Related papers: Pre-training for Spoken Language Understanding wit…

Direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) models suffer from data scarcity issues as there exists little parallel S2ST data, compared to the amount of data available for conventional cascaded systems that consist of automatic speech…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn high-level speech representations has been a popular approach to building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in low-resource settings. However, the common assumption made in literature is that…

Speech enhancement (SE) is usually required as a front end to improve the speech quality in noisy environments, while the enhanced speech might not be optimal for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems due to speech distortion. On the…

We study the problem of word-level confidence estimation in subword-based end-to-end (E2E) models for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Although prior works have proposed training auxiliary confidence models for ASR systems, they do not…

End-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models are usually trained to optimize the loss of the whole token sequence, while neglecting explicit phonemic-granularity supervision. This could result in recognition errors due to…

Speech foundation models trained with self-supervised learning produce generic speech representations that support a wide range of speech processing tasks. When further adapted with supervised learning, these models can achieve strong…

The quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) is critical to Dialogue Systems as ASR errors propagate to and directly impact downstream tasks such as language understanding (LU). In this paper, we propose multi-task neural approaches to…

End-to-end spoken language understanding (SLU) remains elusive even with current large pretrained language models on text and speech, especially in multilingual cases. Machine translation has been established as a powerful pretraining…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) based speech pre-training has attracted much attention for its capability of extracting rich representations learned from massive unlabeled data. On the other hand, the use of weakly-supervised data is less…

Speech and text are two major forms of human language. The research community has been focusing on mapping speech to text or vice versa for many years. However, in the field of language modeling, very little effort has been made to model…

In speech recognition, it is essential to model the phonetic content of the input signal while discarding irrelevant factors such as speaker variations and noise, which is challenging in low-resource settings. Self-supervised pre-training…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) topic has seen a lot of progress these last three years, with the emergence of end-to-end neural approaches. Spoken language understanding refers to natural language processing tasks related to semantic…

Speech representation learning approaches for non-semantic tasks such as language recognition have either explored supervised embedding extraction methods using a classifier model or self-supervised representation learning approaches using…

Data scarcity is one of the main obstacles of domain adaptation in spoken language understanding (SLU) due to the high cost of creating manually tagged SLU datasets. Recent works in neural text generative models, particularly latent…

Spoken Language Assessment (SLA) estimates a learner's oral proficiency from spontaneous speech. The growing population of L2 English speakers has intensified the demand for reliable SLA, a critical component of Computer Assisted Language…

Acoustic-to-word (A2W) models that allow direct mapping from acoustic signals to word sequences are an appealing approach to end-to-end automatic speech recognition due to their simplicity. However, prior works have shown that modelling A2W…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) refers to the process of inferring the semantic information from audio signals. While the neural transformers consistently deliver the best performance among the state-of-the-art neural architectures in…

Textless spoken language models (SLMs) are generative models of speech that do not rely on text supervision. Most textless SLMs learn to predict the next semantic token, a discrete representation of linguistic content, and rely on a…

Speech accents pose a significant challenge to state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Degradation in performance across underrepresented accents is a severe deterrent to the inclusive adoption of ASR. In this work, we…

Training an end-to-end (E2E) neural network speech-to-intent (S2I) system that directly extracts intents from speech requires large amounts of intent-labeled speech data, which is time consuming and expensive to collect. Initializing the…