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Dialect variation is of considerable interest in linguistics and other social sciences. However, traditionally it has been studied using proxies (transcriptions) rather than acoustic recordings directly. We introduce novel statistical…
Accented speech recognition and accent classification are relatively under-explored research areas in speech technology. Recently, deep learning-based methods and Transformer-based pretrained models have achieved superb performances in both…
Speech separation aims to separate multiple speech sources from a speech mixture. Although speech separation is well-solved on some existing English speech separation benchmarks, it is worthy of more investigation on the generalizability of…
This paper explores the relationship between accent strength and articulatory features inferred from acoustic speech. To quantify accent strength, we compare phonetic transcriptions with transcriptions based on dictionary-based references,…
The performance of automatic speech recognition systems degrades with increasing mismatch between the training and testing scenarios. Differences in speaker accents are a significant source of such mismatch. The traditional approach to deal…
Variation in speech is often quantified by comparing phonetic transcriptions of the same utterance. However, manually transcribing speech is time-consuming and error prone. As an alternative, therefore, we investigate the extraction of…
This work explores the effect of gender and linguistic-based vocal variations on the accuracy of emotive expression classification. Emotive expressions are considered from the perspective of spectral features in speech (Mel-frequency…
We collect novel data in the public service domain to evaluate the capability of the state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in capturing regional differences in accents in the United Kingdom (UK), specifically focusing…
The Vocal Joystick Vowel Corpus, by Washington University, was used to study monophthongs pronounced by native English speakers. The objective of this study was to quantitatively measure the extent at which speech recognition methods can…
Advancements in AI-driven speech-based applications have transformed diverse industries ranging from healthcare to customer service. However, the increasing prevalence of non-native accented speech in global interactions poses significant…
The historical and geographical spread from older to more modern languages has long been studied by examining textual changes and in terms of changes in phonetic transcriptions. However, it is more difficult to analyze language change from…
Researches have shown accent classification can be improved by integrating semantic information into pure acoustic approach. In this work, we combine phonetic knowledge, such as vowels, with enhanced acoustic features to build an improved…
State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems struggle with the lack of data for rare accents. For sufficiently large datasets, neural engines tend to outshine statistical models in most natural language processing problems.…
Diphthong vowels exhibit a degree of inherent dynamic change, the extent of which can vary synchronically and diachronically, such that diphthong vowels can become monophthongs and vice versa. Modelling this type of change requires defining…
While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
This work explores the application of various supervised classification approaches using prosodic information for the identification of spoken North S\'ami language varieties. Dialects are language varieties that enclose characteristics…
We present the Perceptimatic English Benchmark, an open experimental benchmark for evaluating quantitative models of speech perception in English. The benchmark consists of ABX stimuli along with the responses of 91 American…
The objective of this work is to investigate complementary features which can aid the quintessential Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) in the task of closed, limited set word recognition for non-native English speakers of…
This paper measures variation in embedding spaces which have been trained on different regional varieties of English while controlling for instability in the embeddings. While previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish…
Acoustic vowel dynamics have some speaker-identifying characteristics, which have been ascribed to individual properties of articulatory strategies: formant transitions have a particular shape because speakers move their articulators, using…