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Automatic pronunciation evaluation plays an important role in pronunciation training and second language education. This field draws heavily on concepts from automatic speech recognition (ASR) to quantify how close the pronunciation of…
Singing techniques are used for expressive vocal performances by employing temporal fluctuations of the timbre, the pitch, and other components of the voice. Their classification is a challenging task, because of mainly two factors: 1) the…
In conversational speech, the acoustic signal provides cues that help listeners disambiguate difficult parses. For automatically parsing spoken utterances, we introduce a model that integrates transcribed text and acoustic-prosodic features…
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) speech generation and voice cloning technologies have produced naturalistic speech and accurate voice replication, yet their influence on sociotechnical systems across diverse accents and…
Current accent conversion (AC) systems do not disentangle the two main sources of non-native accent: segmental and prosodic characteristics. Being able to manipulate a non-native speaker's segmental and/or prosodic channels independently is…
Articulatory acoustic inversion aims to reconstruct the complete geometry of the vocal tract from the speech signal. In this paper, we present a comparative study of several levels of phonetic segmentation accuracy, together with a…
Despite significant advances in recent years, the existing Computer-Assisted Pronunciation Training (CAPT) methods detect pronunciation errors with a relatively low accuracy (precision of 60% at 40%-80% recall). This Ph.D. work proposes…
In this work, we tackle a problem of speech emotion classification. One of the issues in the area of affective computation is that the amount of annotated data is very limited. On the other hand, the number of ways that the same emotion can…
Second-order statistical methods show very good results for automatic speaker identification in controlled recording conditions. These approaches are generally used on the entire speech material available. In this paper, we study the…
Transfer learning aims to reduce the amount of data required to excel at a new task by re-using the knowledge acquired from learning other related tasks. This paper proposes a novel transfer learning scenario, which distills robust phonetic…
We use tensor analysis techniques for high-dimensional data to gain insight into pitch curves, which play an important role in linguistics research. In particular, we propose that demeaned phonetics pitch curve data can be modeled as having…
In this paper, we explore automatic prediction of dialect density of the African American English (AAE) dialect, where dialect density is defined as the percentage of words in an utterance that contain characteristics of the non-standard…
This paper asks whether a distinction between production-based and perception-based grammar induction influences either (i) the growth curve of grammars and lexicons or (ii) the similarity between representations learned from independent…
This study is focused on understanding and quantifying the change in phoneme and prosody information encoded in the Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) model, brought by an accent identification (AID) fine-tuning task. This problem is addressed…
Given the fast development of analysis techniques for NLP and speech processing systems, few systematic studies have been conducted to compare the strengths and weaknesses of each method. As a step in this direction we study the case of…
Speaker verification (SV) systems are currently being used to make sensitive decisions like giving access to bank accounts or deciding whether the voice of a suspect coincides with that of the perpetrator of a crime. Ensuring that these…
Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies show that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop differentiated…
Formants are the spectral maxima that result from acoustic resonances of the human vocal tract, and their accurate estimation is among the most fundamental speech processing problems. Recent work has been shown that those frequencies can…
The recommendation to change breathing patterns from the mouth to the nose can have a significantly positive impact upon the general well being of the individual. We classify nasal and mouth breathing by using an acoustic sensor and…
Pre-trained transformer-based models have significantly advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR), yet they remain sensitive to accent and dialectal variations, resulting in elevated word error rates (WER) in linguistically diverse…