Related papers: SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the…

Although over 300M around the world speak Bangla, scant work has been done in improving Bangla voice-to-text transcription due to Bangla being a low-resource language. However, with the introduction of the Bengali Common Voice 9.0 speech…

Reading comprehension systems for low-resource languages face significant challenges in handling unanswerable questions. These systems tend to produce unreliable responses when correct answers are absent from context. To solve this problem,…

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods are viable solutions for addressing the static memory limits of pre-trained language models. Nevertheless, encountering conflicting sources of information within the retrieval context is an…

Some speech recognition tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), are approaching or have reached human performance in many reported metrics. Yet, they continue to struggle in complex, real-world, situations, such as with distanced…

We present Voxlect, a novel benchmark for modeling dialects and regional languages worldwide using speech foundation models. Specifically, we report comprehensive benchmark evaluations on dialects and regional language varieties in English,…

Multilingual pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) are incredibly effective at Question Answering (QA), a core task in Natural Language Understanding, achieving high accuracies on several multilingual benchmarks. However, little is known…

Large-scale multimodal models achieve strong results on tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA), but they are often limited when queries require cultural and visual information, everyday knowledge, particularly in low-resource and…

We present OOD-Speech, the first out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarking dataset for Bengali automatic speech recognition (ASR). Being one of the most spoken languages globally, Bengali portrays large diversity in dialects and prosodic…

Multimodal/vision language models (VLMs) are increasingly being deployed in healthcare settings worldwide, necessitating robust benchmarks to ensure their safety, efficacy, and fairness. Multiple-choice question and answer (QA) datasets…

Reasoning-focused Question Answering (QA) has advanced rapidly with Large Language Models (LLMs), yet high-quality benchmarks for low-resource languages remain scarce. Persian, spoken by roughly 130 million people, lacks a comprehensive…

Recent developments in speech emotion recognition (SER) often leverage deep neural networks (DNNs). Comparing and benchmarking different DNN models can often be tedious due to the use of different datasets and evaluation protocols. To…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance has improved drastically in recent years, mainly enabled by self-supervised learning (SSL) based acoustic models such as wav2vec2 and large-scale multi-lingual training like Whisper. A huge…

Africa's rich linguistic diversity remains significantly underrepresented in speech technologies, creating barriers to digital inclusion. To alleviate this challenge, we systematically map the continent's speech space of datasets and…

Accessing and comprehending religious texts, particularly the Quran (the sacred scripture of Islam) and Ahadith (the corpus of the sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), in today's digital era necessitates efficient and accurate…

With the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various applications, it is empirical to ensure their fairness across all user communities. However, most LLMs are trained and evaluated on Western centric data, with…

We present a study on the design of multilingual Answer Sentence Selection (AS2) models, which are a core component of modern Question Answering (QA) systems. The main idea is to transfer data, created from one resource rich language, e.g.,…

Thanks to the development of the Semantic Web, a lot of new structured data has become available on the Web in the form of knowledge bases (KBs). Making this valuable data accessible and usable for end-users is one of the main goals of…

Audio Question Answering (AQA) is a key task for evaluating Audio-Language Models (ALMs), yet assessing open-ended responses remains challenging. Existing metrics used for AQA such as BLEU, METEOR and BERTScore, mostly adapted from NLP and…

We introduce VoiceBBQ, a spoken extension of the BBQ (Bias Benchmark for Question Answering) - a dataset that measures social bias by presenting ambiguous or disambiguated contexts followed by questions that may elicit stereotypical…

A large and growing amount of speech content in real-life scenarios is being recorded on consumer-grade devices in uncontrolled environments, resulting in degraded speech quality. Transforming such low-quality device-degraded speech into…