text alignment and are often produced in laboratory settings. While such resources are important for semantic understanding, they do…

Machine learning models allow us to compare languages by showing how hard a task in each language might be to learn and perform well on. Following this line of investigation, we explore what makes a language "hard to pronounce" by modelling…