Related papers: Speech Technology for Everyone: Automatic Speech R…

ASR systems designed for native English (L1) usually underperform on non-native English (L2). To address this performance gap, \textbf{(i)} we extend our previous work to investigate fine-tuning of a pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 model…

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…

Building inclusive speech recognition systems is a crucial step towards developing technologies that speakers of all language varieties can use. Therefore, ASR systems must work for everybody independently of the way they speak. To…

The increasing demand for learning English as a second language has led to a growing interest in methods for automatically assessing spoken language proficiency. Most approaches use hand-crafted features, but their efficacy relies on their…

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…

Recently proposed self-supervised learning approaches have been successful for pre-training speech representation models. The utility of these learned representations has been observed empirically, but not much has been studied about the…

Voicebots have provided a new avenue for supporting the development of language skills, particularly within the context of second language learning. Voicebots, though, have largely been geared towards native adult speakers. We sought to…

In this article, we present an approach for non native automatic speech recognition (ASR). We propose two methods to adapt existing ASR systems to the non-native accents. The first method is based on the modification of acoustic models…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a powerful tool that allows learning of underlying representations from unlabeled data. Transformer based models such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT are leading the field in the speech domain. Generally these…

Nowadays, research in speech technologies has gotten a lot out thanks to recently created public domain corpora that contain thousands of recording hours. These large amounts of data are very helpful for training the new complex models…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are known to exhibit difficulties when transcribing children's speech. This can mainly be attributed to the absence of large children's speech corpora to train robust ASR models and the resulting…

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems perform well on healthy speech. However, the performance on impaired speech still remains an issue. The current study explores the usefulness of using Wav2Vec self-supervised…

Wav2vec2.0 is a popular self-supervised pre-training framework for learning speech representations in the context of automatic speech recognition (ASR). It was shown that wav2vec2.0 has a good robustness against the domain shift, while the…

Speech to text models tend to be trained and evaluated against a single target accent. This is especially true for English for which native speakers from the United States became the main benchmark. In this work, we are going to show how…

In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of transfer learning and continuous learning for various automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. We start with a pre-trained English ASR model and show that transfer learning can be effectively…

Although Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems have achieved human-like performance for a few languages, the majority of the world's languages do not have usable systems due to the lack of large speech datasets to train these models.…

As human-machine voice interfaces provide easy access to increasingly intelligent machines, many state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are proposed. However, commercial ASR systems usually have poor performance on…

Unsupervised speech recognition has shown great potential to make Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems accessible to every language. However, existing methods still heavily rely on hand-crafted pre-processing. Similar to the trend of…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems exhibit the best performance on speech that is similar to that on which it was trained. As such, underrepresented varieties including regional dialects, minority-speakers, and low-resource…

Recent work on self-supervised pre-training focus on leveraging large-scale unlabeled speech data to build robust end-to-end (E2E) acoustic models (AM) that can be later fine-tuned on downstream tasks e.g., automatic speech recognition…