Related papers: Analysis of Data Augmentation Methods for Low-Reso…

As an effective strategy, data augmentation (DA) alleviates data scarcity scenarios where deep learning techniques may fail. It is widely applied in computer vision then introduced to natural language processing and achieves improvements in…

Automatic lyrics transcription (ALT), which can be regarded as automatic speech recognition (ASR) on singing voice, is an interesting and practical topic in academia and industry. ALT has not been well developed mainly due to the dearth of…

How to solve the data scarcity problem for end-to-end speech-to-text translation (ST)? It's well known that data augmentation is an efficient method to improve performance for many tasks by enlarging the dataset. In this paper, we propose…

We present a simple approach to improve direct speech-to-text translation (ST) when the source language is low-resource: we pre-train the model on a high-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) task, and then fine-tune its parameters…

Whispering is a distinct form of speech known for its soft, breathy, and hushed characteristics, often used for private communication. The acoustic characteristics of whispered speech differ substantially from normally phonated speech and…

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advancements in natural language processing and are concurrently extending the language ability to other modalities, such as speech and vision. Nevertheless, most of the previous work…

This study investigates the impact of integrating a dataset of disordered speech recordings ($\sim$1,000 hours) into the fine-tuning of a near state-of-the-art ASR baseline system. Contrary to what one might expect, despite the data being…

Multilingual language models such as mBERT have seen impressive cross-lingual transfer to a variety of languages, but many languages remain excluded from these models. In this paper, we analyse the effect of pre-training with monolingual…

A line of work on Transformer-based language models such as BERT has attempted to use syntactic inductive bias to enhance the pretraining process, on the theory that building syntactic structure into the training process should reduce the…

While Speech Foundation Models (SFMs) excel in various speech tasks, their performance for low-resource tasks such as child Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is hampered by limited pretraining data. To address this, we explore different…

In this paper, we describe several techniques for improving the acoustic and language model of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system operating on code-switching (CS) speech. We focus on the recognition of Frisian-Dutch radio…

Speech technology remains out of reach for most of the over 2300 languages in Africa. We present the first systematic assessment of large-scale synthetic voice corpora for African ASR. We apply a three-step process: LLM-driven text…

Accented automatic speech recognition (ASR) often degrades due to the limited availability of accented training data. Prior work has explored accent modeling in low-resource settings, but existing approaches typically require minutes to…

Speech-based virtual assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google assistant, and Apple Siri, typically convert users' audio signals to text data through automatic speech recognition (ASR) and feed the text to downstream dialog models for…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages remains constrained by limited labeled data and the lack of systematic guidance on model selection, data scaling, and decoding strategies. Large pre-trained systems such as Whisper,…

Most of the current speech data augmentation methods operate on either the raw waveform or the amplitude spectrum of speech. In this paper, we propose a novel speech data augmentation method called PhasePerturbation that operates…

Varying data augmentation policies and regularization over the course of optimization has led to performance improvements over using fixed values. We show that population based training is a useful tool to continuously search those…

For automatic speech translation (AST), end-to-end approaches are outperformed by cascaded models that transcribe with automatic speech recognition (ASR), then translate with machine translation (MT). A major cause of the performance gap is…

Maltese is a unique Semitic language that has evolved under extensive influence from Romance and Germanic languages, particularly Italian and English. Despite its Semitic roots, its orthography is based on the Latin script, creating a gap…

Speech synthesis (text to speech, TTS) and recognition (automatic speech recognition, ASR) are important speech tasks, and require a large amount of text and speech pairs for model training. However, there are more than 6,000 languages in…