Related papers: DUAL: Discrete Spoken Unit Adaptive Learning for T…

Speech recognition systems are often highly domain dependent, a fact widely reported in the literature. However the concept of domain is complex and not bound to clear criteria. Hence it is often not evident if data should be considered to…

Automatic Speech Understanding (ASU) aims at human-like speech interpretation, providing nuanced intent, emotion, sentiment, and content understanding from speech and language (text) content conveyed in speech. Typically, training a robust…

Existing question answering (QA) systems owe much of their success to large, high-quality training data. Such annotation efforts are costly, and the difficulty compounds in the cross-lingual setting. Therefore, prior cross-lingual QA work…

We integrate automatic speech recognition (ASR) and question answering (QA) to realize a speech-driven QA system, and evaluate its performance. We adapt an N-gram language model to natural language questions, so that the input of our system…

In this paper, we introduce a new and simple method for comparing speech utterances without relying on text transcripts. Our speech-to-speech comparison metric utilizes state-of-the-art speech2unit encoders like HuBERT to convert speech…

Spoken dialogue systems (SDSs) utilize automatic speech recognition (ASR) at the front end of their pipeline. The role of ASR in SDSs is to recognize information in user speech related to response generation appropriately. Examining…

Knowledge-based conversational question answering (KBCQA) confronts persistent challenges in resolving coreference, modeling contextual dependencies, and executing complex logical reasoning. Existing approaches often suffer from…

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…

Most previous unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods for question answering(QA) require access to source domain data while fine-tuning the model for the target domain. Source domain data may, however, contain sensitive information and…

In recent years, speech-based self-supervised learning (SSL) has made significant progress in various tasks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR). An ASR model with decent performance can be realized by fine-tuning an SSL model with…

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…

Neural models for question answering (QA) over documents have achieved significant performance improvements. Although effective, these models do not scale to large corpora due to their complex modeling of interactions between the document…

Much recent work on Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) falls short in at least one of three ways: models were trained on oracle text input and neglected the Automatics Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs, models were trained to predict only…

A major focus of recent research in spoken language understanding (SLU) has been on the end-to-end approach where a single model can predict intents directly from speech inputs without intermediate transcripts. However, this approach…

Speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) aims to transcribe speech while assigning transcripts to the corresponding speakers accurately. Existing methods often rely on complex modular systems or require extensive fine-tuning…

Answering Questions over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) is key to well-functioning autonomous language agents in various real-life applications. To improve the neural-symbolic reasoning capabilities of language agents powered by Large Language…

Zero-shot spoken language understanding (SLU) enables systems to comprehend user utterances in new domains without prior exposure to training data. Recent studies often rely on large language models (LLMs), leading to excessive footprints…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is a critical component of voice assistants; it consists of converting speech to semantic parses for task execution. Previous works have explored end-to-end models to improve the quality and robustness of…

Diffusion and flow-based non-autoregressive (NAR) models have shown strong promise in large language modeling, however, their potential for automatic speech recognition (ASR) remains largely unexplored. We propose Drax, a discrete flow…

We consider the problem of spoken language understanding (SLU) of extracting natural language intents and associated slot arguments or named entities from speech that is primarily directed at voice assistants. Such a system subsumes both…