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Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been an essential component of computer assisted language learning (CALL) and computer assisted language testing (CALT) for many years. As this technology continues to develop rapidly, it is important…

In recent years, datasets of paired audio and captions have enabled remarkable success in automatically generating descriptions for audio clips, namely Automated Audio Captioning (AAC). However, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to…

Transformer-based audio self-supervised learning (SSL) models commonly use spectrograms, vision-style Transformers, and masked modeling objectives. However, convolutional patchification with temporal downsampling lowers the effective…

Automatic pronunciation assessment is an important technology to help self-directed language learners. While pronunciation quality has multiple aspects including accuracy, fluency, completeness, and prosody, previous efforts typically only…

This paper proposes an active learning system for sound event detection (SED). It aims at maximizing the accuracy of a learned SED model with limited annotation effort. The proposed system analyzes an initially unlabeled audio dataset, from…

This work presents a broad study on the adaptation of neural network acoustic models by means of learning hidden unit contributions (LHUC) -- a method that linearly re-combines hidden units in a speaker- or environment-dependent manner…

Voice controlled virtual assistants (VAs) are now available in smartphones, cars, and standalone devices in homes. In most cases, the user needs to first "wake-up" the VA by saying a particular word/phrase every time he or she wants the VA…

Recent automatic lyrics transcription (ALT) approaches focus on building stronger acoustic models or in-domain language models, while the pronunciation aspect is seldom touched upon. This paper applies a novel computational analysis on the…

The ability to estimate joint parameters is essential for various applications in robotics and computer vision. In this paper, we propose CAPT: category-level articulation estimation from a point cloud using Transformer. CAPT uses an…

The transcription quality of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems degrades significantly when transcribing audios coming from unseen domains. We propose an unsupervised error correction method for unsupervised ASR domain adaption,…

Previous approaches on accent conversion (AC) mainly aimed at making non-native speech sound more native while maintaining the original content and speaker identity. However, non-native speakers sometimes have pronunciation issues, which…

This study introduces a novel training paradigm, audio difference learning, for improving audio captioning. The fundamental concept of the proposed learning method is to create a feature representation space that preserves the relationship…

In the past decade, we have observed a growing interest in using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and chatbots to provide assistance to language learners, especially in second language learning. By using…

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…

Thanks to the rise of self-supervised learning, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems now achieve near-human performance on a wide variety of datasets. However, they still lack generalization capability and are not robust to domain…

Automatic pronunciation assessment (APA) analyzes second-language (L2) learners' speech by providing fine-grained pronunciation feedback at various linguistic levels. Most existing efforts on APA typically adopt segmental-level features as…

Accurately classifying accents and assessing accentedness in non-native speakers are both challenging tasks due to the complexity and diversity of accent and dialect variations. In this study, embeddings from advanced pre-trained language…

End-to-end (E2E) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models are trained using paired audio-text samples that are expensive to obtain, since high-quality ground-truth data requires human annotators. Voice search applications, such as digital…

Joint punctuated and normalized automatic speech recognition (ASR) aims at outputing transcripts with and without punctuation and casing. This task remains challenging due to the lack of paired speech and punctuated text data in most ASR…

Automated audio captioning (AAC) aims to generate informative descriptions for various sounds from nature and/or human activities. In recent years, AAC has quickly attracted research interest, with state-of-the-art systems now relying on a…